The Doors (4 page)

Elvis Presley, “Mystery Train” (Sun, 1955).

———,
Complete '68 Comeback Special: 40th Anniversary Edition
(RCA, 2008).

Little Junior's Blue Flames, “Mystery Train” (Sun, 1953).

The End, 1966

Early on, Robby Krieger developed a way of saying, in a very few, quiet, spaced notes on his guitar, that something was about to happen. He could make you draw your breath.

It happened first with “The End,” the closing track of
The Doors
, released in January 1967, recorded in August the year before, not long after the notorious debut of the song at the Whisky à Go Go on Sunset Strip. In the studio the song unwinds over nearly twelve minutes; those first notes tell you to suspend any expectations of how long this is going to last. A tambourine shivers off to the side of the sound, like something out of Robert Johnson's “Come on in My Kitchen”—a rattlesnake version of Johnson's whispered “Can't you hear the wind blow?” when he brings that perfect recording almost to a halt.

“Specialize in having fun!” Jim Morrison sang in the song before, “Take It as It Comes”; the words didn't match the music. The band was both light on its feet and relentless, and what was coming, what you were going to have to take, felt dark, hard, irresistible, a test, not anything you could expect.

“The End” was the test. Two minutes in, Krieger plays an atonal figure against a steady count, Ray Manzarek shifts quietly behind him, a green river in the cave of the song, and—a minute, a minute and a half has passed, but there's no sense of time passing—John Densmore hits his drums off the beat, louder each time, fracturing the sound, until you can see his kit tumbling like Keith Moon's, the sound so big you can see an avalanche of drums burying everyone else.

This is a repeating moment; events like this occur across the span of “The End.” All through the piece, there will be incidents when the performance feels as if it's about to tear itself to pieces. It's a question of rhythm. The furious, impossibly sustained assault that will steer the song to its end, a syncopation that swirls on its own momentum, each musician called upon not just to match the pace of the others but to draw his own pictures inside the maelstrom—in its way this is a relief, because that syncopation gives the music a grounding you can count on, that you can count off yourself.

There were exciting pauses in “Take It as It Comes,” when the band pulled back from itself, letting the song loose, letting it tell them where to take it next. Instruments dropped out, but a pulse always held: it was better than most of what was on the radio, but not a new language, a foreign language you had to learn. In “The End” the pauses were traffic accidents, what in the 1920s the Berlin dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck called “the art of yesterday's crash.” Throughout the song, until that
final surge, everything seems tentative, uncertain, unclear; that's the source of the song's power, its all-encompassing embrace of darkness, gloom, and dread, and it's this insistence on the uncertain, on working without a ground, that takes the performance past its own corniness. Morrison's words have the feel of phrases made up on the spot to fit or break the rhythms taking shape around him: the languid, sleepy “The west, is the best” followed by the staccato jump in the way the last five words of “Get here—and we'll do the rest” pull the first two words after them like a weight pulling a house off a cliff. There is the drifting chase after a blue bus, a chase that is a matter of someone walking slowly, deliberately, no matter how fast the bus is going knowing that sooner or later he'll catch it and climb on.

Morrison's voice in the slides in the music that seem to matter most—at the beginning and the end, where “my only friend” is brought into the song and then banished, so the singer can contemplate the perfection of his own isolation, his own renunciations, his own beauty—is full, creamy, a deep well. You could drop a coin into the pool of this voice and never hear the splash. As the voice opens over words or syllables—“friend,” “only,” “die”—the words change shape, gliding out into the empty spaces in the sound. In the way Morrison raises the “end” in the first “This is the end” up past the words preceding it, as if to make sure you don't miss its significance, carries the smell of falsity, pretention, bad poetry; the plain flatness of “my only friend” instantly takes
the end
down to a plane of ordinary life, lets the listener into the song, and sets the words free to find their traveling companions. No element in the music seems to anticipate any other, to call any other forth; the performance is a dance around a fire, with the
pace determined by the flickers, which can't be anticipated, that are never the same—not until the set piece in the center, when the singer says he wants to kill his father and fuck his mother.
¹
The suggestion of the singer reenacting the murder of the Clutter family, but from inside the family, the truly suggestive moment of this part of the song, is erased by the cheapness of shoving Oedipus into the drama: the singer goes quietly into his sister's room, then into his brother's room, he could leave them both dead, he could just be making sure they're asleep, but when he gets to his father and his mother—when he gets to what one friend calls “the ‘Hello Faddah, hello Muddah' extravaganza”—you realize you've heard this story before. That gorgeous tone for single words that make a drama so much richer than this one here changes the white marble of Michelangelo's
David
to the plaster of the statuettes you can buy in the gift shop.

Minutes later, with the music gathering itself for its final charge, the real drama takes place. Krieger, Manzarek, and Densmore are pushing for a centrifugal momentum that will create its own Big Bang, until each piece flies away from the other; Morrison, his one-legged, spread-eagled stage dance now playing out on his tongue, is the controlling rhythmic force. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he snaps, snarls, talking into a mirror, testing the word for its feel in his mouth, finding the same brittle, syncopated click with which Krieger opened the theme, the word
fuck
buried but viscerally changing shape
each time he spits it out, the word cutting itself short,
fuk
, distorting,
fut
, cracking,
fak
, curling around itself,
fug
.

Everything slows down again, and the song returns to the beckoning, the foreshadowing, of its first moments. Wherever it was you started from, you have traveled somewhere else, and no time at all has passed. As the Firesign Theatre had their college student say when he entered his time machine, “I will be gone for a thousand years, but to you it will seem only like a minute.”

 

“The End,”
The Doors
(Elektra, 1967).

Firesign Theatre, “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger,” from
How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All?
(Columbia, 1969). The group's
Everything You Know Is Wrong
(Columbia, 1974) includes a groaning old-Indian parody of the snake section of “The End.”

The Doors in the So-called Sixties

F
OR THREE YEARS, visiting my father in the nursing home where he lived, I would drive across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley to San Francisco and back again, twenty or twenty-five minutes over, twenty or twenty-five minutes back. In the spring of 2010 I made an interesting discovery: in those forty or fifty minutes, switching stations to find something I wanted to hear, cutting from 98.5 to 104.5 to 103.7 to 107.7 to 90.7 as soon as a song I liked was over, sometimes catching signals floating in and out, half a tune before it broke up or was drowned out by something else, I was all but guaranteed to hear all or part of Lady Gaga's “Bad Romance” at least three times, and Train's “Hey, Soul Sister” at least twice. This was not a surprise; those were the big hits of the season, and both were
wonderful—bottomless, each in its own way. With “Hey, Soul Sister,” there was the delirium of the guy dancing in his bedroom as he watched his favorite video on his computer screen, over and over just as people all over the world were now listening to him. The song changed in its emotional meter from one nonsense verse to the next, from the impassioned chorus to the way a banjo isolated the singer in his little drama, the way the band crashing down on the same phrase a stanza later brought him into a greater drama, just one of a million people dreaming the same dream. With “Bad Romance” there was first the delirium of the production, what seemed like thousands of little pieces all spun by some all-seeing, thousand-eared over-mind into a Busby Berkeley chorus line of sounds instead of legs. There was the cruelty of the singer, mocking whoever the
you
in the song was, sneering, turning her back, looking back over her shoulder with a look that killed, shouting at him or her on the street so everyone can hear: “'Cause I'm a freak,
baby
”—the last word squeezed in the sound, the
b
and the
y
cut off just slightly at the beginning and then at the end, so that it's less a word than a spew of pure disgust. And then, with about a minute left on the record, everything changes. “I don't wanna be friends”: a desperation invades the performance, trivializes, erases, everything that's come before it, and pushes on, a completely different person now telling a completely different story, tearing at her hair, her clothes, scratching out her own eyes, then with her dada chant cutting it all off like someone breaking through the last frame of a film to shout “THE END!” I loved them both; I got lost in them each time.

In a way, each record contained its own surprise every time it came on—but the real surprise was something else. As certain as it was that I'd hear “Bad Romance” “Bad Romance”
“Hey, Soul Sister” “Bad Romance” “Hey Soul Sister,” it was close to a sure thing that I'd hear the Doors twice, three times, even four times—and not just “Light My Fire.” Not just the one or two songs into which the radio has compressed Bob Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone”), the Rolling Stones (“Gimmie Shelter,” maybe “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction,” entered in the log of time as just “Satisfaction” to save conceptual space), the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), Sly and the Family Stone (“Everyday People), the Band (“The Weight”), all of the Doors contemporaries save the Beatles as if they were forgotten hacks forever playing the same squalid dive with the same announcement on the door, the name of the one hit maybe bigger than the name of the act because you can always remember the song even if you can't remember who did it, even if whoever is doing it now isn't exactly whoever did it then:
—with, turning just two pages in the newspaper entertainment listings on May 5, 2011—

At any given moment in 2010 you could hear “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Touch Me,” “Love Her Madly,” “L.A. Woman,” “Twentieth Century Fox,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Hello, I Love You,” “Five to One,” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Soul Kitchen,” “Roadhouse Blues.” What were all these songs doing there? And why did most of them sound so good?

As I reveled in the music, as if I hadn't heard it before—realizing, in some sense, that I hadn't: that “L.A. Woman” and “Roadhouse Blues” had never sounded so big, so unsatisfied, so free in 1970 and 1971 as they did forty years later—I remembered Oliver Stone's 1991 movie
The Doors
. The reviews were terrible: “What a shame to have to take your clothes off for a movie like this,” one critic wrote at the time of Meg Ryan's nude scene. I'd expected to hate the film, to watch shows I'd seen and music I'd loved faked and frozen; instead I was shocked at how right it felt, how even the most overplayed scenes still seemed to leave something out: smugness, easy answers, a director's superiority to his own material. The picture was alive; I could replay the movie just by thinking about it.

It came out a year after
Pump Up the Volume
, Allan Moyle's film about a teenager's clandestine radio station in a faceless Arizona suburb. I couldn't get either one out of my head. I didn't want to. But when I tried to tell people about the movies, about why they ought to see them, and, usually, failed to convince them that they should, I realized both films were trapped in the same prison: the prison of the Sixties, not as a period in which people actually lived, but as an idea, or the scrim of an idea, meant to keep all lived experience, all unanswered, unasked questions, as far away as possible. I began to think about why these Sixties—as opposed to a lower-cased
sixties, or whatever years one might choose to apply to the period (1958–69, from the Beats to Altamont, some have said; 1963–74, from John F. Kennedy's assassination to Richard Nixon's resignation; 1964–68, from the Beatles to the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King)—hadn't gone away, and why, perhaps, they never would.

A few years before, in the late 1980s, when I found myself constantly getting calls about the Sixties from newspaper and TV reporters, I decided I wasn't going to talk about it anymore. There was a flood of ludicrous media-created anniversaries: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beatles' first appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, the twentieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones' deadly free concert at Altamont—as if, on the twentieth anniversary of the day Hell's Angels stabbed and beat a young man named Meredith Hunter to death as the Rolling Stones played “Under My Thumb,” people who'd been there, or people who might as well have been there, who'd somehow been convinced that the event was a symbolic turning point in their lives and culture, would turn to each other and say, “Wow! Next Tuesday's going to be the twentieth anniversary of Altamont! Let's all get dressed up like Hell's Angels and naked acid casualties and have a party!” 2007 was if anything worse: forty is traditionally a meaningless year for anniversaries, but the media looked at the calendar and just like that 1967 was, until the page turned, the most important year in history. You weren't
there
? every TV, magazine cover, radio station seemed to ask, or rather taunt. You don't remember the day the Beatles'
Sgt. Pepper
came out? The Six-Day War? The Monterey Pop Festival? The Summer of Love? The first Doors album?