The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years
A fan from the moment the Doors' first album arrived, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Filmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, Greil Marcus muses on how one could drive from here to there, changing fom one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult both of Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later it is a new story.
3.3 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Music, Stage & Screen |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
224 |
| RRP |
£14.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-0571279944 |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber |
| |
A fan from the moment the Doors' first album arrived, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Filmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, Greil Marcus muses on how one could drive from here to there, changing fom one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult both of Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later it is a new story.
Reviews
The New York Times
Dwight Garner
“Mr. Marcus’s acute and ardent new book 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 ... 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.”
15/11/2011
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The Times
Unknown
“... at times Marcus slips out of deep perception and into showboating. He states that Morrison sings the coda to End Of The Night as “a skull he can hold up to the night, until inside Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence you can see The Tiger plain.” Can you? ... It’s worth putting up with, however, because Marcus throws an entirely new and compelling light on songs you have heard countless times before. His poetic analysis of LA Woman is brilliant ... His analysis of pop art through the prism of Twentieth Century Fox is the best art criticism a rock critic has ever produced”
14/01/2012
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The Washington Post
Chris Richards
“[A] brainy, prosey, frequently brilliant account … Marcus has the ability to play tour guide in the places we think we already know. It’s exactly what makes him one of the greatest music scribes to ever do the job, and it’s what makes this book worth reading, love or hate the Doors. Whether Marcus is describing the crack of John Densmore’s snare drum or positing “L.A. Woman” as the secret soundtrack to Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Inherent Vice,” his writing will send you sprinting back into the music, senses sharper than before.”
23/12/2011
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The Financial Times
Peter Aspden
“Using scrupulous analysis of the music as a launch-pad, his writing takes flight into denser atmospheres. The reader unfamiliar with his work will either find these excursions inspired, or preposterous. Here is Marcus on guitarist Robby Krieger’s work on The Doors’ most famous song, “Light My Fire”: “This is man-on-horseback music, all grandeur, nothing rushed, as stately as a marble staircase, a full-size copy of The Winged Victory of Samothrace ... close enough to the immortal to stay on the air for its lifetime without one note ever predicting the next.” Marcus doesn’t quite make the case for such exalted claims.”
06/01/2012
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The Guardian
Richard Williams
“Despite the sharpness of his intellect, the vigour of his writing and the breadth of his references, Marcus can't entirely rescue the Doors from the mediocrity into which they so often drifted, and once or twice, notably in the essay on pop art which he mystifyingly inflicts on the song "Twentieth Century Fox", the vessel capsizes altogether, unbalanced by the freight of the author's imagination. However he did make me go back to the five albums...”
07/01/2012
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The New Statesman
Stuart Maconie
“We are in the rarefied air of high-church rock criticism here. Marcus is a magisterial and important writer, one to whom we should all be hugely grateful. Yet sometimes, through no fault of his own, the Holy Greil has also become the touchstone for the worst kind of rock critic: a humourless, sexless, beardy kind who has elevated one kind of pop music — chest-beating, male, pompous — over others that are feminine and joyful, the kind so often derided by hobnailed bores as cheesy, lightweight or a guilty pleasure.”
16/01/2012
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The New York Times
Camille Paglia
“He eloquently records his emotional impressions or finds vivid analogues to musical experience … But too often, Marcus bruisingly truncates his own mood of bewitching reverie to veer away to some other subject — Thomas Pynchon, Christian Slater, Wayne Wilson, Pop Art, Chuck Berry, Wallace Berman, Harvey Keitel. These arch juxtapositions are so lengthy and distracting that the baffled reader may forget this is a book about the Doors. Worse are the thickets of often garrulous footnotes ending each of the 21 chapters — dismayingly obstructive support material that belongs in the back.”
02/12/2011
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