by Greil Marcus
Reagan, Ronald
Rebel, The (Camus)
“Reconsider Baby” (Presley/ Fulsom)
Redding, Otis
death
description of singing
Monterey Pop Festival (1967)
Reed, Jimmy
Reservoir Dogs (Tarantino)
Retroactive 1 (Rauschenberg)
Reynolds, Jody
Richards, Keith
Riders on the Storm (Densmore)
“River Deep, Mountain High,”
“Roadhouse Blues,”
Densmore
Krieger
language and–156, 158
Morrison
recording
time of recording
Rock Bottom Remainders (photo)
“Rockin’ in the Free World,”
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stones
Altamont
Ed Sullivan Show, The
Rosenquist, James
Rothchild, Paul
Rumor of War, A (Caputo)
Ryan, Meg
San Francisco Chronicle
Sanders, Ed
Schindler, Rudolf
Schindler-Eichler designs
Scorsese, Martin
Sebastian, John
Sebring, Jay
Seeds
Seeger, Pete
Sellers, Peter
“Sharp Dressed Man” (ZZ Top)
Shaw, Greg
“Shout” (Isley Brothers)
Simon, Roger
Situationist International
“Sixteen Tons” (Ford)
Škvorecký, Josef
Slater, Christian
Slick, Grace (photo)
Smith, Bessie
Smithson, Peter
Soft Parade, The
Morrison
“Somebody to Love” (Jefferson Airplane)
“Someone to Love” (Great Society)
“Somebody to Love,”
Sopwith Camel
“Soul Kitchen,”
“Gloria” and
Morrison and
Spector, Phil
Spence, Skip
“Spoonful” (Cream)
Steve Canyon comic strip
Stone, Oliver
Stooges
“Strange Days,”
Krieger
Manzarek
Morrison
Strange Days
“Stuck in the Middle with You” (Stealers Wheel)
Sugerman, Danny
“Summertime,”
Sweetwater
“Take It as It Comes,”
Densmore
Doors, The (album)
Krieger
Manzarek
Morrison
“Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (Dylan)
“Talking Blues,”
Tarantino, Quentin
Tate, Sharon
Taxi Driver (Scorsese/Keitel)
“Tell All the People,”
“Telstar” (Tornados)
Tender Is the Night (Fitzgerald)
Thatcher, Margaret
Them(photo)
“These Arms of Mine” (Redding)
Thompson, Hunter
Tiananmen Square demonstrators
Toback, James
Tombstone (Kilmer)
Top Secret! (Abrahams/Zucker/ Zucker/Kilmer)
Tornados
“Touch Me,”
Krieger
Train
Tricky Cad casebooks (Jess)
True Romance comic books
True Romance (Kilmer)
Truffaut, François
“Try a Little Tenderness” (Redding)
“Tryin’ to Get to You” (Presley)
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” (Byrds)
Turner, Ike and Tina
“Twentieth Century Fox,”
Twilight Zone, The (television show)
Tzon Yen Luie
Un Chien Andalou (Buñel/Dali)
“Under My Thumb” (Rolling Stones)
“Unhappy Girl,”
“Unknown Soldier,”
Densmore
Krieger
Manzarek
Morrison
Van Houten, Leslie
Varnedoe, Kirk
Varsi, Diane
Velvet Underground
Ventura, Michael
Verifax collages (Berman)
Vietnam War
Waiting for the Sun
Warhol, Andy
Whaley, Frank
“When the Music’s Over”
Manzarek
Morrison
performances and
“Roadhouse Blues” and
Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965–1968
Whisky à Go Go, Sunset Strip (photo)
Doors (1966) (photo)
“End, The,”
“Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (Lewis)
Who’s That Knocking at My Door (Scorsese/Keitel)
Wild in the Streets (Shear)
Williams, Paul
Wilson, Brian
Wilson, Wayne
Winters, Shelley
“Wipe Out” (Surfaris)
Wood, Evan Rachel
Woodstock Music and Art Fair
“You Can’t Catch Me” (Berry)
“You Make Me Real,”
Young, Neil
Young Rascals
Young Romance comic books
Zimmerman, Robert
“Big Black Train”/Golden Chords
See also Dylan, Bob
ZZ Top
Greil Marcus is the author of Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, Writings 1968–2010, When That Rough God Goes Riding, and Like a Rolling Stone (all three with PublicAffairs), The Old Weird America, The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, and other books; a twentieth anniversary edition of his Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Berkeley, Princeton, Minnesota, NYU, and the New School in New York; his column Real Life Rock Top 10 appears regularly in the Believer. He lives in Oakland, California.
PUBLICAFFAIRs is a publishing house founded in 1997. It is a tribute to the standards, values, and flair of three persons who have served as mentors to countless reporters, writers, editors, and book people of all kinds, including me.
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Peter Osnos, Founder and Editor-at-Large
1 Morrison refused to change “higher” in “Light My Fire” for The Ed Sullivan Show, but in “The End” for the recording studio he substituted a strangled “Arrragghhh” for the “F
uck you”—or “Fuck you all night long”—he used on stage.
2 Or for that matter the Doors themselves—when in 2003 Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger reformed the band under its own name with Ian Ast-bury of the Cult hanging on to the microphone stand, 1960s video footage and a pyschedelic light show projected behind them, and Ty Dennis, late of the terrible L.A. new wave band the Motels, substituting for John Densmore, who refused to take part.
3 The Miller Beer version omitted the line “There’s a man with a gun over there, telling you you’ve got to beware,” bumping the chorus forward to cover the gap.
4 Unless, as Eve Babitz, much closer to Jim Morrison than most who would claim to be, put it at the time Stone’s movie was released, “Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Oliver Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn’t understand that in the’60s real men were not soldiers. A real man was Mick Jagger in Performance , in bed with two women, wearing eye makeup and kimonos.” In The Doors, Stone played Morrison’s UCLA film professor, tough but fair.
5 “Hybrid of an Elvis movie and a World War II underground resistance film,” in the words of one movie guide, but mainly the 1984 follow-up to the huge Abrahams-Zucker-Zucker comedy Airplane!
6 “One of the minor problems we had back in those days,” the disc jockey Larry Miller says, speaking of his time at KMPX in San Francisco, where, originally holding down the midnight-to-6-a.m. shift on an otherwise all foreign-language station, he invented FM rock ’n’ roll radio, “was that certain long songs turned into ‘phone monsters.’ Like ‘Inagaddadavida.’ Listeners to rock music were blown away by hearing anything more than three minutes long. There were good phone monsters, like the Stones’ ‘Goin’ Home,’ or Quicksilver’s ‘The Fool.’ But after the umpteenth demand for ‘When the Music’s Over’ and ‘The End,’ I decided one night I’d play them both—simultaneously.
“They are not just in different keys—they are in keys that clash badly. The result was like Charles Ives on acid.
“The demands for both songs diminished somewhat after that.” (E-mail to GM, June 27, 2011).
7 In November 1955 Bo Diddley was booked, and told by Sullivan to sing Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” then the biggest song in the country. He did “Bo Diddley” instead and never appeared on the show again.
8 “One night at TT&G studios in Hollywood, where we were recording at $100 an hour, Paul Rothchild took us by the hands and dragged us from the control room into the studio for one of his little talks. He said that we needed a hit soon and that ‘Hello, I Love You,’ with a tight arrangement, could fit the bill,” John Densmore wrote twenty-two years later. “It turned into an unusual song with tons of distortion on the guitar via the latest electronic toy, the fuzz box. Robby had also suggested a catchy way of turning the beat around à la Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love.’ Though I liked the lyrics very much, the new arrangement seemed contrived. When it climbed to number one, I was baffled.” A song about a real situation that has some tiny drama in it—someone going up to someone else on the street and shamelessly saying what he feels—is made into something stupid, obnoxious, a rock star preening, by a jerky arrangement that leaves everyone sounding phony.
9 Berman, whose face appears on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was a zoot-suit jazzbo from the forties; rock ’n’ roll favorites (as included on a mix-tape compiled by his son, Tosh Berman, in 2007) included the Kinks’ “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” the Beatles’ “And I Love Her,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” the Rolling Stones’ fabulous “Tell Me,” Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High,” Love’s “Little Red Book,” Roxy Music’s “The Bogus Man” (“I cannot count the times I have seen my father lying on the floor in our living room with Koch headphones on listening to this track,” Tosh Berman wrote in his notes to the set), Syd Barrett’s “Baby Lemonade,” and the New York Dolls’ “Trash.”
10 “Apple iPhone Discovers Hot New Act: The Doors,” deadtreemedia.composted on April 19, 2011.
11 On December 9, 2010, on the initiative of outgoing Governor Charlie Crist, the Florida Clemency Board granted Morrison a pardon for the convictions resulting from his 1970 trial for indecent exposure, public obscenity, and inciting to riot. On December 22, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Ray Manzarek issued this statement:
“In 1969 the Doors played an infamous concert in Miami, Florida. Accounts vary as to what actually happened on stage that night.
“Whatever took place that night ended with The Doors sharing beers and laughter in the dressing room with the Miami police, who acted as security at the venue that evening. No arrests were made. The next day we flew off to Jamaica for a few days’ vacation before our planned 20-city tour of America.
“That tour never materialized. Four days later, warrants were issued in Miami for the arrest of Morrison on trumped-up charges of indecency, public obscenity, and general rock-and-roll revelry. Every city the Doors were booked into canceled their engagement.
“A circus of fire-and-brimstone ‘decency’ rallies, grand jury investigations and apocalyptic editorials followed—not to mention allegations ranging from the unsubstantiated (he exposed himself) to the fantastic (the Doors were ‘inciting a riot’ but also ‘hypnotizing’ the crowd).
“In August, Jim Morrison went on trial in Miami. He was acquitted on all but two misdemeanor charges and sentenced to six months’ hard labor in Raiford Penitentiary. He was appealing this conviction when he died in Paris on July 3, 1971. Four decades after the fact, with Jim an icon for multiple generations—and those who railed against him now a laughingstock—Florida has seen fit to issue a pardon.
“We don’t feel Jim needs to be pardoned for anything.
“His performance in Miami that night was certainly provocative, and entirely in the insurrectionary spirit of The Doors’ music and message. The charges against him were largely an opportunity for grandstanding by ambitious politicians—not to mention an affront to free speech and a massive waste of time and taxpayer dollars . . . If the State of Florida and the City of Miami want to make amends for the travesty of Jim Morrison’s arrest and prosecution forty years after the fact, an apology would be more appropriate—and expunging the whole sorry matter from the record. And how about a promise to stop letting culture-war hysteria trump our First Amendment rights? Freedom of Speech must be held sacred, especially in these reactionary times.”
Copyright © 2011 by Greil Marcus
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,
a Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Marcus, Greil.
1. Doors (Musical group) 2. Rock music—1961–1970—History and criticism. I. Title.
ML421.D66M38 2011
782.42166092’2—dc23
2011027931
eISBN : 978-1-586-48946-5
