“Five To One” by The Doors

"Five to One" comes stomping out of Waiting for the Sun, the Doors' 1968 album on Elektra, and unlike some of their songs it was born right there in the studio. As music writer Gillian G. Gaar tells it, Jim Morrison asked John Densmore for a steady four-four beat and then fitted his words over it; Morrison wrote the lyric, though the whole band shares the credit.

It never strays from that beat. Densmore's drums and Doug Lubahn's bass come through distorted, Ray Manzarek is on keyboards, and the tune carries a rhythm and blues swagger; AllMusic's Matthew Greenwald heard Robby Krieger's guitar as menacing proto-metal, and plenty since have counted the song among heavy metal's roots. Some took it as revolutionary sloganeering, but Morrison said the words weren't political. Paul A. Rothchild produced, and Bruce Botnick engineered and mixed.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.