The Doors In Concert - Relix Mag Apr 1991

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The Doors In Concert
Myth and Music
By: Ralph Hulett
Relix Magazine Vol 18 No 2
April 1991


During the latter part of the 1960’s, many of the bands that I saw perform seemed to have something to say to young Americans. Recording artists such as Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, and Steppenwolf san anti-establishment, pro drug, and even anti drug songs. Depending on the audience and the performance, a listener could be moved to adhere more closely to the anti-war movement or the hippie lifestyle. Of all the music artists of this era, though, I thought that none would make a lasting impression on me. Then came the Doors.

A Doors performance was not just an ordinary rock concert. It was an experience that an individual as well as an entire crowd could have. The experience was one of mystery, intensity, spontaneity, theatrics, and ceremony. Although lead singer Jim Morrison was the spearhead for the assault on the audience, he also needed the unique blend of jazz, blues, and rock produced by the other musicians to complete the moods that he wished to create. I first heard the Doors perform at my school in La Crescenta, California, in early 1967. Robby Krieger’s screeching guitar work bounced off the walls of Crescenta Valley High School Auditorium, an explosive response to Ray Manzarek’s pipe organ introduction to “When The Music’s Over”. No one had heard this new song before; the Doors first album had been out for only a few weeks, and “When The Music’s Over” wouldn’t turn up on record until their second one was released later in the year. Morrison swaggered out from behind some curtains, dressed in black leather pants and a work jacket. He appeared to be drunk as his body arched left and right. He leaned against the mike stand and slurred the first words, which sounded like, “When da music’s sober…”

Various spectators began to walk out as Morrison pushed himself off and back onto the mike stand, as if fighting with it. He wrapped his legs around the stand and moved his crotch up and down against it. Despite some of the audiences disapproval, things seemed to go smoothly until the band reached the instrumental break.

Krieger let loose a screaming barrage of sound from his Gibson SG. After a few minutes, a loud crack and buzz made it obvious that his volume was too much for the sound system designed for student body speeches and recent shows by bands like the Association. The group stopped playing altogether, and everybody looked at each other. Manzarek shrugged and began a little tune that sounded like “Roll Out The Barrel.” John Densmore banged along on his drums while stagehands tried to fix the blown fuse.

The crowd started to talk, and more people got up and left. Some who stayed complained about how dumb the student council had been to bring such a lousy band to the high school. After five minutes of silence from the stage while the group members talked, the Doors broke into “Light My Fire.” Morrison’s vocals were muddled, sounding like he was, singing through a megaphone. The instruments sounded clear, though, with Manzarek’s carnival-like keyboard work brilliantly opening and ending the song.

Morrison leaned on the mike stand during most of the number, his hands clenched around it and his eyes shut, as if in a trance. Due to the sound problems, and also perhaps to Morrison’s stage behavior, the rest of the show was cut short. Total time for my first ever rock concert was about 20 minutes. It had been pretty disappointing. I couldn’t get over what I had seen in this strange singer. He had seemed to be in a mood all his own, yet somehow projected this mysterious, dark feeling to the audience. It was like an exploration through music, and I felt an urge to have it opened up more.

“That was what we were trying to do,” Manzarek told me in Hollywood in 1978. We wanted our music to reflect a philosophy. A life philosophy having to do with change. Jim and I thought that Nietzsche’s philosophy in his book, The Birth Of Tragedy was a great statement about change.”<br>
Manzarek was referring to the way this 19th century German philosopher viewed existence. In Nietzsche’s view, two powers are always at odds with each other, powers he labeled with the names of Greek gods. The first, Apollo, was the god of healing, fixed images, and no change. The second was Dionysus.

“We wanted our music to be a celebration, and that’s what Dionysus was all about.” Manzarek said. “He was the god of wine and vegetation, the stuff that makes people change. We wanted our music to make people change too, to think differently, and Jim liked to shock people.”<br>
Morrison also identified with Dionysus because Dionysus was the god of sexuality, which Morrison used to the hilt onstage to shock people. Even though it offended many spectators, it also helped create a large following for the band.

“Jim was real extreme, which is why he would get pretty outrageous onstage,” Manzarek went on. “But he finally got tired of the crowd expecting that. It was a release, an expression. Like drama – Dionysus was a god of drama, too. It was a communication.”<br>

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To Morrison, Doors concerts had a purpose for an audience. In an interview with Richard Goldstein in New York in 1969, Morrison said that rock concerts “have always served a function – it gives people with the same station in life a chance to gather together and assemble and just feel the sheer mass of them that exists.”<br>
This coming together was a type of communication sharing for Manzarek. He told Goldstein that “a lot of energy is dissipated in the concert, and there’s no reason that same communal thing can’t be taken to the outside world. And ideally, hopefully, that’s what a good rock concert can do.”<br>
The Crescenta Valley High concert was not a great one, but it awakened in me a desire to see and hear more of what Morrison was about. His uniqueness really had gotten my curiosity up. So later in 1967, I went to see the Doors at Cal State, Los Angeles. I had bought the new second LP, Strange Days, which had increased my curiosity to see the Doors live again. I had no idea what was in store. But looking back now, that performance really helped provide a focus on what the Doors tried to do in a live performance.

The lights went out in the gymnasium, and screams filled the air. Manzarek’s organ churned out the first few notes of “When The Music’s Over” in the darkness. Just before Krieger’s guitar began to scream, a single light beamed out onto the stage, illuminating Morrison like a spirit that had appeared from another world. People in the front cheered as Morrison slowly moved to the mike. He looked dazed, with his head down. Then he suddenly grabbed the mike and screamed wildly, cueing Krieger’s guitar attack.

Morrison’s movements, coupled with the lighting and music, created a sense of drama; this was a sort of ceremony that opened us up into a world of mystery and darkness. Morrison seemed to writhe and flow with the music, it’s changes creating new moods. There was a sense of spontaneity, especially when songs were strung together. “Soul Kitchen” came in the middle of “When The Music’s Over” and part of what would become known as “The Celebration Of The Lizard” was thrown in during the set.

The crowd cried in approval to familiar songs such as “Back Door Man” and “People Are Strange.” Manzarek’s playing during “The Crystal Ship” made it sound like this was a sacred church gathering of sorts. But the longer songs were most interesting, for they gave Morrison the chance to make up new words, moving up to the edge of the stage. The spontaneous feeling of the medleys gave the music the feeling of a moving river – sometimes slow and peaceful, at other times roaring and frantic.

The image is one Morrison himself used in describing to Goldstein how the Doors songs evolved in concert. “A lot of our most interesting songs developed over a period of time playing night after night in clubs,” he said. “It would start out into a fairly basic song and then the music would settle into a kind of hypnotic river of sound. This would leave me free to make up anything that came into my head at the time. I like songs, but I think that’s the part of the performance I enjoy the most – where I have a chance to pick up vibrations from the music and what’s coming from the audience and just follow it wherever in goes.”<br>
Where this performance went was to a frantic celebration of tragedy, death, and rebirth conveyed by Morrison’s theatrics. As the band reached the buildup to the climax of “The End,” Morrison leapt off the stage and into the audience. This happened at the part of the song which Morrison provides a lyrical acting out of the Oedipal complex discussed by Siegmond Freud, referring to the Oedipus plays by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles. In the first of these plays, Oedipus discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Freud discerned in his complex the unconscious desire of a male child to kill and replace his father. In “The End,” Morrison acts this desire out, and at Cal State, as he reached the climatic point of the song, he began to scream uncontrollably.

As Morrison’s screams bounced off the auditorium walls, he ran up the center aisle. He dragged along a mike cord that extended the length of the building. Many in the crowd began to stare at him, perhaps wondering if he had gone crazy. Manzarek’s organ was on full volume, in intense competition with Krieger’s feedback. Somehow, though, the mountains of sound seemed to merge with the screams to form a sinister, complete swirling entity of tragic sound.

Morrison stopped at the other end of the aisle and spun around. Many jumped to their feet and turned to see what he would do next. He slammed to the floor and rolled back down the slanted aisle, shrieking as he went. The mike cord was wrapped around his black leather clad legs and black velour shirt like a snake, a symbol of forbidden knowledge. Other yells filled the air. Performers and audience were both in an uproar. The houselights were on, illuminating the spectacle.

Oedipus opened up a realm of suffering for himself by killing his father and marrying his mother. “Kill! Kill! Kill!, screamed Morrison, pausing between Densmore’s clashing cymbals. The noise grew almost unbearable – then Morrison struck his head against the bandstand and lay still. The music stopped instantly, and the crowd gasped and grew silent. Morrison looked dead, as if he had broken his neck. He lay sprawled in a contorted, twisted heap in the wiring

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Manzarek started up the ending bass notes to the refrain to “The End.” The houselights flashed out. Silence, except for the bass notes. Then a spotlight caught Morrison, standing up as if resurrected from the dead. “This is the end, my only friend, the end,” he sang. He seemed calm and at peace, and I sensed that he had somehow gotten many of us to follow him into another part of the mind, as when someone finds out something horrible they are not supposed to discover, and the mind snaps.

Drama explores the emotions of characters and allows the audience to experience these emotions vicariously. When this type of audience involvement includes music, it can become a type of hypnosis, according to Morrison. He told Goldstein that “..you have to be in a state of mind that music can put you in with its hypnotic quality. It leaves you free to let the subconscious play itself out to wherever it goes. The music gives me a kind of security that makes it a lot easier for me to express myself.”<br>
A lot of the time Morrison seemed spaced out or in another world onstage. He appeared to be meditating on the music in order to find an entryway for expression. With his stage presence and lyrics, he created fantasies that he shared with the audience. Communal gatherings often have a spokesman, and in primitive societies it could be a shaman, or medicine man. Morrison was intrigued by this idea. Drawing a parallel between the shaman and what he did onstage, Morrison told Goldstein that the shaman “…..could be an old man or a young man, but the whole tribe, all ages, try to put him into his trip and listen to him.” When asked what a modern shaman’s role would be in a time of social turmoil, Morrison said, “I don’t think the shaman, is too interested in pursuing his own fantasies. If he became too self-conscious of a function, I think it may tend to ruin his own inner trip.”<br>
The magic of a Doors concert was due to the great musicianship as well as Morrison’s presence. Choice of material and arrangements did not always coincide with what an audience wanted to hear, for the music continually transformed itself. This was especially true with improvisational material, the part that Morrison enjoyed most. A tone or musical backdrop would be created for him to jump into and involve the audience. The music became a vehicle for an exploration.

Morrison believed that musicians needed to be creative, which is why blues and jazz was a good medium for the band to work in. He told Goldstein that “blues and jazz musicians keep on exploring their own music. And sometimes they’re right on time, and the public finds something in it that expresses the time. And sometimes they’re out of favor.”<br>
Whether in favor or not, though, Morrison thought that musicians needed to do their own thing, no matter what anyone else thought. He said, “I think for musicians and poets, artists in general, (the goal) is just to keep exploring their own field. If you’re popular, go with it. And if you go out of favor, just keep doing it.” Manzarek told Goldstein that, “Any rhythm, any riff, any set of lyrics is a release. It’s just if you are releasing yourself totally into what you happen to be playing at the moment.”<br>
Many musical innovators who released themselves, sometimes at an extreme, are no longer with us. Some from the 1960’s such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison may have been self destructive, unable to cope with stardom’s pressures, or mere victims of fate. Perhaps, these artists reflected a time of turmoil and change – not only in their music but in their own lives as well. Their lives, expression in music, and their era came and went in a flurry. But their music continues its influence.

“Music was helpful for Jim for awhile,” Manzarek told me. “His drama, poetry, things he cared about, was carried by the music. Dionysus was god of change – vegetation, wine, sexuality, Jim changed, too. He needed to.” Once Morrison turned his back on music and performing live, it was not long before he went to Paris and died in July 1971. (Editors Note: Morrison gave his last concert with the Doors in December 1970.) At least, it seems that way. There are many stories of how Morrison flirted with death – walking along the edges of high rise buildings, hanging out of windows drunk, and so on. Couldn’t it be possible that he faked his death, people ask? After all, they say he was sick of being a marketed sex object, and he had some serious legal problems plaguing him at the time. What better way to get away from stardom for good than to make everybody think that you’re dead?

Not so, Manzarek told me, “I really think that Jim’s gone – he’s off in another reality, wherever it is. He’s around, but not with us. After he left for Paris that was it. He’d always call for money at the Elektra (Records) office whenever he needed money. He finally didn’t call anymore.”<br>

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The magic of the Doors’ influence can be found best in what the group was trying to do in its music. Through the skillful merging of music, poetry, and theatrics, the audience was shown a mirror to view itself. Epic length songs such as “The End” and “When The Music’s Over” threw out feelings of madness and fear to every listener. Performances were designed to make people become aware of their dark sides. From that point, each individual might be able to overcome some fears and thus become more whole as human beings.

The Doors wanted their audience to confront subconscious fears and view them as non threatening. Water is a symbol for the unconscious, and Morrison sang about it on “Moonlight Drive.” He asked us to “swim to the moon,” to an astral body that controls the sea and “surrender to the waiting worlds that lap against our side.” No doubt the music had a menacing strangeness, but it was a tool for us to consciously or even subconsciously come to terms with ourselves as well as the problems and realities around us.

During the 1960’s death was a strong reality, via the fates of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and thousands of servicemen serving in Vietnam. On the 1968 tour, Morrison would depict death near the end of “The Unknown Soldier.” The drumroll would build as Morrison waited. Krieger would hold up his guitar like a rifle, hit his strings in a echoing climax, and Morrison would fall. Death and rebirth are common mythical themes, and they help bring an understanding of existence, once they were understood.

Man has always needed to face his inner self, and the Doors tried to awaken their audience to do that. The group enjoys an ongoing popularity partly due to the quality of the music – but also because the audience is challenged to face itself. Music changes moods – and an open door invites one to a new place. The Doors showed a way to that newness, not unlike the shaman who led his people ages ago.