Much like 2010′s When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, Greil Marcus’s new book on the Doors is a short, smart, very discursive consideration of musicians dear to the author’s heart. Marcus, then in San Francisco and now in Oakland, saw the L.A. band many times in their early days, and the sense of anticipation they cast has stayed with him, whether he probes their ongoing spell over future generations (the chapter “The Doors in the So-Called Sixties” is largely a twin discussion of Oliver Stone’s Doors movie and the Christian Slater film Pump Up the Volume); discourses on the uses of Pop Art in a discussion of the song “20th Century Fox”; or comparing “Easy Ride” from The Soft Parade to Elvis Presley’s “Do the Clam” (“you could hear the self-loathing coming out of the songs like sweat, if that was your idea of a good time”).
Jim Morrison has become such an overblown pop culture signifier that Marcus’s interlocutions can snap him back to life. Most of what he introduces into the discussion predates the Doors, and it’s a kind of inventory of the music’s real-world backdrop. Marcus also gets at the dark romantic heart — maybe that should be Romantic — that formed the core of the band’s allure.
eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos spoke with Marcus at his office at the New School in New York, where Marcus was teaching for the Fall 2011 semester.
I think of the Doors as a really collegiate band; in terms of their origins, but also in terms of their fans. In The Doors, you talk about how, in 1991, a lot of young people were kind of living ’60s nostalgia, Deadheads and the like. You’ve been teaching a lot more over the last decade or so. Do you notice that still on campuses?
I don’t think of it as nostalgia, necessarily. Probably the best definition of nostalgia is a yearning to recapture something you’ve never experienced in the first place, rather than, “Things were so great then — I remember.” It’s a condition of false memory. That wasn’t my sense. It was more that people wanted to touch something that was exciting to them; that was inspiring to them. They wanted to make some connection. They knew they didn’t experience it. That was a source of dislocation and even pain and confusion.
But I see what you mean. What I’ve found teaching is that knowledge of and connection with music from that period is really widespread. But it’s idiosyncratic. I remember in 2006, I was teaching at Princeton and when I teach a seminar, I always ask people to fill out a questionnaire — where are you from, what are you studying, what are your favorite books and movies and music — just so I can get some sense of who the people are. And that time I had three students out of 14 who listed Astral Weeks as their favorite album. This was recorded not only before they were born but conceivably before their parents were born. This was pretty remarkable. And it certainly wasn’t because it represented nostalgia for the time it was made. They heard it in whatever situation: Maybe their parents played it, maybe they heard something on the radio, maybe they heard “Madame George” in Breakfast on Pluto. But one way or another, they got a hold of it and listened to it and fell in love with it. It didn’t have anything to do with the time period from which it emerged.
But students know so much — I’m talking about people 19, 20, 21. Some students know nothing and care nothing about music from the past decades; no reason they necessarily should. But some people are just so familiar. They’ve created their own frame of reference out of music from the ’50s or the ’60s or the ’20s or whatever it might be.
You talk about Pop Art in the chapter on “20th Century Fox,” about how the stuff nobody thought was going to last forever is the stuff that has lasted as long as it has. I’m curious if you see the Web changing that or altering that, or if it’s maybe a culmination of that? I look at a lot of things online and it seems like with younger people, everything is thrown open so much that they have no choice but to create their own frames of reference.
I don’t know about that. There are still any number of powerful media sources that are presenting frames of reference; saying whether it’s cultural or political, whether it’s time-bound, whether it’s grounded in ethnicity — those things are all present.
You know, I did a lot of my research for Lipstick Traces in the stacks of the University of California at Berkeley library. I spent probably three years doing nothing but wandering around looking for books I’d found in the card catalog, then stumbling on other things that were filed next to them a couple stalls down. You just get fascinated; you forget what you’re there for and you make these remarkable discoveries. Some of them were crucial to what I ended up with. They were things nobody would have ever told me about; I would never have been able to find out through conventional research. I just happened upon some book that looked vaguely interesting. I opened it, I started reading it, I’d come across a mention — “What?! He did that? Now I have to find out about this.”
That was a privileged position. In other words, most people weren’t allowed in the stacks. I was wandering around there. I would spend all day there. I would rarely see another person.
Now, you go on the Internet and one thing leads you to another. You go on YouTube looking for something specific — it will lead you to five, six, maybe dozens, or even hundreds of similarly linked pieces of information. And you’re off. You’re wandering around in the stacks, except the stacks are so much bigger. They’re so much more expansive. They include so much more. And it’s faster. It’s so much faster.
All the time, people are sending me things they’ve found on YouTube that they’ve just stumbled on. They weren’t looking for them, and here they are. Somebody the other day sent me a Bo Diddley performance from Shindig! in the mid ’60s. Jack Goode comes on, and here’s Bo Diddley with his whole band and a white horn section that looks like the Swingin’ Medallions. You know, a frat-house horn section of four or five guys. It’s one of the most exciting performances I’ve ever seen on TV. I remember Squeeze on Saturday Night Live when they did “Annie Get Your Gun” [in 1982]. I mean, my heart was in my mouth. I’d never seen anything so exciting. The shout that goes up from the audience when the song is over is not like a normal Saturday Night Live response to a performance. People can’t believe what they just saw. This was like that.
It made me think of these films that Scorsese used in his [PBS] history of the blues. They were made of American blues performers in Europe in the late ’50s, or maybe early ’60s, and they set up these phony rural backgrounds. You have Big Joe Williams wandering in, sitting down, starting to play “Baby Please Don’t Go,” whatever it was. You can tell that these people — Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins — were giving 5 percent, 10 percent, of what they’d have to give to get over in a Chicago blues club or a juke joint. They just know that the people they’re playing to couldn’t tell the real thing from the false. They know that just being there is all these people want, so they’re shucking. And here’s Bo Diddley on Shindig!, and as the person who sent this to me said, “If he gave anymore my head would explode.”
That stuff is out there. We’re finding it. I think that’s just fabulous. People will create their own frames of reference out of that, or they will find a frame they’ve gotten secondhand.
When you talk about the Doors or Van Morrison, there’s a little bit of the myth in there. Certainly the Doors are a mythical band, and you have to deal with that. You talk about the Oliver Stone movie, which uses the myth as its fuel.
Sure. I talk about the movie mainly in terms of the way it is able, within that legendary mythical context that it builds, to recreate performances, either that happened or didn’t happen, with such incredible immediacy, and a kind of use of symbolism that doesn’t feel that way.
Probably because of that, they’re a band your approach really works with. They’re asking to be interpreted, in a sense. They were self-conscious.
There’s no question. When you said “collegiate” — speaking of the Internet — there’s this thing floating around, a Florida State University video produced in 1960, 1961. Florida State made this video trying to get the state legislature to give it more money. Their budget is being cut. They’re showing what the consequences of this are. And they’re showing a kid going out to his mailbox and opening the mailbox and taking out a letter: “Sorry, we can’t admit you. Your qualifications are great and you’re completely admissible, but we don’t have enough room, because we’re forced to turn away so many students who are qualified.” The student who’s opening this letter is Jim Morrison — he was a student there, and somebody said, “Will you be in this video and be the heartbroken kid who doesn’t get in?” That’s pretty remarkable.
But yeah: These people had gone to college. They had taken classes in modernist literature, were exposed to the 20th-century tradition of art maudit. That’s deeply attractive: It’s basically the tradition of European nihilism. When Ray Manzarek’s wife suggested they do “Alabama Song,” that’s just second nature to them. This is a world they already know and love. So they’re not dumb people. They’ve read and they’ve thought, and they see themselves as part of that tradition, and part of the Elvis tradition, and part of lots of different traditions.
But what I tried to do in this book was just write about the songs. What happens in the songs? When does the music work? When doesn’t it? What’s happening? Why does a song fail? A song that is interesting to me — I don’t want it to fail. I don’t care about 90 percent of the songs on The Soft Parade and Waiting for the Sun, whether they fail or not.
My favorite line in the book is when you call “Five to One” “the band’s own youth-revolt exploitation number.” It doesn’t seem to come from a place of deep-seated disappointment. There’s a real sense of betrayal in what you’ve written about Rod Stewart, for example, when he went Hollywood. Whereas with the Doors, it’s almost like you expect them to fail a certain amount because they’re reaching for certain things.
Well, I guess the difference is that I made a more emotional connection with Rod Stewart’s songs, or they made a connection with me. It’s just different from the connections I’ve made with the Doors’ music. I love their music in different ways. With “Maggie May” and particularly “Every Picture Tells a Story,” “Reason to Believe,” so many other songs, my chest is open, my heart is beating. Everything is exposed. That’s the way I want to live. It just seems like this incredible vision of a good life, a life of complete fulfillment. That’s what I hear in Rod Stewart, in the stuff that I love the best. There’s no question that what’s going on in the Doors is chillier. It’s more thought-out, more formally experimental — it’s different. I love them both, but in a real different way.
What Rod Stewart gave up, if that’s what happened, if he gave up or lost the ability to create the emotional dramas that I was so swept up in, will be swept up in anytime I hear those songs — it seemed to me that he just turned his back on that. I remember talking about this with [music critic] Simon Frith once, and he said, “As far as Rod Stewart knows, when he was coming up, the only reason to get into pop music was to make a million dollars and fuck movie stars. That’s just what it was for.” I thought about that. And that’s OK. If [in order] to make a million dollars and find movie stars to fuck, he had to become a great artist, that’s the price you pay. That’s really how I saw it.
You can’t quite extrapolate that onto the Doors. This is a corny thing to say, but they seemed to be in it for the art.
Well, there’s Ray Manzarek saying in the origin story on the beach — Jim Morrison is singing “Moonlight Drive,” and Manzarek is saying, “Let’s form a band and make a million dollars.” And certainly Robby Krieger, in telling how he wrote “Light My Fire,” wrote this sketch of it, he was trying to write a song like “Hey Joe” by the Leaves. In other words, he was trying to write a hit. He couldn’t think of any other legitimate reason for writing a song. You have to have that. That’s great. There’s nothing wrong with it.
But they certainly thought of themselves as artists. Part of that is the jazz background of John Densmore and Ray Manzarek, and part of it is Jim Morrison wanting to be a poet, and part of it is Robby Krieger’s roots in the folk revival. His idols were Koerner, Ray & Glover. That was art. Obviously, Koerner, Ray & Glover weren’t making a million dollars. It was an incredible thrill for them when they played Minneapolis and they got to invite Tony Glover onstage and play harmonica with them.