The Doors (12 page)

“Shape of Things to Come.”

Then Jim wins in a walk! And if Diane Varsi can stand up there in the Senate banging her tambourine instead of giving a speech, Ray's
already
secretary of state!

As an actor, and in his life offstage—sometimes barely offstage, as with his backstage encounter with a cop at a show in New Haven in 1967, which led to Morrison being arrested
on
stage—Jim Morrison didn't really challenge authority. Rather he conveyed an unlimited, instinctive, but dramatized contempt for authority—which is to say a contempt that was thought through, theorized, a stance footnoted with mental references to Artaud and
Un Chien Andalou
.

“Morrison was one of the few if not the only performer I knew who really believed what he was saying,” Robby Krieger said in 2006.

He wasn't just up there doing his trip and then he'd go home and have a beer and laugh at it all, laugh all the way to the bank. He was a guy that, he lived that life that he lived out onstage all the time. And when he went home it was just some cheap motel somewhere, and he just hung out until the next show, you know. Sometimes he would be the greatest guy you'd ever want to meet—super polite, together, clean, and everything else—but the next day he'd be completely the other way. All those stories are true, most of them: He lived his whole life right on the edge, and people could sense that when he was onstage; there was always something under there, ready to happen—and if they were lucky that night, it
might happen. All I can say is that he was totally committed to living the life of the revolution.

Some of that is there in “The Unknown Soldier” as the Doors performed it in Denmark on September 18, 1968. Here the slowness of the music—the way its parts are fitted together, the deliberateness of the pacing, which suggests people feeling their way through a situation with all the lights off—produces not suspense but a sense of inevitability. Ray Manzarek gets up from the organ and walks behind John Densmore, seemingly to adjust an amplifier, then stands waiting with his head bowed as Densmore plays his roll. Manzarek lifts the amplifier, getting ready to drop it. Robby Krieger lifts his guitar and aims the neck like the barrel of a rifle, lowers it slightly, raises it again, his posture like that of an executioner, his eyes like those of a psychopath. Morrison stands waiting—for what? In the little play of the ensemble, were they performing a deserter's execution, a death in combat, a suicide? That Morrison so fully communicates with his body and the tilt of his head that he has seen this coming makes the shot Krieger fires, backed by the sound of the amplifier hitting the floor, that much more shocking: as you watch the video of the performance, you are sucked into Morrison's mind so fully you might forget anyone else is there, that anything is about to happen. “A Doors concert,” Morrison said in 1968, “is a public meeting called by us for a special kind of dramatic discussion.” “I'd like to play in a club where we could be with other people,” he told a
Chicago Tribune
writer after a show in New York the year before. “Maybe we wouldn't even play. It would be great to sit down
and talk with the audience, to get rid of all the separate tables and have one big table.”

In Denmark, Morrison goes down out of the frame as if he's been erased from it—but in that instant it is the sound of the shot that throws everything off. It's not a crack, a report, an explosion. It's a long, acrid scratch; it sounds as if Krieger is scraping the inside of his strings with his fingernails. It's not a sound you've heard before, or want to hear again. It was the sound of the times that no one else made.

 

John Densmore,
Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors
(New York: Delacorte, 1990), 85, 160. This relentlessly questioning memoir is the best book on the Doors: filled with detail, powered by a sense of unreality, self-deprecating, funny, with Densmore emerging as no hero, no so-called survivor, but, as his title implies, someone along for the ride, on the storm of the times, on the storm he and the rest of the band made themselves.

Jim Morrison, quoted from Jerry Hopkins, “The Rolling Stone Interview,”
Rolling Stone
, July 26, 1969. Collected in
The Rolling Stone Interviews
(New York: Paperback Library, 1971), 229–30. Probably the best single interview with Morrison; Hopkins was a trusted chronicler. The book referenced is long out of print and as a pocket book not likely collected by libraries, but the interview is greatly abridged in the more accessible
The Rolling Stone Interviews
, ed. Jann S. Wenner and Joe Levy (New York: Back Bay, 2007).

“Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),”
The Doors
(Elektra, 1967). The Kurt Weill–Bertolt Brecht collaboration premiered in
Mahogany
.

“The Unknown Soldier” and “Five to One,”
Waiting for the Sun
(Elektra, released July 1968). The 2006 reissue includes a DVD with footage of the Denmark performance.

Phil Ochs, interview in
Broadside
(1965). Quoted in Clinton Heylin,
Behind the Shades
(New York: Viking, 1991).

Wild in the Streets
, directed by Barry Shear, written by Robert Thom (American International Pictures, 1968).

Max Frost and the Troopers, “Shape of Things to Come” (Tower, 1968, #22).

Robby Krieger, in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres,
The Doors
(New York: Hyperion, 2006), 107.

Jim Morrison, quoted in Michael Lydon, “The Doors: Can They Still ‘Light My Fire'?”
New York Times
, January 19, 1969.

———, “The New Generation: Theater with a Beat,” from the
Chicago Tribune
, carried in the
San Francisco Chronicle
, September 28, 1967.

Strange Days

R
AY MANZAREK'S OPENING into “Strange Days” makes the spookiest moment in the Doors' career, and one of the most alluring. It's been lost; the rest of the song swallows it up. It was lost almost from the moment it appeared. Today it can pull itself out of the rest of the music, and you can play it all day long.

It was the first track and the title song of their second album, released nine months after the first, which was anything but unusual in 1967—in 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan put out
Bringing It All Back Home
,
Highway 61 Revisited
, and
Blonde on Blonde
in little more than a year. But the Doors' first album had a number one single, and even though the charts stopped the album itself at #2, in the real world it was probably number one anyway. The second album—whatever it was going to be, whatever it was going to be called, whatever its cover
would be, in this case a circus strongman, a man playing a horn, a mime, a juggler, and a dwarf, all in all an image of strangeness so obviously self-referential it all but put the album title in scare quotes, a tableau so corny you can almost read the casting call, a picture that immediately sent one message to fans, “Uh-oh”—had to match the first, in drama, in reach, in glamour. And in strangeness. That was the band's appeal; that was their shtick; that was their theme; that was what they had to say, or they had nothing to say. “Strange Days,”
Strange Days
: they were putting their cards on the table.

Four notes in four pairs, beginning high, with the trebly sound so common in Los Angeles record studios in the mid-1960s, but cleaner, clearer, the sound like its own tunnel through the night the sound itself was calling up. Four notes chasing each other in four pairs, the theme repeating four times in seven unrushed seconds, a pace that was menacing, threatening, in its first split-second, calming, reassuring, halfway through—
You've been here before, you're still here,
whatever this place is, it'll be here when you get back
. It was a little panorama of dream, fright, and, really, mission: to get to the other side of these strange days. A bet that there was another side.

Each eight-note pattern was lifted higher than the one before it. It was a lilting, lyrical staircase made all of spotlights, each light going dark as soon as one pair passed the baton to the pair ahead of it on the way to the end of the phrase. The race only felt as if it were in slow motion. In truth the pace was quick, nimble, with leaps over the gaps between sounds; it was the shapeliness of the design, an order that the listener was instantly sucked into, that seemed to organize the world, that made the drama of the four pairs of four notes repeated four times in seven seconds feel distant, receding as it pulled you toward it. In 1967, those notes would have made people think of
The Twilight Zone
, even as they detached the show, a derelict caboose on a runaway train, from the history the notes were already reaching for; today it can feel as if the song was reaching for David Lynch's
Lost Highway
, reaching right through it.

There's a flipped bass thump—for the Doors' first album, and on stage, Manzarek used a bass piano device to compensate for the lack of an actual person in the band playing bass; for their second album, they brought in Douglas Lubahn of the short-lived Elektra band and Doors imitators Clear Light—then a doomy strum from Robby Krieger. Manzarek's theme moves from one channel to the other, but it's no longer the voice of the song, just a sound effect, losing its shape, as the song goes on turning into trash, the psychedelic junk you could find in any doorway on Sunset Strip. Jim Morrison comes in, and within less than a minute you could be listening to “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night),” the 1966 hit
by the San Fernando Valley band the Electric Prunes, a group that had originally called themselves Jim and the Lords, which effortlessly translates into a name a forty-five-year-old Morrison, having no right to “The Doors” after the original group broke up in 1973, might along with a few cultist backups have been toting around the same Valley clubs the original Jim and the Lords briefly escaped. Everything clean, direct, straight, unblinking, and fearless in the song is gone, buried under thick, ham-handed, pumped-up breaks between one side of the song and another. The pattern set in those first seconds leads into a melody that Morrison can't sing, that stretches his voice into an ugly, convoluted tangle, and the suspended, transparent tone of “The Crystal Ship,” Morrison's version of Manzarek's seven seconds, is broken into whines and wheezes. At two minutes, the music seems to have been playing for six.

At first, what Morrison was singing matched the black hole Manzarek had opened up: “Strange days have tracked us down.” You could go anywhere with an idea like that, but if you were a singer, if you were a band, you needed music to get you there, to shape that idea into a sound that would arrive in the world as if it had always been there, and leave it different than it had been before it arrived: for “Strange Days,” a world that was harder, more desperate, more exciting, the stakes raised. “There are songs that are ideas, and songs that are records,” Phil Spector was saying as the Doors were recording “Strange Days”—after his production of Ike and Tina Turner's “River Deep, Mountain High” failed to come anywhere near the Top 40, let alone reach number one, where Spector knew it belonged, he locked up his studio and began lecturing at colleges—and, he said with characteristic modesty, “Whoever
can create a song that is both an idea and a record can rule the world.” It was unclear if rule the world meant top the charts or
rule the world
—that's why it was scary to hear him say it, even as you tried to understand what he meant. “Da Doo Ron Ron” might have been it, Spector mused from the stage in his pompadour, his tight suit, his ruffled cuffs, his elevator heels, his eyes flashing with intelligence and mistrust.

For seven seconds, the Doors were almost there. That was closer than most people ever got. As Al Kooper wrote in 1968 in a review of the Band's first album,
Music from Big Pink
, “There are people who will work their lives away in vain and not touch it.”

 

“Strange Days,”
Strange Days
(Elektra, 1967).

Electric Prunes, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” (Reprise, 1966, #11). In 1972 Lenny Kaye made it the lead track of his wildly influential historical compilation
Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968
(Elektra).

Ike and Tina Turner, “River Deep, Mountain High” (Philles, 1966, #88).

Al Kooper, review of the Band,
Music from Big Pink,
Rolling Stone
, August 10, 1968.

People Are Strange

U
NLIKE “STRANGE DAYS,” which was a theme song, a manifesto, “People Are Strange” was just a song—the Doors had been carrying it around since 1966 before it appeared as a single in September 1967. It was a small song, kin to “Alabama Song,” with a loose, flapping honky-tonk piano giving it a sound halfway between the circus in the U.S.A. in the 1950s and a cabaret in Berlin in 1929. It stopped at #12.