The Doors

by Greil Marcus

  “Time to live, time to lie / Time to laugh, time to die”: with eerie composure—as if he’s been doing this at least as long as Mick Jagger and is only now hitting his stride—Jim Morrison is singing words about how it’s necessary not to rush, not to push, to be careful, to hold back, walk don’t run. But he takes flight with his first line, an Icarus leap, and the words are either a joke or a dare, the singer daring the listener to believe a word he says. Don’t move too fast if you want your love to last, he sings, with his hands on the wheel, his foot to the floor, and his eyes squeezed shut.

  Halfway through the bare two minutes of the song—though so much is happening so quickly that when the song is over it can seem to have been playing for two, three times as long—the band pulls back. Compared to the cacophony of the moment before, the song is almost silent, just Manzarek’s bass device counting off time, the effect not of the song moving forward slowly, but the music in complete suspension. This is a conventional device—the old “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” trick, the “Shout” trick—but it feels completely new. Instead of a roadhouse with a screaming crowd suddenly holding its breath, it’s midnight on a beach, the waves are almost silent, the sky blue-black, the moon bright enough for faces and close enough to touch. Just like that, you want the song to stay here. You don’t want it to go back on the highway. You don’t want to move at all. You only want to—And then, much too quickly, a house falls on the music and you can’t remember that the song had ever stopped, that there was anywhere to go but straight ahead, straight into a wall if that’s what’s there.

  Nearing the end—and again, if someone stopped you, pulled you aside, and said, Do you realize all this has been happening in about 110 seconds, Jerry Lee Lewis needed three minutes, the Isley Brothers almost five, you’d say, What, what?—it’s all fury, frenzy, Morrison’s leap in the first seconds of the song now little more than hesitation. “Specialize in having fun,” he says, but whatever it is that’s happening now, it’s much bigger than anything such a sentiment could touch. There’s too much at stake. Too much has been left behind. You’ve been moving much too fast, Morrison chants in the last words of the song, when everything the music—the drums, the organ, the guitar, his voice—has told you that you’re moving much too slowly, that you’re standing still, that you haven’t begun.

  “Take It as It Comes,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).

  Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965–1968 (Rhino, 2009). Featuring paint-thinner vocals, crinkly sound, guitars that are supposed to chime but don’t, Peter Fonda’s “November Night,” such forgotten or hard-to-believe-ever-existed bands as the Common Cold and Pasternak’s Progress, Gene Clark’s altogether unconvincing “Los Angeles” (“city of doom” he sings, as if someone else wrote it and he’s wondering what doom means), a pathetic cover of Sonny Knight’s 1961 deep-soul classic “If You Want This Love” by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, “Marshmallow Skies,” Rick Nelson’s sententious attempt at psychedelia, and “Back Seat ’38 Dodge,” inspired by Edward Kienholz’s notorious, still-shocking life-size, or rather death-size, 1964 assemblage, which the Long Beach quartet Opus 1 turns into a little horror movie: “What’s in the back seat of my ’38 Dodge? I really want to know.” But even the unanswerable Jackie DeShannon’s “Splendor in the Grass,” recorded with the Byrds, promises more than it delivers. No wonder the producers had to squeeze the Doors to get them through theirs.

  Byrds, “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (Columbia, 1965, #1).

  The End, 1968

  WHEN JIM MORRISON SAID that a Doors concert was a kind of public meeting, it was December 14, 1968, hours before the band set up in the L. A. Forum before 18,000 fans. “It was a big deal for us,” Robby Krieger said years later. “Local band plays where the Lakers play!”

  By the end of 1968 the Doors were a Top 40 band. Their last two singles were number one and #3—though they would never again make the top ten. This night they were planning mostly songs from The Soft Parade, still more than six months from release. They had a string sextet, a horn section, and thirty-two amplifiers on the stage. There were three opening acts: Tzon Yen Luie, a Japanese koto player; the cloying Los Angeles group Sweetwater; and Jerry Lee Lewis. All were booed as if they were impostors. “I hope you have a heart attack,” Jerry Lee told the audience. When the Doors came on, there were cheers, but quickly the crowd was drowning out the music with chants for “Light My Fire”—which, for once, the band was determined not to play. Unable to get their new music into the air, they gave in—and as soon as they were finished the crowd began to chant for “Light My Fire” again. “Cut out that shit,” Jim Morrison said. He looked out and asked a question as if he truly did want to know the answer, as if he had no idea what it might be: “What are you all doing here?” He began to taunt the crowd with the same lines that would crack open the show at the Dinner Key in Miami three months later: “You want music?” Everybody screamed. “Well, man,” he said, “we can play music all night, but that’s not what you really want—you want something more, something greater than you’ve ever seen, right?” In Miami, in a drunken rage, those words would suddenly mean that he should show the crowd his penis, that if only symbolically, because it was his, it would be something greater than anyone had ever seen. In Los Angeles the words hung in the air and someone shouted “We want Mick Jagger.”

  Finally, with the show breaking down, Morrison went to the edge of the stage and in an oracular voice began to declaim “The Celebration of the Lizard.” He stopped. People laughed. He went on: “One morning he awoke in a green hotel. With a strange creature growing beside him.” “Is everybody in?” he asked, then again, and again, with each time people shouting: “NOOOOOO!” “The ceremony is about to begin,” he said portentously—try saying the words any other way—and people laughed out loud at the pomposity of it all, or giggled in embarrassment. Then Morrison stood silently. It went on. “Stupid,” someone mutters. “Asshole!”

  “WAKE UP!” Morrison screamed. The band crashed down around him. Many long minutes later, it ended. “When it ends he glares at the audience,” one report had it, “no words need be spoken, and he walks off to almost no ovation.” “You give people what they want or what they think they want and they’ll let you do anything,” he would say the next year, looking back and seeing clearly. “But if you go too fast for them and pull an unexpected move, you confuse them. When they go to a musical event, a concert, a play or whatever, they want to be turned on, to feel like they’ve been on a trip, something out of the ordinary. But instead of making them feel like they’re on a trip, that they’re all together, if instead you hold a mirror up and show them what they’re really like, what they really want, and show them that they’re alone instead of all together, they’re revolted and confused. And they’ll act that way.”

  It was a sometimes excruciating performance, sometimes confusing and alive, the band bashing atonally, refusing any rhythm, Morrison singing and reciting and roaring and whispering—and on Boot Yer Butt!, a strange four-CD collection that the remaining Doors released in 2003, it’s just one more spectral, all but illusionary moment in a waking-dream account of the band’s career, from their earliest live recordings, from a show at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco in March 1967, to the last city save one in which they would ever step on a stage. “Our record album is only a map of our work,” Morrison had said of The Doors in 1967, though as a record album it was as close as they got; this is the territory.

  Beginning with “Moonlight Drive” and the band’s cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man,” ending almost four years later, this meandering walk down an endless beach—you can see people carrying bulky tape recorders and extension mikes following the four guys in the Doors as they walk through the sand, their bootleg mission not to let a random sigh or curse escape—is not drawn from soundboards or well-made audience tapes. It is a compilation of absolutely horrible recordings made with damaged equipment and originally pressed into ille
gal vinyl that warped and splintered as soon as you tried to play it. On these recordings, Morrison can sound miles and miles away from the little handheld microphone that’s picking up his messages, messages that sometimes feel as if they’re coming from the bottom of a well. You may not be able to make out a single instrument behind his voice—or, even more displacingly, you may hear one instrument only. The band can emerge and disappear, as if it’s playing a séance, not a show. You can listen to the entire set straight through, more than forty performances collected or, really, smeared together, and then start all over again, trapped in its faraway, incorporeal spell, and part of that spell is the drama that emerges as the spool unwinds: the drama of a band at war with its audience.

  In the beginning, you hear discovery and embrace: an audience embracing a band, a band’s embrace of its audience, but most of all a band’s discovery and embrace of its own music—a band’s laying claim to music that, whatever its legal status as something they owned, might have still been beyond their reach in a manner they could not deny. The way they find their way into “Break on Through” at the Continental Ballroom in Santa Clara, California, on July 9, 1967—the way they break through the song—is a storming assault. Hundreds of soldiers are climbing the stairways of a once-impregnable fortress and burning it down from the inside—but not before they stop to gaze upon the wonders of the place, the arching ceilings held up as if by mere air, the walls as thick as horses, the marble floors, the gargoyles in the eaves. They dance in a circle, and then, as the fire begins to rise, they only dance faster. No one here gets out alive, Morrison would announce two years later in “Five to One,” but this performance begs that cheap song’s question: who would want to?

  A few months later, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, on December 16, Morrison is falling all over “Alabama Song,” losing the words, the song slithering away from him in disgust. The shows become erratic. With “Light My Fire” drawing fans who don’t care if they hear anything else and often enough are drunk enough, or stoned enough, to take anything else as an insult, a rebuke, at best what they have to put up with to get what they want, there is an edge of contempt in the halls, though it isn’t obvious where it’s coming from.

  Morrison reached for the skies. A version of Muddy Waters’s “I’m a Man” at Winterland in San Francisco, on December 26, is expansive, open, churning, with Morrison and the band improvising long, slow vamps around a sing-songy speech about taking over the world—something, as Morrison digs into the music, the song itself is suggesting. Isn’t that what a man is supposed to do? Does the song say there are any limits to what a person can do? That’s the last thing it says. With the grunge of gray, mottled, echoing sound around him, Morrison is raving as if he is the first to discover what the song always wanted to say, because he has discovered the nerve to say it.

  It all blows up in Miami, but there is anger breaking out well before. In Amsterdam, on September 15, 1968, Morrison collapsed after swallowing drugs in order to get through customs; Ray Manzarek ended up singing every song, turning the Doors into a bar band covering Doors songs. Everywhere, the distance between the band and its audience is thrown into relief, perhaps more symbolic than—night to night in any given town—real, by the distances in the sound itself: the way the music is muffled, as if the band is playing behind a curtain, the singer in front, except when he grabs it in the middle and drapes a length of it over his face.

  The set proceeds chronologically, except for the very last song: “The End,” from the Singer Bowl, in Queens, New York, on August 2, 1968. Because any version of the Doors’ career had to end with “The End”? Because nothing could follow these bizarre, ugly seventeen minutes?

  Robby Krieger’s insinuating guitar line is clear; the little filigree he plays turns the song over. The crowd is loud, drunk, screaming. “Come on, Jimmy!” shouts a man. “Jimmmmyyyy-ayyyyyy, light my fire!” screeches a woman. She sounds like someone running through an asylum while orderlies with syringes try to bring her down. “We just did that one,” Morrison says reasonably. There’s an organized chant, five or six people shouting together: “Come on light my fire!” “Hey,” Morrison says, sounding a little surprised. “This is serious.” There’s more yelling. “SSSSHHHHHHHH,” Morrison whispers.

  “Fuck you!” someone shouts.

  The sound now muffled, his words unintelligible, Morrison tries to talk through the rising noise. “Hey, it ruins everything,” he says. “SSSSHHHHHHH,” he says again. The band keeps time behind him. More than two minutes have gone by and they haven’t been able to start the song.

  “This is the end,” Morrison sings, clearly, the sound picked up loudly. The crowd is silent, but Morrison sounds distracted, as if he’s losing faith in the song: losing faith that it’s worth singing. “You’ll never follow me,” he sings. “In his face!” someone screams. Morrison tries to sing but he can’t find the song. His voice turns oratorical. The woman in the insane asylum is rushing all over the hall, and you can’t tell if she thinks she’s on stage or that the people on stage are trying to kill her. Morrison improvises lyrics that turn into doggerel. People seem to respond in kind: “MORRISON IS IN HIS CAVE!” “UP WITH MARTIANS, DOWN WITH—” if that’s really what anyone is shouting.

  Morrison—the band is barely present now—tries to float over the noise, but the scratch of the woman’s voice, a sound that feels like someone is tearing her nails down your face, makes it impossible. You’re getting to know these people, this small knot in the cauldron of the recording standing in for everybody else. It’s a mosh pit where sounds do all the slamming. People are screaming parodies of the lyrics that Morrison isn’t singing. In the murk he has more presence than ever—but the huge, godlike voice is nothing compared to the far more powerful, mocking crowd.

  Morrison is again making up words for the song, to throw the crowd off, to summon the song from the dead: “A creature is nursing its child, soft arms around the head and the neck, a mouth to connect, leave this child alone, this one is mine, I’m taking her home, back to the rain”—he sounds like a cowboy stuffed with books. There are long, unintelligible passages from Morrison, and then the image of the rain carries through the static of the audience and out of nothing a story shoves itself forward.

  “Stop the car,” Morrison says, plainly; it’s a film noir set piece. “Rain. Night”—he lets loose a muffled scream. He could be in Detour, the killer driving straight out of the ditch with the body in it, which in this moment is in Queens, which is worse. “I’m getting out. I can’t take it anymore. I think there’s somebody coming.” He half sings: “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

  There is silence; the band isn’t playing, for a second no one is talking, or yelling. The moment is so anomalous the silence seems absolute. Someone screams something about cake. The madwoman screams—every scream from her is the same. If she were just a face you could look away. In the back of his mind, a story about “The End” that Morrison would tell a friend the next year is already there. “I went to a movie one night in Westwood,” he’d say, “and I was in a bookstore or some shop where they sell pottery and calendars and gadgets, y’know . . . and a very attractive, intelligent—intelligent in the sense of aware and open—girl thought she recognized me and she came to say hello. And she was asking me about that particular song. She was just out for a little stroll with a nurse. She was on leave, just for an hour or so, from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. Apparently she had been a student at UCLA and freaked on heavy drugs or something and either committed herself or someone picked up on her and put her there. Anyway, she said that the song was really a favorite of a lot of kids in her ward. At first I thought: Oh, man . . . and this was after I talked with her for a while, saying it could mean a lot of things, kind of a maze or a puzzle to think about, everybody should relate it to their own situation. I didn’t realize people took songs so seriously and it made me wonder whether I ought to consider the consequences . . .”

  “
The killer awoke before dawn,” Morrison says stiffly. He seems to rush the song, as if he wants nothing more than to get this part of it over with. The band is still not there. “He took a face from the ancient gallery,” Morrison announces. “And he walked on down the hall,” several male voices answer him. “And he walked on down the hall,” Morrison says, as if they’ve reminded him of what he’s supposed to say. “WALKED ON DOWN THE HALL!” the woman screams. You can’t tell if he’s taunting the crowd or taunting himself, because he knows every word will come back at him, stupid grins on the faces of the people in the crowd, “And he walked on down the hall” now a punch line to something that didn’t start out as a joke. The band is vamping behind him. “Father,” Morrison says. “Yes, son,” a guy in the crowd answers. “YES SON!” answers the woman. “I want to kill you” says a man from the audience. “I want to kill you,” Morrison repeats without expression. He tries to take the song back: “Mooootherrrr—”

  Screams rise up as if out of the ground, without human agency. “I . . . want . . . tuh—” The band speeds up, then stops. There are strangled sounds out of Morrison’s throat, he tries to shout, the crowd is quiet, Morrison is speaking in words that aren’t words, as if he’s trying to explain the song to himself. He sings in self-parody, then locks into sounds inside the words, sounds as demented as those anyone in the crowd is making. His voice is over here and his body is over there. Then the crowd is screaming at him in a way that hasn’t happened before: in the face of the screeching, crows flying out of people’s mouths, you can see Morrison as the people in the crowd are seeing him, a freak, the Elephant Man, the crowd thrilled at how grotesque he is, how crazy, everybody pointing, and though the band is playing, now the real music is coming from the crowd, a tangled skein of sound moving through the hall without a brain.