Post by darkstar3 on Mar 25, 2011 3:59:47 GMT
Hernenaut
Lights, Camera, Organ! or, Ecce Jimbo
Review of "Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors" by Ray Manzarek
REVIEW | A. S. Hamrah | 9/8/2000
We all know of course that ours is a civilization in decline. Knowing that may lead us to wonder, when did it reach its high-water mark? If you read Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors by Ray Manzarek, who was the organ player in that band and its cofounder, you will know: Our civilization achieved its highest expression when Jim Morrison put on a pair of leather pants and went on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing "Light My Fire."
He wasn't supposed to sing the word "higher" but he did anyway. That was in 1967. "Light My Fire" was the number-one song in America. All downhill from there. Now you know.
When I was a child I wasn't aware of the significance of this event. Then, with the innocence often found in children, I thought the Doors were a kiddie band: I was under the impression that their music was for kids. Whenever "Riders on the Storm" came on the radio I was excited because I liked the spooky atmosphere the song tries so hard to create. I especially liked the lyrics, which I assumed—because of lines like "His brain is squirmin' like a toad" and "Take a long holiday/Let your children play" and "Like a dog without a bone"—were aimed at people my age. The organ (not the bone) cinched it for me. That sound I recognized as from the circus and not something adults listened to. It seemed so clear. I didn't know the singer was a famous dead guy and a poet who was buried in Paris. After reading Manzarek's memoir I now know otherwise, to put it mildly.
There's always been something funny about the Doors. Their shameless grandiosity and utter lack of irony or even humor in the face of their own pretension become so overbearing, so pompous, that you start to feel put upon (smothered, even) when you listen to them. As with so much other rock music that is so dead serious, what else can you do but laugh? All other responses get choked off. For instance, no matter how many times I hear "The End," it still cracks me up. It goes without saying that that's not the intention—somehow it seems like the most apt response. As impossible as this is to do, I think if you try to listen to that song like you've never heard it before, it's even funnier. The song's darkness is too studied; Morrison's self-examination too pat; in the mind of the listener the phrase Could you just give me a break please? bubbles up every time. But they never do give you a break; they keep up the goofy act at all costs, and they never break on through to the other side because they're too worried about breaking on through to the other side. It doesn't work at all in the way they intended, yet it's not without its moments of negative transcendence, and these head-smacking moments that despite everything have the power to make you giddy are all that remain. This is either the triumph of the Doors or something else, I'm not sure what. I'm not sure it can even be named.
That's why "The End" is so perfect for the unbelievably overwrought, macho death-wish denouement of Apocalypse Now. You think, ah! These are the people who like this kind of thing: '60s and '70s film school graduates, guys like Morrison and Manzarek who've filtered all art and culture through their trapped adolescent sensibility into a geeky mess where life is some kind of Dionysian orgy of unscary scariness and phony liberation from inner demons, where Eliot is quoted to impress lesser beings, and where colored lights they hypnotize as some shaman-type writhes in pain and tumescent glory. Rock'n'Roll! But rock'n'roll like we're into the Beats, too, OK? You know, the Beats? Poetry? Real poetry? It's fine to kick ass, and indeed we do—indeed we do—but this is Art, and by the way, hello, I love you. Hello?
The film school experience is central to Manzarek's book. The title of its third chapter, "Destiny and the UCLA Film School," encapsulates the entire era in which Manzarek and Morrison flowered, and its presumption explains so much about post-Eisenhower American popular culture. "Destiny," oddly enough, also refers to a silent film of that name by Fritz Lang, an obscure movie which Manzarek mentions more than once. And that's what's funny about this incarnation of the Doors: Manzarek, an accomplished man with two college degrees who can do many things at once, has unexpectedly chosen to cast his memoir as a book of film criticism. Right on page one he points out that Jim may have gone to a movie right before he died ("like Oswald," Manzarek adds for some reason, conflating patsy and president). From mentions of Jim's director pal Agnés Varda and Pandora's Box in the book's first few pages, to the description of a failed before-the-name rockumentary produced by Morrison and a "Woodstock, the movie" defense Morrison's legal team attempted during his famous Miami trial at the book's end, barely a page goes by without the name of a film or filmmaker being dropped. When not discussing movies or using them as points of comparison, Manzarek works in giants of painting, literature, theater, dance, and, yes, music. And then there's classical mythology (calling Dionysus!), world religions (vade retro, "Judeo-Christian-Muslim man"), and philosophy (does the name Nietzsche mean anything to you? It means a lot to Manzarek—and how!). Let me give you an example, from Manzarek's description of an acid trip Morrison related to him:
He said he saw a satyr following him from across the street. A little satyr with horns and pointed ears, a man's head and upper body, walking on two goat legs. A little Greco-Roman satyr. A faun as in Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, so brilliantly danced and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Pan, the god of the forest.
It's that kind of a book. Vaslav Nijinsky. Later we're told the "satyr was the spirit of [Jim's] own freedom."
A long time ago I read a poem by Jim Morrison called "Cinema." It has stuck with me because of its title and because it's very short. I have little John Donne or George Herbert; I have more Jim Morrison than I'd care to admit, a characteristic no doubt of anyone who grew up in America near a radio. "In the womb/We are all blind cave fish." That's the poem, as I recall. In it—between the lofty aspiration of the title and the pretentious, inadequate, startling execution—I find much that explains both the Doors and Manzarek's attitude towards what they did and what they thought they were doing, and the gap between the two. Morrison and Manzarek were brought together at the UCLA film school under the tutelage of Josef von Sternberg, the director of Marlene Dietrich in the '30s, the man who made Morocco and Blonde Venus. Let's call him "Cinema." From the womb of the UCLA film school, the blind cave-fish Manzarek and Morrison emerged into the southern California sunlight, their heads filled with convictions and ideas that Sternberg, that master of lighting, could do little to illumine against all that haze. That sunlight was filled with dust particles made out of degraded '50s hipsterisms that floated down to college level; ideological positions that must've appeared very out-there but were getting a little shopworn by the time they came into Ray's and Jim's possession. These included—but weren't limited to—Chess Records blues, Ferlinghetti-approved books, Bergman films, Weimar Germany (at one point Manzarek describes something as "so Weimar"), Eastern spirituality, 19th century German Romanticism, even musique concrète...
The time was right to turn all that stuff into hit records for the thinking teenybopper. Who could've guessed that doing so would create a Morrison cult that survives into the present day, where the Doors' music is exploited endlessly as Classic Rock, another era's soundtrack slopped interminably and inexcusably onto this one? It's a lesson in devaluation: the same thing the Doors did to the line from Blake that gave them their name. The doors of perception go from Blake to Huxley, end up as the name of a rock band and mean little else to the ten-thousand wannabe Morrisons who have recorded since. The unfortunate rockstar worship of leather pants traces itself back to William Blake, and his harsh beauty and prophetic criticism are reduced to the swagger of a frustrated, unhappy Lizard King announcing from the stage that "I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames."
That's dialogue from a later Morrison, one Manzarek will name "Jimbo," one Jim and Ray didn't predict back around their time at UCLA. Conversations from that period are just as unflattering; Manzarek re-creates them in detail. From the film criticism perspective, they're the highlights of the book. Manzarek and Morrison and their cohorts yammer on endlessly in an embarrassing early '60s cant that entertains immensely the more it pushes credibility.
"I think Vivre sa Vie is Godard's best work," says Alain Ronay as he sips an aperitif.
"Breathless, Alain," Jim comes back. "Breathless is his masterpiece."
"You're both wrong," I passionately object. Contempt [Le Mépris] with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance and Fritz Lang. That's his best film!"
"Could be," Jim agrees.
"It can't be Breathless," says Alain. "Breathless is immature. His first work. Too cutty."
Jim sips his Corona... and says, "It's supposed to be cutty, man. It's called jump cutting. It may not be correct for the 'cinema of your papa,' but it's correct for today. It's at our speed, our tempo. It doesn't belong to the past. We don't belong to the past, not anymore." The hemp was working.
Did he really say "Contempt [Le Mépris]"? I so hope he did not, and that Manzarek the writer only threw that in on the off chance that someone, somewhere, reading Light My Fire might know that film only by its French title, even if he listed the cast. (By the way, "cutty"?) Conversations like that abound; a few pages later Manzarek is informing the reader that John Ford's The Searchers—that perennial hippie bugbear—is inferior to Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, and that people who don't realize this are "squares, certainly not poets" and demonstrate a "lapse of aesthetics."
This is not only how Manzarek has the people in the book talk—real people from his real life forced to mouth clichés and be verbose— it's the way the entire book is written. He and they seem to have swallowed whole whatever groovy-osities came their way, and they regurgitate them in this sit-com dialogue that seems like a put-on but is actually a style, the exact style of the '60s California rock-god dude. The affectation has taken over; it's all that's left. The clichés come rolling in, one after another,—wait. No. To accuse Light My Fire of being cliché-ridden is like accusing the ocean of being wet. Take it or leave it. I take it because this book is such a stunning testimony to what went wrong, sociology in the form of rockography by a guy who doesn't get it. The book is powerful, compelling, hilarious, and mind-blowing, but not for any of the reasons he thinks it is. Why pile on even more clichés to get across how clichéd the book is? Manzarek has done the impossible: He's constructed a book entirely out of clichés. When he uses the word "the" he uses it in a cliché way. This is an achievement. We have been waiting for this thing—the '60s cliché to end all '60s clichés. No more are needed; the last vestiges of meaning have been removed from the All-Important Decade. Manzarek has accomplished this, and he's done it at the level of form! This book is a marker. A warning on a tombstone. Stop and cast an eye. Wait. I'm writing like him. That entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic thing. The sins of the fathers. Will be visited on the sons. And they were. I mean they are. They have been visited on them. The sons. The sins.
Let's get one thing straight, though: If Manzarek makes his Lives of the Doors into a movie-on-the-page, an imitation of a certain kind of movie that constantly refers to other movies, it is not an Oliver Stone movie. One of the great joys of Light My Fire is how Manzarek goes out of his way to bash Stone, the director of an atrocious early '90s biopic on the Doors. The sometimes beautifully ad hominem Stone-bashing is of such a high quality, and so unreserved, that the book is worth it for that alone. Manzarek calls Stone an anti-Semite and a fascist, and accuses him of having "psychotic leanings"; he calls him a misreader of Nietzsche, one who "interprets the warrior's freedom from the lowered state of consciousness of the first three chakras"; he even, gloriously, calls him Oliver "Bonehead" Stone. This dismantling of Stone, while not the book's saving grace, is perhaps something like it.
Stone's film—in which a preening Val Kilmer inadvertently makes Morrison into even more of an asshole than you would expect the combination of Kilmer and Morrison to yield—is repellent in the extreme, but I wish Manzarek had mentioned its one good scene: Kilmer/ Morrison overturns a holiday dinner table, eliciting this response from cute, hippied-up Meg Ryan, playing his long-suffering girlfriend: Jim Morrison, you have ruined another Thanksgiving! At that point, you really felt what their relationship was like. But Meg Ryan's an expert at getting that across.
Manzarek's outrage at Stone's rewrite is understandable for reasons other than that it changed stuff around and was lousy. Manzarek's own version is probably too fragile to allow for any fictionalization other than his own. Like Stone (who in his film turns a student film Morrison made into some kind of homo-Nazi homage to Kenneth Anger), Manzarek loved Jim Morrison. He loved him intensely and didn't feel whole without him. Remembering Morrison's death, he writes "We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Apollo-and-Dionysus dichotomy thing again." This could be Jerry Lewis talking about the breakup with Dean Martin. Note the peculiar showbiz construction of sentiment. The same confused feelings are there, that Jerry and Ray had met the perfect man—an idealized figure both wanted to be but knew they couldn't—and now he was gone. Even a post-collegiate separation elicits longing: "I was going to miss this pothead, this avant-garde stoner, this rebellious psychedelic poet pal of mine." For Manzarek, their union was "the snake biting its own tail."
Then along came Jimbo. The Doors as a band may have been divided in two, but Morrison himself was rent also. Manzarek at times redundantly calls Morrison "Dionysus/Bacchus"—"Dionysus/Janus" would've been more accurate. Two-faced, like Janus, the god of doorways for Christ's sake, Morrison increasingly became the character Manzarek calls "Jimbo," a drunken lout and belligerent good old boy. It's Jimbo, not Jim, that I've always suspected was the one beloved by the Morrison cult, the late-Elvis side of Morrison that strongly appeals to the stadium-parking-lot crowd and other advocates of getting-trashed-as-revolution.
The Dionysian orgy-time (Dionysian Orgy Time—they should've used that as an album title!) that was supposedly the Doors falls apart particularly well in Manzarek's chapters on Morrison's encounter with Andy Warhol and his version of the '60s. I would quote Manzarek's excruciating celebration of a blowjob that Factory demimondaine Nico gave Morrison, but I refrain out of respect for the late chanteuse, a troubled woman arguably as talented as anyone who appears here. That passage is one of Light My Fire's most negatively transcendent moments, and it's a description of something that didn't even happen to the author. It's one of those sections—and the book has many—where after reading it, you think Did I just read that? For Light My Fire is like that—when you're reading it you have to read lots of it out loud to people. Perhaps the best example of this is Manzarek's evocation of the time Morrison's cock met its historical destiny.
We were loaded for bear... The band was primed, rehearsed, and ready to kick ass. And... Jim Morrison had his leathers! Yes. The black snake bone had been born.
The Black mamba. The shaman dipped in liquid licorice. The leather Adonis. [...] And no underwear. [...] Did he look good? Oh, my, yes! He looked great. He was going to pierce the heart of the collective TV audience with black arrows of Eros. Dionysus was about to become manifest on the television screens of America. We were ready to rock, and the satyr was drooling.
Now, leather and snakeskin were something Jim had talked about for a long time. [Jim] adapted the garb and the persona of that handsome young drifter into his own personality projection. And threw in a bit of classic western Americana... leather pants. [...] And he looked great in leather. And when the ladies saw him on TV and saw the bulge in his crotch, they were pierced through the heart chakra. They were slain by love/lust. His American maenads. When they saw, on national television, what appeared to be the head of Jim's penis, the glans penis, straining against the black leather enclosure, they knew he had no underwear. It was just leather against shaft... and their imaginary hand was in between. And they loved him.
The second half of the book is full of such cringe-and-laugh-inducing passages, as they lead inexorably to Morrison's arrest and conviction in Miami for allegedly exposing himself on stage. Jim, Manzarek tells us, didn't really take it out, he just created the illusion of doing so by waving his shirt around like a cape. People "swear to this day that they saw his cock—where there was no cock," he informs.
The whole book is a celebration of an erection that wasn't there. Manzarek has been so insulated from so much for so long that he no longer has any filters. For him, Morrison wasn't like Dionysus, he was Dionysus. Reading Manzarek's wildly self-indulgent prose about the revolution and the world he thinks the Doors created, you try to picture history from his point of view, and then you think, you know—"Touch Me"? That's why the book's joy—Manzarek is so up—isn't just a guilty pleasure. We've entered another realm here. Sure, it's not the one Manzarek thinks it is, but so what? The book is bad, yes, but it is not so-bad-it's-good bad; it's not that the book is bad in a good way, it's more that it's good in a bad way. A new aesthetic category needs to be created for it; let's call it the Middlebrow Ecstatic.
Paradoxically, all the things that middlebrow usually shies away from in its lazy drive to smooth things over and still be reasonable and intelligent—things like sex, drugs, political upheaval, self-aggrandizement, and personal disintegration—are here. It's just that they're here in a form so phony and so unexamined that Manzarek comes off as the ultimate square, a guy so sure he's right and that his vision of the world is yours that he doesn't have to do anything but be trite, ecstatically. He's extremely critical of people who don't penetrate the surface, and yet his every expression is a cliché. His vastness is so small, and his smallness is so vast. His every idea is so typical and draws on such predictable sources, yet he gets it out like nobody's ever thought of it before. Is this what all deified '60s rockers do? You can't tell because a lot of them are English. Manzarek exposes the fraud! By the end of a Manzarek paragraph, say like this one about Andy Warhol:
Andy was most pleased. His hollow, dead, void-filled eyes almost twinkled—if those pools of
dank permissiveness ever could twinkle.
You feel like he's grabbed you by the wrist and pulled you across the living room and he's pressing your head into the TV, on which VH1 is showing a rockumentary about the Doors. It's so ecstatically what you'd expect, and you're way too close and you can't get away. The Middlebrow Ecstatic may turn out to be the dominant mode of our time; this is where it comes from.
It's related to the Brautigan Effect, a reaction to literature where things that aren't supposed to shock do, and then turn into embarrassment, which in turn becomes revulsion and then a psychotic giddiness where you can only laugh, but you realize your laughter is sick. It's all so wrong, but insanely exhilarating. There is no denying this emotion; it's the one place where scorn meets joy. In its nature it is transformative because it makes you swing wildly between that place where you think you're dying sucking the tailpipe of a tractor with a noose around your neck—and good riddance—and another place where the true nature of history is revealed. In the case of Light My Fire, a Horatio Alger story with a pain-wracked drunk as Ragged Dick and a self-obsessed Boomer as narrator, triteness becomes a positive attribute. It cracks the veneer of what has become official culture, the culture of pseudo-Dionysian revolution-speak, lately in the business of selling complicated sneakers and too-large automobiles. In spite of itself, the book sews up at the same time as it unravels the connection between "Peace Frog" and that. Manzarek, the kind of guy who not only lets you know his IQ but also his best friend's and his wife's, has finally cleansed the doors of perception. We can now see the official history of the '60s for what it is: not infinite, but transparent.
Manzarek begs for the Doors to be brought into a larger context than just rock history when he reveals that he wanted Morrison to run for president in 1980. He had an inkling that someone from "the arts or entertainment" would someday make it to the White House, and he wouldn't let Morrison change his name to "James Phoenix" because he didn't think it would work as a name for the president, "and that's where this was all headed." Hubris like this is daunting—the Doors just thought they were so it. They thought everything they did was the first time anyone ever did that; they were the author of every gesture. Even though every major composer and musician of the last two centuries is brought in (OK, just the cool ones) to prove their pedigree, everyone from Mahler to Coltrane, Manzarek still can't get over how goddamn original it all was. But music isn't enough for Manzarek. In his mind, the Doors are the originators of all things that came after them—"Generation X-dom," "slackers," stage diving—they were even the first to go on TV with a real black eye! Even a typical rockstar incident where the Doors act like assholes in a restaurant somehow prefigures Kent State. It's all so clear to him that all of history was leading up to that moment when he and Jim had that conversation on the beach and rushed home to start a rock band. He flat-out says that being intellectual means digging the Doors and that the definition of the not-square is that you like Jim Morrison. That is why the book is so good—Manzarek unconsciously exposes the problem with his generation on every page, all under the guise of penning remembrances of Jim Morrison, mystic troubadour of the lifestyle revolution. The '60s mark the last time young Americans could describe themselves as gods with a straight face and not be called on it. Some may see this as a loss. I don't. I just think it completely explains the "men's movement," that nostalgic reverie of executives and other aging, alienated unalienated-types, who still want to party like it's 900 BC and Dionysus is in the house. Hegemony of rock, let me go!
The behaviors and attitudes that fall under the category of "rockstar" have clotted; they now sit in our society's veins and are no more liberating than those that appear under the heading "supermodel." No one has to tell me that without the Doors we wouldn't be able to listen to Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, X, and Nick Cave, but why is our culture stalled at that point where you don't just go out and buy the 45 of "Light My Fire," you have to buy the whole album? An enforced and corrupt Dionysian joy is strangling me.
Manzarek and Morrison self-consciously defined themselves as altogether new and opposed to the previous generation of popular musicians, which Manzarek repeatedly castigates for being shallow. His defining image of them is that of the Rat Pack swinger who goes around calling women "broads" and won't make way for the new truths to be found in the Age of Aquarius. Evidently it is somehow better to refer to women as "maenads" and to find your self-justifications in pot instead of booze. It struck me as odd that well into the book, on page 303 to be exact, Manzarek suddenly drops in that Frank Sinatra was Morrison's idol. Then I remembered the scene much earlier in the book where Morrison "adjusts" the tail of a black chick dressed as a Playboy bunny before leading her off to the bar, and the idea that Morrison is somehow less macho than Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr. suddenly became hilarious. Far be it from me to criticize someone for buying a girl a drink, but there's something supremely deluded about a guy who can go on for over 350 pages about Dionysian revolution and not see the irony in that. But then again, this is the guy who justified doing a Buick commercial by pointing out that the car it was for "was both ecologically correct and stylish," and that using "Light My Fire" to sell it was an example of a culture "using our brains to save the environment while maintaining a lifestyle and standard of living we really couldn't live without."
Of course Morrison went ballistic when he found out about this, but he was off on a bender when the contract was signed and it was too late to do anything about it. Maybe while he was gone he wrote the lines "Death, old friend,/ Death and my cock are the world." But please, Ray, there was no cock. You admitted it yourself—you and Jim, the poor, dead bastard.
www.hermenaut.com/a132.shtml
Lights, Camera, Organ! or, Ecce Jimbo
Review of "Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors" by Ray Manzarek
REVIEW | A. S. Hamrah | 9/8/2000
We all know of course that ours is a civilization in decline. Knowing that may lead us to wonder, when did it reach its high-water mark? If you read Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors by Ray Manzarek, who was the organ player in that band and its cofounder, you will know: Our civilization achieved its highest expression when Jim Morrison put on a pair of leather pants and went on the Ed Sullivan Show to sing "Light My Fire."
He wasn't supposed to sing the word "higher" but he did anyway. That was in 1967. "Light My Fire" was the number-one song in America. All downhill from there. Now you know.
When I was a child I wasn't aware of the significance of this event. Then, with the innocence often found in children, I thought the Doors were a kiddie band: I was under the impression that their music was for kids. Whenever "Riders on the Storm" came on the radio I was excited because I liked the spooky atmosphere the song tries so hard to create. I especially liked the lyrics, which I assumed—because of lines like "His brain is squirmin' like a toad" and "Take a long holiday/Let your children play" and "Like a dog without a bone"—were aimed at people my age. The organ (not the bone) cinched it for me. That sound I recognized as from the circus and not something adults listened to. It seemed so clear. I didn't know the singer was a famous dead guy and a poet who was buried in Paris. After reading Manzarek's memoir I now know otherwise, to put it mildly.
There's always been something funny about the Doors. Their shameless grandiosity and utter lack of irony or even humor in the face of their own pretension become so overbearing, so pompous, that you start to feel put upon (smothered, even) when you listen to them. As with so much other rock music that is so dead serious, what else can you do but laugh? All other responses get choked off. For instance, no matter how many times I hear "The End," it still cracks me up. It goes without saying that that's not the intention—somehow it seems like the most apt response. As impossible as this is to do, I think if you try to listen to that song like you've never heard it before, it's even funnier. The song's darkness is too studied; Morrison's self-examination too pat; in the mind of the listener the phrase Could you just give me a break please? bubbles up every time. But they never do give you a break; they keep up the goofy act at all costs, and they never break on through to the other side because they're too worried about breaking on through to the other side. It doesn't work at all in the way they intended, yet it's not without its moments of negative transcendence, and these head-smacking moments that despite everything have the power to make you giddy are all that remain. This is either the triumph of the Doors or something else, I'm not sure what. I'm not sure it can even be named.
That's why "The End" is so perfect for the unbelievably overwrought, macho death-wish denouement of Apocalypse Now. You think, ah! These are the people who like this kind of thing: '60s and '70s film school graduates, guys like Morrison and Manzarek who've filtered all art and culture through their trapped adolescent sensibility into a geeky mess where life is some kind of Dionysian orgy of unscary scariness and phony liberation from inner demons, where Eliot is quoted to impress lesser beings, and where colored lights they hypnotize as some shaman-type writhes in pain and tumescent glory. Rock'n'Roll! But rock'n'roll like we're into the Beats, too, OK? You know, the Beats? Poetry? Real poetry? It's fine to kick ass, and indeed we do—indeed we do—but this is Art, and by the way, hello, I love you. Hello?
The film school experience is central to Manzarek's book. The title of its third chapter, "Destiny and the UCLA Film School," encapsulates the entire era in which Manzarek and Morrison flowered, and its presumption explains so much about post-Eisenhower American popular culture. "Destiny," oddly enough, also refers to a silent film of that name by Fritz Lang, an obscure movie which Manzarek mentions more than once. And that's what's funny about this incarnation of the Doors: Manzarek, an accomplished man with two college degrees who can do many things at once, has unexpectedly chosen to cast his memoir as a book of film criticism. Right on page one he points out that Jim may have gone to a movie right before he died ("like Oswald," Manzarek adds for some reason, conflating patsy and president). From mentions of Jim's director pal Agnés Varda and Pandora's Box in the book's first few pages, to the description of a failed before-the-name rockumentary produced by Morrison and a "Woodstock, the movie" defense Morrison's legal team attempted during his famous Miami trial at the book's end, barely a page goes by without the name of a film or filmmaker being dropped. When not discussing movies or using them as points of comparison, Manzarek works in giants of painting, literature, theater, dance, and, yes, music. And then there's classical mythology (calling Dionysus!), world religions (vade retro, "Judeo-Christian-Muslim man"), and philosophy (does the name Nietzsche mean anything to you? It means a lot to Manzarek—and how!). Let me give you an example, from Manzarek's description of an acid trip Morrison related to him:
He said he saw a satyr following him from across the street. A little satyr with horns and pointed ears, a man's head and upper body, walking on two goat legs. A little Greco-Roman satyr. A faun as in Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, so brilliantly danced and choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Pan, the god of the forest.
It's that kind of a book. Vaslav Nijinsky. Later we're told the "satyr was the spirit of [Jim's] own freedom."
A long time ago I read a poem by Jim Morrison called "Cinema." It has stuck with me because of its title and because it's very short. I have little John Donne or George Herbert; I have more Jim Morrison than I'd care to admit, a characteristic no doubt of anyone who grew up in America near a radio. "In the womb/We are all blind cave fish." That's the poem, as I recall. In it—between the lofty aspiration of the title and the pretentious, inadequate, startling execution—I find much that explains both the Doors and Manzarek's attitude towards what they did and what they thought they were doing, and the gap between the two. Morrison and Manzarek were brought together at the UCLA film school under the tutelage of Josef von Sternberg, the director of Marlene Dietrich in the '30s, the man who made Morocco and Blonde Venus. Let's call him "Cinema." From the womb of the UCLA film school, the blind cave-fish Manzarek and Morrison emerged into the southern California sunlight, their heads filled with convictions and ideas that Sternberg, that master of lighting, could do little to illumine against all that haze. That sunlight was filled with dust particles made out of degraded '50s hipsterisms that floated down to college level; ideological positions that must've appeared very out-there but were getting a little shopworn by the time they came into Ray's and Jim's possession. These included—but weren't limited to—Chess Records blues, Ferlinghetti-approved books, Bergman films, Weimar Germany (at one point Manzarek describes something as "so Weimar"), Eastern spirituality, 19th century German Romanticism, even musique concrète...
The time was right to turn all that stuff into hit records for the thinking teenybopper. Who could've guessed that doing so would create a Morrison cult that survives into the present day, where the Doors' music is exploited endlessly as Classic Rock, another era's soundtrack slopped interminably and inexcusably onto this one? It's a lesson in devaluation: the same thing the Doors did to the line from Blake that gave them their name. The doors of perception go from Blake to Huxley, end up as the name of a rock band and mean little else to the ten-thousand wannabe Morrisons who have recorded since. The unfortunate rockstar worship of leather pants traces itself back to William Blake, and his harsh beauty and prophetic criticism are reduced to the swagger of a frustrated, unhappy Lizard King announcing from the stage that "I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames."
That's dialogue from a later Morrison, one Manzarek will name "Jimbo," one Jim and Ray didn't predict back around their time at UCLA. Conversations from that period are just as unflattering; Manzarek re-creates them in detail. From the film criticism perspective, they're the highlights of the book. Manzarek and Morrison and their cohorts yammer on endlessly in an embarrassing early '60s cant that entertains immensely the more it pushes credibility.
"I think Vivre sa Vie is Godard's best work," says Alain Ronay as he sips an aperitif.
"Breathless, Alain," Jim comes back. "Breathless is his masterpiece."
"You're both wrong," I passionately object. Contempt [Le Mépris] with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance and Fritz Lang. That's his best film!"
"Could be," Jim agrees.
"It can't be Breathless," says Alain. "Breathless is immature. His first work. Too cutty."
Jim sips his Corona... and says, "It's supposed to be cutty, man. It's called jump cutting. It may not be correct for the 'cinema of your papa,' but it's correct for today. It's at our speed, our tempo. It doesn't belong to the past. We don't belong to the past, not anymore." The hemp was working.
Did he really say "Contempt [Le Mépris]"? I so hope he did not, and that Manzarek the writer only threw that in on the off chance that someone, somewhere, reading Light My Fire might know that film only by its French title, even if he listed the cast. (By the way, "cutty"?) Conversations like that abound; a few pages later Manzarek is informing the reader that John Ford's The Searchers—that perennial hippie bugbear—is inferior to Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, and that people who don't realize this are "squares, certainly not poets" and demonstrate a "lapse of aesthetics."
This is not only how Manzarek has the people in the book talk—real people from his real life forced to mouth clichés and be verbose— it's the way the entire book is written. He and they seem to have swallowed whole whatever groovy-osities came their way, and they regurgitate them in this sit-com dialogue that seems like a put-on but is actually a style, the exact style of the '60s California rock-god dude. The affectation has taken over; it's all that's left. The clichés come rolling in, one after another,—wait. No. To accuse Light My Fire of being cliché-ridden is like accusing the ocean of being wet. Take it or leave it. I take it because this book is such a stunning testimony to what went wrong, sociology in the form of rockography by a guy who doesn't get it. The book is powerful, compelling, hilarious, and mind-blowing, but not for any of the reasons he thinks it is. Why pile on even more clichés to get across how clichéd the book is? Manzarek has done the impossible: He's constructed a book entirely out of clichés. When he uses the word "the" he uses it in a cliché way. This is an achievement. We have been waiting for this thing—the '60s cliché to end all '60s clichés. No more are needed; the last vestiges of meaning have been removed from the All-Important Decade. Manzarek has accomplished this, and he's done it at the level of form! This book is a marker. A warning on a tombstone. Stop and cast an eye. Wait. I'm writing like him. That entire Judeo-Christian-Islamic thing. The sins of the fathers. Will be visited on the sons. And they were. I mean they are. They have been visited on them. The sons. The sins.
Let's get one thing straight, though: If Manzarek makes his Lives of the Doors into a movie-on-the-page, an imitation of a certain kind of movie that constantly refers to other movies, it is not an Oliver Stone movie. One of the great joys of Light My Fire is how Manzarek goes out of his way to bash Stone, the director of an atrocious early '90s biopic on the Doors. The sometimes beautifully ad hominem Stone-bashing is of such a high quality, and so unreserved, that the book is worth it for that alone. Manzarek calls Stone an anti-Semite and a fascist, and accuses him of having "psychotic leanings"; he calls him a misreader of Nietzsche, one who "interprets the warrior's freedom from the lowered state of consciousness of the first three chakras"; he even, gloriously, calls him Oliver "Bonehead" Stone. This dismantling of Stone, while not the book's saving grace, is perhaps something like it.
Stone's film—in which a preening Val Kilmer inadvertently makes Morrison into even more of an asshole than you would expect the combination of Kilmer and Morrison to yield—is repellent in the extreme, but I wish Manzarek had mentioned its one good scene: Kilmer/ Morrison overturns a holiday dinner table, eliciting this response from cute, hippied-up Meg Ryan, playing his long-suffering girlfriend: Jim Morrison, you have ruined another Thanksgiving! At that point, you really felt what their relationship was like. But Meg Ryan's an expert at getting that across.
Manzarek's outrage at Stone's rewrite is understandable for reasons other than that it changed stuff around and was lousy. Manzarek's own version is probably too fragile to allow for any fictionalization other than his own. Like Stone (who in his film turns a student film Morrison made into some kind of homo-Nazi homage to Kenneth Anger), Manzarek loved Jim Morrison. He loved him intensely and didn't feel whole without him. Remembering Morrison's death, he writes "We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Apollo-and-Dionysus dichotomy thing again." This could be Jerry Lewis talking about the breakup with Dean Martin. Note the peculiar showbiz construction of sentiment. The same confused feelings are there, that Jerry and Ray had met the perfect man—an idealized figure both wanted to be but knew they couldn't—and now he was gone. Even a post-collegiate separation elicits longing: "I was going to miss this pothead, this avant-garde stoner, this rebellious psychedelic poet pal of mine." For Manzarek, their union was "the snake biting its own tail."
Then along came Jimbo. The Doors as a band may have been divided in two, but Morrison himself was rent also. Manzarek at times redundantly calls Morrison "Dionysus/Bacchus"—"Dionysus/Janus" would've been more accurate. Two-faced, like Janus, the god of doorways for Christ's sake, Morrison increasingly became the character Manzarek calls "Jimbo," a drunken lout and belligerent good old boy. It's Jimbo, not Jim, that I've always suspected was the one beloved by the Morrison cult, the late-Elvis side of Morrison that strongly appeals to the stadium-parking-lot crowd and other advocates of getting-trashed-as-revolution.
The Dionysian orgy-time (Dionysian Orgy Time—they should've used that as an album title!) that was supposedly the Doors falls apart particularly well in Manzarek's chapters on Morrison's encounter with Andy Warhol and his version of the '60s. I would quote Manzarek's excruciating celebration of a blowjob that Factory demimondaine Nico gave Morrison, but I refrain out of respect for the late chanteuse, a troubled woman arguably as talented as anyone who appears here. That passage is one of Light My Fire's most negatively transcendent moments, and it's a description of something that didn't even happen to the author. It's one of those sections—and the book has many—where after reading it, you think Did I just read that? For Light My Fire is like that—when you're reading it you have to read lots of it out loud to people. Perhaps the best example of this is Manzarek's evocation of the time Morrison's cock met its historical destiny.
We were loaded for bear... The band was primed, rehearsed, and ready to kick ass. And... Jim Morrison had his leathers! Yes. The black snake bone had been born.
The Black mamba. The shaman dipped in liquid licorice. The leather Adonis. [...] And no underwear. [...] Did he look good? Oh, my, yes! He looked great. He was going to pierce the heart of the collective TV audience with black arrows of Eros. Dionysus was about to become manifest on the television screens of America. We were ready to rock, and the satyr was drooling.
Now, leather and snakeskin were something Jim had talked about for a long time. [Jim] adapted the garb and the persona of that handsome young drifter into his own personality projection. And threw in a bit of classic western Americana... leather pants. [...] And he looked great in leather. And when the ladies saw him on TV and saw the bulge in his crotch, they were pierced through the heart chakra. They were slain by love/lust. His American maenads. When they saw, on national television, what appeared to be the head of Jim's penis, the glans penis, straining against the black leather enclosure, they knew he had no underwear. It was just leather against shaft... and their imaginary hand was in between. And they loved him.
The second half of the book is full of such cringe-and-laugh-inducing passages, as they lead inexorably to Morrison's arrest and conviction in Miami for allegedly exposing himself on stage. Jim, Manzarek tells us, didn't really take it out, he just created the illusion of doing so by waving his shirt around like a cape. People "swear to this day that they saw his cock—where there was no cock," he informs.
The whole book is a celebration of an erection that wasn't there. Manzarek has been so insulated from so much for so long that he no longer has any filters. For him, Morrison wasn't like Dionysus, he was Dionysus. Reading Manzarek's wildly self-indulgent prose about the revolution and the world he thinks the Doors created, you try to picture history from his point of view, and then you think, you know—"Touch Me"? That's why the book's joy—Manzarek is so up—isn't just a guilty pleasure. We've entered another realm here. Sure, it's not the one Manzarek thinks it is, but so what? The book is bad, yes, but it is not so-bad-it's-good bad; it's not that the book is bad in a good way, it's more that it's good in a bad way. A new aesthetic category needs to be created for it; let's call it the Middlebrow Ecstatic.
Paradoxically, all the things that middlebrow usually shies away from in its lazy drive to smooth things over and still be reasonable and intelligent—things like sex, drugs, political upheaval, self-aggrandizement, and personal disintegration—are here. It's just that they're here in a form so phony and so unexamined that Manzarek comes off as the ultimate square, a guy so sure he's right and that his vision of the world is yours that he doesn't have to do anything but be trite, ecstatically. He's extremely critical of people who don't penetrate the surface, and yet his every expression is a cliché. His vastness is so small, and his smallness is so vast. His every idea is so typical and draws on such predictable sources, yet he gets it out like nobody's ever thought of it before. Is this what all deified '60s rockers do? You can't tell because a lot of them are English. Manzarek exposes the fraud! By the end of a Manzarek paragraph, say like this one about Andy Warhol:
Andy was most pleased. His hollow, dead, void-filled eyes almost twinkled—if those pools of
dank permissiveness ever could twinkle.
You feel like he's grabbed you by the wrist and pulled you across the living room and he's pressing your head into the TV, on which VH1 is showing a rockumentary about the Doors. It's so ecstatically what you'd expect, and you're way too close and you can't get away. The Middlebrow Ecstatic may turn out to be the dominant mode of our time; this is where it comes from.
It's related to the Brautigan Effect, a reaction to literature where things that aren't supposed to shock do, and then turn into embarrassment, which in turn becomes revulsion and then a psychotic giddiness where you can only laugh, but you realize your laughter is sick. It's all so wrong, but insanely exhilarating. There is no denying this emotion; it's the one place where scorn meets joy. In its nature it is transformative because it makes you swing wildly between that place where you think you're dying sucking the tailpipe of a tractor with a noose around your neck—and good riddance—and another place where the true nature of history is revealed. In the case of Light My Fire, a Horatio Alger story with a pain-wracked drunk as Ragged Dick and a self-obsessed Boomer as narrator, triteness becomes a positive attribute. It cracks the veneer of what has become official culture, the culture of pseudo-Dionysian revolution-speak, lately in the business of selling complicated sneakers and too-large automobiles. In spite of itself, the book sews up at the same time as it unravels the connection between "Peace Frog" and that. Manzarek, the kind of guy who not only lets you know his IQ but also his best friend's and his wife's, has finally cleansed the doors of perception. We can now see the official history of the '60s for what it is: not infinite, but transparent.
Manzarek begs for the Doors to be brought into a larger context than just rock history when he reveals that he wanted Morrison to run for president in 1980. He had an inkling that someone from "the arts or entertainment" would someday make it to the White House, and he wouldn't let Morrison change his name to "James Phoenix" because he didn't think it would work as a name for the president, "and that's where this was all headed." Hubris like this is daunting—the Doors just thought they were so it. They thought everything they did was the first time anyone ever did that; they were the author of every gesture. Even though every major composer and musician of the last two centuries is brought in (OK, just the cool ones) to prove their pedigree, everyone from Mahler to Coltrane, Manzarek still can't get over how goddamn original it all was. But music isn't enough for Manzarek. In his mind, the Doors are the originators of all things that came after them—"Generation X-dom," "slackers," stage diving—they were even the first to go on TV with a real black eye! Even a typical rockstar incident where the Doors act like assholes in a restaurant somehow prefigures Kent State. It's all so clear to him that all of history was leading up to that moment when he and Jim had that conversation on the beach and rushed home to start a rock band. He flat-out says that being intellectual means digging the Doors and that the definition of the not-square is that you like Jim Morrison. That is why the book is so good—Manzarek unconsciously exposes the problem with his generation on every page, all under the guise of penning remembrances of Jim Morrison, mystic troubadour of the lifestyle revolution. The '60s mark the last time young Americans could describe themselves as gods with a straight face and not be called on it. Some may see this as a loss. I don't. I just think it completely explains the "men's movement," that nostalgic reverie of executives and other aging, alienated unalienated-types, who still want to party like it's 900 BC and Dionysus is in the house. Hegemony of rock, let me go!
The behaviors and attitudes that fall under the category of "rockstar" have clotted; they now sit in our society's veins and are no more liberating than those that appear under the heading "supermodel." No one has to tell me that without the Doors we wouldn't be able to listen to Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, X, and Nick Cave, but why is our culture stalled at that point where you don't just go out and buy the 45 of "Light My Fire," you have to buy the whole album? An enforced and corrupt Dionysian joy is strangling me.
Manzarek and Morrison self-consciously defined themselves as altogether new and opposed to the previous generation of popular musicians, which Manzarek repeatedly castigates for being shallow. His defining image of them is that of the Rat Pack swinger who goes around calling women "broads" and won't make way for the new truths to be found in the Age of Aquarius. Evidently it is somehow better to refer to women as "maenads" and to find your self-justifications in pot instead of booze. It struck me as odd that well into the book, on page 303 to be exact, Manzarek suddenly drops in that Frank Sinatra was Morrison's idol. Then I remembered the scene much earlier in the book where Morrison "adjusts" the tail of a black chick dressed as a Playboy bunny before leading her off to the bar, and the idea that Morrison is somehow less macho than Sinatra or Sammy Davis, Jr. suddenly became hilarious. Far be it from me to criticize someone for buying a girl a drink, but there's something supremely deluded about a guy who can go on for over 350 pages about Dionysian revolution and not see the irony in that. But then again, this is the guy who justified doing a Buick commercial by pointing out that the car it was for "was both ecologically correct and stylish," and that using "Light My Fire" to sell it was an example of a culture "using our brains to save the environment while maintaining a lifestyle and standard of living we really couldn't live without."
Of course Morrison went ballistic when he found out about this, but he was off on a bender when the contract was signed and it was too late to do anything about it. Maybe while he was gone he wrote the lines "Death, old friend,/ Death and my cock are the world." But please, Ray, there was no cock. You admitted it yourself—you and Jim, the poor, dead bastard.
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