Post by darkstar2 on Jul 20, 2008 11:39:48 GMT
LIFE MAGAZINE
APRIL 12 1968
WICKED GO THE DOORS
An Adult’s Education By The Kings of Acid Rock
By: Fred Powledge
I suppose it was a combination of White Power, being 33 years old, Sergeant Pepper and my 9-year-old daughter Polly that made me what so urgently to understand rock.
White Power helped because the field of race relations, about which I usually write, is a the most depressing point since the Civil War. I wanted a vacation. Being 33 because that is almost the earliest age at which you can be jealous of people younger than the music of the 50’s. Sergeant Pepper because the Beatles’ album of that name was the first truly clear indication that the new music was significant – the We Shall Overcome of a musical movement. And Polly because at the age of 9 she is learning to communicate in fantastic ways. The television set has enabled her to become sophisticated about dissent, demonstrations, death and a camera landing on the moon. The transistor radio and the record player, and the new music that she hears from them, are communicating in important ways with her too.
We bought Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and considered it good entertainment. Suitable for the whole family. We realized as we played Sergeant Pepper more and more than the album was not just a collection of 13 songs, but a successful attempt at presenting a whole of something, the way the symphony is a totality made up of several movements. But we didn’t exactly know what the totality of Sergeant Pepper was.
Some of the movements were easy to understand. She’s Leavings Home, which is about a couple’s discovery that their daughter has flown the coop, is pure journalism; but other songs in the album such as Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, were less like photographs and more like abstract paintings. Why was she “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’? Whey were thre “plasticine porters with looking glass ties?”
Before long we were holding family discussions on, say, how much of the record had been perfected in studio echo chambers; therefore, how much of it was impossible to reproduce at live concerts unless it was “lip-synching” was morally right; and on how much of what the Beatles were saying we just couldn’t understand. Gradually my wife and I found that we were no longer moved by what had been our regular music. We were spending more and more time humming Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds to ourselves.
The new music I most wanted to understand was that of a group called The Doors, who took their name from a line by Poet William Blake about, “the doors of perception.” My wife and I heard the first Doors album at a party a year ago, bought it for ourselves and played it a few times.
The sound of the album slowly got inside my head. There was something about The Doors’ music – most of it electronic but never superficial – and their lyrics – very obscure to me at first, then less obscure but never completely understandable – that convinced me their work was significant. This was at a time when hardly anybody else knew about The Doors. I called Elektra Records and asked if there was a second Doors album on the way. Elektra wasn’t sure.
The Doors music, unlike the Beatles, is satanic, sensual, demented and full of acid when you first hear it, and it becomes even more so when you play it over and over again.
You may have had difficulty hearing The Doors on your transistor radio, both because the music is wicked and because the individual tunes are so lengthy. The AM radio stations which devote themselves to the 40 most popular singles are obligated to blat out pimple cream and tooth brighter commercials between two minute plus records, and as a result, a few of them ever would play an early Doors tune called Light My Fire, which was on the first album and had all the marks of a commercial success but ran for six minutes and 50 seconds.
Last April, The Doors released on abbreviated 2:52 version of Light My Fire. By the end of July it was No. 1 on the Billboard ‘Hot 100,’ survey. The album, meanwhile, shot through the charts. Then, in October, Elektra Records brought out a second album, Strange Days. Within two weeks it had reached No. 4 on the Billboard survey. Then, or a month, both Doors LPs were in the Top 10 – a rare feat. Both albums have made far more than $1 million each, and the single version of Light My Fire has sold more than 1.2 million copies. The Doors’ current entry in the Top 40 contest is an apocalyptic song called The Unknown Soldier.
AN AMPLIFIED POET IN BLACK LEATHER PANTS
The most satanic thing about The Doors is Jim Morrison, the lead vocalist and author of most of the group’s songs. Morrison is 24 years old, out of UCLA and he appears – in public and on his records – to be moody, temperamental, enchanted in the mind and extremely stoned on something. Once you see him perform, you realize that he also seems dangerous, which, for any poet, may be a contradiction in terms.
He wears skin-tight black leather pants, on stage and away from it; and when he sings, he writhes and grinds sort of the male equivalent of the late Miss Lilly Christine, the Cat Girl. But with Lilly Christine you had a good idea that the performance was going to stop short of its promised ending point. You don’t know that with Morrison.
Morrison is a very good actor and a very good poet – one who speaks in short, beautiful bursts, like the Roman Catullus. His lyrics often seem obscure, but their obscurity, instead of making you hurry off to play a Pete Seeger record that you can understand, challenges you to try to interpret. You sense that Morrison is writing about weird scenes he’s been privy to, about which he would rather not be too explict.
He had devoted one song called The End – which last 11 minutes, 35 seconds – to be a poem about someone who murders his father and then makes love to his mother, but you may not know this unless you listen to it many times. The final act – after the narrative of the father’s murder and the killer’s entrance into his mothers room – is only suggested by Morrison’s anguished screams and the use of double-time by Ray Manzarek, who talents on the electronic organ and a contraption called the piano bass qualify him as the best craftsman of the group, which includes, John Densmore, who plays the drums. And Robby Krieger, the guitarist. The song ends:
This is the end,
Beautiful friend,
This is the end,
My only friend, the end……
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me.
The end of laughter and soft lies,
The end of nights we tried to die.
This is the end.*
And this if from When The Music’s Over, an 11-minute composition that ends The Doors’ second album:
What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered
And ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives
In the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences
And dragged her down.
I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the
Ground – We want the world and we want it
NOW!
The words are not what you’d call simple and straightforward. You can’t listen to the record once or twice and then put it away in the rack. And this is one of the new music in general: you really have to listen to it, repeatedly, preferably at high volume in a room that is otherwise quiet and perhaps darkened. You must throw away all those old music listening habits that you learned courtesy of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and Mantovani.
You are reminded that the music is a plastic reflection of our plastic world. The wounds are transistorized, sharper than sharp, just as the plastic lettering over a hot dog stand is redder than red. Out of this context the music – even the conventional sounds of the church organ or the street noises – is unreal; in it, it is marvelously effective in reflecting what’s going on in our society. It dances closer to disharmonious, to insanity; sometimes it does sound insane and disharmonious, but then you listen closer and find a harmony hidden deep within it.
On my way to a fuller appreciation of the new music – and, most particularly, The Doors – I talked with three of the people at Elektra who make records, Jac Holzman, 36 is the president of this multimillion dollar a year company whose median employee age is around 25. Paul Rothchild, 32, and Peter Siegel, 23, are two of Elektra’s producers.
The producer of a modern record must be a marvelously sensitive man, with a knowledge of music, and ability to get the most out of a group, and the sense and good taste to know when to use and when not to use – and when, as Rothchild says, to abuse – the complex and tempting machinery that fills the inside of a recording studio. He can tape-record a French horn fly and octave higher, then tuck the sound into a record so that it complements or heightens a particular mood.
“The essential function of the producer,” says Rothchild as he fiddled with potentiometers and slide switches at one of Elektra’s huge consoles, “is to draw from the creative musician and maximum of his capabilities, to bring out whatever expression he is trying to show in the music. Whatever his theatre is, I try to help him stage that.”
I had heard that word “theatre” before in talking to record people. What did it mean?
Rothchild explained that the new music was not just as music for music’s sake. In live performances, groups try to be just as exciting visually as they are aurally. On records, they will use any sound that helps them get across the mood of their music. Thus the producer becomes more than just a sound effect man; he is a producer of theatrical presentations.
THE SONGS ARE REALLY PIECES OF THE THEATRE
“The kinds of songs that are being written today are written sometimes specifically to create a mood in the listener,” said Peter Siegel. “Even when they’re not written with that specific intent, they’re written in such a way that the mood of the listener is essential to the understanding of the song. We’re not dealing with soupy and trite lyrics; we’re dealing with things that people are trying to say – statements, dramatic presentations. So, what we’re doing now is trying to take these songs, which are really small dramatic presentations, and give them a setting which will be meaningful to the music and allow the listener to get himself in the right frame of mind to hear what the song is trying to say.”
Jac Holzman, who had been listening to this, rose from his seat in the Elektra conference room and manipulated a dial on the wall that dimmed the lights down to almost nothing.
“What most of the producers and artists hope for, and what I think Elektra as a company is almost a midwife to, is a stimulation of the imagination. And they’re creating essentially, scenarios without pictures. They’re creating scenarios and you supply the pictures in your mind; they supply the mood and the words.” “It’s just this,” said Rothchild. “The phonograph record has become a true means of communication. And the basic market today for the kind of music we’re discussing,” – he gestured toward the huge console with its treasury of echo, signal clippers and devices for inducing space warps – “is the very young people, because they’re incredibly aware, and aware of lyric content – which is amazing, to be able to follow Kafkaesque lyrics at very early ages. They’re also the late teens and the college graduates from oh, the 1950’s on. People who were raised with rock n’ roll, essentially, but who developed out of what was the Elvis Presley. Bill Haley rock and who cast that aside because it was trival.”
He was right, of course. What could be more, trivial than the words, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog?”
APRIL 12 1968
WICKED GO THE DOORS
An Adult’s Education By The Kings of Acid Rock
By: Fred Powledge
I suppose it was a combination of White Power, being 33 years old, Sergeant Pepper and my 9-year-old daughter Polly that made me what so urgently to understand rock.
White Power helped because the field of race relations, about which I usually write, is a the most depressing point since the Civil War. I wanted a vacation. Being 33 because that is almost the earliest age at which you can be jealous of people younger than the music of the 50’s. Sergeant Pepper because the Beatles’ album of that name was the first truly clear indication that the new music was significant – the We Shall Overcome of a musical movement. And Polly because at the age of 9 she is learning to communicate in fantastic ways. The television set has enabled her to become sophisticated about dissent, demonstrations, death and a camera landing on the moon. The transistor radio and the record player, and the new music that she hears from them, are communicating in important ways with her too.
We bought Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band and considered it good entertainment. Suitable for the whole family. We realized as we played Sergeant Pepper more and more than the album was not just a collection of 13 songs, but a successful attempt at presenting a whole of something, the way the symphony is a totality made up of several movements. But we didn’t exactly know what the totality of Sergeant Pepper was.
Some of the movements were easy to understand. She’s Leavings Home, which is about a couple’s discovery that their daughter has flown the coop, is pure journalism; but other songs in the album such as Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds, were less like photographs and more like abstract paintings. Why was she “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes’? Whey were thre “plasticine porters with looking glass ties?”
Before long we were holding family discussions on, say, how much of the record had been perfected in studio echo chambers; therefore, how much of it was impossible to reproduce at live concerts unless it was “lip-synching” was morally right; and on how much of what the Beatles were saying we just couldn’t understand. Gradually my wife and I found that we were no longer moved by what had been our regular music. We were spending more and more time humming Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds to ourselves.
The new music I most wanted to understand was that of a group called The Doors, who took their name from a line by Poet William Blake about, “the doors of perception.” My wife and I heard the first Doors album at a party a year ago, bought it for ourselves and played it a few times.
The sound of the album slowly got inside my head. There was something about The Doors’ music – most of it electronic but never superficial – and their lyrics – very obscure to me at first, then less obscure but never completely understandable – that convinced me their work was significant. This was at a time when hardly anybody else knew about The Doors. I called Elektra Records and asked if there was a second Doors album on the way. Elektra wasn’t sure.
The Doors music, unlike the Beatles, is satanic, sensual, demented and full of acid when you first hear it, and it becomes even more so when you play it over and over again.
You may have had difficulty hearing The Doors on your transistor radio, both because the music is wicked and because the individual tunes are so lengthy. The AM radio stations which devote themselves to the 40 most popular singles are obligated to blat out pimple cream and tooth brighter commercials between two minute plus records, and as a result, a few of them ever would play an early Doors tune called Light My Fire, which was on the first album and had all the marks of a commercial success but ran for six minutes and 50 seconds.
Last April, The Doors released on abbreviated 2:52 version of Light My Fire. By the end of July it was No. 1 on the Billboard ‘Hot 100,’ survey. The album, meanwhile, shot through the charts. Then, in October, Elektra Records brought out a second album, Strange Days. Within two weeks it had reached No. 4 on the Billboard survey. Then, or a month, both Doors LPs were in the Top 10 – a rare feat. Both albums have made far more than $1 million each, and the single version of Light My Fire has sold more than 1.2 million copies. The Doors’ current entry in the Top 40 contest is an apocalyptic song called The Unknown Soldier.
AN AMPLIFIED POET IN BLACK LEATHER PANTS
The most satanic thing about The Doors is Jim Morrison, the lead vocalist and author of most of the group’s songs. Morrison is 24 years old, out of UCLA and he appears – in public and on his records – to be moody, temperamental, enchanted in the mind and extremely stoned on something. Once you see him perform, you realize that he also seems dangerous, which, for any poet, may be a contradiction in terms.
He wears skin-tight black leather pants, on stage and away from it; and when he sings, he writhes and grinds sort of the male equivalent of the late Miss Lilly Christine, the Cat Girl. But with Lilly Christine you had a good idea that the performance was going to stop short of its promised ending point. You don’t know that with Morrison.
Morrison is a very good actor and a very good poet – one who speaks in short, beautiful bursts, like the Roman Catullus. His lyrics often seem obscure, but their obscurity, instead of making you hurry off to play a Pete Seeger record that you can understand, challenges you to try to interpret. You sense that Morrison is writing about weird scenes he’s been privy to, about which he would rather not be too explict.
He had devoted one song called The End – which last 11 minutes, 35 seconds – to be a poem about someone who murders his father and then makes love to his mother, but you may not know this unless you listen to it many times. The final act – after the narrative of the father’s murder and the killer’s entrance into his mothers room – is only suggested by Morrison’s anguished screams and the use of double-time by Ray Manzarek, who talents on the electronic organ and a contraption called the piano bass qualify him as the best craftsman of the group, which includes, John Densmore, who plays the drums. And Robby Krieger, the guitarist. The song ends:
This is the end,
Beautiful friend,
This is the end,
My only friend, the end……
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me.
The end of laughter and soft lies,
The end of nights we tried to die.
This is the end.*
And this if from When The Music’s Over, an 11-minute composition that ends The Doors’ second album:
What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered
And ripped her and bit her
Stuck her with knives
In the side of the dawn
And tied her with fences
And dragged her down.
I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the
Ground – We want the world and we want it
NOW!
The words are not what you’d call simple and straightforward. You can’t listen to the record once or twice and then put it away in the rack. And this is one of the new music in general: you really have to listen to it, repeatedly, preferably at high volume in a room that is otherwise quiet and perhaps darkened. You must throw away all those old music listening habits that you learned courtesy of the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and Mantovani.
You are reminded that the music is a plastic reflection of our plastic world. The wounds are transistorized, sharper than sharp, just as the plastic lettering over a hot dog stand is redder than red. Out of this context the music – even the conventional sounds of the church organ or the street noises – is unreal; in it, it is marvelously effective in reflecting what’s going on in our society. It dances closer to disharmonious, to insanity; sometimes it does sound insane and disharmonious, but then you listen closer and find a harmony hidden deep within it.
On my way to a fuller appreciation of the new music – and, most particularly, The Doors – I talked with three of the people at Elektra who make records, Jac Holzman, 36 is the president of this multimillion dollar a year company whose median employee age is around 25. Paul Rothchild, 32, and Peter Siegel, 23, are two of Elektra’s producers.
The producer of a modern record must be a marvelously sensitive man, with a knowledge of music, and ability to get the most out of a group, and the sense and good taste to know when to use and when not to use – and when, as Rothchild says, to abuse – the complex and tempting machinery that fills the inside of a recording studio. He can tape-record a French horn fly and octave higher, then tuck the sound into a record so that it complements or heightens a particular mood.
“The essential function of the producer,” says Rothchild as he fiddled with potentiometers and slide switches at one of Elektra’s huge consoles, “is to draw from the creative musician and maximum of his capabilities, to bring out whatever expression he is trying to show in the music. Whatever his theatre is, I try to help him stage that.”
I had heard that word “theatre” before in talking to record people. What did it mean?
Rothchild explained that the new music was not just as music for music’s sake. In live performances, groups try to be just as exciting visually as they are aurally. On records, they will use any sound that helps them get across the mood of their music. Thus the producer becomes more than just a sound effect man; he is a producer of theatrical presentations.
THE SONGS ARE REALLY PIECES OF THE THEATRE
“The kinds of songs that are being written today are written sometimes specifically to create a mood in the listener,” said Peter Siegel. “Even when they’re not written with that specific intent, they’re written in such a way that the mood of the listener is essential to the understanding of the song. We’re not dealing with soupy and trite lyrics; we’re dealing with things that people are trying to say – statements, dramatic presentations. So, what we’re doing now is trying to take these songs, which are really small dramatic presentations, and give them a setting which will be meaningful to the music and allow the listener to get himself in the right frame of mind to hear what the song is trying to say.”
Jac Holzman, who had been listening to this, rose from his seat in the Elektra conference room and manipulated a dial on the wall that dimmed the lights down to almost nothing.
“What most of the producers and artists hope for, and what I think Elektra as a company is almost a midwife to, is a stimulation of the imagination. And they’re creating essentially, scenarios without pictures. They’re creating scenarios and you supply the pictures in your mind; they supply the mood and the words.” “It’s just this,” said Rothchild. “The phonograph record has become a true means of communication. And the basic market today for the kind of music we’re discussing,” – he gestured toward the huge console with its treasury of echo, signal clippers and devices for inducing space warps – “is the very young people, because they’re incredibly aware, and aware of lyric content – which is amazing, to be able to follow Kafkaesque lyrics at very early ages. They’re also the late teens and the college graduates from oh, the 1950’s on. People who were raised with rock n’ roll, essentially, but who developed out of what was the Elvis Presley. Bill Haley rock and who cast that aside because it was trival.”
He was right, of course. What could be more, trivial than the words, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog?”
