The Doors (13 page)

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 uncool 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

O
N
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.

“I think we were actually fundamentally anti-pop,” the architect Peter Smithson of the Independent Group said in 1976. “That is,” he said, “the interest in current phenomena, current imagery—imagery that was thrown up by production, by advertising and so on, that was studied by the Independent Group—each person in the group was studying it for his own reasons. One emerges from it as one went into it, with more information, with one's lines established. But certainly, those who used
the information directly—isn't that a handsome picture or a handsome layout which I could parody for a fine art picture?—I really think that is a completely meaningless activity.”

It's no fun to read this argument today—“one emerges from it” as if from a swamp, from the modern market in which people actually live, “as one went into it,” confirmed in one's conviction that one cannot be changed by the market, that one is immune to it, superior to it. “One's lines” are “established”—that is, one's distance from the world in which people actually live is plotted on a map.

But you don't feel any of this coming out of Paolozzi's work. You feel that thrill of mechanical reproduction—the collage maker, the person who saw
Intimate Confessions
on the newsstand and said,
I
have
to have that
, who then brought it home and said,
Now, what am I going to
do
with this?