The Doors Read Online Free PDF Page A

plane of ordinary life, lets the listener into the song, and sets the words free to find their traveling companions. No element in the music seems to anticipate any other, to call any other forth; the performance is a dance around a fire, with the
pace determined by the flickers, which can’t be anticipated, that are never the same—not until the set piece in the center, when the singer says he wants to kill his father and fuck his mother. 1 The suggestion of the singer reenacting the murder of the Clutter family, but from inside the family, the truly suggestive moment of this part of the song, is erased by the cheapness of shoving Oedipus into the drama: the singer goes quietly into his sister’s room, then into his brother’s room, he could leave them both dead, he could just be making sure they’re asleep, but when he gets to his father and his mother—when he gets to what one friend calls “the ‘Hello Faddah, hello Muddah’ extravaganza”—you realize you’ve heard this story before. That gorgeous tone for single words that make a drama so much richer than this one here changes the white marble of Michelangelo’s David to the plaster of the statuettes you can buy in the gift shop.
    Minutes later, with the music gathering itself for its final charge, the real drama takes place. Krieger, Manzarek, and Densmore are pushing for a centrifugal momentum that will create its own Big Bang, until each piece flies away from the other; Morrison, his one-legged, spread-eagled stage dance now playing out on his tongue, is the controlling rhythmic force. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he snaps, snarls, talking into a mirror, testing the word for its feel in his mouth, finding the same brittle, syncopated click with which Krieger opened the theme, the word fuck buried but viscerally changing shape
each time he spits it out, the word cutting itself short, fuk , distorting, fut , cracking, fak , curling around itself, fug .
    Everything slows down again, and the song returns to the beckoning, the foreshadowing, of its first moments. Wherever it was you started from, you have traveled somewhere else, and no time at all has passed. As the Firesign Theatre had their college student say when he entered his time machine, “I will be gone for a thousand years, but to you it will seem only like a minute.”
    Â 
    â€œThe End,” The Doors (Elektra, 1967).
    Firesign Theatre, “The Further Adventures of Nick Danger,” from How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All? (Columbia, 1969). The group’s Everything You Know Is Wrong (Columbia, 1974) includes a groaning old-Indian parody of the snake section of “The End.”

The Doors in the So-called Sixties
    F OR THREE YEARS, visiting my father in the nursing home where he lived, I would drive across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley to San Francisco and back again, twenty or twenty-five minutes over, twenty or twenty-five minutes back. In the spring of 2010 I made an interesting discovery: in those forty or fifty minutes, switching stations to find something I wanted to hear, cutting from 98.5 to 104.5 to 103.7 to 107.7 to 90.7 as soon as a song I liked was over, sometimes catching signals floating in and out, half a tune before it broke up or was drowned out by something else, I was all but guaranteed to hear all or part of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” at least three times, and Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” at least twice. This was not a surprise; those were the big hits of the season, and both were
wonderful—bottomless, each in its own way. With “Hey, Soul Sister,” there was the delirium of the guy dancing in his bedroom as he watched his favorite video on his computer screen, over and over just as people all over the world were now listening to him. The song changed in its emotional meter from one nonsense verse to the next, from the impassioned