Formed
in 7/1965 in Los Angeles, CA
Disbanded
in 1973
Styles
- Rock & Roll, Psychedelic
The
Doors, one of the most influential and controversial rock bands of the
1960s, were formed in Los
Angeles
in 1965 by UCLA film students Ray Manzarek, keyboards, and Jim Morrison,
vocals, with drummer
John
Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger. The group never added a bass player,
and their sound was
dominated
by Manzarek's electric organ work and Morrison's deep, sonorous voice,
with which he sang
and
intoned his highly poetic lyrics. The group signed to Elektra Records in
1966 and released its first album,
The
Doors, featuring the hit "Light My Fire," in 1967.
The
Doors were somewhat of an anomaly in the rock pantheon. In their heyday
they weren't folk or jazz
and
while some rock critics called their music "acid rock" they weren't part
of the peace-and-love Airplane-Dead-Quicksilver acid-rock sound of San
Francisco. They had nothing in common with the
English
invasion, or even pop music in general though they generated three Number
1 hit singles, and
while
New York City was good to the Doors-almost to the point of adopting them
as their own-they
were
still a league apart from the Velvet Underground, despite a mutual affinity
for dark and somber
themes.
They weren't even part of the folk-rock scene which dominated Los Angeles
in those days, in
the
music of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the like. Even among the hierarchy
that includes Elvis,
Joplin,
and Hendrix, they were a world unto themselves. " A strange and haunting
world," as Jim himself
once
said, "suggestive of a new and wild west."
To
get the best view of Jim Morrison you must go through the Doors and the
most important thing to
remember
about the Doors is that they were a band and each individual formed a side
of the diamond
that
was the whole. One night, on the road, just before the concert was to begin,
a disc jockey climbed
on
the stage to introduce the act: "Ladies and gentlemen, " he announced to
the audience, "please welcome
Jim
Morrison and the Doors!" There was the customary applause. As the DJ walked
down the stairs leading
from
the stage, Jim pulled him aside and said, "Uh-uh, man, you go back up there
and introduce us
right."
The DJ panicked. "What did I say? What did I do? " "It's The Doors, " Jim
said, "the name of the band
is
The Doors."
Here
was a band whose unexpressed goal was nothing short of musical alchemy-they
intended to wed
rock
music unlike any ever heard before with poetry and that hybrid with theater
and drama.
They
aimed to unite performer and audience by plugging directly into the Universal
Mind. They would
settle
for nothing less. For them that meant risk, no gimmicks, nothing up their
sleeves, no elaborate
staging
or special effects-only naked, dangerous reality, piercing the veil of
maya with the music's ability
to
awaken man's own dormant and eternal powers.
The
Doors constantly courted their muse-that is to say, Morrison courted his
muse, and the band followed;
the
band stayed with him. Jim believed one cannot simply will the muse; the
writer or artist's power lies
in
his ability to receive, as well as invent, and it was the artist's duty
to do everything possible to increase
his
powers of reception. To achieve this end the nineteenth-century poet Arthur
Rimbaud had advocated
a
systematic "rational derangement of all the senses." Why? "To achieve the
unknown." How? Any way
possible.
Jim's
fondness, and search, for the unknown is well documented in the following
pages.
"There
are things known," Jim would say in a quote often attributed to William
Blake but in fact
Jim's
own, "and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors." But
Blake did say, in his first
Proverb
of Hell, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." And the next
line down, "Prudence
is
a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity." It needn't be added that Jim
did not court the maid and
courted
capacity whenever he could. Jim drank and yelled and pleaded, cajoled and
danced in inspiration
tounite
the band, to ignite the audience, to set the night on fire, once and for
all, forever.
Sadly,
it was Jim's commitment to this standard, set so early in his professional
career, that finally did in
both
the man and the band. Jim Morrison was a man who would not, could not,
and refused to compromise
himself
or his art. And herein lay his innocence and purity-his summary blessing
and curse. To go all the
way
or die trying. All or nothing. The ecstatic risk. Because he would not
manufacture or cheapen what
he
wrote, he could not fake despair or retend ecstasy. He would not merely
entertain, or go through the
motions;
he was brilliant and desperate, he was driven by an unrelenting need to
"test the bounds of
reality,"
to probe the sacred, explore the profane. And it made him mad...mad to
create, mad to be real.
And
these qualities made him volatile, dangerous and conflicted. He sought
consolation and solace in the
same
elements that had initially inspired him and helped him to create:
intoxicants.
The
French Surrealist Antonin Artaud's theories regarding confrontation, as
expounded in his thesis The
Theatre
and Its Double, were a significant influence on Jim and the group. In one
of the book's most powerful
essays,
Artaud draws a parallel between the plague and theatrical action, maintaining
that dramatic activity
must
be able to effect a catharsis in the spectator in the same way that the
plague purified mankind.
The
goal? "So they will be terrified and awaken. I want to awaken them. They
do not realize they are already dead."
Jim
would, in time, scream "Wake Up!" a thousand times, a thousand nights,
in an effort to shake the
audience
out of their unconsciousness.
"Mystery
festivals should be unforgettable events, casting their shadows over the
whole of one's future life,
creating
experiences that transform existence," Aristotle wrote. Doors concerts-Jim's
performances, when
successful,
accomplished such a transformation. Plutarch attempted to describe the
process of dying in terms
of
a similar initiation: "Wandering astray, down frightening paths in darkness
that lead nowhere; then
immediately
before the end of all terrible things, panic and amazement." There are
magical sounds and
dances
and sacred words passed, and then "the initiate, set free and loose from
all bondage, walks about,
celebrating
the festival with other sacred and pure people and he looks down on the
uninitiated..."
Which
comes damn close to describing the Doors at the peak of their powers: Riding
the snake,
the
serpent, ancient and archetypal, strange yet disturbingly familiar, powerfully
evocative, sensuous
and
evil, strong, forbidding. When Morrison intoned, "The killer awoke before
dawn and put his boots on/he
took
a face from the ancient gallery/and he walked on down the hall," we were
walking down that hall
with
him, in dread, paralyzed, powerless to stop, as the music wove a web of
hysteria around us, wrapping
us
ever tighter in its web, Morrison enacting the tragedy, the patricide,
the horror, unspeakable torment.
WE
SAW IT, WE FELT IT, we were there. We were hypnotized. Reality opened up
its gaping maw and
swallowed
us whole as we tumbled into another dimension. And Morrison was the only
guide: "And I'm
right
here, I'm going too, release control, we're breaking through..." And then
we did.
"Lost
in a Roman wilderness of pain." It wasn't merely a line in a verse. It
was an epitaph for the moment,
a
photograph of the collective unconscious. The symbols were timeless and
the words contained stored-up
images
and energies thousands of years old, now resurrected. Early in the group's
career, Jim tried to explain
some
of this to a journalist: "A Doors concert is a public meeting called by
us for a special dramatic
discussion.
When we perform, we're participating in the creation of a world and we
celebrate that
with
the crowd." A few days before he flew to Paris, to his death, Jim gave
to me what would be his
last
statement to the press: "For e, it was never really an act, those so-called
performances. It was
a
life-and-death thing; an attempt to communicate, to involve many people
in a private world of thought."
It
was the mid-to-late 1960s and bands were singing of love and peace and
acid was passed out, but
with
the Doors it was different. The emerald green night world of Pan, god of
music and panic, was
never
more resplendent than in the Doors' music: the breathless gallop in "Not
to Touch the Earth," the
incipient
horror of "Celebration of the Lizard," the oedipal nightmare of "The End,"
the cacophonous
torment
of "Horse Latitudes," and the dark, uneasy undertones of "Can't See Your
Face in My Mind," the
weary
impending doom of "Hyacinth House," the alluring loss of consciousness
found in "Crystal Ship."
When
the music was over, there was a stillness, a serenity, a connection with
life and a confirmation of
existence.
In showing us Hell, the Doors took us to Heaven. In evoking death, they
made us feel alive.
By
confronting us with horror, we were freed to celebrate with them joy. By
confirming our sense of
hopelessness
and sorrow they led us to freedom. Or at least they tried.
Of
course, psychedelic drugs as well as alcohol could encourage the unfolding
of events. A Greek
musicologist
gives his description of a Bacchic initiation as catharsis: "This is the
purpose of Bacchic
initiation,
that the depressive anxiety of people, produced by their state of life,
or some misfortune, be
cleared
away through melodies and dances of the ritual."
When
Jim was asked by a fan mag how he prepared for stardom he answered, "I
stopped getting haircuts."
What
he didn't say was, "and started dropping acid." Like so many many others,
Jim took drugs to expand
his
consciousness, to gain entry into worlds otherwise locked and sealed off.
Aware of a shaman's relationship
to
his inner-world via peyote, and Castaneda's experiences with Don Juan,
Jim ingested psychedelics.
Like
Coleridge and the opium eaters, he was held spellbound by the artificial
paradise, the hypnagogic
architecture,
the milky seas and starless nights. As with Huxley, Jim marveled before
the splendiferous
geometry
and ancient secrets trembling on the verge of revelation. And like the
romantic poets, he reveled
in
the altering of his senses with anything available-wine, hash, whiskey.
If absinthe had been around during
his
lifetime, Morrison would have been an absinthe drinker. In The Varieties
of Religious Experience,
William
James wrote what Jim already knew: "Sobriety diminishes, discriminates,
and says no; drunkenness
expands,
unites, and says yes." And when the visions no longer pleased or surprised
him, when intoxication
no
longer provided him with the expansive awareness he sought, as Dionysus,
the god of ecstasy, became
Bacchus,
the representative for drunkenness, Jim turned more and more to alcohol
to numb the pain
and
to revel in unconsciousness. At first he drank for the pure joy of it.
"I enjoy drinking," he admitted. "It loosens
people
up and stimulates conversation. Somehow it's like gambling; you go out
for a night of drinking, and
you
don't know where you'll end up the next morning. It could be good, could
be a disaster, it's a throw of
the
dice. The difference between suicide and slow capitulation."
