The Doors (8 page)

The piece appeared on record nine months after
The Doors
, in September 1967, closing out
Strange Days
.
⁶
There were strong songs all across the record—“Strange Days,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Unhappy Girl,” “People Are Strange.” “My Eyes Have Seen You” was a driverless car revving its engine, cutting its gas, the engine revved higher, the gas cut again, the engine revving again and then the whole machine tearing down the strip as if it were the only car on the road, then taking Dead Man's Curve as if it were John Henry, blasting right through it.

But there was a lack of weight, an absence of seriousness. Rock 'n' roll, anyone would tell you, wasn't supposed to be serious, wasn't supposed to have weight, unless it was heavy, but if the music with which the Doors announced themselves said
anything, it said it wasn't kidding. There was a seriousness of intent that was thrilling on its own terms. There was a sense of consequences: to walk through the dramas being enacted on
The Doors
was to take a chance, just a chance, that you might not come out quite the same. That was what people wanted; that was what they hoped for; that was why they listened. That seductive promise was what they heard.

As
Strange Days
reached its last track, the first simple, hesitant, jerky organ notes changed the tone. They promised that this would not be rushed, that it would not be over soon, that the song was writing a check only it could cash. And it didn't pay off. It didn't sustain the suspense of its first moments, but that suspense lingered. It sent listeners back to the song to see if it would give up something that wasn't there the first, third, tenth time before, and it sent the band back to it too, to find out what all those minutes—eleven on record, always more on a stage—were for. In 1969, the Rolling Stones would answer: in many ways, with those slithering first notes building on themselves, each one catching the one before it and passing it, only to be caught in turn, until a broken guitar chord tipped the song into the harsh, unforgiving cauldron that for the next four minutes boiled over, “Gimmie Shelter” was the ultimate Doors record.

Some nights, “When the Music's Over” was a flat, featureless landscape, without intimations that anything worth remembering might be coming—and it was in such a setting that the song could generate drama from within itself. One night in 1968, in Houston, the piece was all but shapeless as it began. Morrison is clear and direct, but there's a song inside the song, and that's what he's after. At its most effective, the band is barely present at all, as if to give the singer the room
he needs to wander out of his own, written words. “Confusion . . . confusion . . . confusion,” he croons, trying to make the word, the idea, open a door. He follows “confusion” with “delusion.” The pauses between words or musical phrases, with no change in tempo or volume, create a kind of airborne swamp, a miasma, that seems complete and whole. Manzarek taps a bump-bump-bump pattern on his bass keyboard, a dozen times, it could be a hundred times, so dully you don't notice it, unless you're trapped by it, and begin to count off the notes, unable to hear anything else. Here, “Sat up all night, talking and smoking, count the dead and wait for morning,” sneaking into the song from the side, unbidden and unwritten—
Not on the record!
some in the crowd will say to themselves, confused,
Aren't they supposed to play the record?—
is all the song wants.

The performance is so sure of itself, so confident, that, if they want it to, the song can say anything. It becomes an open field of action, and what the band holds back carries as great a charge as what it puts on the field. “Hey, look,” Morrison says at one point, just before a written, recorded line—and the feeling is so conversational, so ordinary, that for an instant the performance vanishes, and even as the song goes on you can see him in the crowd which is no longer a crowd, just some people hanging around, asking them, What do you think? Is this working, is it happening? Why did you come tonight? Why are you here? Then he gets back onto the stage and, as on
Strange Days
in its last moments, takes the song back to that opening promise, that first apprehension of portent and dread. “When the music's over”—was it “Turn out the lights,” or “Turn up the lights”? Night to night, city to city, year to year, it wasn't the same.

“Hello to the Cities,” from “The Future Ain't What It Used to Be,” in
The Doors Box Set
(Elektra, 1997).

Robby Krieger quoted in notes to
The Doors Box Set
(Elektra, 1997), 34.

Ray Manzarek quoted in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres,
The Doors
(New York: Hyperion, 2006), 73.

“When the Music's Over,”
Strange Days
(Elektra, 1967).

———, Sam Houston Coliseum, Houston, July 10, 1968, collected on
Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs
(Rhino Handmade, 2003).

The Crystal Ship

W
HO WRITES MOST of your songs?” the late Greg Shaw asked the Doors in San Francisco in 1967, just after the band's March dates at the Matrix, a congenial little box of a club. “Jim writes most of the lyrics,” Robby Krieger said. “I noticed that some of your songs are very strange, like ‘The End' and ‘Moonlight Drive' and a few others,” Shaw said. “A strong mood of death running through a lot of them. I mean, it almost seems as if you lost your mind once, sometime in your past, with these songs as the result. I get the impression from like, ‘End of the Night' particularly a real feeling of Celine,
Journey to the End of the Night,
and from ‘The End' and many of the other songs, of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Really strong moods.” “I don't know,” Jim Morrison said. “Compared to some of the stuff I've heard in San Francisco, I don't think it's too strange. It's pretty straight stuff.”

“The streets are fields that never die,” from “The Crystal Ship,” from
The Doors
, a song the band played at the Matrix, was a captivating image; so was “Speak in secret alphabets,” from “Soul Kitchen,” also from
The Doors
, which they played right before “The Crystal Ship.” As images they hovered, and as ideas, they rang. On the page, maybe as you let them play in your head, they seemed transparent, to explain themselves immediately, but as Jim Morrison sang them, they didn't.

Greg Shaw was right about death. Who knew what shore Morrison's crystal ship, or his own ship, was headed for? Listening now to the ineffable take of the song from
The Doors
, and to the more insistent, expansive performance from the Matrix, the song is pitched between dream and waking, speech and silence, fantasy and act, death or the next morning. It doesn't light. Morrison's balance over the weightless, hesitating figures in the music—the first two words of the song let out in the echoing silence of an empty house; a swooping, sealing bass note; Ray Manzarek's high, slipstream organ; most of all, the stoic, wrap-it-up climb in John Densmore's repeating sets of taps on his snare or cymbal to mark the shift from one movement, one point of view, to the next—calls up a sleepwalker on a tightrope. The physical body of the performance is that of a single breath exhaled across two and a half minutes, and it could be a last breath.

The oddness of the first words—“Before you slip into unconsciousness”—
—throws you off, pulls you down, right from the start. This could be sleep, it could be an overdose, inflicted by the singer or the person he's addressing; it could be murder, suicide, or a suicide pact. Or simply someone about to pass out drunk. From beginning to end—the floating drift across the music—Morrison presents the situation with absolute equanimity. He raises his voice, his volume, only once, near the end, when he sings the title of the song as if he's just discovered it: the three words, the perfect metaphor, the Flying Dutchman of the heart.

Morrison's voice was never more modest, never more full. He was never a soul singer—the reserve of someone thinking everything over, thinking everything through, kept him from that—but here he gave himself up to the steps of the song, steps made of images, notes, melody most of all, trusting those steps to lead to somewhere worth going, even if there was no hint where that might be. “Sometimes I make up words so I can remember the melody I hear,” Morrison once said; you can hear that happening here.

Inside this soft, comforting, deeply elegant song, what Raymond Chandler called the big sleep, what Ross Macdonald called the chill, lingered, lay back on a bed with its lips parted, strolled naked through the rooms of the song like Evan Rachel Wood in Todd Haynes's 2011 film of James M. Cain's
Mildred Pierce
. Death was more distant in “The Crystal Ship” than in “End of the Night,” farther on on
The Doors
, and more convincing. “End of the Night” made a gorgeous setting for Blake's “Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night,” so gorgeous you could think that to make that setting was the only reason for writing the song. The band let the lines echo in the sound, but not in the heart, as they would when Gary Farmer's Nobody spoke them almost thirty
years later in Jim Jarmusch's
Dead Man
, and “The Crystal Ship” was sailing for the heart or nowhere.

In 2007 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opened its fortieth-anniversary
Summer of Love—Art of the Psychedelic Era
retrospective; there was a huge catalogue, the cover spelling out the magic words in a psychedelically unreadable design, recalling those halcyon days when thousands made the pilgrimage to San Francisco to be attacked by the police, dance in the streets, buy drugs, get raped and robbed, and hear wonderful music. Rhino Records released
Love Is the Song We Sing
, a four-CD set that caught the Summer of Love principally by collecting crummy singles by Psychedelic-Era San Francisco Bay Area bands. Nothing would have been more out of place than the sweep, the grandeur, the calmness of the Doors.

San Francisco music was soft at the center—Jefferson Airplane passed out buttons reading JEFFERSON AIRPLANE LOVES YOU and the Grateful Dead didn't believe in death at all. San Francisco music did believe in happy endings. Not all of it. On the first album from Moby Grape, in 1967, a band all but ridden out of town for violating the bohemian vow of visible poverty by accepting a huge promotional campaign by Columbia, there were the warnings of “Lazy Me” (“I'll just lay here, and decay here”) and the rising doubts of “Indifference,” the promise of the Haight-Ashbury at just that point where it turned into a curse. There was the breakdown of Moby Grape leader Skip Spence two years later, with
Oar
, a cracked, scattered, stumblebum travelogue that took you back and forth between the campfire and the psycho ward. The singer stood on the street, with open sores he didn't know he was scratching, clothes filthy, talking to someone who wasn't there; in every broken
tune there was a memory of what could have been, a damn for what should have, when all that was left was what never was.

There was the Great Society, captured, on
Love Is the Song We Sing
—it's embarrassing to keep typing the phrase—at a performance at the Matrix in 1966, when Grace Slick was a sometime model and full-time bohemian with a daring band behind her. With Jefferson Airplane she would make “Somebody to Love” a huge national hit in 1967—all triumph, a soaring escape. A year before it was just the big number of a group that rarely topped the bill at the ballrooms: a fearsome, frightening challenge. Called “Someone to Love” then, it was “Like a Rolling Stone” stripped of its carnival metaphors: if you find yourself on your own, like a complete unknown, what are you going to do then? Die doped-up and gang-banged in a crash pad a block off the Haight, or live a new life? The band finds a fierce rhythmic count to step up the tension—the pressure—between each chorus and the next verse, a breach that seems to open up the ground beneath their feet, and Slick comes off of it every time more outraged, disgusted, contemptuous of anyone who doesn't have the courage to face the truth, throw away the past, and not look back. It's staggering: you've walked into this dodgy little place and here's this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty, and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.

There is a sullen, hateful, dangerous edge in the music—when Slick says “the garden flowers all are dead,” they are dead—an edge muffled in the music everyone else made. Only the Great Society brought it to the surface, for a few months thrilled by the chance to ask a question no one wanted to answer: how do you get from here to nowhere?

It was a kind of heedless prophecy. The Great Society—which sometimes billed themselves as the Great!! Society!!—didn't want to hear the bad answers: who would? But they were there in their music, and you can hear so much of the fabled San Francisco Sound, today, as an effort to fight off the sorts of stories implicit in the music of Moby Grape, Skip Spence, the Great Society, and the Doors. I think of a forgotten novel called
Loose Jam
, by one Wayne Wilson. It came out in 1990; when I listen to Skip Spence, Grace Slick, the Doors, it comes right back.

In Morro Bay, a town a little under two hundred miles south of San Francisco, a fat, balding man named Henry has a nothing job, an embarrassment for a guy on the edge of forty, but he's not complaining. Then his old pal Miles shows up. Miles—Henry's Vietnam buddy and former bandleader, a one-legged, one-time Voice of a Generation, turns Henry's world upside down without half trying. He's more irritating than compelling—the reader wants him to leave even more than Henry does. What is compelling is the inexorable slide of the narrative from orderly, structured occurrences into chaos: a sort of match from the artistry and confidence at the beginning of that first Moby Grape album—the thrilling charge of “Fall on You” and “Omaha”—to the hidden corners and darkened rooms at the end of the album, the people who walked off the record into rooms worse than that.