The Doors - Five to One Meaning

Five to One Lyrics

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...

1. 1TOP RATED

   #1 top rated interpretation:
   anonymous

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   May 16th 2006 !⃝

   This song is usually considered a quissential "us against them" anthem of the 60s/70s time period.
   
   The point is that young people may not have the individual power the older generation does, but together they outnumber the "suits" and the Man, and they can make a difference and bring about vast (usually implied to be social) change.

2. 2TOP RATED

   #2 top rated interpretation:
   anonymous

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   Jul 22nd 2007 !⃝

   First and fore most Jim is a genius. And it's not hard to see that he is talking about fighting oppression. "May take a week And it may take longer. They got the guns But we got the numbers Gonna win, yeah Were takin over Come on!"

3. 3TOP RATED

   #3 top rated interpretation:
   anon123

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   Jan 22nd 2009 !⃝

   in the book, No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman mentioned that in L.A. during this time the ratio of people smokin marijuana was 5:1 or one of every five. Jim never did mention the meaning. I think he left it up for us to decide, or if we didn't get it, he wouldn't let us know. Jim was a brilliant. The better interpretation would probaly be the the ratio of the young to old though. It was a revolution, thigns we're going change. That change is still needed today. "Get together one more time."
4. anonymous

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   Nov 28th 2019 !⃝

   With the next line being no one here gets out alive , 5 to 1 and 1 to 5 must have been leaning towards death so , forget masturbation , forget the ratio between white & blacks , that really just leaves the drug theory .
5. anonymous

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   Jun 25th 2018 !⃝

   Jimbo’s take on the Titanic disaster where only 1 in 5 survived
6. anonymous

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   Nov 26th 2015 !⃝

   5 to 1 is slang for masturbation
   It's all about Jim convincing a pretty lady to get it on with him. He was pretty much nihilist, not a hippy. It's kind of like saying "Hey, you know we could just play by ourself or play together. The whole world is going down anyway." Being that he was arrested on stage for pulling it out makes it plausable.

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7. anonymous

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   Aug 14th 2015 !⃝

   When you read something about The Doors, you often find the ratio-theory back considering this song; the ratio in wich Pam’s heoine was cutted up, and the ratio young verus old are the two most known.
   
   Doors fans are familiar with the fact that they where a band that was highly interested in the subconscious, especially Jim, who also had builded knowledge in Freudian philosophie and philosophie in general.
   
   - 51 (5-1) is a sexual symbolic number known by psychoanalysts and stands for onanism (masturbation).
   
   In that context, the lyric get’s another meaning, one that in my opinion is worth to consider and maybe lies closer to the actual meaning then we think.
8. anonymous

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   Aug 5th 2014 !⃝

   Its pretty above all the war references, Jim himself has said that 5:1 is the ratio of women to men in Los Angeles, 1 in 5 has done LSD.
9. anonymous

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   Dec 29th 2013 !⃝

   The end is about the Freudian theory! just thought you should know!
10. anonymous

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    Oct 12th 2013 !⃝

    """""""""""""Just to clear it up, 5:1 was the ratio of the young generation in the 60's to the older generation because of the 'baby boom'. To put it in basic form, the song is about how they [young people then] could take over, because there were so many of them.""""""""""
11. anonymous

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    Oct 19th 2012 !⃝

    One thing you have to remember about Jim's lyrics are they all have double meaning. What you hear Jim talk about in this song is one of his best examples of it. When Robbie wrote the song follow me down for the doors Jim would not take credit for the song because he did not want people to believe he was ensuing a riot.
    
    It is possible this song has nothing to do with revolution or us v them. As a previous commenter mention it is most likely a song about a on going died between Jim and girl friend Pam of her heroin use. And over Jim's alcohol use amongst other forms of pleasure. Hence "you get yours and I'll get mine" so on.
12. anonymous

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    Mar 6th 2012 !⃝

    Five to one is also the pentagram in wordform. the magical gateway..this is a revolutionary text, but maybe on a non-physical level..you never know with jim
13. anonymous

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    Jan 14th 2012 !⃝

    Just gonna say, this song has A LOT of references to the American Civil War, which I hear Jim was interested in. How did everyone miss this?

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14. anonymous

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    Aug 8th 2011 !⃝

    okay my turn
    by thebenhavens
    
    now this song is a GREAT work of how Jim was a poet and used words to confuse and help us figure out our inner selves which this song is about.
    
    Five to one, baby
    One in five...
    this is where most of you go wrong. that simply means however you slice this pie called life 'no one here gets out alive'. i could stop there because that is THE meaning to this song. i won't though because i want elaborate on Jim. Jim was a poet and a goal of the poet is to explain the simplest of things to get people to wake up. so i wrote this poem as an example.
    
    kill the fuck
    rob the buck
    and rape the daughter
    in the butt
    
    now you might feel insert word here over that poem. if you did then my goal is achieved. you felt something. it's there for you to make your own feelings on. i don't care what it is, just don't judge me, judge the poem.
    the end.

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15. anonymous

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    Feb 19th 2011 !⃝

    5 to 1 were the odds of being killed in the infantry in the Vietnam war. One in five infantry men would go home in a box.
16. ggreenwood4

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    Aug 5th 2010 !⃝

    I know what this song is about as was with Jim when he wrote it! It all stared out at the Whiskey a-go-go. A young girl walked up to Jim and dumped her life story on him so he wrote this about that experience: "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."
    We all left and walked around the corner to were Jim had parked "Ray Manzarek's" car. Just them Pam parked her Pink Jaguar XKE and walked down the hill towards us. Jim approached and and said: "Hey, c'mon, honey
    You won't have along 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 f**K**D up.
    She wasn't going to let him leave without her. Jim lost the argument. Jim drove, Eric rode shotgun, Tex, Pam And I (Gary Greenwood) got in the back seat. The first thing that Jim did was bach Ray's car up over the curb into a Parking Sign And broke it off. He then put the car in drive and pulled forward hitting the parking meter so hard it bent at a 45 degree angle. Finally pulled away, got a break in the traffic and turned lef
17. anonymous

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    Jul 8th 2010 !⃝

    well im almost done with reading ''Jim Morrison life,death,legend'' book.Jim basically is telling his girl pamela who was a heroin addict,the heroin that she was buying was cut five to one .''you get yours baby,i'll get mine'' that was one time they had a fight about her heroin addiction,so he told her you get your stuff and he'll get his,which was drinking alcohol.''your ballroom days are over baby'' is something one of Jim's friend told him,'cause they used to play in ballrooms and now they started playing in arenas.''They;ve got the guns,but we've got the numbers'' it was a chant he used to say,but he used to say it ''we've got the power'instead of numbers,what he means is that the people with higher authority do have guns to stop us,but we have them outnumbered.''trading your hours for a handful of dimes''he was insulting her for getting high for hours when she bought a dime(ten-dollar bags of street heroin''
18. anonymous

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    Oct 17th 2009 !⃝

    It is also worth mentioning that the "number" may also just be a joint.....the grown generation got the guns, but fuck them, we've got marijuana....

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