by Greil Marcus
Table of Contents
ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue:
L.A. Woman
Mystery Train
The End, 1966
The Doors in the So-called Sixties
When the Music’s Over
The Crystal Ship
Soul Kitchen
Light My Fire, The Ed Sullivan Show, 1967
The Unknown Soldier in 1968
Strange Days
People Are Strange
My Eyes Have Seen You
Twentieth Century Fox
End of the Night
Roadhouse Blues
Queen of the Highway
Take It as It Comes
The End, 1968
Light My Fire, 1966/1970
Epilogue:
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
Copyright Page
ALSO BY GREIL MARCUS
Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (1975, 2008)
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (1989, 2009)
Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession (1991)
In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977–92
(1993, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers)
The Dustbin of History (1995)
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes
(2000, 2011, originally published as Invisible Republic, 1997)
Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley in a Land
of No Alternatives (2000)
“The Manchurian Candidate” (2002)
Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005)
The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006)
When that Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (2010)
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 1968–2010 (2010)
AS EDITOR
Stranded (1979, 2007)
Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung by Lester Bangs (1987)
The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad
(2004, with Sean Wilentz)
Best Music Writing 2009 (2009)
A New Literary History of America (2009, with Werner Sollors)
TO LARRY MILLER
THE DOORS—Ray Manzarek, born 1939, Jim Morrison, 1943, John Densmore, 1944, and Robby Krieger, 1946—formed in Venice, a Southern California beach town, in 1965. They started out at parties, weddings, and high-school proms, and played their last show on December 12, 1970, at the Warehouse in New Orleans. Jim Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971.
JIM MORRISON: “Interviews are good, but . . . ”
GREG SHAW: “Oh, they’re a drag.”
JIM MORRISON: “Critical essays are really where it’s at.”
—“Interview with the Doors,”
Mojo Navigator Rock + Roll News
no. 14, August 1967
Prologue:
Light My Fire, 1967
BY SEPTEMBER 30, 1967, when the Doors appeared at the Family Dog in Denver—an outpost of the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, where the band had played often in the first months of the year—“Light My Fire” had already reached number one all over the country. In fact it had stolen the year, at first the nearly seven minutes of the song creeping out of the night on the few, new FM rock ’n’ roll stations that still seemed more rumor than fact, then in a cut-down, three-minute version taking over AM Top 40 stations everywhere, sending their listeners into the record stores or in search of FM if they could find it, to hear the whole song, or to the phones to demand that the AM disc jockeys play it all, which soon enough they did.
This night in Denver it was a fair bet that everyone in the hall had already heard the thing at least four or five hundred times. The Doors had already played it for more than a year, from the nowhere London Fog club off Sunset Strip in Los Angeles to the celebrated Whisky à Go Go on it and at every show after that. They played it before anyone had heard of them; they played it until well after the name of the band was on so many lips that, more than forty years past the singer’s death, after he had been dead for far more years than he had been alive, the name of the band still struck a chord. It wasn’t a chord of memory. It was a note of possibility, of promises made that still remained to be kept, promises that in life were inevitably failed and in the music left behind were kept over and over again.
“We really didn’t see it coming, the new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit,” the British novelist Jenny Diski wrote in 2009. “But perhaps that is only to be expected. It’s possible after all that we were simply young, and now we are simply old and looking back as every generation does nostalgically to our best of times. Perhaps the Sixties are an idea that has had its day and lingers long after its time. Except, of course, for the music.”
There were, of course, those, the great majority, doubtless, who, having finished with their wild youth, put on proper suits come the mid-Seventies and went off to work and a regular life, becoming all their parents could have wished, having just gone through a phase, as the more liberal of the grown-ups had always suggested. But some—these days called, derogatorily, idealists—maintained their former sense that “society” exists, and believe it persists, even beyond the strident years of Margaret Thatcher and the official approved decades of self-interest and greed that have followed. We are the disappointed remnant, the rump of the Sixties.
But that drama was already taking place only two months after “Light My Fire” hit the top of the charts.
How do we make this song into something they haven’t heard before? How do we make it into something we haven’t heard before?
On September 30 there’s a lift in Jim Morrison’s voice for the first two times he reaches the word fire in each chorus, as if running his hands over the single syllable—always, he communicates that as an idea that word is new to him, and so it comes across as a surprise. You’ve heard the word in the song, but you haven’t begun to follow that fire as far as it goes—that’s the feeling. “Fire”—it’s a door swinging open in the wind, seen from a distance.
Compared to the first two times the word is sung on record, the third time—“FY-YUR! ”—is vulgar, a hook, something to wake you up if the song has already put you to sleep. But tonight, in the first chorus, Morrison stays with the word as he first sang it: Fire . . . fiiire . . . fiiiiire. He holds the word up to the light, looking at it from all sides, still letting it float in the air. “Light my fire” was already a cliché, a tired catchphrase by September; within a year it would be a teen-sex poster and a worldwide easy-listening hit by Jose Feliciano, in two years a porn movie. Now, as the song starts, the word fire seems like a strange thing to say, less a word than a rayograph.
The recording from this night is from a bootleg, the sound squeezed into itself. Robby Krieger’s guitar and Ray Manzarek’s organ can seem like the same instrument. But John Densmore’s drumming is always defined, each beat feeling like a choice made, sealed, and left behind. Morrison’s voice floats over the band, even when he seems to be shouting from far behind it—shouting encouragement, as if the song as it builds isn’t enough, isn’t yet itself— COME ON!
LET’S GO!
—then as Manzarek hits a momentum that carries him into the song Morrison is pushing him toward, celebrating that the song is whole, breathing its own air— LET’S GO!
WE LOVE IT!
—then drifting away, as if the music no longer needs him to tell it what to do— In your night, babe
Evil hand
But the long instrumental passages, handed back and forth between Manzarek and Krieger, are
hard to hold on to. They’re meanders, what Manny Faber, talking about painting, talking about movies, talking about jazz, called termite art, art that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” It’s art without intent, without thinking, art by desire, appetite, instinct, and impulse, and it can as easily meander in circles as cross borders and leap gaps. This night Manzarek and Krieger lose the song, as if they’ve forgotten what they were playing. For a moment “Light My Fire” disappears, as if it’s never been performed before, as if there’s no referent, no hit that was ever on the radio. As it will do so many times in the next three years, the song devolves back into other songs, songs that edge out of the vague memory of one musician or another and replace the song they were playing a minute before; this time it’s “My Favorite Things,” a cool jazz moment in a performance that’s no longer part of a rock ’n’ roll show in Denver but back in the Venice beach house where the song was found, though now it’s not 1965 but 1954 and the person everyone’s looking at isn’t Jim Morrison but Chet Baker.
They lose the beat, the song slips, they have trouble finding their way back into the verses, stumbling over the steps back into the fanfare that opens the song, that closes it, that marks Morrison’s stride back into the music, that tells you something is about to happen, that makes it clear something has.
It’s a relief when Morrison is back at the center, when there are words to attack, when there’s a song to take back and rebuild, on the spot; at seven minutes and fifteen seconds into the song it’s a thrill. But the song isn’t there for Morrison either. The hundreds of thousands of times the song has been broadcast on the radio without the solos the musicians have just found and lost have left the song without a body, just head, hands, and feet, spinning, flailing.
Densmore brings it back, with one single hard shuffle that breaks a line between the verse, with its bad rhyme of “mire” and “pyre,” and the chorus, a pattern of five strokes that says, Time’s up. Put up or shut up. And that does it: for the first time, the song is absolutely present, an event taking place as you listen. For the last minute of the performance, the sense of will and strain is so strong that Morrison might be down on his knees, pushing the song through a wall. Every time Densmore leaps to the front of the sound, the certainty that the song will break through is overwhelming; in the next instant, when Morrison takes Densmore’s place, desperation builds on itself. Now it’s Manzarek who’s shouting from behind, all excitement—
ALL RIGHT!
—then with excitement wrapped in fright—
GO!
—fright that the wall may hold, that for all that Morrison puts into “Try to set the night on fire,” it won’t happen.
When the song finally crashes to a close, you can’t tell if it happened or not. As the song ends they’re still pushing, the wall is still holding. The song is over but the story it’s telling is still going on. You can’t hear it but you can feel it on your skin.
Jenny Diski, The Sixties (New York: Picador, 2009), 9, 87.
“Light My Fire,” Family Dog, Denver, September 30, 1967, from Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs, a collection of audience and fans’ concert recordings (Rhino Handmade, 2003).
Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Film Culture, 1962. Collected in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America, 2003), 535.
Come On Baby, Light My Fire, directed by Lou Campa (J. R. L. Productions, 1969). According to Movies Unlimited, “A goody two-shoes anti-marijuana campaigner [Tina Buckley] is abducted by a group of perverts who take her to the home of a drug kingpin, played by Gerard Damiano of ‘Deep Throat’ fame. Soon, the doors of submission and domination are opened when she’s forced to become their sex slave.”
L.A. Woman
A S THE TITLE TRACK of the Doors last album, released in April 1971, three months before Jim Morrison died in Paris, his ideal of following in the footsteps of Rimbaud replaced by an image of Marat dead in his bathtub, “L.A. Woman” emerged over the years, until after four decades you could turn on your car radio and find all eight minutes of it still talking, jabbering, this bum on Sunset Strip going on about a woman and the city and the night as if someone other than himself is actually listening. You can hear it there, anytime—and you can hear it playing between every other line of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 L.A. detective novel Inherent Vice, set in the spring of 1970, just before the Manson trial is about to begin, a time when, as Pynchon calls it up, the freeways eastbound from the beach towns “teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody’s radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations.”
The book is a love letter to a time and place about to vanish: about the fear that “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”
At the very time in which Pynchon has placed his story—about a rock ’n’ roll musician supposedly dead of a heroin overdose who turns up in his old band unrecognized by his own bandmates (“Even when I was alive, they didn’t know it was me”), a disappeared billionaire developer, a gang of right-wing thugs called Vigilant California, a criminal empire so vast and invulnerable even to speak its name is to make the earth tremble, the first, primitive, bootlegged version of the Internet, and an old girlfriend—people were already talking about the great hippie detective novel. About a dope deal, of course—and an outsider version of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer. Roger Simon’s Moses Wine—starting out in 1973 with The Big Fix and still on the case thirty years later, wasn’t it. In 1971 Hunter Thompson played the role well in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” but soon dissolved in his own aura. Pynchon’s Doc Sportello somehow realizes the fantasy.
About to turn thirty, he lives in Gordita Beach, halfway between Hermosa Beach and El Segundo, though not on any real-life map. He thinks of himself as John Garfield; he’s the same height. On his wall is a velvet painting he bought on the street: “a Southern California beach that never was—palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works.”
He thought of it as a window to look out of when he couldn’t deal with looking out of the traditional glass-type one in the other room. Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.
That’s as good a description of “L.A. Woman” as any other. It has the textures of ordinary life, and everything about it is slightly off, because the epic is what it’s reaching for, but without giving itself away, without makeup, cool clothes, photo shoots, or any other trappings of Hollywood glamour. Robby Krieger’s guitar is in the front of the music, thin and loose, intricate and casual, serious and quick as thought. Jim Morrison is in the back of the sound, as if trailing the band on the street, shouting that he’s got this song for them, a new-type song for a dime, it’d be perfect, and you can see the Morrison who’s singing, a man who in 1970 did look like a bum, a huge and tangled beard, a gut hanging over his belt, his clothes stained. The voice is full of cracks and burrs, and an inspiring, crazy exuberance, a delight in being on the streets, in the sun, at night under neon, Blade Runner starring Charles Bukowski instead of Harrison Ford—this bum doesn’t shuffle down the street, he runs, stops, twi
rls, runs back the way he came. Maybe the city doesn’t want to see him, but he’s in love with the city and that’s the story he has to tell. He’s not blind. “Motel money, murder madness,” he muses to himself; he can see the fear the Manson gang left in the eyes of the people he passes even as they avert their eyes from his, but he’s not afraid, and he knows he’s not the killer they’re afraid of. The whole song is a chase in pieces, the guitarist tracing half circles in the air, the singer dancing in circles around him, the guitarist not seeing him, the singer not caring.
In Inherent Vice there are set pieces lifted, as they have to be, from the likes of The Little Sister or The Chill—the visit to the big mansion, the hero doped up in the locked room. What is new is Pynchon’s depiction of the economy of the hippie utopia as altogether heroin-driven, a suspicion that flits around the edges of the first pages of the story and drives the last sixty pages like a train. What’s new in the detective-story novel is Sportello himself, a one-time skip tracer who’s graduated into the world of the licensed PI, beach-bum division, and Sportello’s nemesis, the infinitely manipulative LAPD homicide detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, who could have stepped out of H. P. Lovecraft. “It’s like,” he says, “there’s this evil sub-god who rules over Southern California? who off and on will wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that are always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth? . . . bye-bye, Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, we’ve seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I’m afraid. We’ve found the gateway to hell, and it’s asking far too much of your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding on through it, horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that much closer to the end of the world”—and you can almost see Squeaky Fromme, not to mention four or five previous generations of Southern California mystics and psychics, perched on his shoulder, smiling like Natalie Wood.
