The car crash that inspired a classic song by The Doors

Exploring Jim Morrison's poetry through his best lyrics

(Credit: Alamy)

Thu 17 Oct 2024, 2pm, UK

Artistic inspiration can often come from the most unlikely places. In the case of counterculture icons The Doors, songwriter Jim Morrison seemed to move through life, absorbing inspiration like a long-haired sponge, which can be seen in the variety of sounds and musical influences he explored during his time with the band. Despite typifying the hippie era with his music and performance, part of Morrison’s inspiration came from his early childhood experiences.

Born in 1943 to a military family, Morrison had a predictably atypical childhood. Given his father’s position as a high-ranking admiral in the US Navy, the Morrison family lived a nomadic lifestyle, which meant that young Jim Morrison was forced to continually adapt to new environments and circumstances. Furthermore, the singer’s parents had a particularly bizarre method of discipline.

Parents vowed never to spank their children, as was common at the time, but instead employed a military-style “scolding” in which they would verbally beat their children to tears in an effort to discourage bad behavior. Unsurprisingly, then, Morrison ended up cutting ties with his family, for the most part, after graduating from UCLA in 1965 – around the same time he formed The Doors.

Even if he moved away from his family, Morrison would still draw on his early experiences throughout his songwriting career. One of the most prominent examples of this came with the song ‘Indian Summer’, one of the first songs the band recorded together. Despite being on their initial demo tapes, the song was not widely released until Hotel Morrisons in 1970, perhaps due to its dark background.

‘Indian Summer’ used morbid inspiration from a car accident Morrison suffered as a child. During a family trip to New Mexico at the age of four, the car Morrison was traveling in was involved in an accident. During said accident, a Native American family was injured or, as Morrison stated, killed. Undoubtedly a landmark event for four-year-old Morrison, he never seemed to forget the deaths of that family.

“The souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians…were running around, going crazy,” he once said, talking about the accident and the construction of ‘Indian Summer’. “And it just jumped into my soul. And they are still there.” Admittedly, it should be mentioned that Morrison took a consistent cocktail of mind-altering substances throughout most of his time with The Doors, which may go some way to explaining how the dormant spirit of the dead First Nations led him to write ‘ IndianSummer’. .

However, the song remains one of the clearest examples of Morrison drawing on his tumultuous childhood in the music of The Doors. After all, the band was part of a new wave of counterculture groups capturing the political and social revolution of the late 1960s. They rarely concerned themselves with the tender self-reflection of exploring childhood trauma; they were rooted in the immediate present.

Potentially as a result of the change in Morrison’s songwriting suggested by ‘Indian Summer’, the song took nearly five years to be officially released, and when it finally did, it was hidden away as the album’s penultimate track. Hotel Morrisons. The Doors also never performed the song live, as it did not seem to have the same impact as many of their other compositions. Regardless, ‘Indian Summer’ is certainly worth revisiting.