Five to One
| "Five to One" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by The Doors from the album Waiting for the Sun | ||||
| Released | July 13, 1968 | |||
| Recorded | February–May 1968 | |||
| Length | 4:24 | |||
| Label | Elektra | |||
| Writer(s) | Jim Morrison | |||
| Producer(s) | Paul A. Rothchild | |||
| Waiting for the Sun track listing | ||||
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"Five to One" is a song by The Doors, from their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun.
Part of the song ("Your ballroom days are over, baby/Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening/crawl across the years"), was seemingly lifted from the 19th-century hymnal and bedtime rhyme "Now the Day is Over" ("Now the day is over/Night is drawing nigh/Shadows of the evening/Steal across the sky") by Morrison. Similarly, Morrison quoted the "Christian child's prayer" in a live version of "Soul Kitchen" sung in 1969 and also altered the children's rhyme "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over The candlestick" to suit part of his poem An American Prayer ("Words dissemble/Words be quick/Words resemble walking sticks"). Morrison was possibly referring to a Dylan Thomas story entitled The Fight in Thomas' Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, where the central character reads from a poem called Warp ("[...] Five into one, the one made of five into one, early/Suns distorted too late.").
The lyrics/lines “Your ballroom days are over […]/You walk across the floor [of the ballroom?]/Trade in your hours for a handful of dimes [Brother, can you spare a dime?] could be a reference to Horace McCoys’s 1935 novel (and 1969 movie, a year after the release of Waiting For The Sun) They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? about a Depression-era marathon dance set in La Monica Ballroom over the Pacific Ocean on Santa Monica Pier near Los Angeles.
The song's most famous performance was at the 1969 Miami concert at the Dinner Key Auditorium. Towards the end of the performance, a drunken Morrison declared the audience "idiots" and "slaves". The concert would end with Morrison being accused of "attempting to incite a riot" among the concert goers, resulting in his arrest, and later conviction, for indecent exposure. This performance can be heard on Disc 1 of The Doors: Box Set and is depicted in Oliver Stone's film The Doors.
During the reunion of the original lineup of The Doors sans Jim Morrison on VH1 Storytellers, Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots took up vocals. Before the performance Robby Krieger said Weiland was one of the few frontmen who could "fill Jim's leather pants". Scott said that "Five to One" was what inspired him to begin a career in rock music.
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