"The Doors" examines Jim Morrison's poetry and lyrics to find if they hold up to the mythology.

Greil Marcus sees '60s icons through filter of today

Many of us born long after the 1960s ended encounter the Doors for the first time around the onset of puberty. Passed a copy of The Doors or Strange Days, we were bedazzled by the entrancement of Jim Morrison's mystical-shamanic poetry. But are the Doors, like the novels of Thomas Wolfe, midnight snacking, or self-pity, an adolescent pleasure better remembered than reencountered?

Music fans - and those of us who write about music for a living - utter Greil Marcus's name with a certain hushed reverence appropriate to the man who wrote Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, two of the finest books ever written about rock 'n' roll. Writing about Dylan, Elvis, or the Sex Pistols, Marcus provided a tantalizing glimpse of the secret underground rivers of mythos coursing beneath the music. Marcus is undoubtedly attracted to Morrison for the same self-aware mythological quality. But where Dylan and Presley touched the musical godhead, Morrison groans under the burden of immortality. I began thinking that there was a lot less here than met the eye. Why was there so little art that seemed to live up to its name, and so little music that lived up to that art? Marcus, as it happens, is speaking about pop art, but in many ways, it feels like the truest statement yet made about the Doors themselves.

The Doors is a mixtape book, with each chapter devoted to a particular Doors song, and like a good mixtape, it hopscotches around, taking in Elvis (a Marcus obsession), the Manson murders, Van Morrison (subject of a 2010 book by Marcus), Neil Young, and Oliver Stone's Doors biopic. Marcus is at his best when he listens creatively, returning from an exploration deep into the jungle of Doors songs with a report on what he has discovered: As the music edged into its seventh minute, he says of their cover of Elvis' Mystery Train, it seemed to have developed a mind of its own: you can hear the song musing over itself, the wheels feeling the tracks, the engine wondering at the rightness of a machine tied to a road of iron, the machine achieving a lightness, a weightlessness, that makes the tracks disappear. Then again, the Doors also make Marcus assemble sentences like this one: There is the drifting chase after a blue bus, a chase that is a matter of someone walking slowly, deliberately, no matter how fast the bus is going, knowing that sooner or later he'll catch it and climb on. Jim Morrison: bad influence on writers and poets of all stripes since 1966. Even Greil Marcus, apparently.

Aesthetic infelicities aside, Marcus's larger point is that as a casualty of the 1960s, Morrison was swallowed by the very same mythology he helped to create. This is what is terrifying: the notion that the Sixties was no grand, simple, romantic time to sell others as a nice place to visit, but a place, even as it is created, people know they can never really inhabit, and never escape. Even as he lauds the Doors, Marcus acknowledges the strange afterlife of the band, and particularly Morrison's posthumous rock canonization at the hands of fans not yet born when he died in a Paris room. The Doors live on where other, perhaps better bands have vanished, and Marcus is too smart a critic to pretend to know why: “Don’t worry about what will last, and what won’t; don’t flatter yourself that your intent, your commitment to the enduring, is anything but vanity. What lasts for a decade is no more than a conspiracy of taste. What lasts for a century is an accident.

Critical essays are really where it's at, Morrison once said, in a statement that serves as Marcu's epigraph. I concur wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but this particular critical essay suffers - perhaps unfairly, but suffers nonetheless - from a paucity of depth in its choice of subject. For anyone who is no longer 14 years old, it may be challenging to take Jim Morrison's pronouncements seriously.

Source: The Boston Globe