The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

by Greil Marcus

Overview

A fan from the moment the Doors' first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610392365
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/09/2013
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	437,867
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus, When that Rough God Goes Riding, The Shape of Things to Come, Mystery Train, Dead Elvis, In the Fascist Bathroom, Double Trouble, Like a Rolling Stone, and The Old Weird America; a twentieth anniversary edition of his book Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Princeton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column “Real Life Rock Top 10” appears regularly in The Believer. He has lectured at U Cal, Berkeley, The Whitney Museum of Art, and Princeton University. He lives in Berkeley.

Editorial Reviews

Reading Mr. Marcus at his best…is like watching a surfer glide shakily down the wall of an 80-foot wave, disappear under a curl for a deathly eternity, then soar out the other end. You practically feel like applauding. He makes you run to your iPod with an ungodly itch in your cranium. You want to hear what he hears. It's as if he were daring you to get as much out of the music as he does. Mr. Marcus's acute and ardent new book…is his 13th and among his best…Mr. Marcus's achievement in The Doors is to isolate and resurrect this band's best music and set it adrift in a swirling and literate cultural context.
—The New York Times

Dwight Garner

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. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

San Antonio Express-News, August 28, 2011
“With an astounding breadth of knowledge, Marcus unmasks The Doors in his latest missive from the cultural trenches.”

Publishers Weekly, September 5, 2011
"Music critic Marcus offers a relentlessly beautiful and insightful evaluation of the music of the Doors ... 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 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 weapon were contempt on both sides.' This is an impressive tribute."
 

B&N Review, November 16, 2011
“The Doors is a reflection on the Doors' music in time and over time — and it is a book about the band like no other.”

VanityFair.com
“Just My Type” 12/11:  “Greil Marcus, music critic, cultural historian, infinite riffer and groover, has a gift for sweeping readers up in his passions…. Reading the book gives the experience of being in the studio with the band: the world outside still exists, but we’re safe in the booth—no background noise, or groupies, or memories of Mother. Just us, the music, and Marcus. It’s a pleasure.”
 

Washington Post
“Prosey, frequently brilliant…. Marcus has the ability to play tour guide in the places we think we already know. It’s exactly what makes him one of the greatest music scribes to ever do the job, and it’s what makes this book worth reading, love or hate the Doors.”

Financial Times

From the Publisher

The poetic lyrics and haunting melodies of the Doors created a distinctive sound in the 1960s, and the life and death of Jim Morrison, the charismatic, outrageous lead singer, have prompted numerous books and the Oliver Stone movie The Doors. Longtime fans will be excited to see new material written on the band but may be ultimately disappointed with this addition from well-known critic Marcus (Lipstick Traces; Invisible Republic). He attempts to focus solely on the music and present a new story, but his narrative is disjointed, as particular songs send him on rambling dissertations about everything from pop art exhibits to Charles Manson. VERDICT Doors fans will not find new material here. Better choices remain popular titles like Chuck Crisafulli's The Doors: When the Music's Over, Ray Manzarek's Light My Fire, and Stephen Davis's Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend. Still, completists will be looking for Marcus's latest. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/11.]—Rosalind Dayen, South Regional Lib., Broward Cty., FL

Library Journal

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'sBoot 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'sInherent Viceharks back to Morrison's crazed vocals on "L.A. Woman."

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

Kirkus Reviews