The rock world was still staggering from the back-to-back deaths of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin when they were suddenly and mysteriously joined in pop star heaven by Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors.
Hendrix’s aura has been kept financially floating by virtue of many posthumous live albums and filmed tributes, and Joplin is famed by her biopic, as a result of two recent biographies and a court dispute over the nature of her death. Morrison is barely mentioned but with recent live albums released a plenty and now the newly released London Fog Box Set of the Doors early live set at the infamous tiny venue, The near future, we are told, Jerry Hopkin’s book on Morrison will appear in print .
The Doors peaked early, with one remarkably strong year or so, By the time of his death, Morrison was definitely seemed to be losing interest. Yet for a while he and his group were one of rock’s premier attractions and in many ways, some fortunate and some not, one of the most influential. In early 1967 the word on The Doors came from two sources: Crawdaddy! and Murray the K’s WOR-FM show, where Buffalo Springfield proclaimed The Doors their favorite L.A. band. And The Doors‘ debut album was a singularly special event on a year that was brimming with stellar first efforts (Moby Grape, Country Joe, Buffalo Springfield). There was something foreboding about The Doors, something candlelit about the lyrical imagery and entirely sensual about the instrumental interplay. One is tempted to describe them as, from the very first lines of their very first album (“You know the day destroys the night/Night divides the day”), the original dialectical rock band. Morrison the writer, self-consciously poetic, dealt in contradiction: light/dark, death/life, water/fire, to a greater extent than any other rock lyricist. In that winter, The Doors was an underground experience of mystery and intrigue.
By summer, of course, it was impossible to avoid the song Light My Fire, an ever present invocation that marks its time as precisely as Sgt. Pepper and that became part of the general vocabulary. Around the same time, The Doors began appearing in concert on the east coast.
The initial live Doors shows were hardly satisfactory. Ray Manzarek supplied the bass line on organ, More crucial, however, were Morrison’s shortcomings. He had yet to accommodate his live approach from what he used in clubs to one suited to the concert hall. The sets were short, 30-45 minutes, and consisted of rehashed album material that was neither effectively staged nor good-naturedly spontaneous.
As it happens, they still had some reserve life in them. In March 1968, Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East and on the second weekend, following the Janis Joplin opening night , The Band played one of the most mesmerizing performances you could have hoped to witness. After dismal sets by Ars Nova and Chrome Syrcus, The Doors came out and spellbound an audience with a show of intensive drama and uncommonly well-played music. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore locked into a wholly cohesive, responsive unit fronted by a man who appeared possessed.
Rock theatre was what it was on that practically virginal Fillmore stage, and there had been nothing quite like it before in those days before showman like Alice, David and Iggy. Lit by a single spot and accompanied by a subtle light show, Morrison dove head on into When the Music’s Over , plunging into a two-hour set that included the full-length version of Celebration of the Lizard, a bizarre mixture of erotic rock and neo-beat poetics. What was remarkable was the absolute control that Morrison held over his material and over the audience. Over the previous summer a mess of marvelous rock was played in New York City by The Who, The Yardbirds, The Dead and many more groups who obviously surpassed The Doors in terms of rock kinetics and energy, but this was different. That was brilliant rock for dancing, shouting and destroying; this was Performance
At that concert, The Doors screened a short film cued to promote their newest single, The Unknown Soldier. It was a crude work, influenced, I know now, by Godard and Bunuel, and filled with Morrison-as-martyr iconography, simulated vomiting and political montage. And yet it worked. Morrison the U.C.L.A. film student knew how to use Morrison the performer in an effective manner and, as should be evident from his interviews and his book of poetry, he was both highly intuitive and intellectually curious about the theories and possibilities of cinema. It would have been no surprise had he became a competent, if heavy-handed, filmmaker. “The Unknown Soldier” brought the crowd to its feet and for an encore The Doors did a new, extended The End.
Jim Morrison and The Doors were, at that moment, superstars. It was a very short moment. The follow-up single to “Soldier” was Hello, I Love You, and the third album, Waiting for the Sun, was a little uninspired. “Celebration of the Lizard” was printed on the inside of the uni-pack, but a mere four minutes of it was on the record . In black and white, moreover, it seemed silly, an unstructured tour-de-forceby a mediocre poet.
There were some memorable television appearances on Ed Sullivan and Jonathan Winters (on which Morrison tore apart some scenery) and on a PBS special devoted to them that had Richard Goldstein and Al Aronowitz debating their worth as well as the premiere of ‘The Soft Parade’, an epic work with all of the pretense and none of the style of their earlier attempts at this form .
The Morrison legacy is one remarkable album that fuses for all time his concern with blues and theatre (Willie Dixon and Brecht/Weill) and a dynamic on-stage persona that he could not sustain. He is also the ancestor of all those rockers, with theatrical pretensions that revolve around death, mysticism and evil sexuality.
The Fat Angel Sings 