This is the beginning … the beginning of my essay … the beginning.
*****
Maybe it’s just me, but have the Doors become the band that people “used” to like?
To admit that you once went through a Doors “phase”? Perfectly acceptable of course. But to admit that you’re still a Doors fan? Isn’t that like admitting you still like Titanic, or that you still shop at JC Penney?
Let me know if this scenario has the ring of familiarity to it:
After having heard the standard eight Doors songs that were stuck in permanent rotation on your local oldies and/or classic rock station (do I really need to list them?) in your highly impressionable youth, you borrowed Best of the Doors on a whim (from that blonde kid in school who dyed his hair black), concluded Jim Morrison was the most profound lyricist in the history of modern song, engaged in long arguments over whether The Soft Parade was “underrated” or a stylistic misfire, and then one day, you woke up, and suddenly … you had better things to do.
Sure, I get it. The Doors seem really deep when you’re, like, fifteen years old, and then you discover Morrissey. Question: Does “Light My Fire” need to be broadcast over the radio one more single time? (Subquestion: What is the sound of one Doors song clapping?) And weren’t the “real” rock rebels of the late ’60s proto-punkers like Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, not some drunken navy brat in leather pants rambling about horses’ eyes and screams of the butterfly? I mean, he may have been the lizard king, but he couldn’t do everything.
However.
I would like everyone reading this right now to engage in a little thought exercise.
I want you to stop, take a deep breath, and imagine, just for a moment, that you’ve never heard this album before. Imagine that you’ve never seen a single tattered Doors poster on a clueless teenager’s bedroom wall, never heard your dad patiently explain to you that “Mr. Mojo Risin” was actually an anagram for “Jim Morrison,” never even heard the freaking Jose Feliciano version of “Light My Fire.”
Travel with me, if you can, to a place where this album is as new as the freshly risen morning sun. Take away all your preconceptions, your baked-in prejudices, your hipster cynicism. To paraphrase William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, then the first Doors album would be heard as it is: infinite.”
*****
Did you know that there were other members of the Doors besides Jim Morrison? How long has this information been out there? Should I call up somebody at Rolling Stone? I guess what I’m saying is, can we forget about the notorious front man for a second and the give other three guys some love?
Now, was the drummer the “best” drummer, the guitarist the “best” guitarist, the keyboardist the “best” keyboardist? But the thing is, I feel like the Doors had to be these three guys. There are some bands where certain members didn’t seem to be a critical piece of the puzzle, or the most appropriate fit. Would it still have been Fleetwood Mac without Bob Welch, Traffic without Dave Mason, Simon & Garfunkel without Garfunkel? I suspect we have our answer. But all three instrumentalists in the Doors strike me as being the “right” guy. Densmore, Krieger, and Manzarek were tight. No amount of studio chops could buy that level of shared intuition. They were, for instance, the masters of what I would like to call the “unison stab” and the “simmer down and heat ‘em up.” (Yes, I’m inventing my own bullshit “rock critic-speak,” but just go with me here.)
Perhaps the most prototypical Doors “unison stab” might be the one that concludes the little interlude section of “Peace Frog.” Krieger, Manzarek, and, uh, studio bassist Ray Neapolitan (?) engage in a frisky stop-start duet with Densmore, until Krieger tosses out some fiery licks, then everyone momentarily pulls back to let Jim rant about Indians bleeding in the desert, yadda yadda yadda, before unleashing a flawlessly-timed “BLAP!” and effortlessly slipping back into the main groove.
These guys were tighter than the seams on Jim’s trousers, is what I’m saying.
And for the “simmer down and heat ‘em up,” look no further than the “Mr. Mojo Risin’” vamp in “L.A. Woman,” where a track that’s otherwise been steadily cruising along the 405 (insert gratuitous L.A. joke about “cruising” down a freeway at 12 mph here) takes an unannounced detour down Mulholland Drive, then the tempo grows progressively speedier and speedier, Jim’s tonsils grow progressively crustier and crustier (“Rii-din,’ rii-din!”), and you’re stuck in the backseat with this creep, hollering “Someone let me out of the God damn car!,” and then Jim unleashes what might be the all-time greatest wordless, inebriated Jim Morrison vocal ad lib in the history of wordless, inebriated Jim Morrison ad libs (“I’m go WHOO! YEAH! RIDE! Oh! … mmmm-yeay.”) and then boom, “Just got into town about an hour ago …,” and thank God, we’re back on the interstate.
I’m talking about three guys who could glance at each other and just silently know, “All right, we’re gonna go here, then we’re gonna go there, and then we’re gonna bring it all around full circle with pinpoint precision, like none of that stuff in between even happened.” It’s maaaagic.
All I’m saying is: don’t like Jim? Fine. Just pretend you’re from Latvia or Moldova or something and you don’t understand a single word he’s saying.
That said, Jim Morrison fulfills my number one requirement for a lyricist: never be boring. (See also: Taupin, Bernie). He may be pompous, he may be ridiculous, but he sure as hell isn’t clichéd. Also, little-known fact: some of the Doors’ lyrics weren’t actually written by Jim Morrison. (For instance, “Light My Fire” was apparently the first song Robby Krieger ever composed [!], although I believe the “funeral pyre” verse was an addition from Jim.)
Quick college anecdote: Back in the days when I served on the, ahem, “staff” of my short-lived university humor magazine The Sneeze, I once wrote a piece titled “The Day Jim Morrison Came Into My Living Room,” a satirical work intended to contrast the mundane banter of the typical late ‘90s frat bro with the more fanciful, symbolic verbiage of a certain lead singer of note. Sadly, I believe the rest of the staff (AKA one guy named James) declined to use the piece, but perhaps its time simply hadn’t come. I hereby decree that that time is now.
Ladies and gentlemen, making its public debut for the first time in 20 years, I give you “The Day Jim Morrison Came Into My Living Room”:
I’ve always considered myself a moderate Doors fan, but that still doesn’t quite explain what happened a few months ago, when Jim Morrison just showed up in my living room one day.
I was playing some videogames when I heard a noise in the hallway. I turned to look, and there he was – leather pants, long hair, beer in hand – everything.
“Jim Morrison?,” I called out. “Dude, I thought you were dead.”
Jim replied, “Just got into town about an hour ago, took a look around to see which way the wind blow.”
I was incredulous. “But Jim . . . is it really you?”
“Come on, come on, come on, come on now touch me babe . . .”
I reached over and, sure enough, it was Jim. “Wow, Jim man, whatcha been up to?”
“Woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.”
“That’s cool, man, that’s cool.” I couldn’t think of what to say. “You wanna bite to eat or something?”
“Before I sink into the big sleep, I want to hear the scream of the butterfly.”
“Groovy, dude.” He then wandered over to the dresser, and he started staring at this photo of my ex. “That’s my ex-girlfriend man.”
“Don’t you love her madly, wanna be her daddy.”
“Tell me about it. You know, I was thinking of calling her again sometime. What do you think I should say?”
“‘Before you slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss.’”
“Good one man, that’s a good one.” Jim really had a way with words. “What else?”
“‘You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar.’”
“Aw, right on.” He started leafing through some of my Maxims. “You want a few copies? I got extras.”
“Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection. Send my credentials to the House of Detention.”
“It’s all good, Jim, it’s all good.” I was actually getting pretty hungry, so I told Jim I was gonna go out and get some pizza.
“Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.”
“Thanks man. Any other advice?”
“There’s a killer on the road. His brain is squirming like a toad.”
“Gotcha.” I was gonna ask if he wanted to come along, but he started to head for the back door. “Heading out Jim?”
“I’m a back door man.”
“Where you goin’?”
“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar.”
“I’ll show you later man, I gotta get some grub you know.”
“Meet me at the back of the blue bus!”
“Another time man. It’s been good hangin’ out.”
“We chased our pleasures here, dug our treasures there.”
“Yeah man, I really gotta go.”
He waved goodbye, and just like that, he was gone.
The pizza was awesome.
And that, my friends, is how I passed the time during my college years.
*****
Allow me, if I may, to list a few additional moments in the Doors catalog which I neglected to shoehorn into that piece, and which also make me laugh (whether I’m laughing at Jim or with Jim is almost irrelevant): 1) “Yer ballroom dayz-urrrouuvahh-bebe.” 2) “Yew cannot petition the Lord … with prayer!” 3) “Yeh ah woke up this morning and I got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
Honestly, I’m not even sure Jim Morrison took Jim Morrison that seriously. “Twentieth Century Fox”? Get it? Instead of talking about the famed movie studio behind then-recent hits such as The Sound of Music and Zorba the Greek, he’s actually talking about some swingin’ ‘60s Sunset Strip princess? Like Lou Reed could ever pull off a play on words that clever.
As a sardonic third-person character study, “Twentieth Century Fox” strikes me as something of an outlier in Jim’s work (assuming he wrote it), owing more to Ray Davies or Mick Jagger than Rimbaud or Baudelaire, but lo and behold, I think the man may have had a gift for this sort of dry, observational songwriting:
Well, she’s fashionably lean
And she’s fashionably late
She’ll never wreck a scene
She’ll never break a dateBut she’s no drag
Just watch the way she walksShe’s a twentieth century fox
No tears, no fears
No ruined years, no clocks
She’s a twentieth century foxShe’s the queen of cool
And she’s the lady who waits
Since her mind left school
It never hesitatesShe won’t waste time
On elementary talk‘Cause she’s a twentieth century fox
Got the world locked up
Inside a plastic box
Now, despite referring to her as a “fox” and clarifying that she’s the “Queen of cool” and “no drag,” why do I get the sneaking suspicion that his admiration for this female is not entirely devoid of reservations? Is a life with “no tears” and “no fears” truly to be commended? I mean, anyone who thinks they’ve “got the world locked up inside a plastic box” is an idiot. You know who definitely doesn’t think he’s got the world locked up inside a plastic box? Certainly not Mr. “Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free” over here.
And speaking of limitless and free: I love how, out of the thousands, millions, nay, billions of tracks in the entire universe that the group had at its disposal in terms of potential cover material (for inclusion on their debut record, with which they’re presumably hoping to make a carefully crafted first impression, yes?), the two tracks the group chose to cover both happened to feature lyrics about … little girls. I can see the conversation now:
“Ray, Robby, John … I have a vision for this band. A peyote-steeped vision, borne out of the howling, mournful, mystical desert landscape. My vision is this: whatever songs we choose to cover, be they German cabaret or Chicago blues, they must mention little girls. This … shall be our message to the masses.”
“Show us the way to the next little girl”? Apparently the original Brecht lyric to “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)” (in case you’re not familiar with Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) was “Show us the way to the next pretty boy.” Hmm. Which version induces more heebie-jeebies? You decide. (Side question: best-ever use of a Marxophone on a rock record?)
Then there’s this potential eyebrow-raiser from “Back Door Man”: “The men don’t know, but the little girls understand.” Understand … what, precisely? The appeal of the Twilight series?
Like many others, I came across the original Howlin’ Wolf version of “Back Door Man” long after having absorbed every note of the Doors’, and was surprised to learn that the band had transformed its John Lee Hooker-style “one chord” groove into a more conventional 12-bar blues progression – purists they were clearly not. Whereas the Yardbirds and the Animals and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and their ilk all assumed that the best way to interpret Chicago blues was to try to be as reverential and deferential as possible, I think Jim Morrison understood that the best way to interpret Chicago blues was to try to sound as hammered and fucked up as possible. It’s like the Doors simultaneously “cleaned up” the Howlin’ Wolf version, and yet somehow made it even dirtier.
Top five Jim Morrison grunts and/or yelps during the intro of “Back Door Man”:
- 0:03: “Rrrr-ah!”
- 0:04: “Eu-uuh”
- 0:10: “Huah!”
- 0:11: “Yeah”
- 0:17: “Oh … Yeah”
I couldn’t say if Jim was affecting drunkenness in his delivery or if he was genuinely suffering from the real deal, but either way, I’m convinced: “You men eat your dinner eat yh-horr … pork and bayns, I eat more chicken any man ever seen, yay … yeeaay.” I can literally picture him at that very moment, leaning against a lamppost, Jack Daniels in hand, leather pants halfway unzipped, heroically steadying himself between that first “yay” and the following “yeeaay.” The image is as clear in my mind as a crystal ship.
*****
Look, it would be nice if my 9th favorite album of the ‘60s were some offbeat, overlooked, under-the-radar gem that would have generated heated debate and spirited double-takes, but sometimes, when a part-time Buddhist makes a top 10 list, he just has to go with the facts.
Fact: This album has eleven songs on it. And every single one of these songs is hot, molten gold. They’re all “hits.” Well, maybe not “The End,” but let’s call that one an “FM radio hit.” There ain’t a dud in the bunch. I know it. You know it. We all know it. A record label could release a Doors “Best Of,” include any of these songs, and be completely justified in doing so. Yeah, even “I Looked at You.” So, apologies if this selection isn’t “spicy” enough.
(This pick doesn’t even allow me to indulge in a long digression on all the artist’s various line-up changes and spin-off groups, like I had the chance to do in my Byrds essay. The Doors were the same four guys the whole time. They formed, they wrote some songs, they released their debut album. Riveting backstory.)
I mean sure, am I a little sick of tracks #1, #6, and #11 in particular? I guess so. I don’t know. Am I a little sick of shaving every morning?
For instance, do I have a single new observation to make regarding “Break On Through (to the Other Side)”? I got nothing. I’m pulling up lint. Just read Lindsay Planer’s song review from the All Music Guide, which points out a few intricacies I might have overlooked all these years:
Immediately the lyrics indicate that something is different. For example, Morrison’s use of the words “destroy” and “divide” to invoke images of day and night, reveal a literacy that had rarely been incorporated into rock music. “Break On Through” is structured like a love song. However, Morrison’s phraseology cleverly juxtaposes romantic lyrics such as “I found an island in your arms/A country in your eyes” with the almost sinister lines “arms that chain/Eyes that lie”.
Oh he’s a slippery one, that Jim. See what I mean though? It’s easy to let one’s overfamiliarity sour the jaded listener on Morrison’s underlying skill.
So no, I do not find myself putting this album on too often. That said, there are two songs in particular that haven’t fully worn out their welcome in my head, and they’re not the ones you might expect me to name.
Perhaps it’s Manzarek’s use of elegant grand piano on “The Crystal Ship” that really helps it stand out from the rest of the album’s Vox Continental fiesta, or perhaps it’s the sing-song manner in which Jim intones the opening lines, deftly jumping from low to high notes, like a hypnotist dangling a watch in front of my face while luring me into a somnolent trance. I’m partially convinced that he discovered the lyrics on a moldy roll of parchment during an Indiana Jones-style archeological excavation in an abandoned Mayan temple, and is in fact delivering the echo-laden a cappella opening (“Be … fore … you …”) in said temple. If the stone passageway into the inner sanctum happened to be shut, I suspect his sly rhyming of “kiss” with “unconsciousness” would have acted like the lyrical equivalent of an “Open Sesame”:
Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another kiss, another kissThe days are bright and filled with pain
Enclose me in your gentle rain
The time you ran was too insane
We’ll meet again, we’ll meet againOh tell me where your freedom lies
The streets are fields that never die
Deliver me from reasons why
You’d rather cry, I’d rather flyThe crystal ship is being filled
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
A million ways to spend your time
When we get back, I’ll drop a line
Earlier praise aside, I’ll have to dock him a couple points for later recycling the “pain,” “rain,” and “insane” rhymes for usage in “The End” (if you’re going to recycle your rhymes, at least wait until the next album). And speaking of Jim’s humor: “When we get back, I’ll drop a line”? Like “line” as in “phone call,” or “line” as in “tab of LSD”? (I think that’s the joke; I’m a little rusty with my psychedelic slang. But I do know that the title, unlike what some questionable internet commentators have suggested, is not a reference to crystal meth.)
Also: could you imagine an actual crystal ship? Would it even float? Talk about a brutal glare on sunny days. The cost of insurance must have been outrageous.
Although arguably not Jim’s lyrically finest moment (“Time to live/Time to lie/Time to laugh/Time to die”?), the other track that always sounds fresh to me is the deepest of deep cuts, “Take It As It Comes,” I suppose because it’s short, sweet, punchy, and not quite so overplayed, with the boys pulling out their “simmer down and heat ‘em up” trick by letting Jim leer around the premises prior to the final chorus. “Go real slow/You like it more and more/Take it as it comes/Specialize in having fun”? “Specialize in having fun”? Who “specializes in having fun”? Sounds like a wayward lyric from the Duck Tales or Rescue Rangers theme, but props to those tasty bass licks, presumably played by session pro and future Bread (!) member Larry Knetchel.
Then the band explodes with fiery vigor on that last go-round, as if they secretly know they won’t get the chance to rock out again until roughly nine minutes or so into the following cut. Come to think of it, with its quiet verse/aggressive chorus arrangement, “Take It As It Comes” is almost proto-Pixies? Well, I doubt the Pixies would have chosen to include not one, but two dinky keyboard solos. Also notice how, after Jim repeats the line “moving much too fast,” Manzarek apparently becomes inspired to convey that concept with his instrument, and swiftly pulls out some rapid “Toccata and Fugue” triplet hocus pocus before the whole enterprise crashes to a feisty close.
A first-time listener whose eyes have wandered away from the stereo (or computer) at this point could easily be forgiven for thinking, “So. Last track, huh? Man, ten killer songs, pretty great album!” Oh, but “Take It As It Comes” isn’t quite the end, my friend.
Which leads me to another observation: a well-chosen running order can certainly go a long way. Whoever put this thing together, be it one clear-headed engineer or perhaps the entirety of the drug-fueled collective, deserves the Nobel Prize for Running Order (the first Nobel Prize that would actually mean something). Notice how the album wisely alternates between sinister, minor key tracks (“Break On Through,” “The Crystal Ship”) and more good-natured, major key cuts (“Soul Kitchen,” “Twentieth Century Fox”), or between uptempo rockers (“I Looked at You,” “Take It As It Comes”) and languid ballads (“End of the Night,” “The End”). Like, could you imagine “End of the Night” and “The End” back-to-back? That could have been the “end” of this album’s majesty in one fell swoop.
*****
So, 1967: a pretty good year for music, if I may say so, and talk about starting off with a bang.
The Doors came out on January 4, 1967. What if this album had been released merely a week earlier? Could you imagine thinking of this album as “1966” album? No, no, no. Sounds all wrong to me. The sheer thought of it almost makes me vomit somehow. If this had been released in December 1966, you know what I would have had to do? I would have had to quit my day job, invent a time machine, personally go back, and change the release date to 1967.
I am told that The Doors was recorded in the summer of 1966, but come on, that’s not the summer I associate with this album. When I think “Summer of 1966,” I think of the Beach Boys and the Mamas & the Papas and The Four Tops and more clean-cut crap like that. This album belongs with Vietnam War protests, Hendrix molesting his flaming guitar, Bonnie and Clyde being sliced and diced like green onions … you know, more destructive, Dionysian impulses.
Which brings me, finally, to “The End.” And speaking of time travel, it appears the band must have found a wormhole of its own somewhere in the bathroom of Sunset Sound Records, because what we have here is the case of a group of musicians writing the perfect song for a film … thirteen years before that film had even been made. Like I said, Jim, despite being the lizard king, couldn’t quite do everything … but man, he could come frighteningly close.
Before its usage in Apocalypse Now, I wonder what most music fans associated “The End” with. Sophocles? Bad acid? “The End” without Apocalypse Now is like “The Blue Danube” without 2001: A Space Odyssey, like peanut butter without jelly, like Sonny without Cher, like North Dakota without South Dakota. They were made for each other.
*****
And now, let me tell you about the first time I heard this album. Most of the albums in my top 10 are albums I actively sought out at some point, or lavishly focused my undivided attention onto during my initial listen. But like Mr. Mojo Risin’ after a few too many bottles, I just sort of … stumbled into this one.
Twas the middle of my junior year of high school. A crush on a girl hadn’t been going quite the way I’d been hoping it would. Feelings of depression were prevalent. One Friday afternoon, looking for some sort of change of pace, I asked my best friend if I could hang out at his house in the rural hills instead of go back to my own family’s cramped mobile home. Mercifully, he agreed. As the evening wore on, I asked him if I could … you know … just spend the night there. And so, late into the evening, as he handed me a few sheets for a makeshift bed, he mentioned that he’d bought some Doors CD on the recommendation of a mutual schoolfriend of ours, and that it was pretty good, and I said, rather absent-mindedly, “Yeah, put it on, I feel like shit tonight, whatever.”
To say that I already knew “Light My Fire” would be like saying that I already knew I was right-handed. When I first discovered, at the tender age of eleven, what were, back in the day, known as “oldies,” “Light My Fire” was one of the first I initially drooled over. Having seen a brief clip of the Doors performing it on the Ed Sullivan Show (from one of those tacky late night “Best of Ed Sullivan” specials), I quickly became acquainted with the story of how the producers had politely asked Jim to substitute the word “better” for “higher” so as not to corrupt the highly impressionable youth of our nation – a request to which he supposedly agreed, only to renege on the promise and sing “higher” on live TV anyway. I recall with a bemused chuckle the scene in a certain Oliver Stone film where either Ed himself or one of his underlings angrily banishes the Doors from the sacred Eden that is the Ed Sullivan Show, shouting at the top of his lungs something like, “You’ll never do the Ed Sullivan Show again!,” while Jim, utterly unfazed, mumbles, “We just did the Ed Sullivan Show.” Ooooooh.
At any rate, I remember my eleven-year-old self, while taping the song off the radio, concluding that the instrumental jam in the middle was simply going on much too long, pausing the recording, and then resuming it a couple of minutes later, just in time for the last verse. I must have listened to my self-made edit at least 20 times. I was an idiot.
So yes, I knew that one, had presumably heard “Break On Through” more than a few times, most likely from “classic rock” radio rather than “oldies” radio (given that the song had not actually been a charting hit), and I think “Twentieth Century Fox” was vaguely familiar to me, but, with one notable exception, I didn’t recognize any of the other songs on this fine Doors CD that my friend and I were suddenly enjoying together.
That notable exception … was “The End.”
Funny thing is, three weeks prior to this initial listen at my buddy’s house, I wouldn’t have recognized the album’s closing track if it had been my own father trying to avoid my feverish stabs in a darkened hallway. But as fate would have it, by some strange, Doors-fueled cosmic coincidence, I had viewed Apocalypse Now for the very first time in my life only two weeks earlier.
The song came on. I said to my friend, “Hey, this is the song that played at the start of this movie I just saw!” He asked me what Apocalypse Now was about. I then proceeded to summarize, over the course of the next ten minutes or so, the plot of Apocalypse Now.
Now, this wasn’t just some run-of-the-mill Apocalypse Now summary that I gave him. This was the best summary of Apocalypse Now anyone has ever given to anyone. My summary of Apocalypse Now could have won a Pulitzer, or an O. Henry Award, or possibly even an Edgar. I didn’t just summarize the plot details; I summarized the feel of the movie. In my summary, you could taste the sweat dripping down Willard’s face. You could hear the rumble of the helicopter blades as the Vietnamese peasants screamed in terror. You could see those corpses hanging from Kurtz’s compound. I’m pretty sure that my summary concluded just about the same time “The End” concluded. At any rate, without intending to do so, I had convinced my friend that we should immediately go rent Apocalypse Now and watch it together, which we promptly did the next day, turning it into a double bill (at my friend’s urging) with Natural Born Killers.
Where was I? Oh, right, “The End.” Initially, while bordering on the abstract, I’m not sure the opening of the song suggests that it will do anything other than continue to make some semblance of sense, but I think Jim throws any linear storyline right out the window sometime around, oh, let’s say … “Ride the snake to the lake”? My favorite part might be what I’d call an extra tasty dose of nonsensical drunken Jimbo rambling: “The west … is the best … the west is the … beh-hest … yeah yeah … and we’ll do the rest.” Come again?
“The blue bus?” Why “blue”? Why does the bus have to be blue? “Weird scenes inside the goldmine?” What is this, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? Is the wicked stepmother fronting a band on acid? “He’s old … and his skin is cold”? What does the temperature of the snake’s skin have to do with anything? (And while we’re at it, how can the midnight be “bright”?). I feel like I’m asking the wrong questions.
Here’s a theory I just found an anonymous individual proposing on the internet: the “blue bus” is actually an army bus taking fresh new recruits to basic training, the “snake” is actually a river coiling its way into the deepest recesses of the Vietnam jungle, the “face from the ancient gallery” is the GIs smearing their faces with grease paint, the “sister,” “brother,” “father,” and “mother” aren’t the singer’s sister, brother, father, and mother, but rather the innocent families that American soldiers are raping and killing in their homes and … look, what did the song’s actual author have to say for himself? From Wikipedia:
“Every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. I really don’t know what I was trying to say. It just started out as a simple goodbye song … Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.”
Yeah. That’s what I thought. Personal favorite sublimely ridiculous moments:
- 0:03: Either Robby Krieger is attempting, by stroking the strings around the highest fret of his guitar, to simulate the sound of a person passing through a curtain of wind chimes upon entering an opium den, or the sound of a robot trying to floss its teeth?
- 6:50: “He went into the room where his sister lived and …” And? “Then he …” He what? Come on, Jim, spit it out! “… Paid a visit to his brother and then he …” For the love of God, just get on with it, will ya? “He walked on down the hall!” That’s it? Hmm. OK. Never heard a singer sound quite so excited to describe a man merely walking down a hall before, but there’s a first time for everything I suppose. Oh, wait, never mind, he’s still rolling.
- 7:34: “Mother … I want to … UAH-HUA-HUA-YEAHH-COME-ON-BAEAE!!” Sorry Jim, not sure I caught all that, could you repeat it a little more clearly?
- 8:48: The band hurtles into what might be described as a Yardbirds-style “rave up,” except perhaps if the Yardbirds had been fronted by … Emperor Palpatine? Any concept of shared tempo seems to suddenly be deemed a confining relic of the Eisenhower era, as John Densmore basically starts doing whatever the fuck he wants, finally smacking headfirst into the proverbial fruit cart right around 9:54, while Manzarek, I presume, slams his forehead into the keys, generating a rather nice mishmash of “almost chords” around the 10:12 mark, before Densmore gently wipes the crushed peaches and plums off his sleeve and resumes his timekeeping duties.
And those millions of twelve-year-old girls who bought the album expecting to hear eleven different versions of “Light My Fire” … were never the same again.
Well, who cares, the Velvet Underground were “weirder,” says the Millennial hipster, but see, the Velvet Underground’s weirdness was right up front, whereas the Doors were more like the “back door men” of weirdness. You’re chewing your gum and bopping your head along to “Soul Kitchen,” and then all of a sudden, before you know it, you’re killing your father and fucking your mother and you don’t know how you got there and you don’t know how the hell you’re going to find your way back. It’s like right around the two-thirds mark in John Fowles’s The Magus: you figured you’d just take some harmless teaching position in Greece, and now you’re tied to a rack in a basement, surrounded by a gang of renegade psychologists wearing sinister animal heads, and you can’t figure out if the girl is named Lily or Julie or Vanessa or what exactly.
Also, for the record, this album came out in January 1967; a certain banana-emblazoned album didn’t even come out until March. This album came out so early, in fact, it still features that vintage, impossibly extreme stereo separation – the kind where the drums and bass (or bass keyboard) are panned hard left, the guitar and “regular” keyboard are panned hard right, and Jim is left standing stark naked in the center (well, occasionally joined by piano for comfort). It’s the kind of early stereo mix that bothers the hell out of some people but doesn’t bother me in the least. Oh no, there’s instruments on the left, and instruments on the right. What is a poor boy to do? See, that’s what your brain is for. It can hear sounds coming through different ear lobes, and, like, combine them. Amazing. But studio technology sure was moving fast in those days. Strange Days came out only nine months later, and yet one might describe it as sounding a good deal beefier and fancier. Elektra gave them a real budget for that one.
But while the stereo mix may be primitive, other little sonic details have always struck me as quite ingenious and effective. For instance, notice the first chorus of “Twentieth Century Fox,” the second chorus of “I Looked at You,” or the middle eight of “Soul Kitchen,” where one Jim sings in an upper octave while a second Jim sings in a lower octave. It’s like the clichéd angel and devil sitting on the shoulders of a person facing a quandary … except in this case, both Jims are the devil?
So, that weekend at my friend’s house was slightly prior to my All Music Guide phase. I didn’t know that the album was considered a “five-star classic” and that it always appeared on “greatest albums” lists and had this whole sterling reputation. I simply realized that it was clearly an enjoyable album that I needed to have in my music collection. It was a simpler time. People said hello to each other in the street. Mothers braided their daughters’ hair. College students expected to land jobs once they graduated. So I asked my friend to make a cassette copy of it for me.
In those days, about 90% of the pop music in my tape collection consisted of what I suppose one might call “love songs,” which, at that exact moment in my life, I was not in the mood for. What I liked about The Doors, then, was that the album didn’t quite consist of proper “love songs.” I suppose “Light My Fire” is technically a “love song,” but I see it as more like a Romeo and Juliet-style suicide pact love song.
There’s also “I Looked at You,” which is sort of the Doors’ version of AM bubblegum (I just saw an internet comment stating that it’s essentially a Dave Clark Five rip-off, and, by golly … listen to “Glad All Over,” then listen to this, and tell me what you think), but I’ve always felt the chipper, “skipping along on a spring afternoon” feel of lines like “Now we’re on our way/No we can’t look back” is undercut by the lyric that follows, “Cause it’s too late,” almost as if the track is, in truth, a Black Sabbath-style “love song” to Satan. (Plus, with its multiple fake endings, it may boast the band’s finest-ever employment of my previously described “unison stab.”)
And let’s not forget the aforementioned “love songs” to little girls. Mostly the subject matter is abstract and artsy-fartsy and not even Jim in his most lucid state could have told anybody what the songs were genuinely “about.”
Did I wear the album out? Did it transform my view of the universe and my place in it? No. But every time I’d put it on, I’d dig it from start to finish. Fast-forward twenty-five years later, and that’s still more or less how I feel about the damn thing. The songs are great. Water is wet. The Arctic is cold. News at Ten.
But what makes the album “part-time Buddhist,” you ask? I’ll certainly have to dock it a few points for its lead singer overdosing at age 27, which is not a particularly part-time Buddhist way to go out. Well, I guess I’d say it’s the appealing tension, or perhaps “balance,” between darkness and comfort. I think Jim’s growl could go toe to toe with Janis’s or Fogerty’s (“Try tah set the night on … fiiiii-uhhh-ah!”), but you know what the odd thing is? He’s also a crooner. In the Classic Albums documentary series’ episode devoted to the album, engineer Bruce Botnick states:
“When Jim came into the studio, he’d never recorded before – first time. I didn’t know what he was gonna be like. And my favorite vocal microphone is a Telefunken U-47. And I showed it to him, I said ‘This is gonna be your mic,’ and he froze. And he said, ‘That’s great.’ I said, ‘Why is that?’ He said, ‘That’s the mic that FRANK SINATRA sings in.’”
Can’t you just imagine our Nietzschean uber mensch leaning back, grinning from ear to ear with sweet delight at the thought of this paranormal, technological link with Ol’ Blue Eyes? But I feel it. For every moment of danger and menace on The Doors, there seems to be a moment of soothing calm and acceptance. In the final seconds of “The End,” you know what I’m thinking? “If this is the end, the end feels … kind of nice?” It’s like receiving anesthesia on your death bed.
All I can say is: as I travel through this peculiar goldmine called life, sometimes it’s nice to know I’m not the only one trapped inside who’s been noticing that, man, there are some weird scenes going on in here.