Producer Paul Rothchild was one [who believed Jim's accident story]: "As a child he was driving with his parents, and there was a truck full of Indians that had crashed and overturned. There was a medicine man dying at the side of the road, and Jim, this four- or five-year-old child vividly remembered a mystical experience when, as the shaman died, his spirit entered Jim's body. That was the pivotal event of his entire life. He always viewed himself as the shaman, having mystical powers and the ability to see through many facades to the truth. It was this power that drove him. This was the great force that pushed his life and took him out of the rigid, military environment of his youth and turned him into a seer."

Riordan, James and Jerry Prochnicky, Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991, p. 193.

When Manzarek heard that Morrison wanted to call the band The Doors, he thought it was ridiculous until he remembered the Blake line. "At the time, we had been ingesting a lot of psychedelic chemicals," Manzarek remembers, "so the doors of perception were cleansed in our own minds, so we saw music as a vehicle to, in a sense, become proselytizers of a new religion, a religion of self, of each man as god. That was the original idea behind The Doors. Using music and Jim's brilliant lyrics."

Riordan, James and Jerry Prochnicky, Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991, p. 74.

Jim Morrison later recounted what happened to him during this time: "I was living in this abandoned office building, sleeping on the roof. And all of a sudden I threw away most of my notebooks that I'd been keeping since high school and these songs just kept coming to me. It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs. This kind of mythic concert that I heard . . . I thought I was going to be a writer or a sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts---one or two at most. I saw a few things on TV, but I had never been a part of it all. But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience---a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just taking notes at a fantastic rock concert that was going on inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them."

Riordan, James and Jerry Prochnicky, Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, New York: William Morrow and Company, 1991, p. 72.