The Doors (5 page)

“What is the meaning of Beatles Woodstock Altamont
today?
” people would ask me on the phone twenty years before that. “There's
no
meaning,” I would say, irritated, but also confused. “Why are you doing this story?” I'd ask them. They didn't know; they weren't in charge. They were just told to go out and get the story, and someone said I might know, as if I, or anyone my age, might have some secret we were keeping.

The implication seemed to be that anyone who might know had nothing better to do than to sit around wondering about the meaning of events that, at the time, had mostly felt like fun, or not fun. As if one's life had been empty ever since. That, I realized, was the secret behind the media's need for these stories, or non-stories. The media had a sense that ever since the 1960s, life had been empty. That nothing had happened since: nothing worth memorializing, anyway. And that too was part of the media secret, the idea of memorializing. The anniversaries were attempted funerals. They were attempts to bury something. But the funeral never seemed to end, and the burial never seemed complete.

I thought of a
New Yorker
cartoon: a nicely dressed middle-aged woman stands in her nice living room and turns to her husband, who's got a big paunch, who's draped in a chair looking miserable, exhausted, unkempt. “Honey,” she says, “the '60s are over.” This would have been funny in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected president. The cartoon appeared in 1988, just before Ronald Reagan left the White House. And that was all too right. Ronald Reagan was a Sixties person if anyone was; the negation of the mythic Sixties, but Sixties nonetheless. “In his early years Elvis Presley was virtually apolitical,” the columnist and novelist Michael Ventura wrote in 1987. “Yet no one else in the '50s except Martin
Luther King had as huge a political effect in the United States. Elvis single-handedly created what came to be known as the youth market, the demand for the form of music he made popular. Through being united as a market, that particular wave of youth felt the cohesion of community that became the '60s upheaval, an upheaval that all our politics since have been in reaction to, for, or against.”

Like Newt Gingrich dismissing Bill and Hillary Clinton as “counter-culture McGoverniks,” by which he meant beatniks, by which he meant Sputnik, by which he meant commies, it was by setting himself so firmly and grandly against that upheaval that Ronald Reagan became a national figure. In 1966, running for governor in California, he ran against the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of two years before, and won; in 1980 he ran against the Sixties as such, just as Margaret Thatcher had done in the U.K. the year before. Both did better than simply run against the Sixties: they kept the time and the idea alive by co-opting its rhetoric, by so brilliantly taking its watchwords, or its slogans, as their own. “Adventure,” “risk,” “a new world”—those were emblems no conservative movements had claimed since the 1930s, when the movements that did trumpet such words named themselves fascist. Unlike their formal political ancestors—Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon, or Conservative prime ministers Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden—Reagan and Thatcher were utopians. They were impossible and unthinkable without the Sixties, and the 1960s, without the idea and the years actually lived. They couldn't afford to let them die.

Around the time
The Doors
appeared in theaters, a nineteen-year-old friend came to ask me for help with a college paper
he was writing on the 1960s. Here was someone I'd known all his life, and in 1991 he wanted to talk about the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1967, about the Grateful Dead—not because this was ancient history, but because it wasn't. He knew too many Deadheads his own age. He was trying to understand what all this had to do with him: why were his friends dressing up like tSpheir parents had or hadn't twenty-five years before and going to the same shows? I tried to tell him how strange that seemed to me, how impossible it would have been for me and my friends to have put on suits in 1965 and called ourselves Benny Goodmanheads or even Billie Holiday-heads. But I couldn't get that across. I wanted to tell him about
Pump Up the Volume
, about hints of something new coming out of a cultural desert, but that too seemed out of reach.

As I'd watched my own daughters grow up—in 1991 the oldest was twenty-one, born just days after Altamont; my wife stayed home, because we figured if the baby was born there we'd have to name it Mick, and because we had heard Hell's Angels would be there and we knew who they were—I followed the growth of this remarkable persistence of a vanished time. I followed it as a form of oppression. It seemed to me that if my own children were to have a chance to make a culture of their own, to make their own history, then the Sixties would have to take their rightful place in the filing cabinet of yesterdays and once-upon-a-times. But all their lives, people who were in their teens and twenties when the Doors, twenty years gone, reappeared as
The Doors
had been told by movies and books and television and the radio that
then
was when it all happened, that
there
were the touchstones of whatever dribs and drabs of art and politics they might flatter themselves
to call their own. Over and over, people a generation younger than I am have been told that the sound of which they can claim only the echo happened once, and it won't happen again. When, in 1991, people turned on the radio, or when people turn it on today, and hear Buffalo Springfield's 1966 “For What It's Worth,” the record itself or a commercial based on it,
³
when they hear a tune sparked by riots on Sunset Strip in 1965, with the lines “There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear,” one thing
is
clear: you're supposed to feel that something happened, but it isn't happening anymore. You were born at the wrong time; you missed it. “One of my first sentient thoughts as a rock critic,” Gina Arnold, one of the best ones, wrote in 1991, “was how incredibly sad it was that I had been born to be a teen in the '70s—too late to have seen the Rolling Stones in their heyday. My first glimpse, in 1976, seemed so late for the train—little did I know they'd drag on for another fifteen years.” Would she have believed she could have written the same sentence twenty years later?

Looking at the Berlin Wall falling in 1989, Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay–cum–
New Yorker
cartoon “The End of History,” announcing that no longer would humanity be troubled by possibilities of change outside of fashion; to his children he bequeathed a life of peace, quiet, and acceptance. Neil Young, a member of Buffalo Springfield when they made “For What It's Worth,” watched the same event and recorded a song called “Rockin' in the Free World.” He already had a
long road of oddness behind him. Depending on when you looked, he was addled, confused, quaint, and again and again, someone you hadn't heard before. He'd pretended to be an Indian; he'd said positive, mysterious things about Charles Manson. He wrote and sang “Ohio,” a song about the shooting of students at Kent State in 1970 as thrilling as it was bitter; endorsing Reagan in 1984, he'd said, “You can't always support the weak. You've got to make the weak stand up on one leg, half a leg, whatever they've got.” “Rockin' in the Free World” was a statement he apparently felt was so crucial he recorded and released it twice, acoustic and electric, live and in the studio, in order to say that the free world was turning its back on freedom.

In the 1989 acoustic version, the audience is as present in the sound as the singer, violently ignoring the singer's every violent denunciation of what his country has come to. As Young sings about a dead crack baby “who'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool”—if those lines aren't rock 'n' roll, what is?—the people in the crowd cheer, yell, stomp, raise fists, pump arms in the air: Free World! Alright! We won! They're so excited that this Sixties person is right there, in the flesh: they can tell someone they saw him before he died. The audience sounds as if it's tossing a beach ball back and forth as the guy on stage sings about the death of all he holds dear.

It feels terrible; it feels fine. The sound from the stage and the sound from the crowd say that for one interesting public person, nothing has been settled. That he's standing in front of a big crowd playing an acoustic guitar to sing his song for people who are oblivious to what he has to say suggests that someday he might be standing on a corner with a guitar case
open at his feet. It's a promise that he'll always shout, even if his shout won't be heard, a promise that an unheard shout is its own power principle, precisely because in the world of pop culture what isn't heard doesn't exist. That shout is the tree falling unheard and thus the tree that never fell, until, years later, the echo shakes the world like an earthquake. Young acts out this paradox: he performs as a Sixties relic who is not a relic, whose best music is at once behind him and yet to be made. He insists it is still his place to describe history, to name it a betrayal and declare himself unsatisfied.

That is Oliver Stone with
The Doors
. Stone was in his mid-forties when he made the picture. Behind him were
Salvador
,
Platoon
,
Wall Street
,
Talk Radio
,
Born on the Fourth of July
, all of them overstated, overplayed, overdone, powerful. He was a man obsessed with his place in history, and obsessed with proving to himself and to the world that he was part of it. He enlisted in the Army to fight in Vietnam because he was afraid he might miss it—that he might, in words the critic Leslie Fiedler wrote about the 1930s, miss “the mythic life of his generation.”
⁴
For Stone the past is present. He wasn't there to see what the Doors did back in the 1960s, when they, his movie says, acted out the mythic life of their generation; he heard their music twisted by history, heard it on Armed Forces Radio
and on bootleg tapes in Vietnam. The film is a denial that he missed it, a denial so loud it says one thing: I didn't miss it, but you did.

That was the feeling in the ad campaign, with terribly hokey lines cut into radio spots over background Doors music: first the somber “The ceremony is about to begin,” then the call to action, “We've gotta make the myths!” That was the feeling in the interviews Stone gave to promote the film. “What does this movie have to say to a '90s audience?” he asked himself in one, and he answered himself: “Freedom. Now. It once existed . . . But there's a religious fundamentalism returning to this country. And people like me are going to be bonfires.” It was a heroic act to make this movie, he wanted you to understand; he was willing to be martyred for it. Six dollars and you could watch. The movie should have been awful. Instead it was terrifying.

My wife and I stood in line with scores of people in their teens and twenties. We felt cast out of time, waiting with people who seemingly wanted to claim as more theirs than ours what we'd once gone to see every weekend. I wondered why they had no culture of their own to rebuke us with. I felt the Sixties I hate: something unnamable, like the last unkillable remnants of a disease, a virus with no antidote, a disease of “Freedom . . . It once existed.” A disease of freedom
then
, cursing new generations not with their own St. Vitus's Dance, some horrible new upheaval, but with a kind of cultural apathy, a sleeping sickness. What does it mean to pay to watch other people be free? What does it mean to pay to watch dead people be free? “All the
National Lampoon
parodies of the alternative culture have come true,” Elvis Costello said in an interview published the same month
The Doors
was released.
“Now you really can get
'60s Golden Protest Favorites
, a historical view which completely distorts that time. When you were 15 or 16 it was an enormously exciting time, and reading the magazines then you were really believing the sense that there was gonna be a revolution in '68, and then this moment of it ‘not happening.' Now there's the ‘approved' version, which is that it was some kind of nice outing people went through and then didn't so much wise up as start feeling sorry for themselves during the Carter administration, and then got embittered and self-serving during the Reagan administration. These historical vandals are changing history, putting spin control on it even before it's finished.” Reading the reviews, you couldn't have expected anything different from Oliver Stone.

All I remembered of the Doors—all I remembered from the hundreds of times I played their first album, from the few times I played the ones after that, from the dozen times I saw them on stage—was the complex and twisting thrill of being taken out of myself. It was a sensation captured by Ian McEwan in
The Innocent
, a novel that ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall, in lines about what a young man felt in Berlin more than thirty years before, when he first heard “Heartbreak Hotel,” when the song “spoke only of loneliness and despair. Its melody was all stealth, its gloom comically overstated . . . The song's self-pity should have been hilarious. Instead it made Leonard feel worldly, tragic, bigger somehow.”

This isn't simply shown in Oliver Stone's movie; it isn't merely recorded, memorialized, wrapped up and presented to you in a neat package with a greeting card reading “Freedom . . . It once existed . . . Wish you'd been here.” It isn't presented. It happens.

It happens in a nightclub when the Doors' music is still inches away from them; it happens in concert sequences when Jim Morrison is a star whose best music is seemingly behind him, has been fixed—when, like the movie that exists in its ads rather than on the screen, the Doors were little more than an outfit selling a myth of freedom that already imprisoned them, imprisoned them as a pop group whose only recognized, concrete social role was to get one more hit.