For the price of a modern day coffee you can have a frolicking highway-side romp with the erstwhile rock saints of yesterday’s countercultural vanguard. Abandon your morality at the door and embrace the morality of the motel room, where dinner is served with a side o’ sin and every day’s a rain soaked Sunday. Your companions for the trip? Four self-indulgent lovers, not fighters, with malevolent attitudes towards the Vietnam War, ambivalent attitudes on paying when payment’s due, and benevolent attitudes toward flowered wallpaper and $2 cocktail night.
And while you’re attending to your summer of love hangover you’ll be sweetly serenaded by the men behind the pane glass window, patiently beckoning you into their folksy two-bit Eden. They take their debauchery with a hit of fringe and their hedonism with a side of camel toned leather. Resisting their charms? Strike while the iron is hot because they’re checking out in the morning.
Forever here for a good time, not a long time, soon they’ll be back on the road putting Kerouac and his ilk to shame, forever living by the adage that ‘There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.’ And roll away they will, but for now the twilight’s coming, the lounge is buzzing, and room 211 is where you’ll find your salvation.
What of the allure of the skid row hotel? It’s a mythological space, the provenance of bohemians and aspirational hangers-on, and artistes with revolutionary credentials. The Doors find themselves right at home, welcomed by four walls and a desk that indulge their modernist pretenses and romantic self-assessments. The motel and the open road are interwoven, bound together by their mutually beneficial conspiracy: swallow lone voyagers up and spit them back out onto the highway, making lone wolves and opportunists out of the best, and misanthropic wanderers out of the worst.
The Doors tap into the mythological potential of the intersection between motel, open road, and creative boundlessness, molding the pieces into an alluring silhouette, that of the wild-eyed rock ruffian. They forge a sultry new material from the ashes of tired bohemian tropes, one that revels in both caricature and a moody interpretive cult of the individual.
Selected Tracks
Roadhouse Blues Waiting for the Sun Peace Frog Blue Sunday Land Ho! Queen of the Highway Indian Summer
