by Greil Marcus
As Strange Days reached its last track, the first simple, hesitant, jerky organ notes changed the tone. They promised that this would not be rushed, that it would not be over soon, that the song was writing a check only it could cash. And it didn’t pay off. It didn’t sustain the suspense of its first moments, but that suspense lingered. It sent listeners back to the song to see if it would give up something that wasn’t there the first, third, tenth time before, and it sent the band back to it too, to find out what all those minutes—eleven on record, always more on a stage—were for. In 1969, the Rolling Stones would answer: in many ways, with those slithering first notes building on themselves, each one catching the one before it and passing it, only to be caught in turn, until a broken guitar chord tipped the song into the harsh, unforgiving cauldron that for the next four minutes boiled over, “Gimmie Shelter” was the ultimate Doors record.
Some nights, “When the Music’s Over” was a flat, featureless landscape, without intimations that anything worth remembering might be coming—and it was in such a setting that the song could generate drama from within itself. One night in 1968, in Houston, the piece was all but shapeless as it began. Morrison is clear and direct, but there’s a song inside the song, and that’s what he’s after. At its most effective, the band is barely present at all, as if to give the singer the room he needs to wander out of his own, written words. “Confusion . . . confusion . . . confusion,” he croons, trying to make the word, the idea, open a door. He follows “confusion” with “delusion.” The pauses between words or musical phrases, with no change in tempo or volume, create a kind of airborne swamp, a miasma, that seems complete and whole. Manzarek taps a bump-bump-bump pattern on his bass keyboard, a dozen times, it could be a hundred times, so dully you don’t notice it, unless you’re trapped by it, and begin to count off the notes, unable to hear anything else. Here, “Sat up all night, talking and smoking, count the dead and wait for morning,” sneaking into the song from the side, unbidden and unwritten—Not on the record! some in the crowd will say to themselves, confused, Aren’t they supposed to play the record?—is all the song wants.
The performance is so sure of itself, so confident, that, if they want it to, the song can say anything. It becomes an open field of action, and what the band holds back carries as great a charge as what it puts on the field. “Hey, look,” Morrison says at one point, just before a written, recorded line—and the feeling is so conversational, so ordinary, that for an instant the performance vanishes, and even as the song goes on you can see him in the crowd which is no longer a crowd, just some people hanging around, asking them, What do you think? Is this working, is it happening? Why did you come tonight? Why are you here? Then he gets back onto the stage and, as on Strange Days in its last moments, takes the song back to that opening promise, that first apprehension of portent and dread. “When the music’s over”—was it “Turn out the lights,” or “Turn up the lights”? Night to night, city to city, year to year, it wasn’t the same.
“Hello to the Cities,” from “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be,” in The Doors Box Set (Elektra, 1997).
Robby Krieger quoted in notes to The Doors Box Set (Elektra, 1997), 34.
Ray Manzarek quoted in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 73.
“When the Music’s Over,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967).
———, Sam Houston Coliseum, Houston, July 10, 1968, collected on Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade, 2003).
The Crystal Ship
WHO WRITES MOST of your songs?” the late Greg Shaw asked the Doors in San Francisco in 1967, just after the band’s March dates at the Matrix, a congenial little box of a club. “Jim writes most of the lyrics,” Robby Krieger said. “I noticed that some of your songs are very strange, like ‘The End’ and ‘Moonlight Drive’ and a few others,” Shaw said. “A strong mood of death running through a lot of them. I mean, it almost seems as if you lost your mind once, sometime in your past, with these songs as the result. I get the impression from like, ‘End of the Night’ particularly a real feeling of Celine, Journey to the End of the Night, and from ‘The End’ and many of the other songs, of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Really strong moods.” “I don’t know,” Jim Morrison said. “Compared to some of the stuff I’ve heard in San Francisco, I don’t think it’s too strange. It’s pretty straight stuff.”
“The streets are fields that never die,” from “The Crystal Ship,” from The Doors, a song the band played at the Matrix, was a captivating image; so was “Speak in secret alphabets,” from “Soul Kitchen,” also from The Doors, which they played right before “The Crystal Ship.” As images they hovered, and as ideas, they rang. On the page, maybe as you let them play in your head, they seemed transparent, to explain themselves immediately, but as Jim Morrison sang them, they didn’t.
Greg Shaw was right about death. Who knew what shore Morrison’s crystal ship, or his own ship, was headed for? Listening now to the ineffable take of the song from The Doors, and to the more insistent, expansive performance from the Matrix, the song is pitched between dream and waking, speech and silence, fantasy and act, death or the next morning. It doesn’t light. Morrison’s balance over the weightless, hesitating figures in the music—the first two words of the song let out in the echoing silence of an empty house; a swooping, sealing bass note; Ray Manzarek’s high, slipstream organ; most of all, the stoic, wrap-it-up climb in John Densmore’s repeating sets of taps on his snare or cymbal to mark the shift from one movement, one point of view, to the next—calls up a sleepwalker on a tightrope. The physical body of the performance is that of a single breath exhaled across two and a half minutes, and it could be a last breath.
The oddness of the first words—“Before you slip into unconsciousness”— Be
fore
you
slip
into
unconsciousness
—throws you off, pulls you down, right from the start. This could be sleep, it could be an overdose, inflicted by the singer or the person he’s addressing; it could be murder, suicide, or a suicide pact. Or simply someone about to pass out drunk. From beginning to end—the floating drift across the music—Morrison presents the situation with absolute equanimity. He raises his voice, his volume, only once, near the end, when he sings the title of the song as if he’s just discovered it: the three words, the perfect metaphor, the Flying Dutchman of the heart.
Morrison’s voice was never more modest, never more full. He was never a soul singer—the reserve of someone thinking everything over, thinking everything through, kept him from that—but here he gave himself up to the steps of the song, steps made of images, notes, melody most of all, trusting those steps to lead to somewhere worth going, even if there was no hint where that might be. “Sometimes I make up words so I can remember the melody I hear,” Morrison once said; you can hear that happening here.
Inside this soft, comforting, deeply elegant song, what Raymond Chandler called the big sleep, what Ross Macdonald called the chill, lingered, lay back on a bed with its lips parted, strolled naked through the rooms of the song like Evan Rachel Wood in Todd Haynes’s 2011 film of James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. Death was more distant in “The Crystal Ship” than in “End of the Night,” farther on on The Doors, and more convincing. “End of the Night” made a gorgeous setting for Blake’s “Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night,” so gorgeous you could think that to make that setting was the only reason for writing the song. The band let the lines echo in the sound, but not in the heart, as they would when Gary Farmer’s Nobody spoke them almost thirty years later in Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, and “The Crystal Ship” was sailing for the heart or nowhere.
In 2007 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opened its fortieth-anniversary Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era retrospective; there was a huge catalogue, the cover spelling out the magic words in a psychedelically unreadable design, recall
ing those halcyon days when thousands made the pilgrimage to San Francisco to be attacked by the police, dance in the streets, buy drugs, get raped and robbed, and hear wonderful music. Rhino Records released Love Is the Song We Sing, a four-CD set that caught the Summer of Love principally by collecting crummy singles by Psychedelic-Era San Francisco Bay Area bands. Nothing would have been more out of place than the sweep, the grandeur, the calmness of the Doors.
San Francisco music was soft at the center—Jefferson Airplane passed out buttons reading JEFFERSON AIRPLANE LOVES YOU and the Grateful Dead didn’t believe in death at all. San Francisco music did believe in happy endings. Not all of it. On the first album from Moby Grape, in 1967, a band all but ridden out of town for violating the bohemian vow of visible poverty by accepting a huge promotional campaign by Columbia, there were the warnings of “Lazy Me” (“I’ll just lay here, and decay here”) and the rising doubts of “Indifference,” the promise of the Haight-Ashbury at just that point where it turned into a curse. There was the breakdown of Moby Grape leader Skip Spence two years later, with Oar, a cracked, scattered, stumblebum travelogue that took you back and forth between the campfire and the psycho ward. The singer stood on the street, with open sores he didn’t know he was scratching, clothes filthy, talking to someone who wasn’t there; in every broken tune there was a memory of what could have been, a damn for what should have, when all that was left was what never was.
There was the Great Society, captured, on Love Is the Song We Sing—it’s embarrassing to keep typing the phrase—at a performance at the Matrix in 1966, when Grace Slick was a sometime model and full-time bohemian with a daring band behind her. With Jefferson Airplane she would make “Somebody to Love” a huge national hit in 1967—all triumph, a soaring escape. A year before it was just the big number of a group that rarely topped the bill at the ballrooms: a fearsome, frightening challenge. Called “Someone to Love” then, it was “Like a Rolling Stone” stripped of its carnival metaphors: if you find yourself on your own, like a complete unknown, what are you going to do then? Die doped-up and gang-banged in a crash pad a block off the Haight, or live a new life? The band finds a fierce rhythmic count to step up the tension—the pressure—between each chorus and the next verse, a breach that seems to open up the ground beneath their feet, and Slick comes off of it every time more outraged, disgusted, contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t have the courage to face the truth, throw away the past, and not look back. It’s staggering: you’ve walked into this dodgy little place and here’s this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty, and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.
There is a sullen, hateful, dangerous edge in the music—when Slick says “the garden flowers all are dead,” they are dead—an edge muffled in the music everyone else made. Only the Great Society brought it to the surface, for a few months thrilled by the chance to ask a question no one wanted to answer: how do you get from here to nowhere?
It was a kind of heedless prophecy. The Great Society—which sometimes billed themselves as the Great!! Society!!—didn’t want to hear the bad answers: who would? But they were there in their music, and you can hear so much of the fabled San Francisco Sound, today, as an effort to fight off the sorts of stories implicit in the music of Moby Grape, Skip Spence, the Great Society, and the Doors. I think of a forgotten novel called Loose Jam, by one Wayne Wilson. It came out in 1990; when I listen to Skip Spence, Grace Slick, the Doors, it comes right back.
In Morro Bay, a town a little under two hundred miles south of San Francisco, a fat, balding man named Henry has a nothing job, an embarrassment for a guy on the edge of forty, but he’s not complaining. Then his old pal Miles shows up. Miles—Henry’s Vietnam buddy and former bandleader, a one-legged, one-time Voice of a Generation, turns Henry’s world upside down without half trying. He’s more irritating than compelling—the reader wants him to leave even more than Henry does. What is compelling is the inexorable slide of the narrative from orderly, structured occurrences into chaos: a sort of match from the artistry and confidence at the beginning of that first Moby Grape album—the thrilling charge of “Fall on You” and “Omaha”—to the hidden corners and darkened rooms at the end of the album, the people who walked off the record into rooms worse than that.
Very quickly, Henry’s hard-won belief that life is governed by some inherent, given set of limits—a belief won through countless defeats, compromises, and willful refusals to remember a life that promised anything else—seems impossible to credit. As the present breaks up—Henry’s job lost, his house wrecked, his would-be girlfriend stolen—Vietnam returns in flashbacks, and you begin to recognize Henry clutching for the underside of middle-class gentility as a version of Hemingway’s Nick Adams, hanging on to his fishing pole in “Big Two-Hearted River” in the aftermath of the First World War. But as it is portrayed here, Vietnam was—is—not a war but a charnel house. It’s not a situation constructed to realize some geopolitical objective, but a situation constructed to strip off all morality, all constraint, and not at anyone’s My Lai, but back at camp, among one’s fellows, as the urge to murder seeks its closest target. Such celebrated Vietnam novels as Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato or memoirs on the order of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War were fundamentally, no matter how phonily, about ethics; Wayne Wilson wasn’t interested. In his accounts of meaningless conflicts between people supposedly on the same side, you’re returned to the worst moment in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Aarfy’s rape and murder of Michaela, the Italian servant girl, except that that was a signal event, impossible for a reader to forget, and what happens in Wilson’s Vietnam—ordinary life reduced to the level of the sort of obscene insult that leaves a person weak, humiliated, and ready to kill whoever looks ready to die—is hard to remember, a black haze, and as terrifying as a Bosch painting of hell.
Soon enough, as Henry and Miles’s flight from Miles’s pursuer, an enemy from Vietnam, puts them on the road, the language of flashbacks takes over the present. A long-ago night of sordid, back-to-the-world Haight-Ashbury hippie sex gets payback: people who once thought they were living out the zeitgeist return as flotsam, garbage tossed up decades later. As they return, they change old horrors, even decent memories, into a simple seediness. People just get uglier, and a sense of time is the last thing they can use: “Henry was astonished at the contrast between this haggard woman and the girl to whom he’d surrendered on that night so long ago”—he can’t even think about what he must look like to her. “Now the corners of her mouth sagged and the skin below her eye looked bruised and when Henry bent to kiss the top of her head a vapor of beer and fried onions rose from her hair . . . Some mangy dog with a red bandana tied around its neck (Henry was willing to bet its name was something like Kilo or Shit) followed them into the living room.” The dog’s name turns out to be Roach.
If all of that—the Skip Spence story, Henry’s story, the back door Grace Slick flung open after you walked through the front door—isn’t present in “The Crystal Ship,” it is, along with other lives, waiting. The glamour in the song hides its demons, but doesn’t banish them.
At the Matrix, the tale unwinds in a swaying wind. Morrison waits behind the words, as if letting them emerge of their own accord, at their own speed. Kicked off by what feels like a spontaneous, joyous Heyyyyyy! from Morrison, Manzarek’s organ solo is full of color, the sound rising to the low ceiling and spreading out from there, driven by the thrill of getting it right, of the band truly finding its voice for the first time that night—and, as it happened, the last.
The words, the image of “the crystal ship” is propelled out of the song, launched into its black sea. Morrison embraces the words, the image, as if it’s always been a treasure to him, and it is instantly lit. As he heads for the end of the song—“When we get back, I’ll drop a line,” a wave goodbye that for me has always called up Robert Johnson’s “When I return / You’ll have a great long story to tell,” a sc
ene full of affection, regret, a scene that leaves the listener wondering if the person singing and the person to whom he’s speaking will ever see each other again—its first moment returns. “Before you . . .”—there seems to be no assurance that any words will follow, and no need for them at all.
“Interview with the Doors,” Mojo-Navigator Rock + Roll News no. 14, August 1967. Collected in Suzy Shaw and Mick Farren, BOMP!—Saving the World One Record at a Time (Pasadena: AMMO Books, 2007), 80.
“The Crystal Ship,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).
———, Live at the Matrix (DMC/Rhino, 2008).
Jim Morrison, in John Densmore, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (New York: Delacorte, 1990), 59: “Jim was a guy with a natural instinct for melody but no knowledge of chords to hang it on.”
Moby Grape, Moby Grape (Columbia, 1967). See the fine retrospective Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape (Columbia Legacy, 1993).
Skip Spence, Oar (Columbia, 1969). The 2000 reissue on Sundazed includes ten additional tracks and my Rolling Stone review of the album upon its release. The original album supposedly sold fewer copies than any LP release in Columbia history, and was out of print within a year; it was recorded in Nashville, with Spence as a one-man band (the original drummer in the Jefferson Airplane, he played guitar in Moby Grape), after he spent months in Bellevue following a psychotic breakdown: he tried to attack his bandmates Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson with an axe.
Great Society, “Someone to Love,” recorded at the Matrix, summer 1966. Originally released on Conspicuous Only in Its Absence (Columbia, 1968, the band’s first, posthumous album; see also Born to Be Burned, Sundazed, 1995, which includes the single version of “Someone to Love,” released February 1966 on the Northbeach label); collected on Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970 (Rhino, 2007), which along with wonderful photographs and early and signal recordings by Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Charlatans, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, also features perhaps the only readily available proof that Blackburn and Snow, Wildflower, the Frantics, the Front Line, the Mourning Reign, the Oxford Circle, the Stained Glass, the Otherside, Teddy and His Patches, the Immediate Family, the New Breed, People, the Generation, Butch Engle and the Styx (“Hey I’m Lost”—no kidding), Country Weather, Public Nuisance, and the Savage Resurrection existed at all.
