The Doors

Starred review from August 29, 2011
Music critic Marcus (Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus) offers a relentlessly beautiful and insightful evaluation of the music of the Doors—a fitting tribute on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Morrison’s death in 1971—but also a complete rethinking of the Doors’ work as an entire story that captures the 1960s as “a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape.” He begins with the band’s first album, The Doors, and offers a tribute to the power of the work as a whole, especially the lengthy and much-maligned “The End,” to make “everything seems tentative, uncertain, unclear: that’s the source of the song’s power, it’s all-encompassing embrace of darkness, doom and dread.” He argues that the band’s second album, Strange Days, perfectly captured the end of the 1960s ideals: “Already in 1968 the Doors were performing not freedom but its disappearance.” And he contrasts a fascinating range of official and bootleg live recordings of such hit singles as “Touch Me” to show that by 1970 “a war between the band and its audience was underway, a war whose weapons were contempt on both sides.” This is an impressive tribute to “the revolt the Doors momentarily embodied, and acted out,” as well as to Jim Morrison’s artistic attempt to move beyond the hatred he felt for the band’s pop success.

September 1, 2011

The veteran critic (Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, 2010, etc.) turns his attention to one of the defining rock bands of the 1960s.

Outside of the band's 1967 debut album, the Doors strike Marcus as a mediocrity. So why write about them? In part because the release of "official bootleg" albums of live Doors shows offer new perspectives for Marcus to consider. It may help to have 2003's Boot Yer Butt! handy as he sagely discusses the group deconstructing "Light My Fire" onstage in 1967, or the way "The End" messily collapsed live a year later. In those pieces, Marcus eagerly strips the Doors of the psychedelic clichés that have attached to them. A compulsion to debunk myths about the '60s drives much of this book: Sick of being called upon to opine romantically on Woodstock culture, Marcus hears the death of the Summer of Love dream in the Doors' music, the way its mood seemed to foreshadow the Manson murders and the Altamont tragedy. As ever, the author synthesizes a variety of works to make such points, and the connections aren't always clear or convincing. What "Twentieth Century Fox" has to do with pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein is no clearer at the end of one essay than it was at the beginning. But Marcus' enthusiasm is often infectious, as in his astonishment over his admiration for Oliver Stone's biopic or the way Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice harks back to Morrison's crazed vocals on "L.A. Woman."

An honorable if sometimes clumsy attempt to put the Doors in their cultural place.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2011

Hard to believe that the Doors were around for only five years; their music was and remains so outsize. Distinguished rock/culture critic Marcus aims to get beyond the very long shadow of Jim Morrison. Not just for Sixties types.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2011
Veteran rock scribe Marcus considers the history of the Doors and what he sees as their lasting cultural impact in this retrospective of the band whose lead singer, Jim Morrison, though dead since 1971, appeared on a Rolling Stone cover in 1981 (after Marcus' departure from the magazine) with the legend, He's hot, he's sexy, and he's dead. He's still dead, but Marcus seems to suggest he's still hot and sexy. Always a notable spawner of outsize metaphor, Marcus outdoes himself, walking readers through individual Doors songs while spewing historical references and pop-cultural insights. Here he explains the connection between 1920s Berlin dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck and the pauses in the song The End, and there he invokes a Corvette with a five-speed transmission to describe the seamless seven minutes of a performance of Roadhouse Blues in 1970. In short, Marcus minutely dissects the Doors and their songs in his familiar bombastic yet mellifluous style. Some readers will appreciate that. Others will merely be informed by his attention to detail and his cultural insights.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)