Carnival of Infinite Night

Driving down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman so alone

          — The Doors

In 1971, the Doors released “L.A. Woman,” a hallucinatory song that ferries the listener through a Los Angeles of broken dreams and mythic night. The music conjures a sound like that of a surreal circus. Electric guitar and piano weave together strange melodies that promise both delight and terror, while a relentless bass throbs with menace, despair, and loss. Behind it all, hypnotic drumbeats drive us deeper into a transcendent delirium where we find that the city’s dreams of exquisite beauty have become an infinite carnival of night.

Masked revelers dance through the streets, while mobsters, trapped in motels and driven mad by money and murder, peer through amnesiascopes that obliterate memory with floods of desire. Black limousines repeat tragic odysseys along Mulholland Drive, and burning wrecks fill the hills with a fire that encircles the city in rings of flame. From hidden Hollywood bungalows, innocence endlessly auditions for corruption, and lost women forever wander the glittering cityscape of desperate pleasures. Scent draws desolate lovers together, and they frantically consummate forgotten passions only to discover that the Cowboy has already unlocked the Blue Mojo and revealed the truth. Shattered by memories of betrayal and loneliness we wave our farewells and wake into an infinite dream.

At ten seconds short of eight minutes, “L.A. Woman” is not the longest song by the Doors—“The End” clocks in at nearly twelve minutes—but it was one of the last recorded before singer Jim Morrison died in Paris later that year. Many now see the song as a kind of goodbye gift from Morrison and maybe a song that helps us better understand this American city of angels, dreams, and disasters. It seems fitting that the song comes from a band named after a book on psychedelics called The Doors of Perception, a title which was itself inspired by William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”