Marcus The Doors

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ISBN: 978-0-571-27996-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

A fan from the moment the Doors' first album arrived, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Filmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, Greil Marcus muses on how one could drive from here to there, changing fom one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult both of Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later it is a new story.

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He is the author of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Lipstick Traces,Double Trouble and Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 and the editor of Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 he curated the exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He writes the Real Life Rock Top 10 column for The Believer and teaches at the New School in New York. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker'. Greil Marcus lives in California.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Marcus, Greil

Leseproben

Prologue: Light My Fire, 1967

BY SEPTEMBER 30, 1967, when the Doors appeared at the Family Dog in Denver—an outpost of the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, where the band had played often in the first months of the year—“Light My Fire” had already reached number one all over the country. In fact it had stolen the year, at first the nearly seven minutes of the song creeping out of the night on the few, new FM rock ’n’ roll stations that still seemed more rumor than fact, then in a cut-down, three-minute version taking over AM Top 40 stations everywhere, sending their listeners into the record stores or in search of FM if they could find it, to hear the whole song, or to the phones to demand that the AM disc jockeys play it all, which soon enough they did.

This night in Denver it was a fair bet that everyone in the hall had already heard the thing at least four or five hundred times. The Doors had already played it for more than a year, from the nowhere London Fog club off Sunset Strip in Los Angeles to the celebrated Whisky à Go Go on it and at every show after that. They played it before anyone had heard of them; they played it until well after the name of the band was on so many lips that, more than forty years past the singer’s death, after he had been dead for far more years than he had been alive, the name of the band still struck a chord. It wasn’t a chord of memory. It was a note of possibility, of promises made that still remained to be kept, promises that in life were inevitably failed and in the music left behind were kept over and over again.

“We really didn’t see it coming, the new world of rabid individualism and the sanctity of profit,” the British novelist Jenny Diski wrote in 2009. “But perhaps that is only to be expected. It’s possible after all that we were simply young, and now we are simply old and looking back as every generation does nostalgically to our best of times. Perhaps the Sixties are an idea that has had its day and lingers long after its time. Except, of course, for the music.”

There were, of course, those, the great majority, doubtless, who, having finished with their wild youth, put on proper suits come the mid-Seventies and went off to work and a regular life, becoming all their parents could have wished, having just gone through a phase, as the more liberal of the grown-ups had always suggested. But some—these days called, derogatorily, idealists—maintained their former sense that “society” exists, and believe it persists, even beyond the strident years of Margaret Thatcher and the official approved decades of self-interest and greed that have followed. We are the disappointed remnant, the rump of the Sixties.

But that drama was already taking place only two months after “Light My Fire” hit the top of the charts.

How do we make this song into something they haven’t heard before? How do we make it into something we haven’t heard before?

On September 30 there’s a lift in Jim Morrison’s voice for the first two times he reaches the word fire in each chorus, as if running his hands over the single syllable—always, he communicates that as an idea that word is new to him, and so it comes across as a surprise. You’ve heard the word in the song, but you haven’t begun to follow that fire as far as it goes—that’s the feeling. “Fire”—it’s a door swinging open in the wind, seen from a distance.

Compared to the first two times the word is sung on record, the third time—“FY-YUR!”—is vulgar, a hook, something to wake you up if the song has already put you to sleep. But tonight, in the first chorus, Morrison stays with the word as he first sang it: Fire … fiiire … fiiiiire. He holds the word up to the light, looking at it from all sides, still letting it float in the air. “Light my fire” was already a cliché, a tired catchphrase by September; within a year it would be a teen-sex poster and a worldwide easy-listening hit by Jose Feliciano, in two years a porn movie. Now, as the song starts, the word fire seems like a strange thing to say, less a word than a rayograph.

The recording from this night is from a bootleg, the sound squeezed into itself. Robby Krieger’s guitar and Ray Manzarek’s organ can seem like the same instrument. But John Densmore’s drumming is always defined, each beat feeling like a choice made, sealed, and left behind. Morrison’s voice floats over the band, even when he seems to be shouting from far behind it—shouting encouragement, as if the song as it builds isn’t enough, isn’t yet itself—

COME ON!

LET’S GO!

—then as Manzarek hits a momentum that carries him into the song Morrison is pushing him toward, celebrating that the song is whole, breathing its own air—

LET’S GO!

WE LOVE IT!

—then drifting away, as if the music no longer needs him to tell it what to do—

In your night, babe

Evil hand

But the long instrumental passages, handed back and forth between Manzarek and Krieger, are hard to hold on to. They’re meanders, what Manny Faber, talking about painting, talking about movies, talking about jazz, called termite art, art that “feels its way through walls of particularization, with no sign that the artist has any object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” It’s art without intent, without thinking, art by desire, appetite, instinct, and impulse, and it can as easily meander in circles as cross borders and leap gaps. This night Manzarek and Krieger lose the song, as if they’ve forgotten what they were playing. For a moment “Light My Fire” disappears, as if it’s never been performed before, as if there’s no referent, no hit that was ever on the radio. As it will do so many times in the next three years, the song devolves back into other songs, songs that edge out of the vague memory of one musician or another and replace the song they were playing a minute before; this time it’s “My Favorite Things,” a cool jazz moment in a performance that’s no longer part of a rock ’n’ roll show in Denver but back in the Venice beach house where the song was found, though now it’s not 1965 but 1954 and the person everyone’s looking at isn’t Jim Morrison but Chet Baker.

They lose the beat, the song slips, they have trouble finding their way back into the verses, stumbling over the steps back into the fanfare that opens the song, that closes it, that marks Morrison’s stride back into the music, that tells you something is about to happen, that makes it clear something has.

It’s a relief when Morrison is back at the center, when there are words to attack, when there’s a song to take back and rebuild, on the spot; at seven minutes and fifteen seconds into the song it’s a thrill. But the song isn’t there for Morrison either. The hundreds of thousands of times the song has been broadcast on the radio without the solos the musicians have just found and lost have left the song without a body, just head, hands, and feet, spinning, flailing.

Densmore brings it back, with one single hard shuffle that breaks a line between the verse, with its bad rhyme of “mire” and “pyre,” and the chorus, a pattern of five strokes that says, Time’s up. Put up or shut up. And that does it: for the first time, the song is absolutely present, an event taking place as you listen. For the last minute of the performance, the sense of will and strain is so strong that Morrison might be down on his knees, pushing the song through a wall. Every time Densmore leaps to the front of the sound, the certainty that the song will break through is overwhelming; in the next instant, when Morrison takes Densmore’s place, desperation builds on itself. Now it’s Manzarek who’s shouting from behind, all excitement—

ALL RIGHT!

—then with excitement wrapped in fright—

GO!

—fright that the wall may hold, that for all that Morrison puts into “Try to set the night on fire,” it won’t happen.

When the song finally crashes to a close, you can’t tell if it happened or not. As the song ends they’re still pushing, the wall is still holding. The song is over but the story it’s telling is still going on. You can’t hear it but you can feel it on your skin.

Jenny Diski, The Sixties (New York: Picador, 2009), 9, 87.

“Light My Fire,” Family Dog, Denver, September 30, 1967, from Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs, a collection of audience and fans’ concert recordings (Rhino Handmade, 2003).

Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” Film Culture, 1962. Collected in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (New York: Library of America, 2003), 535.

Come On Baby, Light My Fire, directed by Lou Campa (J. R. L. Productions, 1969). According to Movies Unlimited, “A goody two-shoes anti-marijuana campaigner [Tina Buckley] is abducted by a group of perverts who take her to the home of a drug kingpin, played by Gerard Damiano of ‘Deep Throat’ fame. Soon, the doors of submission and domination are opened...