Within an electrifying few years during the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll was transformed from a brash diversion of antsy teenagers into a serious genre that threatened to rival the traditional fine arts. Instrumental in this swift development was a Los Angeles band, the Doors, whose charismatic but tormented and self-destructive lead singer, Jim Morrison, attained cult-like status after his mysterious death at 27 in Paris in 1971, only four years after the release of their first album.
Whether rock ever completely fulfilled its early promise is arguable. What seems incontrovertible, however, is that rock’s fabulous commercial success could be ruinous to young bands, which were pushed by record companies into the artificial environment of punishing tours in cavernous arenas designed for sports. The gifted Doors were among the first victims of this still near-universal corporate strategy.
No one seems better positioned to write about the Doors than Greil Marcus. A native and longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he witnessed the convulsions of the 1960s firsthand. As a music journalist and historian, he has mostly remained outside academe, a rarity among American public intellectuals. His 12 previous books include Mystery Train (1975), a pioneering appreciation of the then-derided Elvis Presley; Lipstick Traces (1989), a genealogy of punk rock that became canonical for postmodernist academics here and abroad; and several studies of Bob Dylan. Marcus has served as editor or co-editor of five projects, including “A New Literary History of America” (to which I contributed the article on Tennessee Williams).
It is unclear, however, to whom Marcus’ new book, The Doors, is addressed. Scanty background about the band is provided, and what is here often whizzes by out of chronological order. Marcus expects that the Doors’ career is widely known from Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors — but that hypnotically evocative film is 20 years old. Hence more foundational material on the Doors would have been welcome.
For reasons not addressed until almost halfway through the book, Marcus pays more attention to rare concert and studio tapes than to the major Doors albums that made a sensation around the world. He eloquently records his emotional impressions or finds vivid analogues to musical experience. For example, he says his principal memory of listening to the Doors or seeing them live was “the complex and twisting thrill of being taken out of myself”. He describes the “lift” in Morrison’s voice in the Doors’ first hit song, Light My Fire, as “a door swinging open in the wind, seen from a distance”. This is beautiful writing.
Highly admirable is the respect Marcus accords to the three musicians who provided a gorgeous framework for Morrison: the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, the guitarist Robby Krieger and the drummer John Densmore. However, I missed some acknowledgment of their varied musical backgrounds (classical, Chicago blues, folk, flamenco, jazz), which provided such brilliant syncretism in the Doors’ eerie sonic landscape.
Central to Marcus’ argument is that the Doors prophetically anticipated both the political assassinations of 1968 and the Charles Manson murders of 1969. As an early Doors fan, I find this linkage strained. The shocking Oedipal ritual of the Doors’ song The End, with its fratricide, patricide and incest, was hallucinatory family romance based, as Morrison said, on ancient myth and “poetic drama”. It was not Manson’s squalid butchery-by-proxy, where the cowardly mastermind was not even present. In general, Marcus shows little sympathy for Morrison’s archetypal imagination, steeped in Freud and Jung as well as Native American religion, which goes virtually unmentioned here.
Greil Marcus is an American original whose reflections and digressions are always thought-provoking. But there are passages in this book that desperately need fine-tuning, notably a painful denigration of the great Lotte Lenya, whose classic performance of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Alabama Song inspired the Doors’ deliciously decadent version on their first album. Marcus disregards the fact that Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, starring Lenya herself, had undergone a huge revival in the 1950s and that a Lenya album, released by Columbia Masterworks with a provocatively sophisticated cover drawing, was on display in many college rooms in the 1960s.
THE DOORS
A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
Greil Marcus
Public Affairs; 210 pages; $21.99
©2011 The New York Times News Service
