Lifetime of Listening - THE DOORS

The best piece of advice I’ve heard someone give an aspiring rock critic is this: For God’s sake, don’t try to write like Greil Marcus.

THE DOORS
A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
By Greil Marcus

It was meant as a compliment. Mr. Marcus’s style — brainy but fevered, as if the fate of Western society hung on a chord progression — is nearly impossible to mimic without sounding portentous and flatulent. This voice is so hard to pull off that 15 percent of the time even Mr. Marcus can’t do it. He takes a pratfall in the attempt.

But, oh my, that other 85 percent. Reading Mr. Marcus at his best — on Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Sly Stone, the Band, Sleater-Kinney, Dock Boggs or Randy Newman, to name just a few of his obsessions over the years — 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, “The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years,” is his 13th and among his best. I say this as someone who has never cared deeply or even shallowly about the Doors, a band that to my ears (I was 6 in 1971, the year Jim Morrison died in Paris) has always been classic-rock sonic wallpaper. “The End” sounded ruinous and sublime in “Apocalypse Now.” But please don’t make me listen to “Hello, I Love You” or “Touch Me” again. I’m pretty sure Jose Feliciano will be singing “Light My Fire” in hell.

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. He catches “the sweep, the grandeur, the calmness” of their songs. He underscores Jim Morrison’s otherworldly appeal: “Unlike any rock ’n’ roll singer since ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ devoured the world’s airwaves, he had Elvis’s Greek-god looks, his seductive vampire’s hooded eyes; like Elvis he communicated the disdain of the beautiful for the ordinary world.”

He captures, excellently, how Morrison unnerved, during the Charles Manson years, everyone who saw the band. “Here’s this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty,” Mr. Marcus writes, “and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.”

Don’t come to “The Doors” looking for a history of the band; Mr. Marcus dispenses with that in one short paragraph in front. Don’t arrive looking for another overview of Morrison’s childhood, or a fresh account of his arrest in Miami in 1969 for exposing himself onstage.

Don’t come looking for hagiography, either. He’s fully aware that some of the band’s music “carries the smell of falsity, pretension, bad poetry.” Some of the Doors’ music was so fetid, Mr. Marcus writes, that “Morrison sounded as if he had a bag over his face, so no one would know who was singing it.”

This book is broken down into short chapters, most of them named for songs Mr. Marcus either admires or has something to say about: “Roadhouse Blues,” “L.A. Woman,” “The End,” “When the Music’s Over,” “Soul Kitchen.” He spends a lot of time listening to bootleg live performances of these songs, as well as concert moments like the band’s 11-minute cover of the Elvis song “Mystery Train.” He is a close reader of the band’s “language of dread.”

Mr. Marcus is old enough — he was born in 1945 — to have seen the Doors perform live a dozen or so times. He’s old enough, too, that those of us who’ve kept up with his work over the years worry that he might lose a step someday. He hasn’t. And he can still surprise you. In this book he professes his admiration for Oliver Stone’s oft criticized 1991 movie “The Doors,” which starred Val Kilmer as Morrison. “The movie should have been awful,” Mr. Marcus writes. “Instead it was terrifying.”

He surprises in other ways. Who’d have thought Mr. Marcus would have loved Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Romance,” or (it hurts me a bit to type this) Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister”? Or that he’s a fan of the 1990 Christian Slater movie “Pump Up the Volume”?

Along the way, in “The Doors,” Mr. Marcus bounces his assessments of the band’s music against the work of other musicians, writers and artists, from Thomas Pynchon to the blues singer Robert Johnson, to the dramatist Dennis Potter and the Firesign Theater.

He quotes others shrewdly. Here’s a small X-ray of the Oliver Stone movie from the writer Eve Babitz: “Val Kilmer is supposed to have gotten Jim’s looks exactly right, but what can Val Kilmer know of having been fat all his life and suddenly one summer taking so much LSD and waking up a prince? Val Kilmer has always been a prince, so he can’t have the glow.”

Mr. Marcus dilates at length, too, on a quotation from Kim Gordon, the bassist for the band Sonic Youth. “People pay,” Ms. Gordon wrote in 1983 about the best rock musicians, “to see others believe in themselves.” The author follows this tangent a long way, and follows others too, including the way FM radio has compressed so many careers into a few songs and the idiocies of ’60s nostalgia.

He is pointed about why bands need hit songs. “If ‘Light My Fire’ hadn’t made the Doors into stars,” Mr. Marcus suggests, “you can hear how their music could have curdled into artiness, everything self-referential, post-modern, each note a parody of something else, not a word needing to mean what it said, the group more popular in Paris or Milan.”

The Doors will never mean to me what they mean to Mr. Marcus. But this book means more to me than most rock books. Thankfully there’s little history, little reporting and few facts in it. As Jim Morrison said in a 1967 interview, in a line Mr. Marcus happily reprints, “Critical essays are really where it’s at.”