The Doors

by Greil Marcus

  Morrison came off Manzarek’s solo as smoothly as before. He sang the first verse. He passed over the melody, licking the word fire as Elvis himself might have done, if he’d closed his 1960 post-Army comeback album Elvis Is Back! with “Light My Fire” instead of “Reconsider Baby”—as if, given what Elvis did to Lowell Fulsom’s signature song, infusing every word with a heat that has never cooled, there was any difference.

  For the refrain Morrison screamed “FIRE!” again. And then he pulled out all the stops; listening, it sounds as if he’s tearing off his clothes. His voice is suddenly rough, harsh, bearing down, an explosion of pressure. Densmore finds his footing, and gives Morrison his. It’s a different song, a different night, a different place; a different audience is called into being. Now every breath is deep, drawn from all the way down in the chest, the breath you draw before you’re about to leap; each breath is as strong, as sudden, as full of vengeance and lust as that moment when Densmore’s stick first hit the skin.

  Morrison’s diction coarsens, the words lose their beginnings and endings, the singer is rushing past the song, the song is coming up behind the singer like a wave, they meet at Morrison’s furious, inflamed higher, which here, with the song taking on its full body, carries no more musical or moral weight than any other word, note, phrase, sound—the sound, right now, of freedom. It’s shocking, how much pleasure freedom can bring: “Come on!” Manzarek shouts from the side in the last chorus, beside himself. Now they’re on the other side. After this, did the song ever need to be played again?

  “Light My Fire,” The Ed Sullivan Show, collected on When You’re Strange: Songs from the Motion Picture: A Film About The Doors (DMC/Rhino, 2010).

  Elvis Presley, The Ed Sullivan Shows (Image Entertainment DVD, 2006); notes by GM.

  ———, Elvis Is Back! (1960). The 2011 RCA Legacy reissue comprises two CDs, including also the 1960–61 singles “Fame and Fortune,” “It’s Now or Never,” “A Mess of Blues,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Surrender,” plus the 1961 album Something for Everybody, and the 1961–62 singles “I Feel So Bad,” “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” “Little Sister,” and “Good Luck Charm.” Like so many before and after him, Jim Morrison knew Elvis Presley had something no one else would ever have, which only made him reach for it more passionately, and more cryptically, in a manner less obvious, all but occulted. Given the delicacy and glamour Elvis gives the songs on Elvis Is Back! from “Fever” to “Girl of My Best Friend” to “Dirty, Dirty Feeling” to “Such a Night,” it’s hard to believe this wasn’t the Elvis album Morrison played more than any other. Today you can hear him all over it.

  The Unknown Soldier in 1968

  RAY WANTED JIM TO take it all the way,” John Densmore wrote in 1990, looking back in his book Riders on the Storm. “To the White House. He imagined himself secretary of state. Sounded like fantasy time to me, but I think a part of Ray hoped it would really happen. I thought Jim was too crazy to be as popular as he was already! I was scared by the idea of more power in his hands.” For Morrison himself, it wasn’t altogether off his mind. “There should be a week of national hilarity . . . a cessation of all work, all business, all discrimination, all authority,” he said to his friend Jerry Hopkins, who was interviewing Morrison for Rolling Stone. “A week of total freedom. That’d be a start. Of course, the power structure wouldn’t really alter. But someone off the streets—I don’t know how they’d pick him, at random, perhaps—would become president. Someone else would become vice president. Others would be senators, congressmen, on the supreme court, policemen . . . One thing I said one time: the logical extension of the ego is God. I think the logical extension of living in America is to be President.”

  “THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER” is not much of a song. It has that hurdy-gurdy rhythm that allows for vocal improvisation but never really gets anywhere. The music remembers the elegant stop time, the careful, drunken steps—one step forward, a pause, a moment to think about it, another step—of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” on the band’s first album. Kurt Weill’s 1927 attempt to be Bix Beiderbecke with Bertolt Brecht’s little ditty, Lotte Lenya’s attempt to be Bessie Smith or Sara Martin—writing and singing in English in Berlin, their heavy accents, their clumsy eagerness, made the tune. By the time the Doors took it up half a century later it had aged so well it fell into their hands. Their version was better than the original, where Lenya—by 1967 most easily recalled as the hideous KGB officer Rosa Klebb in the second James Bond movie—rushed the verses, dragged back on the chorus. When she sang it after the war she smoothed out all the rough spots; the tipsy woman stumbling from doorpost to doorpost gave it that big toothpaste smile. The Doors raised up the paper moon, waved at it, kept knocking on the doors of one bar after another even though it was 4 a.m. and the bars had been dark for hours. With “The Unknown Soldier” the band remembers everybody is doing it, doing it, doing it, as Marcel Janco murmured in 1916 in Zurich in the Cabaret Voltaire, but doesn’t remember how to do it.

  In 1968 there were a lot of people declaring that the war was over, as the Doors would do in “The Unknown Soldier.” In whispery tones that fell back before the power of his own words, Allen Ginsberg had announced “The war . . . is over now,” in 1966 in his Vietnam-as-Kansas, Kansas-as-Vietnam epic, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”—only to come back minutes later in complete exasperation: “The war was over several hours ago!” Why hasn’t anybody noticed? In 1971 John Lennon and Yoko Ono would be draping WAR IS OVER IF YOU WANT IT banners over their beds. In 1968 the Doors were trying to act it out.

  On record, as a single that barely scraped the Top 40, then as a track on Waiting for the Sun, the band’s floppy third album and their only number one LP, “The Unknown Soldier” began with faraway, echoey sound effects. Boots marched through the song from the left speaker to the right, from one side of the room to the other, from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. It ended with easily rolling, everything’s-all-right riffs from Robby Krieger over the sound of cheering crowds rushing through the suddenly warless streets: the Doors’ own V-V Day, unless it was Vietnam’s V-USA Day. It was not stirring, except for the hokey segment in the middle: the soldiers marched, Jim Morrison called out “Present! Arms!” you heard a rifle lock and load, John Densmore played a long military drum roll, and there was a rifle shot. Loud, brittle, harsh. A quick sound, and the band went back to the song too quickly. The shot didn’t hang in the air—but it was still frightening. In 1968, that sound—sudden, despite the fanfare; louder than you expected, because you could guess what was coming; louder than you were expecting, if you’d heard the record before—sudden, loud, brittle, harsh—was not a metaphor. It carried events inside of it. As you heard the sound, you saw what happened.

  Neither Martin Luther King, Jr., or Robert F. Kennedy had been shot when “The Unknown Soldier” was released as a single in March, but people were already asking, incessantly, under their breath, maybe when either man appeared on the nightly news, which could be almost every night, if it would happen, and when it would happen. It had already happened, with John F. Kennedy, with Malcolm X: the most unsettling thing about the line “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car” on Waiting for the Sun, in the musically incoherent “Not to Touch the Earth,” was that it wasn’t specific, wasn’t necessarily about JFK; it was an image floating over the tableau of everyday life.

  The story carried by that rifle crack was happening with police and people in the streets shooting to kill in Watts, Newark, Harlem, Detroit, in race riots so fierce, so ambitious, you could feel the nation cracking. It was happening every day, thousands of times over, in Vietnam. It was happening in Germany, when the student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot; in Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet Union erased Prague Spring as if to laugh at the naïveté of French students and workers with their May days; in Mexico City, where government forces shot uncounted hundreds of protesting students, and then spent forty years keeping both the bodies and any public memo
ry of the killings buried. But in the United States, the specter had as much power as the fact. In 1965, Phil Ochs had fantasized that, after Highway 61 Revisited, a set of songs about the country rushing down its own spine as a police car turned on its siren and gave chase, Bob Dylan would not be able to get on a stage: “He’s gotten inside so many people’s heads—Dylan has become part of so many people’s psyches—and there’s so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now.” The declension in the phrases, the way they fade away from each other, as if they don’t want to hear each other, is as musical as any song Ochs ever wrote. For many reasons, some of them not from another country than the one Ochs was describing, except for one night to gather with others to praise Woody Guthrie, Dylan did not set foot on a stage in 1968.

  What the Doors didn’t have to remember in 1968, as they tried to find a way to make “The Unknown Soldier” convincing, not a joke, was dread. In 1968 dread was the currency. It was what kept you up all night, and not just the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, when before his death was finally announced Norman Mailer swore he’d give up an arm if Kennedy lived; dread was what made the promise believable when Mailer wrote about it. That was because people all over the country had lived through the same long night, thought the same thoughts, made the same promises, knowing they would all come up cold.

  Dread was why every day could feel like a trap. There was murder everywhere; Camus’s argument, in The Rebel, that in the modern world every act leads to murder, came off the page both as common sense and a curse. The feeling that the country was coming apart—that, for what looked and felt like a casually genocidal war in Vietnam, the country had committed crimes so great they could not be paid, that the country deserved to live out its time in its own ruins—was so visceral that the presidential election felt like a sideshow.

  In this setting, the Doors were a presence. They were a band people felt they had to see—not to learn, to find out, to hear the message, to get the truth, but to be in the presence of a group of people who appeared to accept the present moment at face value. In their whole demeanor—unsmiling, no rock ’n’ roll sneer but a performance of mistrust and doubt—they didn’t promise happy endings. Their best songs said happy endings weren’t interesting, and they weren’t deserved.

  You can imagine Manzarek, Densmore, Morrison, and Krieger bagging their scheduled rehearsals and songwriting sessions for Waiting for the Sun and cutting into a movie theater to see Wild in the Streets, the AIP youth-revolt exploitation number staring Christopher Jones as the rock ’n’ roll singer and president of the United States Max Frost, Shelley Winters as Frost’s mother, Larry “The Hook” Bishop and Richard “Stanley X” Pryor as Frost’s compatriots, and Hal Holbrook, Ed Begley, and a completely numb Diane Varsi as U.S. senators—not to mention, around the edges of the frame, Dick Clark, Peter Tork, Gary Busey, Melvin Belli, Bobby Sherman, and Walter Winchell—and the Doors in their seats saying, Hey, that’s us! This is just “Five to One” with movie stars!

  More than forty years later, “Five to One,” the band’s own youth-revolt exploitation number from Waiting for the Sun, was still probably getting more airplay than anything else on the album, even more than “Hello, I Love You,” which three years before, when Manzarek, Morrison, Densmore, and Manzarek’s brothers Rick and Jim recorded a demo version, was not the embarrassment it would become in 1968.8 “We’re takin’ over,” Morrison slurred, sounding as if revolution was about as interesting as a bunch of bikers taking over a bar. Wild in the Streets was more interesting: a corrupt senator jumps on the youth bandwagon, thinking that a law lowering the voting age to fourteen will get him to the White House—when instead it’s Max Frost who takes over, and sends everyone over thirty to reeducation camps where they’re fed LSD all day long. Christopher Jones was the latest in the long line of new James Deans, but with his soft, shapely features, he was also the first new Jim Morrison. The match was impossible to miss; that might have been precisely why he was cast. And while as discourse on revolt Wild in the Streets trumped “Five to One” many times over, the revolt the Doors momentarily embodied, and acted out, was not only a matter of bad lyrics and cartoon music, which is all “Five to One” is. Bullshit! you can hear the Doors crowing in the theater. If that turkey makes it to the White House with that “Soul Kitchen” rip-off—what’s it called?

  “Shape of Things to Come.”

  Then Jim wins in a walk! And if Diane Varsi can stand up there in the Senate banging her tambourine instead of giving a speech, Ray’s already secretary of state!

  As an actor, and in his life offstage—sometimes barely offstage, as with his backstage encounter with a cop at a show in New Haven in 1967, which led to Morrison being arrested on stage—Jim Morrison didn’t really challenge authority. Rather he conveyed an unlimited, instinctive, but dramatized contempt for authority—which is to say a contempt that was thought through, theorized, a stance footnoted with mental references to Artaud and Un Chien Andalou.

  “Morrison was one of the few if not the only performer I knew who really believed what he was saying,” Robby Krieger said in 2006.

  He wasn’t just up there doing his trip and then he’d go home and have a beer and laugh at it all, laugh all the way to the bank. He was a guy that, he lived that life that he lived out onstage all the time. And when he went home it was just some cheap motel somewhere, and he just hung out until the next show, you know. Sometimes he would be the greatest guy you’d ever want to meet—super polite, together, clean, and everything else—but the next day he’d be completely the other way. All those stories are true, most of them: He lived his whole life right on the edge, and people could sense that when he was onstage; there was always something under there, ready to happen—and if they were lucky that night, it might happen. All I can say is that he was totally committed to living the life of the revolution.

  Some of that is there in “The Unknown Soldier” as the Doors performed it in Denmark on September 18, 1968. Here the slowness of the music—the way its parts are fitted together, the deliberateness of the pacing, which suggests people feeling their way through a situation with all the lights off—produces not suspense but a sense of inevitability. Ray Manzarek gets up from the organ and walks behind John Densmore, seemingly to adjust an amplifier, then stands waiting with his head bowed as Densmore plays his roll. Manzarek lifts the amplifier, getting ready to drop it. Robby Krieger lifts his guitar and aims the neck like the barrel of a rifle, lowers it slightly, raises it again, his posture like that of an executioner, his eyes like those of a psychopath. Morrison stands waiting—for what? In the little play of the ensemble, were they performing a deserter’s execution, a death in combat, a suicide? That Morrison so fully communicates with his body and the tilt of his head that he has seen this coming makes the shot Krieger fires, backed by the sound of the amplifier hitting the floor, that much more shocking: as you watch the video of the performance, you are sucked into Morrison’s mind so fully you might forget anyone else is there, that anything is about to happen. “A Doors concert,” Morrison said in 1968, “is a public meeting called by us for a special kind of dramatic discussion.” “I’d like to play in a club where we could be with other people,” he told a Chicago Tribune writer after a show in New York the year before. “Maybe we wouldn’t even play. It would be great to sit down and talk with the audience, to get rid of all the separate tables and have one big table.”

  In Denmark, Morrison goes down out of the frame as if he’s been erased from it—but in that instant it is the sound of the shot that throws everything off. It’s not a crack, a report, an explosion. It’s a long, acrid scratch; it sounds as if Krieger is scraping the inside of his strings with his fingernails. It’s not a sound you’ve heard before, or want to hear again. It was the sound of the times that no one else made.

  John Densmore, Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (New York: Delacorte, 1990), 85, 160. This relentlessly questioni
ng memoir is the best book on the Doors: filled with detail, powered by a sense of unreality, self-deprecating, funny, with Densmore emerging as no hero, no so-called survivor, but, as his title implies, someone along for the ride, on the storm of the times, on the storm he and the rest of the band made themselves.

  Jim Morrison, quoted from Jerry Hopkins, “The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, July 26, 1969. Collected in The Rolling Stone Interviews (New York: Paperback Library, 1971), 229–30. Probably the best single interview with Morrison; Hopkins was a trusted chronicler. The book referenced is long out of print and as a pocket book not likely collected by libraries, but the interview is greatly abridged in the more accessible The Rolling Stone Interviews, ed. Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay, 2007).

  “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),” The Doors (Elektra, 1967). The Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht collaboration premiered in Mahogany.

  “The Unknown Soldier” and “Five to One,” Waiting for the Sun (Elektra, released July 1968). The 2006 reissue includes a DVD with footage of the Denmark performance.

  Phil Ochs, interview in Broadside (1965). Quoted in Clinton Heylin, Behind the Shades (New York: Viking, 1991).

  Wild in the Streets, directed by Barry Shear, written by Robert Thom (American International Pictures, 1968).

  Max Frost and the Troopers, “Shape of Things to Come” (Tower, 1968, #22).

  Robby Krieger, in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 107.