The Doors of Perception

A Glance Back at a Singular Band & a Fading Era

Yesterday was December 8, the day John Lennon was shot in 1980. There was a bit of media coverage, but less and less each year. Forty-two years later, it’s not the dark, painful anniversary, perhaps for anyone, that it used to be. Hard to imagine…. a world where many young people don’t know who in the heck John Lennon was. The day before yesterday, I saw someone on TV ask a Gen Z’er if they knew what day would “live in infamy.” They didn’t know. If December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, can be fading from instant cultural association, December 8 must be even more endangered.

I’ve been reading Riders on the Storm, a book by the Doors’ drummer John Densmore. Reading part of the final chapter last night, Densmore mentions Jim Morrison’s birthday for the first time in the book… 1943, December 8. Hmmm, strange serendipity. After buying it a year ago, at last spending nearly a month with this book, I finally land upon December 8. On December 8. “Weird scenes inside the gold mine,” indeed.

In my life few public figures loom larger than John Lennon. One who comes close is Jim Morrison. One of them came into the world and the other went out on December 8. Both were gone way too soon. Both remain very much alive and active in my psyche.

I don’t like living in the past. Every time I indulge, I am pricked by Don Henley’s admonition, “Don’t look back, you can never look back.” Of course, this is nigh impossible. Yet, as you get older such retro-perspective is basically endemic. And, certainly, there is much to be perceived, experienced and learned from backward glances, with or without rose-colored glasses. It’s strange growing old; the phenomenon of the old world dying out, figuratively and literally, is queer, disquieting and unsteadying; sturdy old handrails of culture turn to sawdust.

Wasn’t it just a few years ago when everyone knew and loved the Beatles, and, love them or hate them, everybody at least knew of the Doors? We were the Baby Boomers, the generation that glorified youthful idealism, nonconformity and rebellion. Even as we eventually morphed into as staid and materialistic as any other generation, we (at least many of us) have yet to entirely surrender that self-identity. Because of our sheer numbers, we carried our adolescent culture well beyond the normal pull-date for such silliness. Now, even as we fall like flies, to some degree, we still dominate. Five decades later, remakes of our old television shows are standard entertainment fare. THE cultural phenomenon of our generation, the Beatles, are still revered by at least a significant chunk of kids these days. That could not have been said for us about our parents’ idols, much less grand parents’. The Sixties, in particular, are still regarded as cool. That much is true. I was there. I was seven when they started, and 17 when they ended… I think the perfect perspective on the whole wondrous, frightening, hopeful, disenchanting shebang.

Yet the slippery slope has been breached. Like every other decade in history, the Sixties are, finally, in the process of being forgotten. New generations with new interests, new identities, new cultural touchstones, new hopes, dreams, worries, fears are now in play. They don’t want or need our old baggage taking up space in their collective consciousness. I get it, and agree, even as I sense that some of the tradeoffs are for inferior product. Music is one of those realms. I could present multiple exhibits, but here, since I’m lately into their story, I’ll simply submit the Doors.

I sense that Jim Morrison and the Doors are already even more lost to American culture than the Beatles may ever be. The Beatlemania phase probably locked some shimmer of the Beatles existence into permanent media memory, if not much more than a side note for most normal citizens of these and decades to come, perhaps like we, as youth, were only vaguely aware of the phenomena of Rudy Vallee or Bing Crosby, the teen sensations of 1929 and 1939, respectively. As for the Doors, even after 100 million records sold worldwide, a string of hit singles, public scrutiny, scorn and sensation, induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 (now nearly three decades ago itself), their once bright light seems another shard of the Sixties evaporating into the ether.

Concurrent with the book, I’ve been streaming the Doors albums. Ha! What a world… instead of just listening to the actual albums I have in my collection. And it’s all coming back to me. The Doors! These are my boys. Countless hours spent listening, alone in my bedroom, to that music, those lyrics. I know every guitar lick, every drum fill, every organ passage. Jim’s voice. Like nobody else… before or since. Such strange words (with most of the content of the first two albums written in 1965–66… the days of Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees!). What do they mean? I still don’t know. Densmore admits he still doesn’t know. Lennon was the Walrus. Safe, funny enough an image. Jim was the Lizard King! What the hell is that?

Jim Morrison was a unique figure in rock and roll history: the first and only Lizard King, it turns out, an agitated complexity, a tortured sage, the first pop music shaman, the first dark poet to spill out surreal nightmares to catchy melodies. He was the first real screamer in pop music. Not fun Little Richard — style yelps (later copied by countless others, including John and Paul), but true primal screeching banshees flying out of his vocal cords. Consistently magnificent in his vocal delivery, both in the studio and on stage, Morrison was wildly inconsistent in his non-vocal stage performance, sometimes barely moving for an entire concert, seemingly impaled on a microphone-stand cross, and sometimes crazy-dancing like a stoned wizard shaking his magic maraca before collapsing and writhing on the stage floor, or sometimes leaping into the audience. Not infrequently he would berate his own audience. He could well be considered the first punk rocker, his awkward, jerky writhing and the frenzied Doors’ audiences a precursor to the sneering vocalists and mosh pits to come. A decade after his death, a conga line of punk front-men would copy Jim’s movements, profanity, his post-modern deconstructionism and disdain for establishment, authority, tradition, decorum.

But the Doors were much more than Jim. Even as № 76 on Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists,” Robby Krieger has to be the most underrated guitarist of the rock era… by a landslide. I’m watching the Doors’ concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968, and Robby is coaxing all manner of howls and wails and distortion and explosions out of his Gibson. How is this possible? In the days when there were no effect pedals… only a volume pedal? Hendrix himself had nothing on Krieger for sonic strangeness emanating from a guitar. Sure Jimi was faster, but probably couldn’t play flamenco… Robby could (listen to “Spanish Caravan”!!!). Krieger also wrote some of the Doors biggest hits, including “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me” and “Love Her Madly.”

Densmore’s jazz-influenced drumming is impeccably suited to emphasize the drama of the Doors’ lyrics and Jim’s pyrotechnics, while Ray Manzarek’s slinky organ is the signature sound, a cartoonish switchblade that slices up the spine. Indeed, how is it possible for a 3-piece band, centered around a cheezy organ, capable of creating music that scares the hell out of you? Like diabolical clowns, the Doors did it again and again.

In Venice Beach, Ray founded the Doors in 1965, the year “Wooly Bully” was the top hit, a novelty song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, featuring nonsense words… and a chintzy organ. It would be a year and a half before Elektra Records would introduce them to the nation, during which interlude pop music experienced a radical evolution in thematic and lyrical heft. Rougher, tougher, deeper, more experimental, more capable musicians, songwriters and singers suddenly emerged from everywhere at once. The Doors would be among the most proficient at this new, higher level of music.

I had not turned 15 years old when I first heard “Light My Fire.” It was a singular tune; I had never heard anything like it. The singer’s baritone reminded me of the Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley, so, having never seen any images of the band, I imagined the singer similarly tall, lanky, clean-cut, plain-looking conservative type. It would be months in those prehistoric, pre-MTV, pre-internet days before I would glimpse this assemblage called the Doors, at first take a rather uninteresting name for a band in those days of the “Who,” as well as the “Guess Who,” “Buffalo Springfield,” “Jefferson Airplane,” “Creedence Clearwater Revival,” “Moby Grape” to name but a few. Only later would I learn that the name was derived from a phrase by William Blake, “the doors of perception,” and realized there was perhaps more actual meaning to this name than any other flippantly-coined band.

When I finally saw the cover of the Doors’ first album, I was stunned. Instead of Bill Medley (though, oddly, he and Jim do actually have a resemblance), the Doors singer was a Greek god, perfect body, perfect hair, unsmiling perfect face, the ultimate rock star, then and now. The look drew me in. But more than that. That voice. Those melodies. Those lyrics. Those licks. I haven’t listened to these songs for decades. They now sound fresh, almost like new, but no… they are old friends. I’m trying to be critical. Was I a dumb kid, falling for treacle, as I did for Herman and –egads!- Freddie and the Dreamers a few years earlier? Do they hold up… thematically, lyrically, melodically, vocally, aurally? Not only do they hold up, they still carve out a niche for themselves in the pantheon of rock and roll era music that literally no one else occupies. The Doors make everything on the radio these days seem like shallow, pathetic, polished tripe.

My long postponed re-listening confirms: the Doors weren’t just frickin’ sensational, they were epic! Densmore calls them a “band of the dark.” Maybe so. But not to me. As a teenager I couldn’t fathom the pain and anguish that Jim was going through, apparent now, to me, in many of his lyrics. But at the time, for me, the Doors were the light. They WERE the Doors of perception. What a tangled world they portrayed. It sounded weird and exciting. I have to get out of this boring, podunk town and check all of this out! I’ve got to get into a love of fire. I’ve got to get to Love Street, where the creatures meet. I’ve got to experience a moonlight drive. I’ve got to ride a Crystal Ship. Horse Latitudes! Cold, grinding grizzly bear jaws! Ewww…. What other details of history do I need to know about? Hey, I’m strange, too! Make me free.

That was more than half a century ago. Kapowie goes my brain!

When Jim died on July 3, 1971, Brian Jones, Jimi and Janis Joplin had already passed… all of them 27-years old. Of these, Jim’s demise hit me the hardest, by far. I‘d’ never been a serious Stones fan, and while I admired Jimi’s talent, I had none of his records — though I wore out a tape version of “All Along the Watchtower.” Jim, however, was my guy. The Sixties were officially over, and so was my innocence. It had survived the political assassinations of the Sixties but not the loss of Jim Morrison.

There had been troubling warnings. I was 18 now, and had watched him transform into a puffy caricature with a big, ugly beard. The obscenity trial in Miami had already further marred the Doors’ vibe. What was he doing? The Greek god had already died; he didn’t make it out of the Sixties, replaced by a tubby imposter.

I don’t think I ever properly processed Jim’s death, and the subsequent demise of the Doors. The band, without Jim, released two albums but I was uninterested. Then, without fanfare, they called it quits. I barely noticed. I was now at college and had many other things on my mind. A few years later, my best friend was killed; five years after that, John was assassinated. I think Jim’s death had numbed me to the point of almost expecting the worst of the world… the very opposite of what the Sixties stood for, an Easy Ride. There was only one way to get back into balance, back to loving the world… Break on Through to the other side. I managed, but it took awhile.

It’s been 42 years now since that horrible day in front of the Dakota when a fan, no less, robbed the world of John Lennon. How come I’m just now realizing it was also Jim’s birthday?

Even as I left them behind shortly after Jim’s passing, I think I carried the Doors with me a whole lot more than I ever suspected. There were telltale signs, such as when each August swooned feeling compelled to hum “Summer’s Almost Gone.” I used to think of them as America’s best-ever rock band. I maybe still do. By what criteria? I don’t know… perhaps philosophical integrity. Just for grins, I did a quickie web search. A 2021 ranking of the “50 Greatest American Bands” by UltimateClassicRock.com lists the Doors as № 6. Ahead of them: Aerosmith (really?), Creedence Clearwater Revival, Van Halen (you gotta be kidding!), Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and the Beach Boys. Behind the Doors in this list are the Talking Heads, R.E.M., the Eagles, Simon and Garfunkel (not really a “band”) № 10. Well at least this source still remembers the Doors (could be a bunch of geezers running it). Notably, all of these bands date back at least 40 years.

How blessed were we to have been alive, and old enough to appreciate, not just the Beatles, but all of the other outstanding musical geniuses of that general era? I suppose that every generation looks back to its youth with rose-colored glasses, elevating their generational heroes upon an ever-rising pedestal. Yet, I think, objectively, that music stands head and shoulders over the vast bulk of what came before and since.

So I’m still looking back. Before I “slip into unconsciousness,” I’ll give myself a little bit more time to “linger long on Love Street.” It’s a bittersweet indulgence, a familiar balm in these cursed times — direct from a time which was also cursed (maybe they all are) — ginning up pangs of blissful remembrance but also melancholy and loss… of youth and friends and family and innocence. The instantly recognizable sound of the Doors is still capable of haunting, with a wise sage singer running along the edges of insanity. More so than any other artists of our generation, including Dylan, they warned us all of this was coming. The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.

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No Hate.
No Violence.
All Life is Sacred.
The Universe is Magnificent & Beautiful.
Love is the Way.

Copyright 2022, Rusty Reid