am Blake and the writings of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It was his own dark style of poetry that caught the eye of fellow classmate Ray Manzarek who was a classically trained keyboardist. After hearing Jim’s early attempts at lyric writing they decided to form a band. They recruited Robbie Krieger and John Densmore from the Psychedelic Rangers and The Doors were born. Jim got the name from Aldous Huxley’s book on mescaline, The Doors of Perception, which quoted a William Blake poem, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as is, infinite. Jim’s problem with authority led him to believe that to truly be free, you must break away from society. He was interested in anything about revolt, disorder, and chaos. He believed these to be the road to freedom. When asked in an interview what freedom really was, Jim responded “There are different kinds of freedom-there’s a lot of misunderstanding…the most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first. You can take away a man’s political freedom and you won’t hurt him-unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him.” He wanted to show people the way to freedom.Jim’s experience with death and the Indians stuck with him profoundly through the years. In fact, he never stopped claiming the soul of one of the Indians was with him. Jim never actually called himself this, but his fans considered him a shaman or a king. Jim once said, “The shaman…he was a man who would intoxicate himself. See, he was probably already an…uh…unusual individual. And, he wou...
