Swimming to the Moon

"I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning. It seems to me to be the road to freedom." Thus 23-year-old Jim Morrison states the philosophy behind The Doors, the rock group for which he is the chief songwriter and singer. Not surprisingly. The Doors are based in Los Angeles, where they find their peculiar mysticism perversely congenial. "This city is looking for a ritual to join its fragments," says Morrison. The Doors are looking for such a ritual too--in Morrison's words, "a sort of electric wedding."

The search takes them not only past such familiar landmarks of the youthful odyssey as alienation and sex, but into symbolic realms of the unconscious--eerie night worlds filled with throbbing rhythms, shivery metallic tones, unsettling images. Swim to the moon, they sing, and "penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide."

Preaching passion of both the metaphysical and physical order, The Doors have a style at once more plaintive and dramatic than the droning, hypnotic waves of sound poured out by other West Coast groups such as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. They startle and bemuse with a uniquely mournful and moody tone that shades Morrison's dusky voice seamlessly into a dark-textured background: the haunting organ, piano and bass of Ray Manzarek, 24; the sinuous guitar of Robby Krieger, 21; the nimble drums of John Densmore, 22.

When The Doors finally bring off their electric wedding, it may well take the form of a small-scale musical play. The prototype is The End, their enigmatic, 11 1/2-minute string of visions apparently revolving around an Oedipus situation, in which Morrison portrays several roles--some behind a red mask. Last week, opening an engagement at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, they introduced The Unknown Soldier, an antiwar philippic with martial music, shouted commands, the loading click of a rifle and shots mixed in with instrumental passages.

The Doors ultimately envision music with "the structure of poetic drama." Such a forbidding structure could cramp their financial fortunes, which at the moment are wide open: both of their albums, The Doors and Strange Days, are among the top five on the sales charts; Light My Fire has been one of the smash singles of the year. But they don't seem worried, since the more complex forms come closer to fulfilling their apocalyptic imagination. Says Morrison: "We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves."

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