Five to One

Yeah, c'mon
Love my girl
She lookin' good
C'mon
One more

Five to one, baby
One in five
No one here gets out alive, now
You get yours, baby
I'll get mine
Gonna make it, baby
If we try

The old get old
And the young get stronger
May take a week
And it may take longer
They got the guns
But we got the numbers
Gonna win, yeah
We're takin' over
Come on!

Yeah!

Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening crawl across the years
Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful dimes
Gonna' make it, baby, in our prime

Come together one more time
Get together one more time
Get together one more time
Get together, aha
Get together one more time!
Get together one more time!
Get together one more time
Get together one more time
Get together, gotta, get together

Ohhhhhhhh!

Hey, c'mon, honey
You won't have a long wait for me, baby
I'll be there in just a little while
You see, I gotta go out in this car with these people and...

Get together one more time
Get together one more time
Get together, got to
Get together, got to
Get together, got to
Take you up in my room and...
Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah
Love my girl
She lookin' good, lookin' real good
Love ya, c'mon



- The song took its title from the first line, "Five to One," a statistic that went unexplained by Jim.

- Statistics between 1960-1969

• Population 177,830,000
• Unemployment 3,852,000
• National Debt 286.3 Billion
• Average Salary $4,743
• Teacher's Salary $5,174
• Minimum Wage $1.00
• Life Expectancy: Males 66.6 years, Females 73.1 years
• Auto deaths 21.3 per 100,000
• An estimated 850,000 "war baby" freshmen enter college; emergency living quarters are set up in dorm lounges, hotels and trailer camps.

The sixties were the age of youth, as 70 million children from the post-war baby boom became teenagers and young adults. The movement away from the conservative fifties continued and eventually resulted in revolutionary ways of thinking and real change in the cultural fabric of American life. No longer content to be images of the generation ahead of them, young people wanted change. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles, laws, and entertainment. Many of the revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties are continuing to evolve today. Reference

- Paul Rothchild's theory is that, "Five to one is the same as one in six, the approximate ratio of blacks to whites in the U.S., and one in five I remember being reported as the dope-smoking ratio in Los Angeles." But whenever he was asked, Jim (Morrison) would only say that he didn't consider the song political. (pg 152, No One Here Gets Out Alive)

- Listened to in its entirety, the song seems to be a parody of all the naive revolutionary rhetoric heard on the streets and read in the underground press in the late sixties This interpretation is strongly supported by the final verse, the verse Jim's audience paid little attention to. In it Jim addressed some of the young people in his constituency, the "hippie/flower child" hordes he saw in growing numbers, panhandling on the city sidewalks outside every concert hall.

Your ballroom days are over, baby
Night is drawing near
Shadows of the evening crawl across the years
Ya walk across the floor with a flower in your hand
Trying to tell me no one understands
Trade in your hours for a handful dimes
Gonna' make it, baby, in our prime
(pg 152, No One Here Gets Out Alive)

- He (Jim Morrison) was so drunk when he recorded this song, he needed help from the studio staff on when to begin singing. If you listen closely, you can hear someone in the background say "One more" before Jim starts his first verse. The opening part ("Yeah, c'mon - I love my girl. She lookin' good...") is some of Jim's nonsensical drunk rambling. Reference

- 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.

Author's Note: The above paragraph stated that this event occurred "towards the end of the performance" when rather it was actually near the beginning of the performance as evidenced by the link to the live recording I posted.

- If the lyric "Five to one" is taken to be the mathematical odds against "getting out of here alive," then the next line, "One in five" is incorrect. Five-to-one odds against success represents a one-in-six chance. "Four to one" would correspond to "One in five." Reference

- One of the more common interpretations was that "Five to One" was about the Vietnam War, the title a reference to the oft-repeated statistic that the Viet Cong forces outnumbered American troops by a ratio of five to one. Reference

- Most likely Morrison selected the song's title not because it echoed a ratio that had any particular referent, but simply because he like the sound and meter of the phrases 'five to one' and 'one in five.' Reference

- "Night is drawing near, shadows of the evening crawl across the years" is an adaption of the Victorian-era hymn "Shadows of the Evening," whose first verse is:
Now the day is over,
Night is drawing nigh.
Shadows of the evening
Steal across the sky. Reference