| "Peace Frog" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by The Doors from the album Morrison Hotel | ||||
| Released | February 1970 | |||
| Recorded | November 1969 | |||
| Genre | Blues rock | |||
| Length | 2:50 (5:02 with "Blue Sunday") | |||
| Label | Elektra | |||
| Writer | Jim Morrison Robby Krieger Ray Manzarek John Densmore |
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| Producer | Paul A. Rothchild | |||
| Morrison Hotel track listing | ||||
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"Peace Frog" is a song by The Doors which appears on the album Morrison Hotel. It was released on vinyl in February 1970 by Elektra/Asylum Records and produced by Paul Rothchild. It has a fairly short running time of 2:50 and blends seamlessly into the next track on the album, "Blue Sunday", making it easy for radio stations to play the two songs consecutively.
Contents |
The hook of the song is a distorted G5 chord played twice by guitarist Robby Krieger, followed by a brief percussive Wah-wah effect. Morrison begins nearly every line with the word blood, often referring to "Blood in the streets..." blood everywhere... A brief musical interlude is next, followed by a guitar solo, and a spoken word verse ("Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding..."). The song ends with a final chord as it segues into the next track, "Blue Sunday".
The line "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind" originates from his poem, "Newborn Awakening" (and it also appears at the end of "Ghost Song"). The line is born out of "Dawn's Highway", a poem in which Jim describes an event that occurred when he was young. As Morrison described it in An American Prayer:
| “ | Me and my — mother and father — and a grandmother and a grandfather — were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death." "So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is floating in the breeze, man. |
” |
The line "Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven" likely refers to Morrison's December 9, 1967 arrest at the New Haven Arena during a concert. After an altercation with a police officer backstage, Morrison made the incident known to the concert audience, and was arrested for attempting to incite a riot [1]. A similar line about Chicago probably refers to the conflict surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention.