The Doors Read Online Free PDF

chorus to the way a banjo isolated the singer in his little drama, the way the band crashing down on the same phrase a stanza later brought him into a greater drama, just one of a million people dreaming the same dream. With “Bad Romance” there was first the delirium of the production, what seemed like thousands of little pieces all spun by some all-seeing, thousand-eared over-mind into a Busby Berkeley chorus line of sounds instead of legs. There was the cruelty of the singer, mocking whoever the you in the song was, sneering, turning her back, looking back over her shoulder with a look that killed, shouting at him or her on the street so everyone can hear: “’Cause I’m a freak, baby ”—the last word squeezed in the sound, the b and the y cut off just slightly at the beginning and then at the end, so that it’s less a word than a spew of pure disgust. And then, with about a minute left on the record, everything changes. “I don’t wanna be friends”: a desperation invades the performance, trivializes, erases, everything that’s come before it, and pushes on, a completely different person now telling a completely different story, tearing at her hair, her clothes, scratching out her own eyes, then with her dada chant cutting it all off like someone breaking through the last frame of a film to shout “THE END!” I loved them both; I got lost in them each time.
    In a way, each record contained its own surprise every time it came on—but the real surprise was something else. As certain as it was that I’d hear “Bad Romance” “Bad Romance”
“Hey, Soul Sister” “Bad Romance” “Hey Soul Sister,” it was close to a sure thing that I’d hear the Doors twice, three times, even four times—and not just “Light My Fire.” Not just the one or two songs into which the radio has compressed Bob Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone”), the Rolling Stones (“Gimmie Shelter,” maybe “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” entered in the log of time as just “Satisfaction” to save conceptual space), the Byrds (“Mr. Tambourine Man”), Wilson Pickett (“In the Midnight Hour”), Sly and the Family Stone (“Everyday People), the Band (“The Weight”), all of the Doors contemporaries save the Beatles as if they were forgotten hacks forever playing the same squalid dive with the same announcement on the door, the name of the one hit maybe bigger than the name of the act because you can always remember the song even if you can’t remember who did it, even if whoever is doing it now isn’t exactly whoever did it then:
    Creedence Clearwater Revisited
(“PROUD MARY”)
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—with, turning just two pages in the newspaper entertainment listings on May 5, 2011—
    John Fogerty
(“PROUD MARY”)
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    At any given moment in 2010 you could hear “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Touch Me,” “Love Her Madly,” “L.A. Woman,” “Twentieth Century Fox,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Hello, I Love You,” “Five to One,” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Soul Kitchen,” “Roadhouse Blues.” What were all these songs doing there? And why did most of them sound so good?
    As I reveled in the music, as if I hadn’t heard it before—realizing, in some sense, that I hadn’t: that “L.A. Woman” and “Roadhouse Blues” had never sounded so big, so unsatisfied, so free in 1970 and 1971 as they did forty years later—I remembered Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie The Doors . The reviews were terrible: “What a shame to have to take your clothes off for a movie like this,” one critic wrote at the time of Meg Ryan’s nude scene.