"The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years"
By Greil Marcus
PublicAffairs, $14.35
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“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” goes a famously derisive quote whose provenance is mysterious but which is often attributed to Elvis Costello. Greil Marcus’ body of work stands as a repudiation of that quote as well as, perhaps, its embodiment. Marcus has been writing about music since long before music criticism was a recognized profession, and his 1975 book “Mystery Train” probably did more than any single tome to make it one. The sound he hears coming out of his speakers is only the starting point of the discussion, which he will happily lose sight of on his way to make a more interesting point. His sentences twist, turn, pull and prod, grabbing at ideas and letting them go, nodding to reference points without fully explaining them and, when successful, approximating the feel of the music he writes about. All these traits can make his prose dizzying, hard to follow and a bit breathless — the way you’d imagine dancing about architecture might actually feel.
“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,” Marcus writes in his new book, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.” “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.’”
“The Doors,” much like the books Marcus has written on Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, is not really about its titular subject. Sure, there are tossed-off scraps of biography, occasional quotes from archived interviews with the band members and plenty of line-by-line, if not breath-by-breath, dissections of their performances. But for Marcus, the Doors’ music is simply a lens through which to view American culture. So a chapter devoted to the song “L.A. Woman,” includes a detailed discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s mystery novel “Inherent Vice,” along with nods to Jacques Louis-David’s painting “The Death of Marat,” the film “Blade Runner,” H.P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” Natalie Wood, Squeaky Fromme and Don DeLillo’s “Great Jones Street.” (It’s best to keep Wikipedia open on your browser if you want to keep up.) A 25-page chapter on “20th Century Fox” barely mentions the song, passing over it on the way to a critical assessment of 20th-century pop art instead.
Much of the book is shot through with hard thoughts about the 1960s — what the decade has come to signify and what it really means. It’s certainly satisfying to read Marcus, a product of the ’60s if there ever was one, decrying the oppressive shadow the decade has cast over the 50 years that followed it. That said, his annoyance at being periodically asked by various media outlets to reflect on the significance of Woodstock, Altamont or other ’60s milestones years later feels disingenuous. “The implication,” he writes, “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.” Of course, what Marcus grumpily dismisses is a pretty good description of most of his books.
“The Doors” is (loosely) organized as a series of chapters, each examining a separate performance by the band. Although Marcus often writes about a version of a song from a specific concert on a specific night more than 40 years ago, the age of Google and YouTube has made clips of most of these performances instantly retrievable. This enables readers to compare Marcus’ analysis with their own.
Writing about a 1967 performance of the Doors’ hit “Light My Fire,” Marcus writes, “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.”
The fact that Jim Morrison probably never thought any of these things, the fact that he may have just been drunk, is of no consequence to Marcus. To him, once a song goes out into the world, it doesn’t belong to the singer anymore; it belongs to the audience. That can make for plenty of passages that feel overheated and overthought, but the writing is lively and provocative enough to make readers want to follow Marcus’ rhetorical flights of fancy.
This isn’t just a book for Doors fanatics. In fact, Marcus might not wholly disagree with those who tend to dismiss them as a dull, second-rate garage band and Morrison as a pretentious poseur who thought doing lots of drugs made him profound. According to Marcus, the Doors’ second and third albums “were filled with words that had no reason to be written, much less sung,” and music that “noodled pointlessly over broken beats, truncated melodies so ungainly most of the time Jim Morrison sounded as if he were giving a speech.”
Two of the band’s biggest hits (“Touch Me” and “Hello, I Love You”) are, “songs the Monkees might have blanched at,” and “Unknown Soldier,” which Marcus devotes an entire chapter to, “is not much of a song” at all.
But while he’s unsparing in his criticism of the band’s lesser work, Marcus holds out the possibility that at their best, the Doors hit on something much greater than themselves. Ultimately, his book’s unifying theme is not quite clear — something about the failure of America to live up to the promise of the ’60s — but the lack of clarity in the destination doesn’t really make the journey less enjoyable.
By Greil Marcus
PublicAffairs, $14.35
BUY NOW
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” goes a famously derisive quote whose provenance is mysterious but which is often attributed to Elvis Costello. Greil Marcus’ body of work stands as a repudiation of that quote as well as, perhaps, its embodiment. Marcus has been writing about music since long before music criticism was a recognized profession, and his 1975 book “Mystery Train” probably did more than any single tome to make it one. The sound he hears coming out of his speakers is only the starting point of the discussion, which he will happily lose sight of on his way to make a more interesting point. His sentences twist, turn, pull and prod, grabbing at ideas and letting them go, nodding to reference points without fully explaining them and, when successful, approximating the feel of the music he writes about. All these traits can make his prose dizzying, hard to follow and a bit breathless — the way you’d imagine dancing about architecture might actually feel.
“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,” Marcus writes in his new book, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.” “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.’”
“The Doors,” much like the books Marcus has written on Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, is not really about its titular subject. Sure, there are tossed-off scraps of biography, occasional quotes from archived interviews with the band members and plenty of line-by-line, if not breath-by-breath, dissections of their performances. But for Marcus, the Doors’ music is simply a lens through which to view American culture. So a chapter devoted to the song “L.A. Woman,” includes a detailed discussion of Thomas Pynchon’s mystery novel “Inherent Vice,” along with nods to Jacques Louis-David’s painting “The Death of Marat,” the film “Blade Runner,” H.P. Lovecraft, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night,” Natalie Wood, Squeaky Fromme and Don DeLillo’s “Great Jones Street.” (It’s best to keep Wikipedia open on your browser if you want to keep up.) A 25-page chapter on “20th Century Fox” barely mentions the song, passing over it on the way to a critical assessment of 20th-century pop art instead.
Much of the book is shot through with hard thoughts about the 1960s — what the decade has come to signify and what it really means. It’s certainly satisfying to read Marcus, a product of the ’60s if there ever was one, decrying the oppressive shadow the decade has cast over the 50 years that followed it. That said, his annoyance at being periodically asked by various media outlets to reflect on the significance of Woodstock, Altamont or other ’60s milestones years later feels disingenuous. “The implication,” he writes, “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.” Of course, what Marcus grumpily dismisses is a pretty good description of most of his books.
“The Doors” is (loosely) organized as a series of chapters, each examining a separate performance by the band. Although Marcus often writes about a version of a song from a specific concert on a specific night more than 40 years ago, the age of Google and YouTube has made clips of most of these performances instantly retrievable. This enables readers to compare Marcus’ analysis with their own.
Writing about a 1967 performance of the Doors’ hit “Light My Fire,” Marcus writes, “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.”
The fact that Jim Morrison probably never thought any of these things, the fact that he may have just been drunk, is of no consequence to Marcus. To him, once a song goes out into the world, it doesn’t belong to the singer anymore; it belongs to the audience. That can make for plenty of passages that feel overheated and overthought, but the writing is lively and provocative enough to make readers want to follow Marcus’ rhetorical flights of fancy.
This isn’t just a book for Doors fanatics. In fact, Marcus might not wholly disagree with those who tend to dismiss them as a dull, second-rate garage band and Morrison as a pretentious poseur who thought doing lots of drugs made him profound. According to Marcus, the Doors’ second and third albums “were filled with words that had no reason to be written, much less sung,” and music that “noodled pointlessly over broken beats, truncated melodies so ungainly most of the time Jim Morrison sounded as if he were giving a speech.”
Two of the band’s biggest hits (“Touch Me” and “Hello, I Love You”) are, “songs the Monkees might have blanched at,” and “Unknown Soldier,” which Marcus devotes an entire chapter to, “is not much of a song” at all.
But while he’s unsparing in his criticism of the band’s lesser work, Marcus holds out the possibility that at their best, the Doors hit on something much greater than themselves. Ultimately, his book’s unifying theme is not quite clear — something about the failure of America to live up to the promise of the ’60s — but the lack of clarity in the destination doesn’t really make the journey less enjoyable.
