Calling on the gods... Slay a few animals... At the crossroads

When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!

Can you give me sanctuary
I must find a place to hide
A place for me to hide

Can you find me soft asylum
I can't make it anymore
The Man is at the door [what man?]

[...]

There's only four ways to get unraveled
One is to sleep and the other is travel, da da
One is a bandit up in the hills
One is to love your neighbor 'till [sodomy?]
His wife gets home

[...]

All our lives we sweat and save
Building for a shallow grave
Must be something else we say
Somehow to defend this place
Everything must be this way
Everything must be this way, yeah

[...]

Out of sight!
The lights are getting brighter
The radio is moaning
Calling to the dogs [gods?]
There are still a few animals
Left out in the yard
[...]

[...]

We need someone or something new
Something else to get us through, yeah, c'mon

Callin' on the dogs [gods?]
Callin' on the dogs [gods?]
Oh, it's gettin' harder
Callin' on the dogs [gods?]
Callin' in the dogs [gods?]
Callin' all the dogs [gods?]
Callin' on the gods

You gotta meet me
Too late, baby
Slay a few animals
At the crossroads
Too late
All in the yard
[...]
By the crossroads
You gotta meet me
[...]
At the edge of town
[...]
Outskirts of the city
You and I
We need someone new
Somethin' new
Somethin' else to get us through
Better bring your gun
Better bring your gun
[...]

[...] 

  "The Soft Parade," The Doors, the soft parade.

  And he [Morrison] finally got there [the vocal theater and rhythmic tension of those first breakthrough records], at the very end of the album, in "The Soft Parade" [...] Morrison growls in ecstasy: "This is the best part of the trip!" And it is, a resolution of the fanfares and detours all over the rest of The Soft Parade, into that original pagan magic.

Fricke, David, the insert, the doors/the soft parade, Rhino Entertainment Company, 2007.

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.