Rubbish.
In a word,
that’s Greil Marcus’s ‘The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years’,
a terrible subtitle that yet betrays the incredible fascination the band have
commanded from their prime recorded output which spanned in fact four years, but we can’t expect much
higher mathematical knowledge from a professional writer and social critic who
already displays such a poor training in language arts and social studies
(perhaps he should have stuck to chemistry – in describing Ed Sullivan’s
attempt to censor The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’ for their performance on his CBS
program, Marcus muses, “The network couldn’t have contrived a less musical
solution if they’d suggested Jim Morrison sing the chemical formula for
lithium.” Lithium is an element, functionally an ion, not a molecular
compound.)
Rubbish.
Apparently, that’s what Marcus feels The Doors’ music amounts to – is this what
he finds so inspiring in it? Surely the writer is not alone in his half-assed
write-off of a critique, although at this point the group has pretty firmly
been established as one of the greatest rock acts of all time – not that that
untouchable list doesn’t contain a great deal of blunders. But that’s beside
the point. Despite my own flagrant bias in favor of one of my favorite bands of
all time, I can appreciate their shortcomings, although these may be precisely
the opposite of what the modern liberal hack finds so depreciable. But if you
are going to present what made these four musicians so great, and what continues
to draw interest and excitement from young and old alike, as reason enough to
trade those old well-worn records in at the shop for credit towards Taylor
Swift’s latest epic, you are going to have to write a convincing argument, not
a piece of junior-high homework your dog had the good taste not to eat. To
convince me, that is; not to get it
published, clearly.
The
Sunshine-Acid-orange the group’s photo is bleached into on the book’s cover is
probably what made me pick it up in the first place, but I’m always ready to
check out another perspective on The Doors; hopeful I might upturn some blue
rock I missed in the desert that sweeps all footprints away and discover
something I hadn’t noticed before, or at least a few tidbits of novel data to
store away.
One of the
main arguments of the book seems to be that Jim got fat toward the end of his
life, and therefore was no longer cool, and perhaps was never cool to begin
with. You’d think this old bastard had lived long enough to give up talking
about ‘cool’ in the first place, but the esthetic of the 60’s never dies for
some, another running theme of the present work. In fact, Marcus equates
maturity, coolness and vulgarity (like all today’s journalists do) even more so
than Jim did; when discussing The Doors’ unsurpassed performance of ‘Gloria’,
in reference to Jim’s line “It’s getting too darn fast” Marcus notes, “the darn sticking out, as if this is a
little boy not ready for grown-up words.” Rather, darn is the more respectable,
and therefore adult, way to express precisely what the poet wanted to say.
Marcus’
metaphors are impotent, his arguments unfeasible and his analogies groundless. We
watch with anticipation as he constructs the framework of what might be some
grand philosophy or poignant social theory on the significance of culture and
then it falls over, a house of cards and he hasn’t even got a full deck. We
might be open to his critical belittling of some over-idolized alcoholic
acidhead’s poetry if the writer himself didn’t make such a mockery of the
English language, at all turns. Something kept me reading, through to the very
end, with absorption: was it really just I couldn’t believe how bad the writing
was?
No, there
was more. To be honest it makes me mad, not just to see my youthful heroes trashed
so ineffectually (and yet with such authority) by some no-name hack…I could do
that myself. Marcus will be dead some day, and despite his confused, mildly
amusing bitterness at what he himself holds dear, his misplaced irony, we can
see what the band meant to someone who actually went to see them and other
great (and not-so) acts of the times, and who, as he says, has been listening
to them for a lifetime. Even as he dismantles the sacred Gospel According to
the Lizard King, he is grasping for words he doesn’t possess that might convey
what the group was capable of in the 60’s, what they did to him and his young
wife back then, what they do to listeners now. What is at stake is what
Nietzsche called “the use and misuse
of history for life” and I think Marcus’s
intentions might be noble enough. He is attempting to cover with sand the idols
whose hollow eyes he himself has stared into, once, long ago on some beach of
the collective unconsciousness while skinny-dipping with Hare Krishnas…but
enough corny symbolism. Marcus wants to sound out the idols for what they are,
or what they could be, not what they have been, and so is perhaps the truest to
Morrison’s own intentions of any critic I have read on the subject. Perhaps.
The problem
of freeing the youth from the great statues of the past is that we remove the
ground out of which culture can grow.
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