blues and jazz and death into a heady rock and roll stew that was a perfect soundtrack for a generation bent on breaking down the doors of perception" (Lester Bangs, quoted in Sinclair 100). Morrison's rebellious attitudes combined perfectly with the music to create an inspiring picture of a rebel who was intent on opening his generation's eyes to the restrictions that their comfortable lives placed on them. The Doors, like most of the Rock bands of the era, "perceived their music as a means to explode the social fabric of America" (Szatmary 119). But, their goals were not political, in the usual sense. Instead, Morrison described himself as an "erotic politician," and saw himself as a visionary artist whose work would free others so that they could see what lay behind the appearance of reality (Szatmary 122). In the mind of Jim Morrison, this goal could be accomplished by altering consciousness with drugs and alcohol, heightening the awareness of pain and death, and surrendering to the erotic. As one critic wrote, the Doors were "missionaries of apocalyptic sex" whose "music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation" (Joan Didion, quoted in Reynolds and Press 118).
In order to understand the impact of Morrison and the Doors, however, it is necessary to understand the cultural setting in which their rebellion developed. In the 1960s, middle-class college students had begun a reaction against society. After World War II, the American middle class had achieved the highest standard of living in history. But, the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s also led to an emphasis on conformity. Many affluent young people began to believe that their society could offer only "a life of mediocrity" in which the individual "languishes as a cog in the machine, while dreaming of a life fit for heroes" (Reynolds and Press 3). Then, in the 1960s, the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, and the sexual revolu...