The Doors (9 page)

Very quickly, Henry's hard-won belief that life is governed by some inherent, given set of limits—a belief won through countless defeats, compromises, and willful refusals to remember a life that promised anything else—seems impossible to credit. As the present breaks up—Henry's job lost, his house wrecked, his would-be girlfriend stolen—Vietnam returns in
flashbacks, and you begin to recognize Henry clutching for the underside of middle-class gentility as a version of Hemingway's Nick Adams, hanging on to his fishing pole in “Big Two-Hearted River” in the aftermath of the First World War. But as it is portrayed here, Vietnam was—is—not a war but a charnel house. It's not a situation constructed to realize some geopolitical objective, but a situation constructed to strip off all morality, all constraint, and not at anyone's My Lai, but back at camp, among one's fellows, as the urge to murder seeks its closest target. Such celebrated Vietnam novels as Tim O'Brien's
Going After Cacciato
or memoirs on the order of Philip Caputo's
A Rumor of War
were fundamentally, no matter how phonily, about ethics; Wayne Wilson wasn't interested. In his accounts of meaningless conflicts between people supposedly on the same side, you're returned to the worst moment in Joseph Heller's
Catch-22
, Aarfy's rape and murder of Michaela, the Italian servant girl, except that that was a signal event, impossible for a reader to forget, and what happens in Wilson's Vietnam—ordinary life reduced to the level of the sort of obscene insult that leaves a person weak, humiliated, and ready to kill whoever looks ready to die—is hard to remember, a black haze, and as terrifying as a Bosch painting of hell.

Soon enough, as Henry and Miles's flight from Miles's pursuer, an enemy from Vietnam, puts them on the road, the language of flashbacks takes over the present. A long-ago night of sordid, back-to-the-world Haight-Ashbury hippie sex gets payback: people who once thought they were living out the zeitgeist return as flotsam, garbage tossed up decades later. As they return, they change old horrors, even decent memories, into a simple seediness. People just get uglier, and a sense of
time is the last thing they can use: “Henry was astonished at the contrast between this haggard woman and the girl to whom he'd surrendered on that night so long ago”—he can't even think about what he must look like to her. “Now the corners of her mouth sagged and the skin below her eye looked bruised and when Henry bent to kiss the top of her head a vapor of beer and fried onions rose from her hair . . . Some mangy dog with a red bandana tied around its neck (Henry was willing to bet its name was something like Kilo or Shit) followed them into the living room.” The dog's name turns out to be Roach.

If all of that—the Skip Spence story, Henry's story, the back door Grace Slick flung open after you walked through the front door—isn't present in “The Crystal Ship,” it is, along with other lives, waiting. The glamour in the song hides its demons, but doesn't banish them.

At the Matrix, the tale unwinds in a swaying wind. Morrison waits behind the words, as if letting them emerge of their own accord, at their own speed. Kicked off by what feels like a spontaneous, joyous
Heyyyyyy!
from Morrison, Manzarek's organ solo is full of color, the sound rising to the low ceiling and spreading out from there, driven by the thrill of getting it right, of the band truly finding its voice for the first time that night—and, as it happened, the last.

The words, the image of “the crystal ship” is propelled out of the song, launched into its black sea. Morrison embraces the words, the image, as if it's always been a treasure to him, and it is instantly lit. As he heads for the end of the song—“When we get back, I'll drop a line,” a wave goodbye that for me has always called up Robert Johnson's “When I return / You'll have a great long story to tell,” a scene full of affection,
regret, a scene that leaves the listener wondering if the person singing and the person to whom he's speaking will ever see each other again—its first moment returns. “Before you . . .”—there seems to be no assurance that any words will follow, and no need for them at all.

 

“Interview with the Doors,”
Mojo-Navigator Rock + Roll News
no. 14, August 1967. Collected in Suzy Shaw and Mick Farren,
BOMP!—Saving the World One Record at a Time
(Pasadena: AMMO Books, 2007), 80.

“The Crystal Ship,”
The Doors
(Elektra, 1967).

———,
Live at the Matrix
(DMC/Rhino, 2008).

Jim Morrison, in John Densmore,
Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors
(New York: Delacorte, 1990), 59: “Jim was a guy with a natural instinct for melody but no knowledge of chords to hang it on.”

Moby Grape,
Moby Grape
(Columbia, 1967). See the fine retrospective
Vintage: The Very Best of Moby Grape
(Columbia Legacy, 1993).

Skip Spence,
Oar
(Columbia, 1969). The 2000 reissue on Sundazed includes ten additional tracks and my
Rolling Stone
review of the album upon its release. The original album supposedly sold fewer copies than any LP release in Columbia history, and was out of print within a year; it was recorded in Nashville, with Spence as a one-man band (the original drummer in the Jefferson Airplane, he played guitar in Moby Grape), after he spent months in Bellevue following a psychotic breakdown: he tried to attack his bandmates Jerry Miller and Don Stevenson with an axe.

Great Society, “Someone to Love,” recorded at the Matrix, summer 1966. Originally released on
Conspicuous Only in Its Absence
(Columbia, 1968, the band's first, posthumous album; see also
Born to Be Burned,
Sundazed, 1995, which includes the single
version of “Someone to Love,” released February 1966 on the Northbeach label); collected on
Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965–1970
(Rhino, 2007), which along with wonderful photographs and early and signal recordings by Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, the Charlatans, Moby Grape, and the Grateful Dead, also features perhaps the only readily available proof that Blackburn and Snow, Wildflower, the Frantics, the Front Line, the Mourning Reign, the Oxford Circle, the Stained Glass, the Otherside, Teddy and His Patches, the Immediate Family, the New Breed, People, the Generation, Butch Engle and the Styx (“Hey I'm Lost”—no kidding), Country Weather, Public Nuisance, and the Savage Resurrection existed at all.

Wayne Wilson,
Loose Jam
(New York: Delacorte, 1990). See also Charles Perry,
The Haight-Ashbury: A History
(New York: Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1984); Joel Selvin's harrowing
The Summer of Love: The Inside Story of LSD, Rock & Roll, Free Love, and High Times in the Wild West
(New York: Dutton, 1994); and Barney Hoskyns's incandescent if rosy
Beneath the Diamond Sky: Haight-Ashbury 1965–1970
(London: Bloomsbury, 1997).

Robert Johnson, “From Four Until Late” (1937). Best heard on
The Centennial Collection—The Complete Recordings
(Columbia Legacy, 2011).

Soul Kitchen

F
ROM THE TIME the Doors first came together in Venice in 1965—at first, Ray Manzarek, his brother Rick on guitar, his brother Jim on harmonica, Jim Morrison, and John Densmore—they loosened up with “Gloria,” like a thousand other garage bands around the country, jumping on Them's greatest hit when they got tired of kicking off with “Louie Louie.” As Don Henley once said, reviewing the all-author band the Rock Bottom Remainders at their debut at the 1992 American Booksellers Association convention in Anaheim, “It's hard to fuck up ‘Gloria'”—that just before detailing just how the Remainders had achieved the nearly impossible. From the beginning, though, the Doors also made “Gloria” part of their shows. Soon after winning the spot as house band at the Whisky à Go-Go in May 1966, opening for Captain Beefheart, Love, and Buffalo Springfield, they found themselves second
on the bill to Them itself. “Gloria” was the first song their leader, Van Morrison, ever wrote, two years before in Belfast, when Them, the house band at the Maritime Hotel, would play it for twenty minutes or more—he couldn't know in 1966 that it would follow him for the rest of his life, just like “Light My Fire” would always follow the Doors.

On the last night of a two-week stand, the Doors and Them took the stage together, first for Wilson Pickett's “In the Midnight Hour,” which had become the classy “Louie Louie” for groups with any pretentions toward rock 'n' roll as an art form. One night that same year in San Francisco, at the Fillmore, Quicksilver Messenger Service ended their set with “In the Midnight Hour,” the Grateful Dead ended theirs with it, Jefferson Airplane ended theirs with it (“Not a classic, but an epic,” Jon Landau had written of Pickett's 1965 original, as if it were something to test yourself against, not beat to death), until finally, somewhere around two in the morning, all three bands climbed onto the stage again and tried to ride the exhausted beast one more time. At the Whisky, the two Mor-risons, Them and the Doors, faced off together for “Gloria.” The pictures from that night show Van Morrison as a dervish, his eyes rolling like dice, with Jim Morrison towering above him, not moving, his eyes closed. Really, he could be praying the words—“Like to tell you about my baby / You know she comes around / About five feet four / From her head to the ground”—waiting for the chance to sing, to come in, maybe, on “Just about midnight.”

The respect you can see in Jim Morrison's face was still there when the Doors played “Gloria” at the Matrix nine months later to close a night; so is a proud, grungy garage sound, at first only drums and guitar, letting the song find its footing. There's no attempt to pump the song up, to make it more than it is: “And her name is
G! L! O
—” Even when Jim Morrison shifts the language, for the first verse dropping the third line and part of the fourth, dropping “Just about five feet four / From her—” so that the song opens, as for the Doors it always would—
—making an image of surpassing strangeness, a woman so stooped she's bent in half, or crawling on the ground, if not listening with her ear to the ground for some signal that the time is right, the song retains its moral shape, its essential modesty, even when the singer is shouting out the name, even when everyone in the band is shouting, even when the singer screams that she makes him feel alright. The song held its shape when Jim Morrison shifted its terrain, from Van Morrison's room in Belfast to Robert Johnson's Mississippi—
—and it held its shape even when Jim Morrison, as Van Morrison almost dares any other singer of the song to do, has to take it past Van Morrison's “She knock upon my door / She comes in my room” to “Closer, closer / Touch me, baby,
touchhhhhh me
,” even “Eat it,” if that's what he says, falling back from whatever it is he's singing, putting the lightest question mark at the end of whatever word it is. Manzarek closes it with a keening, lyrical wham.

In 1969, in Los Angeles after the Miami disaster, at a sound check, the Doors sound like Paul Revere and the Raiders at their best: a crackling, soulful guitar, a hoarse vocal, the band playing with nothing to prove, letting the song play them, Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Manzarek coming in for the chorus, as if it's not three people but a choir chanting “GLO-HHHHHHHH
RIA!
” as Morrison counts off the letters. Then the tune breaks, and it turns. “You were my queen, and I was your fool / Riding home, after school,” Morrison croons. “It's getting softer,” he says, half in imitation of the Isley Brothers' “A little bit softer now” in “Shout,” half asking the song to give him the time he needs. “A little bit softer now / Slow it down.” The band brings the song to a crawl. “Wrap your legs around my neck,” Morrison asks, trying to sound lascivious, asking for more, until finally she does make him feel alright: “It's getting harder.” And then “it's getting too fast.” And then it's “too late, too late, too late, too late,” he's come too fast, maybe before he's even inside, and there's nothing left to do but shout out that name again, bigger than ever, and get out with an ending that feels bigger than anything that came before.