| "Five to One" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by The Doors from the album Waiting for the Sun | ||||
| Released | July 13, 1968 | |||
| Recorded | February–May 1968 | |||
| Genre | Psychedelic rock, acid rock, hard rock, heavy metal[1] | |||
| Length | 4:24 | |||
| Label | Elektra | |||
| Writer | Jim Morrison Robby Krieger Ray Manzarek John Densmore |
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| Producer | Paul Rothchild | |||
| Waiting for the Sun track listing | ||||
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"Five to One" is a song by The Doors, from their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun.
Contents |
"Five to one" is rumored to be the approximate ratio of whites to blacks, old to young, or non-pot smokers to pot smokers in the US in 1967, depending on whom you ask. A further urban legend has it as the ratio of Viet Cong to American troops in Vietnam. However, when asked, Jim Morrison said the lyrics were not political.
This would seem quite likely, at least for part of the song ("Your ballroom days are over baby/Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening/crawl across the years"), which is patently lifted from the c19th hymn/al and bedtime rhyme Now the Day is Over ("Now the day is over,/Night is drawing nigh,/Shadows of the evening/Steal across the sky") for whatever reason of Morrison's.[2] Similarly, Morrison quoted the Christian child's prayer in a live version of "Soul Kitchen" sung in 1969 [3] and also altered the children's rhyme "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candlestick" to suit part of his poem An American Prayer ("Words dissemble/Words be quick/Words resemble walking sticks").[4] Lastly, Morrison was quite possibly referring to a Dylan Thomas story entitled The Fight in Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog,[5] where the central character reads from a poem called Warp ( " [...] Five into one, the one made of five into one, early/Suns distorted too late."). In this instance, the "five" are described by Thomas as "tears", "suns", and "inscrutable spears in the head".
The opening part ("Yeah, c'mon - I love my girl. She lookin' good...") is some of Jim's nonsensical drunk rambling. Morrison got the idea for this while waiting in the audience before performing a concert in 1967. On bootlegs of live recordings, Morrison included the phrase "fucked up" in the spoken word section at the end. He frequently swore at live shows, but the studio albums were originally either curse-free or censored.
The song's most famous performance was at the 1969 Miami concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium. Towards the end of the performance, a drunken Morrison declared the audience "idiots" and "slaves". The concert would end with Morrison being accused of "attempting to incite a riot" among the concert goers, resulting in his arrest, and later conviction, for indecent exposure. This performance can be heard on Disc 1 of The Doors: Box Set and is depicted in Oliver Stone's film The Doors.
During the reunion of the original lineup of The Doors sans Jim Morrison on VH1 Storytellers, Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots took up vocals. Before the performance Robbie Krieger said Weiland was one of the few frontmen who could "fill Jim's leather pants". Scott said that "Five to One" was what inspired him to begin a career in rock music.
In the video game Grand Theft Auto IV it is heard on the Liberty Rock Radio station on The Lost and Damned expansion pack. It also appears in Miami Vice episode "Back In The World".
Yuya Uchida & The Flowers recorded what is possibly the first cover in 1968 for their album Challenge! although it was not released until the remaster in 2007. Marilyn Manson released a studio cover of the song, while Velvet Revolver and the Russian band Splean (Russian: Сплин) have covered it live. The guitar solo on Pearl Jam's "Alive" was based on Ace Frehley's guitar solo on the Kiss song "She", which was in turn based on Robby Krieger's solo in "Five to One".[6] Kanye West sampled "Five to One" to create the beat for Jay-Z's diss song of Nas and Mobb Deep called "Takeover". In 2011, American band Make Love and War released their remake of the song to coincide with the peak of Arab Spring, with a video portraying images of toppled and at-risk Middle East dictators, as well as footage of past and present popular uprisings.[7]
Oasis released a song named "Waiting for the Rapture" (on 2008's Dig Out Your Soul) which is very similar to "Five to One".