The Doors

by Greil Marcus

  Jim Morrison, quoted in Michael Lydon, “The Doors: Can They Still ‘Light My Fire’?” New York Times, January 19, 1969.

  ———, “The New Generation: Theater with a Beat,” from the Chicago Tribune, carried in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1967.

  Strange Days

  RAY MANZAREK’S OPENING into “Strange Days” makes the spookiest moment in the Doors’ career, and one of the most alluring. It’s been lost; the rest of the song swallows it up. It was lost almost from the moment it appeared. Today it can pull itself out of the rest of the music, and you can play it all day long.

  It was the first track and the title song of their second album, released nine months after the first, which was anything but unusual in 1967—in 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan put out Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde in little more than a year. But the Doors’ first album had a number one single, and even though the charts stopped the album itself at #2, in the real world it was probably number one anyway. The second album—whatever it was going to be, whatever it was going to be called, whatever its cover would be, in this case a circus strongman, a man playing a horn, a mime, a juggler, and a dwarf, all in all an image of strangeness so obviously self-referential it all but put the album title in scare quotes, a tableau so corny you can almost read the casting call, a picture that immediately sent one message to fans, “Uh-oh”—had to match the first, in drama, in reach, in glamour. And in strangeness. That was the band’s appeal; that was their shtick; that was their theme; that was what they had to say, or they had nothing to say. “Strange Days,” Strange Days: they were putting their cards on the table.

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Doot do

  Four notes in four pairs, beginning high, with the trebly sound so common in Los Angeles record studios in the mid-1960s, but cleaner, clearer, the sound like its own tunnel through the night the sound itself was calling up. Four notes chasing each other in four pairs, the theme repeating four times in seven unrushed seconds, a pace that was menacing, threatening, in its first split-second, calming, reassuring, halfway through—You’ve been here before, you’re still here, whatever this place is, it’ll be here when you get back. It was a little panorama of dream, fright, and, really, mission: to get to the other side of these strange days. A bet that there was another side.

  Each eight-note pattern was lifted higher than the one before it. It was a lilting, lyrical staircase made all of spotlights, each light going dark as soon as one pair passed the baton to the pair ahead of it on the way to the end of the phrase. The race only felt as if it were in slow motion. In truth the pace was quick, nimble, with leaps over the gaps between sounds; it was the shapeliness of the design, an order that the listener was instantly sucked into, that seemed to organize the world, that made the drama of the four pairs of four notes repeated four times in seven seconds feel distant, receding as it pulled you toward it. In 1967, those notes would have made people think of The Twilight Zone, even as they detached the show, a derelict caboose on a runaway train, from the history the notes were already reaching for; today it can feel as if the song was reaching for David Lynch’s Lost Highway, reaching right through it.

  There’s a flipped bass thump—for the Doors’ first album, and on stage, Manzarek used a bass piano device to compensate for the lack of an actual person in the band playing bass; for their second album, they brought in Douglas Lubahn of the short-lived Elektra band and Doors imitators Clear Light—then a doomy strum from Robby Krieger. Manzarek’s theme moves from one channel to the other, but it’s no longer the voice of the song, just a sound effect, losing its shape, as the song goes on turning into trash, the psychedelic junk you could find in any doorway on Sunset Strip. Jim Morrison comes in, and within less than a minute you could be listening to “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” the 1966 hit by the San Fernando Valley band the Electric Prunes, a group that had originally called themselves Jim and the Lords, which effortlessly translates into a name a forty-five-year-old Morrison, having no right to “The Doors” after the original group broke up in 1973, might along with a few cultist backups have been toting around the same Valley clubs the original Jim and the Lords briefly escaped. Everything clean, direct, straight, unblinking, and fearless in the song is gone, buried under thick, ham-handed, pumped-up breaks between one side of the song and another. The pattern set in those first seconds leads into a melody that Morrison can’t sing, that stretches his voice into an ugly, convoluted tangle, and the suspended, transparent tone of “The Crystal Ship,” Morrison’s version of Manzarek’s seven seconds, is broken into whines and wheezes. At two minutes, the music seems to have been playing for six.

  At first, what Morrison was singing matched the black hole Manzarek had opened up: “Strange days have tracked us down.” You could go anywhere with an idea like that, but if you were a singer, if you were a band, you needed music to get you there, to shape that idea into a sound that would arrive in the world as if it had always been there, and leave it different than it had been before it arrived: for “Strange Days,” a world that was harder, more desperate, more exciting, the stakes raised. “There are songs that are ideas, and songs that are records,” Phil Spector was saying as the Doors were recording “Strange Days”—after his production of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” failed to come anywhere near the Top 40, let alone reach number one, where Spector knew it belonged, he locked up his studio and began lecturing at colleges—and, he said with characteristic modesty, “Whoever can create a song that is both an idea and a record can rule the world.” It was unclear if rule the world meant top the charts or rule the world—that’s why it was scary to hear him say it, even as you tried to understand what he meant. “Da Doo Ron Ron” might have been it, Spector mused from the stage in his pompadour, his tight suit, his ruffled cuffs, his elevator heels, his eyes flashing with intelligence and mistrust.

  For seven seconds, the Doors were almost there. That was closer than most people ever got. As Al Kooper wrote in 1968 in a review of the Band’s first album, Music from Big Pink, “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”

  “Strange Days,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967).

  Electric Prunes, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” (Reprise, 1966, #11). In 1972 Lenny Kaye made it the lead track of his wildly influential historical compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 (Elektra).

  Ike and Tina Turner, “River Deep, Mountain High” (Philles, 1966, #88).

  Al Kooper, review of the Band, Music from Big Pink, Rolling Stone, August 10, 1968.

  People Are Strange

  UNLIKE “STRANGE DAYS,” which was a theme song, a manifesto, “People Are Strange” was just a song—the Doors had been carrying it around since 1966 before it appeared as a single in September 1967. It was a small song, kin to “Alabama Song,” with a loose, flapping honky-tonk piano giving it a sound halfway between the circus in the U.S.A. in the 1950s and a cabaret in Berlin in 1929. It stopped at #12.

  Was Jim Morrison too good looking, more a swagger on two feet than a person, to feel as strange as the person in this song? Eve Babitz didn’t think so. Having propositioned him at the London Fog in early 1966, she looked back in 1991, as part of the media orchestration for The Doors—one of scores of Is-Oliver-Stone’s-Jim-Morrison-the- real Jim-Morrison? pieces. “Val Kilmer is supposed to have gotten Jim’s looks exactly right,” Babitz wrote, “but what can Val Kilmer know of having been fat all of his life and suddenly one summer taking so much LSD and waking up a prince? Val Kilmer has always been a prince, so he can’t have the glow.” Jim Morrison wasn’t cool, she said: “It was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors of Perception . . . what an Ojaigeeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of unco
ol idea.” His girlfriend Pamela Courson, Babitz said, “was the cool one . . . She had guns, took heroin, and was fearless in every situation . . . Whereas all he had previously brought to the moment was morbid romantic excess, he now had someone looking at him and saying, ‘Well, are you going to drive off this cliff, or what?’”

  Listening to “People Are Strange,” it isn’t hard to believe the singer knows what he’s talking about. Robby Krieger’s guitar smoothly, confidently, walks Morrison into the tune, and some of that confidence stays with him, until the last word of the first verse. “Faces look ugly, when you’re alone” slips by, sung so lightly it’s like a firefly, but that lightness is gone one line later. “Streets are uneven, when you’re down”—the down almost cut off, running into a wall, face first, the word squeezed shut: down. It’s such a displacing effect—or not an effect at all, but an action, a tiny event inside a rehearsed, arranged, constructed performance—it can hide the strangeness, the truth, of the line itself: someone so out of joint the streets he or she walks are thrown out of joint. Someone else can walk down the same streets a minute later and not notice that anything is wrong.

  The next time the line comes up in the song, the down sealing the moment, deliciously, unwinding like kite string, the word no longer remotely means what it says; the song has taken it all back. By the end it’s a happy sing-along. So that first down sticks, thuds, echoes.

  So often, the Doors lost their songs as the songs took shape. Did they pull back? Did Paul Rothchild polish the music until the shine was unbreakable and the glow as evanescent as, really, a glow has to be? At the end of the 2006 reissue of Strange Days, there were extra tracks; one was of a few false starts for “People Are Strange.” “Gentlemen, new sensations the Doors make another album,” Rothchild says from the control booth. “Here we go, this is going to be take three, a multiple of, you know, divisible of six, nine, and all those other magic numbers, take three.” There’s a long pause. Krieger tunes with a strum, then the outline of a riff; there’s a squeak from the organ. There’s more talk; again, “Take three.” And then there is the warmest, most suggestive drawn-out circle of a roll fingered on the strings—a figure suggestive not only of emotions yet to be felt, words yet to be spoken, songs yet to be played, but lives yet to be lived—suggestive most of all of an opening into a bigger story than the song as it was recorded, the first time, the third time, the twenty-fourth time, ever meant to tell. “Okay, pick it up from right there,” Rothchild says. “Not pick it up, start it again, that was really groovy. Twenty-five—” Krieger plays a couple of dead notes. “Gentlemen, that could be our take, lets do another one, right now. Go right into it, here we go, twenty-eight, nine?” “Uh, seven,” someone says. “Twenty-seven,” Rothchild announces. Krieger steps in again, his sound lower, louder, bigger, but the story in the notes smaller.

  “People Are Strange,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967). “People Are Strange (False Starts & Studio Dialogue),” Strange Days (Elektra /Rhino, 2006).

  Eve Babitz, “Jim Morrison Is Alive and Well and Living in Hollywood,” Esquire, March 1991. A portrait in cool—the author’s—that keeps breaking down, and probably worth more than all the Doors memoirs save John Densmore’s. With a drawing of Morrison as he would have looked twenty years after: pudgy, dull-eyed, not as cool as the reader.

  My Eyes Have Seen You

  NOTHER STAIRCASE: Tenochtitlán, to the top, in a sprint, then looking down as the fireworks begin.

  “My Eyes Have Seen You,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967).

  Twentieth Century Fox

  ON The Doors, “Twentieth Century Fox” was less a song than a Lichtenstein: pop art. It had that pop sheen, the irony, the sardonic grin: You don’t think I’m fooled, do you? Unlike Rolling Stones songs about women who needed to be put in their place—“Under My Thumb,” which you can almost see the singer rehearsing in a mirror, or the dizzying “Miss Amanda Jones”—the Doors’ portrait of the perfect L.A. woman was all bright colors, full of affection, even envy. Guys had it tough. They had to go out and race Dead Man’s Curve, shoot the curl, score dope, pay for dinner, and stand up in front of people and be famous. If they could pull it off, all girls had to do was strut, and with the band’s jerky, high-heels beat behind her, this one could pull it off. She didn’t look forward, she didn’t look back. She let the looks come to her; she saw the world through everyone else’s eyes, as if looks shot right through her and gave her X-ray vision. Banking off the keyed drums-organ-guitar crunches of the sound, Jim Morrison’s vocal was all highs and lows, nothing in between, the stuttering breaks of the tune in step with “Alabama Song” and “People Are Strange.” If “Light My Fire” hadn’t made the Doors into stars you can hear how their music could have curdled into artiness, everything self-referential, post-modern, each note a parody of something else, not a word needing to mean what it said, the group more popular in Paris or Milan, especially during fashion week, than anywhere in America, just like Chet Baker. In this world, “Twentieth Century Fox” was never a hit—neither was anything else—but after a few years it was the song everyone wanted to hear.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2001 I was in Paris, at the Pompidou Center, walking through Les années pop, a huge show of pop art from 1956 to 1968. On the walls were most of the usual masterpieces, all the big names, plus much more. Architecture: numerous plans for the sort of utopian houses and cities no one would ever want to live in. Tupperware. Movies: film of Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, and Bruce Conner’s A Movie, his hilarious collage film of disaster footage. Artifacts: album covers, Richard Avedon’s Life magazine Beatle portraits. Clothes. Posters. Newsreels. Music playing in all the galleries.

  The museum was packed. Pop art shows are always popular, because pop art is easy to relate to. It’s big, it’s glamorous, and it’s full of references everyone knows, that leave no one out. But almost everything seemed beside the point. I wasn’t sure what point—it was just . . . pointlessness. The music playing was the same. If there was a true spirit of pop art, it wasn’t in Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,” the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love”—though it was, somehow, present in the Tornados’ 1962 “Telstar,” that weird piece of British surf music celebrating the first telecommunications satellite. With the organ sounding like a bagpipe—the sound was so tinny, distant, and distorted you could imagine it really was the first thing bounced off Telstar—the record was cheap, corny, and triumphant: irresistible. It sounded right. “Twentieth Century Fox” would have been almost too right. “Light My Fire” or “Take It as It Comes” would have blown down the conceptual walls that were holding up the whole show.

  I began thinking that there was a lot less here than met the eye. Why was there so little art that seemed to live up to its name, and so little music that lived up to that art? It was as if pop culture, something real, had been hijacked by pop art—by something that wasn’t real.

  Once, trying to figure out what pop culture was, I ended up with the phrase “the folk culture of the modern market.” Pop culture is a culture in which people tell themselves, and tell each other, stories about the modern market. That doesn’t mean the billboard Elektra Records put up over Sunset Strip to announce the Doors’ first album, a marketing first; it means an unknown station playing unknown music, until both turn into secrets everyone wants to tell. The modern market is a field of rumors and tall tales, promises and threats, warnings and prophecies: as people talk, pop culture is landscape and the change of seasons, war and peace, the clearing of forests and the building of cities, religious revivals and moral panics, wealth and poverty, adventure and discovery, sex and death, citizenship and exile.

  You can hear this in the way The Doors went from an L.A. scenester’s secret to all-American password, and you can see it in two founding works of pop culture: Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1947 collage I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything and Chuck Berry’s 1955 “No Money Down.” Paolozzi was the most playful,
aesthetically omnivorous member of England’s Independent Group—the small post-war combine of architects, visual artists, and critics who were drawn to the commercial imagery of American culture, who could not see themselves in what Independent Group member Richard Hamilton called “hard-edged American painting,” abstract expressionism, Jackson Pollock, the new art everyone was supposed to be thrilled by. With rationing still a fact of daily life in Britain, the Independent Group was eager to get out of the war, out of the post-war, into a new real life.

  As an artist, Paolozzi was already living it. “Wherever he went,” his Independent Group comrade Lawrence Alloway remembered, “he was, you know, bending things, drawing things, turning paper plates into something, so that he was habitually an improvising working artist . . . he was kind of someone who had this itchy creativity on a continuous basis, always being bombarded by mass-media imagery.”

  The glee, the promiscuousness with which Paolozzi scavenged for his images—images taken from women’s magazines, advertisements, comic books—tells you it might be closer to the mark to say he was always exposing himself to mass media imagery. It might be closer than that to say Paolozzi was swimming in it—like Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, swimming through oceans of coins in his money bin. Like the Berlin dada collage artist Hannah Höch, swimming through the imagery of her own post-war, in the 1920s, criticizing the subjugation of women, satirizing gender roles, and also reveling in fashion and style, shoes and makeup.

  Walter Benjamin spoke of “art in the age of mechanical reproduction”; what you can see in Paolozzi’s work is the thrill of mechanical reproduction. At the center of I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything is the cover of an issue of Intimate Confessions , with a smiling woman in a skimpy red dress and black stockings, her legs drawn up to her chest. Pasted in is a man’s hand holding a big, ugly, fearsome-looking handgun to the head of the rich man’s plaything—unless she is, as described on the right side of the magazine cover, the “Ex-Mistress,” the “Woman of the Streets,” or the “Daughter of Sin,” or unless they’re all the same person. Out of the barrel of the gun comes a cloud of smoke and the word “POP!” There’s cherry pie and Coca-Cola and the logo “Real Gold” and a fighter plane.