by Greil Marcus
There are crashing sounds from the band, then from the crowd, we’re-all-going-to-die-and-I-can’t-wait sounds. It’s scary. Anything could happen except anything good.
Morrison tries to sing the end of the song; he does, but all of his trust in the song is gone. Someone in the audience puts two fingers in his mouth and blows. He does it again.
It all comes to an end. You’ve listened to all four discs, for more than five hours, mesmerized. You can start over. You can’t imagine that the group could have. You remember that this is a false ending, that the chronologically last song of the set, “L.A. Woman” from the State Fair Music Hall, in Dallas, on December 11, 1970, was all shadows, figures disappearing into the mist, a singer trying to find the face that would explain everything, and maybe succeeding. You can’t believe the band pushed on that far, that long. They were tougher, maybe, or as Charlie Poole sang in “If I Lose, I Don’t Care,” in 1927, four years before he drank himself to death, “The blood was a-runnin’, I was running too / To give my feet some exercise, I had nothing else to do.”
Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade, 2003).
Jim Morrison, “You give people what they want,” from Jerry Hopkins, “The Rolling Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone (July 26, 1969), collected in The Rolling Stone Interviews (New York: Paperback Library, 1971), 229.
———, “only a map,” from “The New Generation: Theater with a Beat,” Chicago Tribune, carried in the San Francisco Chronicle, September 28, 1967.
———, “I went to a movie,” from Hopkins, 225–26.
Charlie Poole, “If I Lose, I Don’t Care” (Columbia, 1927). For the country inside one of the most American songs America has ever produced, see the anthology “You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me”: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music (Columbia, 2005); for the soul, Loudon Wainwright III, “If I Lose,” on High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project (2nd Story Sound, 2009).
Light My Fire, 1966/1970
IN THE STUDIO IN 1966, the song took shape in two parts: the first half, through Ray Manzarek’s solo, and the second half, running Robby Krieger’s solo through to the final choruses and then the end.
It’s all of a piece. All across Manzarek’s solo there is a beast to one side, John Densmore, who with the constant, pushing insistence of tumbling drums, could be eating the music whole, spitting it back. At unexpected moments he pulls back, pulls Manzarek with him, his sound suddenly full of open spaces, and you hear a stick hit the snare as a single event. With Krieger’s solo he is more circumspect, as if the beast isn’t sure what species of animal it’s now faced with, as if it’s willing to wait to find out. As the passage goes on, so fluidly from Krieger, Densmore repeats the single snare shot he used to kick the song off, the first thing you hear, its echo immediately swallowed by Manzarek’s opening fanfare—and, at the end, almost the last thing you hear. From start to finish, Densmore’s hand is on the wheel; that is why everyone else sounds so free.
Following not Krieger’s original composition but Ray Manzarek’s mad-scientist lab work, the whole performance is one great circle. The tale—like a founding story, Moses with his tablets, Fred C. Dobbs with his lottery ticket—has been told so many times, acted out bit by bit in Oliver Stone’s The Doors, because it’s a good story.
Just off the beach in Venice, the band is trying to find its music. Morrison has some songs; nobody else does. Like a high school teacher, he gives everyone an assignment: come back with a new song. Only Krieger does: a verse and a chorus. “I was trying to do something that was reminiscent of ‘Hey Joe,’” he said years later, “the version by the Leaves”—an L.A. band whose principal distinction was that they were likely the first of far too many groups to record “Hey Joe,” and possibly the least convincing. For a song about a man killing his unfaithful lover, the Leaves sound like they’re playing with matches. But they did have a bright sound and they played fast. Krieger’s ambition revealed the germ of trash and chart-chasing at the heart of the high, churchlike seriousness of the band at its most distinctive, for better or for worse: Krieger was trying to write a hit. Why else write songs?
It didn’t take anyone long to realize it was a song. As Morrison came up with the second verse, rhyming “mire” with “pyre,” both words were too literary, too far from the ordinary language of the pop song, to have been on Krieger’s mind. But then came the part of the story that made it a story, and made the song something more.
Manzarek thought the music needed a frame, a kicker, something to seal it—something that would let the listener pull it out of the air, something that would let the musicians put it there. Go out to the beach, he said. Leave me alone while I figure it out. He gives a technical explanation: All my classical studies came to fruition. A simple circle of fifths was the answer. The chords were G to D, F to Bb, Eb to Ab (two beats on each chord), and then an A for two measures. Run some Bach filigrees over the top in a turning-in-on-itself Fibonacci spiral.
“Like,” he said, now a poet, someone trying to get you to see what he heard, “a nautilus shell.” You can hear him tell Krieger, Morrison, and Densmore exactly that, and sooner than later the music taking exactly that shape—a closed but continual Möbius strip neither musicians nor listeners could escape, something so right, and so unlikely, it almost made no sense.
Announcing itself, announcing the song, announcing the band just after Densmore’s first drumbeat, the piece Manzarek devised is thrilling—thrilling as a promise, thrilling as a thing in itself. If the song itself wasn’t so eager to say everything all at once, you’d linger over Manzarek’s fanfare, wanting to hear it again; it would block the song. But you forget it.
Morrison sweeps through the first verses and choruses like a visitation, a magic carpet on its way to somewhere else, and Manzarek steps into his solo. There is something cheesy, something all but ? & the Mysterians about his sound—to one ear, the tinny, trebly organ never varying, but to the other ear never boring, textures and shifts of tone and points of view always changing, fast, impossible to track, a car rushing up and down the canyon roads, then out on the Pacific Coast Highway in the middle of the night, a Porsche Spyder, Jan and Dean’s woodie, a zebra-striped hearse, from beginning to end anything with a motor and four wheels. Both ears are hearing the same thing at the same time.
When Krieger appears, just after three minutes, it’s a surprise, because you’ve forgotten there’s a guitar in the music. Anonymously chording all through Manzarek’s solo, as unvaryingly as the bass piano Manzarek uses to plant the rhythm, Krieger has disappeared from his own song, and when he emerges, it’s more than a surprise, it’s a shock. This is man-on-horseback music, all grandeur, nothing rushed, as stately as a marble staircase, a full-size copy of The Winged Victory of Samothrace, or Eric Clapton’s solos in “All Your Love” and “Spoonful”: that close to white elephant art, close enough to the immortal to stay on the air for its lifetime without one note ever predicting the next.
In Honolulu, in April 1970, the band spent almost twenty-one minutes in the song. When Krieger stepped in after seven and a half minutes, he turned it toward “My Favorite Things”; two minutes later he was playing hard, searching for a pulse the song might have always hidden, and at twelve minutes he was still flying. He was reclaiming his song; at this point, you’ve forgotten that Jim Morrison too was ever part of it, and so it’s a shock in turn when, after more than fourteen minutes, Morrison returns, as if from limbo, or backstage, or the men’s room, to turn the song again, this time into “Fever,” then “Summertime,” then the Doors’ own “Love Hides.”
But in 1966, in the studio, there is no accounting for Krieger’s hold on the music: the lines he is crafting are so sonically clear, so emotionally transparent, that when he cuts into a fast flurry of notes it’s as if the whole edifice is about to crack. Then the flow is back, the coast highway now stretching into the night farther than you can see or even imagine, Manzarek is surfing behind Krieger, Manzarek’s shifts
and slides appearing and disappearing seemingly without will or intent, carried by Krieger’s waves, a great smile, all pleasure, loose in the water, and you might wonder: How can this ever end? How can they get out of this? How will they ever get back to the song? It’s like seeing a movie you’ve seen a hundred times before and still not believing that what happens next will, that you can’t change it, that you can’t stop the shot, the slamming door, the fall from the bell tower.
They get back with Krieger pulling up short, as if at a roadblock; it’s the only jarring moment of the song. But as Krieger stops, John Densmore increases the speed, and soon everyone has followed him over the crest of the music, right into the arms of Manzarek’s shining shell, no longer a fanfare, but a confirmation that life is not the same, terrain has been crossed, and the day won’t end as it began. Something is about to happen, that roll of organ chords said at the start; something has happened, they say now.
At the beginning, in the studio, in the first verses, there’s an echo on Morrison, creating a hollow, reverberating effect, so that he feels bigger than life, floating above the action, all knowing, all seeing. Smooth, full, rounded, not a crack or a tear, it’s not a blues voice, not a rock ’n’ roll voice, perhaps closer to Dean Martin’s than anyone else’s, if Dean Martin could ever bring himself to the pace of “Light My Fire.” But now, at the end, with the verses and choruses repeating, Morrison too has made the journey, and when he returns with “The time to hesitate is through,” you believe this isn’t just a line he’s spouting, or using; he’s learned that it is true, and his goal, for as long as the song remains his, is to explain how and why this is so. He does it with physical force, pressing on the words, the melody, pulling the organ, the guitar, the drums toward him, until finally at the end his voice can tear.
Densmore again hits his snare, a single beat, but harder, cleaner, than the sound that began the song. Manzarek follows one more time with the little circle the performance has followed, expanded, from the start. It is the most satisfying ending imaginable: it doesn’t leave you wanting more. It leaves you shaking your head in delight.
“Light My Fire,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).
———, Honolulu Convention Center, April 18, 1970, collected on Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade, 2003).
Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek, in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 43.
Leaves, “Hey Joe” (Mira, 1966, #31).
Eric Clapton, “All Your Love,” on John Mayhall with Eric Clapton, Bluesbreakers (Deram, 1966).
———, “Spoonful,” on Cream, Fresh Cream (Reaction, 1966).
Epilogue:
“You’re Not Going to Be Remembered”
WHEN ACTORS MIGRATE from movie to movie, traces of their characters travel with them, until, regardless of the script, the setup, the director’s instructions, it’s partly the old characters speaking out of the mouths of the new ones, guiding a new character’s hand into a gesture you remember from two or twenty years before. This transference can be immediately unsettling: Joan Allen and Tobey Maguire as mother and son in 1997 in The Ice Storm and in Pleasantville barely a year later make each movie a version of the other, and each character a version of the people who, as you watch, the actor and actress are playing somewhere else. Don’t they remember? you almost say out loud in the theater as Maguire’s David tries to get through to Allen’s Betty Parker in Pleasantville, and the answer is, they do—not just the actors, but the characters.
As Harvey Keitel moved on from his first role in Martin Scorsese’s 1968 Who’s That Knocking at My Door, through Scorsese’s Mean Streets in 1973, his Taxi Driver in 1976, James Toback’s Fingers in 1978—Keitel’s best and most extreme performance, seemingly folding everything before and after into a single Jimmy as he breaks into pieces—all the way to Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant in 1992, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in 1994 and on from there, the roles aged Keitel in the strongest manner. He thickened, even coarsened, over the decades; his flesh slipped, his skin went dull, but his eyes burned more brightly when he was old than when he was young. Even playing himself in the stupid finale of Get Shorty in 1995, he seemed to carry all of his past roles with him, somewhere in the back of his mind, in the fatigue or in the vehemence of his gestures—and also, in those flinty eyes, the viewer’s own memory of those roles. The uncanny appears: with this double memory in play, Keitel moves and speaks as if he is conniving with himself, playing what we haven’t seen him do yet against what we’ve seen him do before.
But the uncanny gains in resonance the farther the echo is from its source. In The Doors, in 1991, Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison is drunk on a plane with his road buddy Tom Baker, played by Michael Madsen, an actor who, when you watch him now, no matter what his role or when the movie was made, always seems to be doing a version of his Mr. Blonde razor dance to “Stuck in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs. It’s March 1, 1969; Morrison and Baker are on their way to the Miami concert that will upend the Doors’ career. Baker looks over at Morrison’s belly, which seems to be ballooning as we watch. “What are you going to do when the music’s over?” he says, Madsen’s face revealing the slightest embarrassment over the telegraphed self-referentiality of the script. But his face retrieves a sense of the real for the next line: “You’re not going to be remembered, Jim.” And so after dying in the bathtub in the last scene of the movie Kilmer’s Morrison migrates through nearly a score of roles—an uncredited, out of focus dead Elvis in True Romance, an unsuccessful Bruce Wayne in Batman Forever, barely noticed as Doc Holli-day in Tombstone or barely seen as Simon Templar in The Saint, part of the scenery as Willem de Kooning in Pollock, until finally, with Jim Morrison the one part still burned onto Kilmer’s face, he turns up again in L.A. in 2003 in Bob Dylan’s Masked and Anonymous, scars or scratches down his cheeks, long hair, a loose beard, now herding sheep and goats in a tiny encampment in a parking lot, sharpening a big knife, ranting about God and man and corruption and vanity, all but automatically mouthing What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister? from “When the Music’s Over.”
In 2003 it’s more than twenty years since the journalist Jerry Hopkins and the Doors insider Danny Sugerman, in their enormous best-seller No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison, cynically hinted that despite their title Jim Morrison wasn’t dead after all: that, like Elvis, he’d faked his death to escape the pressures of fame, not to mention the real possibility of prison, where anything could happen, but that he’d be back, that one day—11 It’s been twenty years since the one-time Sixties generational historian James Howard Kunstler, picking up Hopkins’s and Sugerman’s cue, published his equally cynical novel The Life of Byron Jaynes, where at the end the Jim Morrison character shows up naked on a motorcycle. It’s been twenty years since Jim Morrison lookalike Michael Paré, playing the long presumed dead singer Eddie Wilson, shows up at the end of the film Eddie and the Cruisers, in the midst of an Eddie and the Cruisers revival, to see his younger self in a bank of TV screens in the window of an electronics store, only to walk away alone, his shoulders hunched, a lovely, satisfied look on his face. If Val Kilmer’s old mirror man is going to show up anywhere, isn’t it more likely, isn’t it more right, that it’d be as a half-crazy Nature Boy in a dystopian future Los Angeles ruled by Third World gangsters than as Byron Jaynes’s Joe Doaks in New England or Eddie Wilson’s Mr. No Name in New Jersey? “A crack in the mud at the bottom of a sun-dried lake I count more beautiful than any human being, you know what I mean?” says Kilmer’s animal man, sounding as if he’s quoting from a book of Jim Morrison’s poetry, as Bob Dylan’s Jack Fate looks on impassively. “Know what you mean,” Dylan says. “Kinda like a curse on being born.” “You got that right,” says Kilmer. “That’s ’cause we live in fear. ’Cause we know we’re going to die.” He picks up a rabbit. “Animals don’t know they’re going to die,” Morrison says, stumbling over his words, his thought
s backing up in his head, with “The End” and “People Are Strange” and “L.A. Woman” and even “Alabama Song” backing up too, all of it coming out in the mindless voice of someone who regardless of who might be standing in front of him is always talking to himself, or God. “Holds us back, knowledge of death. I say, amazing grace indeed,” he says, as he raises his knife.
The Doors, directed by Oliver Stone, written by Randall Jahnson and Stone (1991).
Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles, written by Sergei Petrov (Bob Dylan) and Rene Fontaine (Larry Charles) (2003).
Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive: The Biography of Jim Morrison (New York: Plexus, 1980).
James Howard Kunstler, The Life of Byron Jaynes (New York: Norton, 1983).
P. F. Kluge, Eddie and the Cruisers (New York: Viking, 1980).
Eddie and the Cruisers, directed by Martin Davison, written by Davidson and Arlene Davidson (1983).
Acknowledgments
This book was fun to write, and part of the reason why is that, over the years, writing about the Doors and others here and there, I was lucky to find people who were fun to work with: Lisa Bralts-Kelly at Cake in Minneapolis, Danny Alexander at Johnson County Community College, Nancy Duckworth, Jon Carroll, and Bill Broyles at New West/California, Doug Simmons at the Village Voice, David Frankel and Ingrid Sis-chy at Artforum, Graham Fuller at Interview, Bill Wyman at Salon, Steve Perry and Melissa Maerz at City Pages in Minneapolis, Mark Francis at the Centre Pompidou, Michel Braudeau at la Nouvelle Revue Française, the staff of the Seattle and Portland Arts and Lectures series, Hal Foster at Princeton, Vendela Vida and Andrew Leland at the Believer, Eric Weisbard at the Experience Music Project, and Melissa Harris at Aperture. I owe thanks to Ben Fong-Torres and Jerry Hopkins, for their invaluable work on the Doors and their friendship over many years, and as well to Kathi Goldmark, Joel Selvin, Dave Marsh, Michael Sragow, Tosh Berman, Kristine McKenna, Erik Bernstein, and Tabitha King.
