by Greil Marcus
“Specialize in having fun!” Jim Morrison sang in the song before, “Take It as It Comes”; the words didn’t match the music. The band was both light on its feet and relentless, and what was coming, what you were going to have to take, felt dark, hard, irresistible, a test, not anything you could expect.
“The End” was the test. Two minutes in, Krieger plays an atonal figure against a steady count, Ray Manzarek shifts quietly behind him, a green river in the cave of the song, and—a minute, a minute and a half has passed, but there’s no sense of time passing—John Densmore hits his drums off the beat, louder each time, fracturing the sound, until you can see his kit tumbling like Keith Moon’s, the sound so big you can see an avalanche of drums burying everyone else.
This is a repeating moment; events like this occur across the span of “The End.” All through the piece, there will be incidents when the performance feels as if it’s about to tear itself to pieces. It’s a question of rhythm. The furious, impossibly sustained assault that will steer the song to its end, a syncopation that swirls on its own momentum, each musician called upon not just to match the pace of the others but to draw his own pictures inside the maelstrom—in its way this is a relief, because that syncopation gives the music a grounding you can count on, that you can count off yourself.
There were exciting pauses in “Take It as It Comes,” when the band pulled back from itself, letting the song loose, letting it tell them where to take it next. Instruments dropped out, but a pulse always held: it was better than most of what was on the radio, but not a new language, a foreign language you had to learn. In “The End” the pauses were traffic accidents, what in the 1920s the Berlin dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck called “the art of yesterday’s crash.” Throughout the song, until that final surge, everything seems tentative, uncertain, unclear; that’s the source of the song’s power, its all-encompassing embrace of darkness, gloom, and dread, and it’s this insistence on the uncertain, on working without a ground, that takes the performance past its own corniness. Morrison’s words have the feel of phrases made up on the spot to fit or break the rhythms taking shape around him: the languid, sleepy “The west, is the best” followed by the staccato jump in the way the last five words of “Get here—and we’ll do the rest” pull the first two words after them like a weight pulling a house off a cliff. There is the drifting chase after a blue bus, a chase that is a matter of someone walking slowly, deliberately, no matter how fast the bus is going knowing that sooner or later he’ll catch it and climb on.
Morrison’s voice in the slides in the music that seem to matter most—at the beginning and the end, where “my only friend” is brought into the song and then banished, so the singer can contemplate the perfection of his own isolation, his own renunciations, his own beauty—is full, creamy, a deep well. You could drop a coin into the pool of this voice and never hear the splash. As the voice opens over words or syllables—“friend,” “only,” “die”—the words change shape, gliding out into the empty spaces in the sound. In the way Morrison raises the “end” in the first “This is the end” up past the words preceding it, as if to make sure you don’t miss its significance, carries the smell of falsity, pretention, bad poetry; the plain flatness of “my only friend” instantly takes the end down to a plane of ordinary life, lets the listener into the song, and sets the words free to find their traveling companions. No element in the music seems to anticipate any other, to call any other forth; the performance is a dance around a fire, with the pace determined by the flickers, which can’t be anticipated, that are never the same—not until the set piece in the center, when the singer says he wants to kill his father and fuck his mother.1 The suggestion of the singer reenacting the murder of the Clutter family, but from inside the family, the truly suggestive moment of this part of the song, is erased by the cheapness of shoving Oedipus into the drama: the singer goes quietly into his sister’s room, then into his brother’s room, he could leave them both dead, he could just be making sure they’re asleep, but when he gets to his father and his mother—when he gets to what one friend calls “the ‘Hello Faddah, hello Muddah’ extravaganza”—you realize you’ve heard this story before. That gorgeous tone for single words that make a drama so much richer than this one here changes the white marble of Michelangelo’s David to the plaster of the statuettes you can buy in the gift shop.
Minutes later, with the music gathering itself for its final charge, the real drama takes place. Krieger, Manzarek, and Densmore are pushing for a centrifugal momentum that will create its own Big Bang, until each piece flies away from the other; Morrison, his one-legged, spread-eagled stage dance now playing out on his tongue, is the controlling rhythmic force. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he snaps, snarls, talking into a mirror, testing the word for its feel in his mouth, finding the same brittle, syncopated click with which Krieger opened the theme, the word fuck buried but viscerally changing shape each time he spits it out, the word cutting itself short, fuk, distorting, fut, cracking, fak, curling around itself, fug.
Everything slows down again, and the song returns to the beckoning, the foreshadowing, of its first moments. Wherever it was you started from, you have traveled somewhere else, and no time at all has passed. As the Firesign Theatre had their college student say when he entered his time machine, “I will be gone for a thousand years, but to you it will seem only like a minute.”
“The End,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).
Firesign Theatre, “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger,” from How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All? (Columbia, 1969). The group’s Everything You Know Is Wrong (Columbia, 1974) includes a groaning old-Indian parody of the snake section of “The End.”
The Doors in the So-called Sixties
FOR THREE YEARS, visiting my father in the nursing home where he lived, I would drive across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley to San Francisco and back again, twenty or twenty-five minutes over, twenty or twenty-five minutes back. In the spring of 2010 I made an interesting discovery: in those forty or fifty minutes, switching stations to find something I wanted to hear, cutting from 98.5 to 104.5 to 103.7 to 107.7 to 90.7 as soon as a song I liked was over, sometimes catching signals floating in and out, half a tune before it broke up or was drowned out by something else, I was all but guaranteed to hear all or part of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” at least three times, and Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” at least twice. This was not a surprise; those were the big hits of the season, and both were wonderful—bottomless, each in its own way. With “Hey, Soul Sister,” there was the delirium of the guy dancing in his bedroom as he watched his favorite video on his computer screen, over and over just as people all over the world were now listening to him. The song changed in its emotional meter from one nonsense verse to the next, from the impassioned chorus to the way a banjo isolated the singer in his little drama, the way the band crashing down on the same phrase a stanza later brought him into a greater drama, just one of a million people dreaming the same dream. With “Bad Romance” there was first the delirium of the production, what seemed like thousands of little pieces all spun by some all-seeing, thousand-eared over-mind into a Busby Berkeley chorus line of sounds instead of legs. There was the cruelty of the singer, mocking whoever the you in the song was, sneering, turning her back, looking back over her shoulder with a look that killed, shouting at him or her on the street so everyone can hear: “’Cause I’m a freak, baby”—the last word squeezed in the sound, the b and the y cut off just slightly at the beginning and then at the end, so that it’s less a word than a spew of pure disgust. And then, with about a minute left on the record, everything changes. “I don’t wanna be friends”: a desperation invades the performance, trivializes, erases, everything that’s come before it, and pushes on, a completely different person now telling a completely different story, tearing at her hair, her clothes, scratching out her own eyes, then with her dada chant cutting it all off like someone breaking through the last frame o
f a film to shout “THE END!” I loved them both; I got lost in them each time.
In a way, each record contained its own surprise every time it came on—but the real surprise was something else. As certain as it was that I’d hear “Bad Romance” “Bad Romance” “Hey, Soul Sister” “Bad Romance” “Hey Soul Sister,” it was close to a sure thing that I’d hear the Doors twice, three times, even four times—and not just “Light My Fire.” Not just the one or two songs into which the radio has compressed Bob Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone”), the Rolling Stones (“Gimmie Shelter,” maybe “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” entered in the log of time as just “Satisfaction” to save conceptual space), the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), Sly and the Family Stone (“Everyday People), the Band (“The Weight”), all of the Doors contemporaries save the Beatles as if they were forgotten hacks forever playing the same squalid dive with the same announcement on the door, the name of the one hit maybe bigger than the name of the act because you can always remember the song even if you can’t remember who did it, even if whoever is doing it now isn’t exactly whoever did it then: Creedence Clearwater Revisited
(“PROUD MARY”)
Thunder Valley Casino • Resort
—with, turning just two pages in the newspaper entertainment listings on May 5, 2011— John Fogerty
(“PROUD MARY”)
Cache Creek Casino Resort2
At any given moment in 2010 you could hear “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Touch Me,” “Love Her Madly,” “L.A. Woman,” “Twentieth Century Fox,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Hello, I Love You,” “Five to One,” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Soul Kitchen,” “Roadhouse Blues.” What were all these songs doing there? And why did most of them sound so good?
As I reveled in the music, as if I hadn’t heard it before—realizing, in some sense, that I hadn’t: that “L.A. Woman” and “Roadhouse Blues” had never sounded so big, so unsatisfied, so free in 1970 and 1971 as they did forty years later—I remembered Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie The Doors. The reviews were terrible: “What a shame to have to take your clothes off for a movie like this,” one critic wrote at the time of Meg Ryan’s nude scene. I’d expected to hate the film, to watch shows I’d seen and music I’d loved faked and frozen; instead I was shocked at how right it felt, how even the most overplayed scenes still seemed to leave something out: smugness, easy answers, a director’s superiority to his own material. The picture was alive; I could replay the movie just by thinking about it.
It came out a year after Pump Up the Volume, Allan Moyle’s film about a teenager’s clandestine radio station in a faceless Arizona suburb. I couldn’t get either one out of my head. I didn’t want to. But when I tried to tell people about the movies, about why they ought to see them, and, usually, failed to convince them that they should, I realized both films were trapped in the same prison: the prison of the Sixties, not as a period in which people actually lived, but as an idea, or the scrim of an idea, meant to keep all lived experience, all unanswered, unasked questions, as far away as possible. I began to think about why these Sixties—as opposed to a lower-cased sixties, or whatever years one might choose to apply to the period (1958–69, from the Beats to Altamont, some have said; 1963–74, from John F. Kennedy’s assassination to Richard Nixon’s resignation; 1964–68, from the Beatles to the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King)—hadn’t gone away, and why, perhaps, they never would.
A few years before, in the late 1980s, when I found myself constantly getting calls about the Sixties from newspaper and TV reporters, I decided I wasn’t going to talk about it anymore. There was a flood of ludicrous media-created anniversaries: the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock, the twentieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ deadly free concert at Altamont—as if, on the twentieth anniversary of the day Hell’s Angels stabbed and beat a young man named Meredith Hunter to death as the Rolling Stones played “Under My Thumb,” people who’d been there, or people who might as well have been there, who’d somehow been convinced that the event was a symbolic turning point in their lives and culture, would turn to each other and say, “Wow! Next Tuesday’s going to be the twentieth anniversary of Altamont! Let’s all get dressed up like Hell’s Angels and naked acid casualties and have a party!” 2007 was if anything worse: forty is traditionally a meaningless year for anniversaries, but the media looked at the calendar and just like that 1967 was, until the page turned, the most important year in history. You weren’t there? every TV, magazine cover, radio station seemed to ask, or rather taunt. You don’t remember the day the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper came out? The Six-Day War? The Monterey Pop Festival? The Summer of Love? The first Doors album?
“What is the meaning of Beatles Woodstock Altamont today?” people would ask me on the phone twenty years before that. “There’s no meaning,” I would say, irritated, but also confused. “Why are you doing this story?” I’d ask them. They didn’t know; they weren’t in charge. They were just told to go out and get the story, and someone said I might know, as if I, or anyone my age, might have some secret we were keeping.
The implication seemed to be that anyone who might know had nothing better to do than to sit around wondering about the meaning of events that, at the time, had mostly felt like fun, or not fun. As if one’s life had been empty ever since. That, I realized, was the secret behind the media’s need for these stories, or non-stories. The media had a sense that ever since the 1960s, life had been empty. That nothing had happened since: nothing worth memorializing, anyway. And that too was part of the media secret, the idea of memorializing. The anniversaries were attempted funerals. They were attempts to bury something. But the funeral never seemed to end, and the burial never seemed complete.
I thought of a New Yorker cartoon: a nicely dressed middle-aged woman stands in her nice living room and turns to her husband, who’s got a big paunch, who’s draped in a chair looking miserable, exhausted, unkempt. “Honey,” she says, “the ’60s are over.” This would have been funny in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was first elected president. The cartoon appeared in 1988, just before Ronald Reagan left the White House. And that was all too right. Ronald Reagan was a Sixties person if anyone was; the negation of the mythic Sixties, but Sixties nonetheless. “In his early years Elvis Presley was virtually apolitical,” the columnist and novelist Michael Ventura wrote in 1987. “Yet no one else in the ’50s except Martin Luther King had as huge a political effect in the United States. Elvis single-handedly created what came to be known as the youth market, the demand for the form of music he made popular. Through being united as a market, that particular wave of youth felt the cohesion of community that became the ’60s upheaval, an upheaval that all our politics since have been in reaction to, for, or against.”
Like Newt Gingrich dismissing Bill and Hillary Clinton as “counter-culture McGoverniks,” by which he meant beatniks, by which he meant Sputnik, by which he meant commies, it was by setting himself so firmly and grandly against that upheaval that Ronald Reagan became a national figure. In 1966, running for governor in California, he ran against the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of two years before, and won; in 1980 he ran against the Sixties as such, just as Margaret Thatcher had done in the U.K. the year before. Both did better than simply run against the Sixties: they kept the time and the idea alive by co-opting its rhetoric, by so brilliantly taking its watchwords, or its slogans, as their own. “Adventure,” “risk,” “a new world”—those were emblems no conservative movements had claimed since the 1930s, when the movements that did trumpet such words named themselves fascist. Unlike their formal political ancestors—Republican presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nixon, or Conservative prime ministers Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden—Reagan and Thatcher were utopians. They were impossible and u
nthinkable without the Sixties, and the 1960s, without the idea and the years actually lived. They couldn’t afford to let them die.
Around the time The Doors appeared in theaters, a nineteen-year-old friend came to ask me for help with a college paper he was writing on the 1960s. Here was someone I’d known all his life, and in 1991 he wanted to talk about the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in 1967, about the Grateful Dead—not because this was ancient history, but because it wasn’t. He knew too many Deadheads his own age. He was trying to understand what all this had to do with him: why were his friends dressing up like tSpheir parents had or hadn’t twenty-five years before and going to the same shows? I tried to tell him how strange that seemed to me, how impossible it would have been for me and my friends to have put on suits in 1965 and called ourselves Benny Goodmanheads or even Billie Holiday-heads. But I couldn’t get that across. I wanted to tell him about Pump Up the Volume, about hints of something new coming out of a cultural desert, but that too seemed out of reach.
As I’d watched my own daughters grow up—in 1991 the oldest was twenty-one, born just days after Altamont; my wife stayed home, because we figured if the baby was born there we’d have to name it Mick, and because we had heard Hell’s Angels would be there and we knew who they were—I followed the growth of this remarkable persistence of a vanished time. I followed it as a form of oppression. It seemed to me that if my own children were to have a chance to make a culture of their own, to make their own history, then the Sixties would have to take their rightful place in the filing cabinet of yesterdays and once-upon-a-times. But all their lives, people who were in their teens and twenties when the Doors, twenty years gone, reappeared as The Doors had been told by movies and books and television and the radio that then was when it all happened, that there were the touchstones of whatever dribs and drabs of art and politics they might flatter themselves to call their own. Over and over, people a generation younger than I am have been told that the sound of which they can claim only the echo happened once, and it won’t happen again. When, in 1991, people turned on the radio, or when people turn it on today, and hear Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 “For What It’s Worth,” the record itself or a commercial based on it,3 when they hear a tune sparked by riots on Sunset Strip in 1965, with the lines “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear,” one thing is clear: you’re supposed to feel that something happened, but it isn’t happening anymore. You were born at the wrong time; you missed it. “One of my first sentient thoughts as a rock critic,” Gina Arnold, one of the best ones, wrote in 1991, “was how incredibly sad it was that I had been born to be a teen in the ’70s—too late to have seen the Rolling Stones in their heyday. My first glimpse, in 1976, seemed so late for the train—little did I know they’d drag on for another fifteen years.” Would she have believed she could have written the same sentence twenty years later?