The Doors

by Greil Marcus

  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

  FROM 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— Tell you about my baby

  She comes around

  She comes around here

  Head to the ground

  —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— You got to meet me at the crossroads

  You got to meet me at the edge of town

  Outskirts of the city

  You better come alone

  Just you and I

  And the evening sky

  —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.

  It was a performance that, with no audience, with no one to care, to mull it over, to pick it apart, crossed over into priapic self-parody and instantly crossed back into impotent self-loathing, but at the end still allowed the song to sound like itself. But by the time the Doors settled in for a week of shows in New York in 1970, and a kind of war between the band and its audience was under way, a war whose weapons were contempt on both sides, there was nothing left of the song but the porn movie it had always half promised to be.

  “Getting softer,” Morrison whispered in New York, now more like Jerry Lee Lewis in “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The band slows. “Take it,” Morrison sings. “Eat it. Lick it. Put your lips around my cock, baby.” “SUCK IT!” Manzarek snaps from the side, sounding like someone who’s paying to watch. “Gonna eat you, honey,” Morrison sways. “TASTE IT!” says Manzarek. “Getting harder, harder, longer,” Morrison warbles, too early for South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. It goes on, with Manzarek adding a wolf whistle after Morrison’s “Wrap your hair around my skin.”

  “Getting harder,” Morrison announces again. “HARDER,” Manzarek seconds, as if the point needs to be stressed. “Getting faster too,” Morrison says, doubt behind the bravado. “GETTING LONGER!” says Manzarek. “It’s getting too darn fast,” Morrison says, the darn sticking out, as if this is a little boy not ready for grown-up words. “It’s getting harder, gonna rip you in two, woo!”—and nothing happens. The singer pulls the rug out from under himself, pulls the song inside out: “Too late, too late, can’t stop—”

  Plainly, the band loved the song too much to ever let it go, no matter how traduced at their hands it might become: always, there was that clattering beginning, with Krieger battering his strings as if his fingers were sticks, and that colossal finish, Manzarek running the flourishes he was so fond of right into a wall. Just as plainly, the song got under Jim Morrison’s skin; it wouldn’t let him go. But “Gloria” gave the Doors something back.

  “Soul Kitchen” was the Doors’ own “Gloria”—with the same steady climb toward a looming chorus. It was a staircase—not, as with “Gloria,” in
imagery, but in the cadence the two songs shared, slowed down so strongly in “Soul Kitchen” that a sense of deliberation, so physical that it was more body than thought, became the guiding spirit of the song.

  The first ambitious piece of writing on rock ’n’ roll I recall reading was Paul Williams’s “Rock Is Rock: A Discussion of a Doors Song,” in the May 1967 issue of Crawdaddy! To Williams, “Soul Kitchen” wasn’t “Gloria,” it was “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and just as “Blowin’ in the Wind” had a message—to Williams, that the answer, knowledge, is beyond our reach—so did “Soul Kitchen”: “The message of ‘Soul Kitchen’ is of course ‘Learn to forget.’” It’s a phrase that makes a hinge, almost exactly halfway through the song, as it appeared on The Doors.

  Never mind that when people tell you that anything is a matter of of course—and especially anything having anything to do with art—they are telling you to stop thinking, to stop listening, to stop seeing, to shut up. “Soul Kitchen” does not have a message. It’s an image, as quietly dramatic a sexual image as any could be. For all of Jim Morrison’s unbearable poetic extravaganzas on Doors albums, those two words are poetry, translating something almost beyond words into ordinary language and back again to the ether—just as the line that carries the image, the moment of poetry, “Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen,” is intuitive songwriting, and the line that follows, “Warm my mind near your gentle stove,” with its nicely matched kitchen and stove, is Scrabble. It doesn’t hurt the ruling image, doesn’t touch it: “soul kitchen” is too unlikely, too immediately right.

  The song is pulled forward—pulled toward itself, what it wants, what it wants to be—by that image. “Speak in secret alphabets” is no less sexual, and no less sexual than Bob Seger’s “Working on mysteries without any clues,” but Seger, in “Night Moves” in 1976, looking back to 1962, when he was seventeen, was being true to his school, where “secret alphabets” would have got you laughed at. Jim Morrison, thinking of himself as a poet, could ask himself not merely how to say it, but how not to: how to say what you mean to say while saying many other things at the same time. “Oh, the wonder,” Seger mouthed, giving up; “Speak in secret alphabets,” Morrison chanted, eyes and hands running over bodies, bodies closing eyes and hands, until the music all but gave off scent. “Soul Kitchen” entered “Gloria”’s building, climbed its stairs, knocked on its door, went into its room, and flew out the window.

  On record, the song is a dark room, the lights flicking off, the sign on the door switched from OPEN to CLOSED. But like every other Doors song, it changed shape according to the mood of the band, the city, the hall, the audience, the weather, the news, whether Morrison was in love with the song or consumed with hate for anyone else who claimed to love it, whether he was drunk or sober or just drunk enough not to care what anybody else thought. In Chicago, more than a year after The Doors began its climb to #2 on the charts, “Soul Kitchen” is a river; the point is not to cross it, but to let it take you down. Over more than seven and a half minutes, more than twice the length of the song on record, Morrison seems more interested in finding spaces in the song where he can get off of it, walk away, squint at the horizon, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, than in his “Poor Otis, dead and gone, left me here to sing his song,” which here does feel like a gesture of regret and comradeship, especially when he adds, from Lead Belly, from Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” from the old folk song “Liza Jane,” “Pretty little girl with the red dress on . . . Poor Otis, dead and gone.”

  On The Doors the chorus comes back, hammering, where everything else was reverie, an elegy to a night over before it began, a fantasy that might yet be realized, through the night and into the next day, over the hill and through the woods. The song makes you wait for its two words, raised like hands over eyes, the fingers opening and closing.

  Them, “Gloria” (London, 1965, #93).

  Don Henley, “Amateur Night,” LA Weekly, June 3–10, 1992. “It was a cacophonous frat-party nightmare,” Henley wrote of the Rock Bottom Remainders’ debut performance of “Louie Louie,” at Cowboy Boogie in Anaheim on May 25, 1992. “Had we been in Texas, there would have been gatoring, chugging and hurling . . . Then the band staggered into ‘Gloria,’ with the lead vocal by Dave Barry. Back in the peace-and-love era I had to play ‘Gloria’ 13 times in one night at a Delta Sig party, so this song affects me like burnt pizza. Barry’s late-’60s college-boy version of a Beatle haircut only fueled the memory. He took the usual liberties with the lyrics (the part about coming into the bedroom).”

  Mid-Life Confidential: The Rock Bottom Remainders Tour America with Three Chords and an Attitude, ed. Dave Marsh (New York: Viking, 1994). With contributions by Dave Barry, Tad Bartimus, Roy Blount, Jr., Michael Dorris, Robert Fulghum, Kathi Goldmark, Matt Groening, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Barbara King-solver, Al Kooper, GM, Dave Marsh, Ridley Pearson, Joel Selvin, and Amy Tan. Featuring a long round-robin on possible perfect-crime responses to the Don Henley review, mostly involving arcane Chinese tortures and murder techniques, a photo of a blood-smeared Dave Marsh in a wig and a prom dress as the dead girlfriend in “Teen Angel,” and Remainders’ musical director Al Kooper (as the author of Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards, not a ringer) on the Critics’ Chorus: “This is the nadir of western civilization. Right here, in our show.”

  Rock Bottom Remainders, The Roxy, Atlanta, 1993 (left to right, front, Al Kooper, guitar, Critics Chorus wih Joel Selvin, Dave Marsh, GM, Roy Blount, Jr., and guest; back, Dave Barry, guitar, Josh Kelly, drums, Ridley Pearson, bass, Jimmy Vivino, keyboards)

  “Gloria,” Live at the Matrix (DMC/Rhino, 2008).

  ———, Los Angeles, Aquarius Theatre, 1969, from Alive She Cried (Elektra, 1983), collected on In Concert (Elektra, 1991).

  ———, New York, Felt Forum, January 18, 1970, from “Live in New York,” in The Doors Box Set (Elektra, 1997).

  “Soul Kitchen,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).

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

  Van Morrison and Jim Morrison at the Whisky. The best photos, by George Rodriguez, in smoky color, are in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 56–57.

  Paul Williams, “Rock Is Rock: A Discussion of a Doors Song,” Crawdaddy! May 1967. Collected in Williams, Outlaw Blues: A Book of Rock Music (1969) (Glen Ellen, CA: Entwhistle, 2000).

  Bob Seger, “Night Moves” (Capitol, 1976, #4).

  Light My Fire, The Ed Sullivan Show, 1967

  AND YOU FELLAS, why don’t you have a nice smile on your faces when you go out there?” said Ed Sullivan, backstage on September 17, 1967, just as the Doors were about to step in front of the cameras to play “Light My Fire.” “There’s no point in being sullen. You know what I mean?” “But we’re a sullen group, Ed,” said Ray Manzarek.

  So he said in 1991 in Oliver Stones’s The Doors, anyway. It was the site of the first national Doors scandal, or rather success-through-scandal: as with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones before them, the people running the show, broadcast live, wanted something other from the Doors than what they came to play. For Bob Dylan in 1963 it was “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” the show wanted axed, and he walked off. For the Rolling Stones earlier in 1967 it was, all too famously, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”; as they were told to do, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sang “Let’s spend some time together,” with Mick popping his eyes to let the world know it was in on the joke.7 For the Doors, CBS demanded they change the line “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher”—supposedly, to “couldn’t get much better.” The network couldn’t have contrived a less musical solution if they’d suggested Jim Morrison sing the chemical formula for lithium. Supposedly, the rest of the band was ready to acquiesce—If it was good enough for the Stones . . . This was a big deal; more dates were dangled. Supposedly, Morrison said okay.

  It’s hard to believe Manzarek, John Densmore,
and Robby Krieger didn’t know what was coming. Densmore begins the performance with the huge stomp! of a single shot on the snare—as someone said at the time, it was hard to imagine anyone hitting anything harder. But after that he hits everything else too hard. You don’t hear a beat. You hear nerves, or fear.

  Morrison steps into the song languidly, with no tension, no foreshadowing. Unlike Elvis Presley in his third and last appearance on the Sullivan show, in 1957, the only time he was shot from the waist up—with Elvis pointedly looking down at his own body, as if what the camera was now hiding was something he’d never showed when the camera was all the way back, catching him from head to toe, he and his combo in action, playing to each other with joy, abandon, and speed—Morrison dropped no clues. He all but used the tune as a trampoline. “Girl, we couldn’t get much hiiiii,” he sang, letting the rest of higher disappear, letting it slip by as if it hadn’t been there at all, and while at least the sign of the offending word had been present, going out to the nation live, you could believe that in fact this was okay: okay for CBS, an honorable compromise for the Doors. “FIGH-YARRRRGH! YEAH! ” Morrison screamed just about a minute in, just before Manzarek begins a seven-second solo, squeezing the song into its single version, as if Morrison was making up for what wasn’t there. His scream was exciting. Nothing else had been.