The Doors by Greil Marcus

Author:Greil Marcus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2011-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

“Strange Days,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967).

Electric Prunes, “I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” (Reprise, 1966, #11). In 1972 Lenny Kaye made it the lead track of his wildly influential historical compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 (Elektra).

Ike and Tina Turner, “River Deep, Mountain High” (Philles, 1966, #88).

Al Kooper, review of the Band, Music from Big Pink, Rolling Stone, August 10, 1968.

People Are Strange

UNLIKE “STRANGE DAYS,” which was a theme song, a manifesto, “People Are Strange” was just a song—the Doors had been carrying it around since 1966 before it appeared as a single in September 1967. It was a small song, kin to “Alabama Song,” with a loose, flapping honky-tonk piano giving it a sound halfway between the circus in the U.S.A. in the 1950s and a cabaret in Berlin in 1929. It stopped at #12.

Was Jim Morrison too good looking, more a swagger on two feet than a person, to feel as strange as the person in this song? Eve Babitz didn’t think so. Having propositioned him at the London Fog in early 1966, she looked back in 1991, as part of the media orchestration for The Doors—one of scores of Is-Oliver-Stone’s-Jim-Morrison-the- real Jim-Morrison? pieces. “Val Kilmer is supposed to have gotten Jim’s looks exactly right,” Babitz wrote, “but what can Val Kilmer know of having been fat all of 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.” Jim Morrison wasn’t cool, she said: “It was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors of Perception . . . what an Ojaigeeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.” His girlfriend Pamela Courson, Babitz said, “was the cool one . . . She had guns, took heroin, and was fearless in every situation . . . Whereas all he had previously brought to the moment was morbid romantic excess, he now had someone looking at him and saying, ‘Well, are you going to drive off this cliff, or what?’”

Listening to “People Are Strange,” it isn’t hard to believe the singer knows what he’s talking about. Robby Krieger’s guitar smoothly, confidently, walks Morrison into the tune, and some of that confidence stays with him, until the last word of the first verse. “Faces look ugly, when you’re alone” slips by, sung so lightly it’s like a firefly, but that lightness is gone one line later. “Streets are uneven, when you’re down”—the down almost cut off, running into a wall, face first, the word squeezed shut: down. It’s such a displacing effect—or not an effect at all, but an action, a tiny event inside a rehearsed, arranged, constructed performance—it can hide the strangeness, the truth, of the line itself: someone so out of joint the streets he or she walks are thrown out of joint. Someone else can walk down the same streets a minute later and not notice that anything is wrong.

The

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