The Summer I Got Into The Doors

Take a trip back to the hazy, sun-drenched Midwestern heat of July 2014. Host Luke Ferris takes the solo mic for a deeply personal essay episode reflecting on a formative, vagabond summer spent house-crashing, working menial internships, and driving endless miles across Michigan. It was a season of isolation, cheap beer, and beautiful mundanity—all set to a heavy, mystic, and psychedelic soundtrack. 

In this essay episode, Luke explores how the raw lore of Jim Morrison and The Doors found him at exactly the right time, romanticizing his solitude and putting him into a meditative state that culminated in a single, life-changing morning beach decision.

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Sources for this episode:

• Royalty-free music and sound effects via Artlist.com
• THE DOORS | Official Trailer | STUDIOCANAL
• Hotelroom Freakout Scene - Apocalypse Now

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

It's a hot sunny morning in East Lansing, Michigan. The sidewalks, typically bustling with young adults rushing to and fro from classes, were empty in the summer, so the streets felt like any old small town in the Midwest. The year is twenty fourteen. I'm walking to my internship at a local marketing company, wearing an oversized hammy-down polo and khakis. My hair is a bit disheveled from my sink shower, and I'm pacing toward a generic office building in downtown. Mainly for the coffee. It was one of the few perks of the internship, besides a very menial paycheck and school credit. Free coffee that I could guzzle down while I wrote fake blogs and created backlinks for one of the company's clients. Yes, this is a real internship and a real job that I did. To energize my mundane existence ahead, I plugged in my headphones into my sparkling new iPhone and opened up my iTunes and started playing the doors. Welcome to a podcast called Least Important Things, a podcast about movies, friendship, and finding meaning in the most important of the least important things. I'm your host, Luke Ferris. The Doors are one of those synonymous rock bands from the 60s that have been rotated on every classic rock station for half a century. They've got a minimum of five, six, seven songs that probably everybody has heard at least once: Roadhouse Blues, Light My Fire, LA Woman, Touch Me, Break On Through to the Other Side, and Riders on the Storm to name a few. And if you grew up in a classic rock household like mine, you probably knew them before you knew them. A few of the Doors moments stand out in my memory of my childhood or growing up. One is from a burned CD my older brother's friend gave him that had Riders as the last track with that haunting rhythmic backtrack of a thunderstorm. It was unlike anything I had heard of that time. Really mainly due to only I was listening to Christian radio and movie soundtracks. My mom singing to the chorus of Hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name? And then giving a caveat that that's not appropriate to tell someone that you love them if you've never met them. And then my elementary school bus driver's loyalty to the classic northern Michigan 98.1 the Bear that played the Doors, Led Zeppelin, and a host of classic rock music that was the soundtrack to every morning riding through the rural Michigan countryside. So the doors, whether I realized it or not, were a constant tone of my growing up. But it wasn't until the summer of 2014 when I went deep. I mean, I really got into the doors. Let's just say I was quote unquote house crashing at my girlfriend's college house that summer. You see, if you leased a house near college campus, you had to commit to a full year of rent, even if you left for the summer. So for three months, the house was gonna sit empty. I coerced her and her roommates that if I stayed there, I could mow the lawn, converse with the landlord, and check on things if a rogue summer storm took out the power. And don't worry, I paid for the utilities. Seems like a fair deal to me. Or at least 21-year-old me. So, like a squatter, I lived in this old house that was previously occupied by four college girls. I slept in my girlfriend's room, and besides my backpack and a suitcase of clothes, there wasn't really evidence that I was there. That summer I was working my normal job on campus, my internship, as I mentioned, and then spending evenings twice or three times a week helping this old couple that my cousins knew who lived in the area and did landscaping for them. Plus, on weekends, I was mainly driving home or driving to visit my girlfriend. And it was in this vagabond collegiate lifestyle where the doors found me. I didn't have internet at the house, so I would check out DVDs at the library and play them on my 17-inch MacBook Pro. And my beat-down Ford Explorer couldn't connect to my iPhone, so I also had to check out CDs from the library so I could play them on my hour and a half ride across the state to visit my girlfriend. So between streaming the doors during work on this new platform called Spotify, listening to their CDs on Long Summer Drives, I engrossed myself in the doors, their mythology, and the persona of the lead singer, Jim Morrison. Now it may seem weird that I was getting into a band in 2014 that essentially ceased to exist when Morrison tragically died in 1971 at the age of 27. But that's why I always say we live in the best music generation because we can access anything at any time and have any experience. If not new, but new to us. I talked about this in our episode of The Joy of Rediscovery in season 3. The doors have this raw, driving, almost mystic sound that's part blues, part psychedelic, and 100% California 60s rock and roll. Outside of just enjoying the intensity and driving nature of the three-piece musicians in the group, it was Morrison's poetic writing and stage persona that captivated me. I watched live YouTube videos, read a biography also checked out from the library, listened to his posthumous poetry album in American Prayer, where his bandmates played music to his pre-recorded spoken lyrics, and of course, I watched the biopic on Morrison The Doors, starring Val Kilmer.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

I'm the poet and you're my museum.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

You almost can't see Val and Jim separately. They're one based off of this incredible performance, albeit a flawed film. So what was it about the doors at that time and place in my life? I think it was the nature of that summer, that weekday lifestyle. I was alone a lot, isolated in a shitty office, listening to the damn Patrick show and doing pretty repetitive, boring work. I walked across the city, the campus, listening, thinking, writing. I romanticized this isolation, and the doors were my soundtrack. The vastness of the band's sound, the intoxicating voice of Morrison. I think I brought an almost psychedelic nature onto my life of modernity. But the furthest I got to a trip was buying two tall boys of Genesee beer from Quality Dairy and getting slightly beer buzzed. You see, I was spending as little money as possible at that time. So I had plenty of time to think, dream, and wonder about life, the future. I was able to live in the romance of my imagination that as a full-fledged adult, I barely have time to do, to be bored, to daydream, because there's always another task. There's always something to do to keep this life of adulthood together. But it wasn't like I was in this state the entire summer. There was small talk interactions with my coworkers. The couple who seemingly just kept making up work for me to do in their yard so they could write me a check because they thought I was a good kid and they wanted to support me. Hanging out with Zach Hall, friend of the show at the movie theater, or playing bocce at his apartment. Watching the 2014 World Cup after hours at my campus job because they had access to sports channels. I remember watching Tim Howard stand up strong against Belgium, seemingly blocking every shot, even though we lost. I was cheering alone in a basement office in front of a TV. Or I'd have these three-hour long conversations with my girlfriend most evenings. Anytime sitting outside or on the couch, I'd sometimes drift into a meditative state while listening to her talk about her day. Not that I didn't care what she was saying, it was more that I felt a level of comfort, of bliss, of living in the mind of her voice. These simple moments paired with my exploration into the sound and lore of the doors, created a hazy lifestyle of heat, sunshine, highways, and deep thoughts. There was a sense of scarcity. Live as low and vagabond as possible. I can't tell you what I ate every day that summer, maybe just scraped on potato chips, leftovers from visiting home, and a lot of ramen. And the music reflected that. I think I imagined myself as the hippie poet turned rock star. It was that same summer I watched Apocalypse Now for the first time, featuring one of the most harrowing solo performances in cinema history. The intro to Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam interpretation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, opens with the scene of burning palm trees, helicopters, winding to the song The End by the Doors. The Hummer of the helicopters transitions to a lonely hotel room fan in Saigon where Martin Sheen, playing Captain Willard, loses his sanity as he waits for his next orders.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

I'm here a week now. Waiting for a mission. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Behind the scenes, Sheen spent multiple days in this room set, and Coppola pushed his lead actor way beyond the professional lines, encouraging him to get drunk and totally go berserk into himself. The climax of the end concurs with Sheen in real life punching the mirror, bleeding, and stripping naked in tears. It's one of the most guttural scenes in movie history, paired with the haunting tones of the doors and Morrison's priest-like incantations. Did I want to put myself into that state? I I don't know. I think I wanted a taste of it, almost like a diet version of that. And I think why? Because I was I was young. I was living in this life of transition. I had a lot of things happening in my life. Transitioning into adulthood. It was my last summer before my senior year. Leaving the world of academia. What was the future gonna hold? Was this the last summer of my youth? Was this a summer of freedom? Freedom of my mind, maybe, of my schedule of responsibility. Those couple months were kind of this endless highway that I could drive onto. And I think it put me into that meditative state, that contemplative state of change. I don't know if you've ever been there where there's periods where you're doing nothing but everything's changing. And listening to the doors still puts me into that state that I listened to them while I was writing this, totally going into that creative state, that creative flow where you lose sense of time. You're just in it, you're present. And it put me right back to that summer. The unforgettable, forgettable daily routine. That spaciness, that mundane life of contemplation, and going through the motions. But mostly that state brings me back to a moment, a morning, driving directly into the red rising sun, walking onto the misty beach, listening to the wind, the waves crashing, looking, longing, hoping with anticipation of a moment, a decision that would change my life, change my direction. A decision that only a naive, foolish 21-year-old could make. A decision that on paper maybe seemed foolish, but on the scale of the heart, or dreams, or romance, was the only course of action I could take. That late July morning in the summer of 2014 was when I asked my girlfriend to marry me. The craziest, best decision I've ever made.com slash least important things to get more information about the episodes, shows, and become a free or paid subscriber to get special alerts and more surprises to come. Follow us on those social links, and we'll see you next time on Least Important Things.