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and Manzarek was hooked. ‘When I heard those first four lines, I said, “Wow, that’s it – those are the best lyrics I’ve ever heard for a rock’n’roll song!” As he was singing, I could hear the chord changes and the beat: my fingers immediately started moving.’
    Manzarek asked if he had any others, and Morrison sung a few more. Manzarek seized the opportunity, and told Morrison they should form a group.
    When they met that day, Manzarek said Morrison looked like Michelangelo’s David, having lost his puppy fat and found his cheekbones. As he’d been living off little but acid for the past few months, he was incredibly gaunt, his weight having dropped from 160 pounds to under 135. The transformation was nearly complete.
    The pair then recruited a drummer called John Densmore whom Manzarek had met in his meditation class. At first the sober and untroubled Californian had reservations about the partnership: ‘Their songs were really far out to me . . . I didn’t understand very much; but then I figured, I’m the drummer, not the lyricist.’ Nevertheless, he joined.
    Morrison set about turning the group into a vehicle for his ideas. In the spirit of the times, he became obsessed with subversion: ‘America was conceived in violence. Americans are attracted to violence, out of cans. They’re TV-hypnotised – TV is the invisible protective shield against bare reality. Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel any reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols, and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they’re emotionally dead.’
    Morrison was also obsessed with what he called the ‘Apollonian–Dionysian split’. The idea came from Nietzsche, who devoted much time to analysing the phenomenon in Greek culture. The German philosopher’s book
The Birth of Tragedy
, written in 1872, was once cited by Morrison as the volume to read if you wanted to understand his thoughts. It is, to quote Morrison biographer Mike Jahn, ‘a philosophical road map to the Doors’. The terms are derived from the names of the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysus. As well as being the messenger of the gods, Apollo was the presiding deity of music, medicine, light and youth, and was identified with the sun. The handsome, youthful, long-haired Dionysus was the god of wine and permissiveness, universally adored by women. It’s no wonder Morrison chose to identify with him.
    Nietzsche used these terms to make a distinction between reason and instinct, between order andchaos. Apollonian culture produced order and control, whereas Dionysian culture encouraged emotional abandon. ‘Under the charm of the Dionysian,’ wrote Nietzsche, ‘not only is the union between man and man reaffirmed, but nature which has become alienated, hostile or subjugated, celebrates once more her reconciliation with her lost son, man.’ When he pointed out that music and theatre were the natural expressions of the Dionysian, Morrison took the bait, hook, line and sinker.
    Morrison often referred to the Doors as a theatre of myths, always stressing the Greek connection. ‘Sometimes I like to look at the history of rock and roll like the origin of Greek drama,’ he once said, ‘which started out of a threshing floor at the crucial seasons and was originally a band of worshippers, dancing and singing. Then, one day, a possessed person jumped out of the crowd and started imitating a god.’
    In September 1965 Morrison met an eighteen-year-old redhead called Pamela Courson, a typically pretty California girl, whose father was also an officer in the Naval Reserve. Just before meeting Morrison she had dropped out of her art classes at Los Angeles City College, and was ‘looking for something meaningful to do’. In Jim Morrison she found it. The couple fell in love,