Five to One

"Five to One" is a song by The Doors, from their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun.

"Five to one" is rumored to be the approximate ratio of whites to blacks, young to old, or pot smokers to non-pot smokers in the US in 1967, depending on whom you ask. A further urban legend has it as the ratio of Viet Cong to American troops in Vietnam. However, when asked, Jim Morrison said the lyrics were not political. This would seem quite likely, at least for part of the song ("Your ballroom days are over baby/Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening/crawl across the years"), which is patently 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") for whatever reason of Morrison's. 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"). Lastly, Morrison was quite 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.") In this instance, the "five" are described by Thomas as "tears", "suns", and "inscrutable spears in the head". One of the interpretations has a sexual connotation, referring to the manual satisfaction, which can be quite obvious from the verses "five to one, baby, one in five, no one here gets out alive, you´ll get yours, baby, I´ll get mine, gonna make it, baby, if we try."

On bootlegs of live recordings, Morrison included the phrase "fucked up" in the spoken word section at the end. He frequently swore at live shows, but the studio albums were originally either curse-free or censored.

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.