The Doors - Riders on the Storm

This was the last song Jim Morrison recorded. He went to France and died a few weeks later. The single was released in June 1971, shortly before Morrison's death.

The song can be seen as an autobiographical account of Morrison's life: he considered himself a "Rider on the storm." The "killer on the road" is a reference to a screenplay he wrote called The Hitchhiker (An American Pastoral), where Morrison was going to play the part of a hitchhiker who goes on a murder spree. The lyrics, "Girl you gotta love your man" can be seen as a desperate plea to his long time girlfriend Pamela.

As it says in Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend by Stephen Davis, in 1962, while Jim was attending Florida State University in Tallahassee, he was seeing a girl named Mary Werbelow who lived in Clearwater, 280 miles away. Jim would oftentimes hitchhike to see her. "Those solitary journeys on hot and dusty Florida two-lane blacktop roads, with his thumb out and his imagination on fire with lust and poetry and Nietzsche and God knows what else - taking chances on redneck truckers, fugitive homos, and predatory cruisers - left an indelible psychic scar on Jimmy, whose notebooks began to obsessively feature scrawls and drawings of a lone hitchhiker, an existential traveler, faceless and dangerous, a drifting stranger with violent fantasies, a mystery tramp: the killer on the road."

Lyrics

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan

Riders on the storm

There's a killer on the road

His brain is squirmin' like a toad

Take a long holiday

Let your children play

If you give this man a ride

Sweet family will die

Killer on the road, yeah

Girl, you gotta love your man

Girl, you gotta love your man

Take him by the hand

Make him understand

The world on you depends

Our life will never end

Gotta love your man, yeah

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Into this house we're born

Into this world we're thrown

Like a dog without a bone

An actor out on loan.

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm

Riders on the storm