The Doors, Joe

I knew "Light My Fire" was one of the best classic rock songs of all time back before I even knew who the Doors were or even attempted to buy any of their albums. So imagine my surprise as I'm lying on the family room couch one lazy Christmas afternoon (back when I didn't spend Christmas day sweating through my shirt trying to soberly prepare for hosting dinner with both sides of the family; back when Christmas was one of the only times all year when I would receive new CDs, since I was poor and didn't know how to steal digital files yet and Santa was all I had in terms of exploring new (to me) music) and I listen to "Light My Fire" on purpose (vs. at gunpoint by the radio) and I discover that this whole time, this whole fucking time, the song I knew as "Light My Fire" was a radio edit, and that there was this entire fucking dank-ass guitar solo hiding in there, how it slinks forward out of the darkness, the band quiet for a moment and then Robby Krieger's strings peeking into the light, and forward on from there. For me, this micro-experience, there on the family room couch (oh christ, so many musical memories over the year, lying there supine and letting the experience of the great rock 'n' roll canon wash over me), was indicative of the place in my heart that the Doors would occupy for, gosh, how many years now, more than twenty?

One entire paragraph into this review and I haven't uttered the name "Jim Morrison" yet, which was on purpose. Can't reveal all the cards too early in the hand. The Doors have and can exist without the Lizard King, but if we're talking about the story of the Doors, then it begins and ends with him. And if we're talking about my story of discovering the story of the Doors, then the waxing and waning of my critical opinion of this this rock outfit hinges entirely on how I feel or felt about Jim Morrison as a canonical figure and as a myth and as a person, depending on which stage of my life I was currently at. At sixteen, I revered him, and looked up to him as the agent of chaos that I only hoped I could be in my most vivid night dreams. At 26, I pitied him, looking down upon a man clearly crying for help, lashing out with cringey behavior, gone too soon but, to be honest, not unexpectedly, based on the bullshit he was carrying on with in his early 20s up until he hit the French baths. At 36, I find myself back to where I started—perhaps not reverential this time, but still great valuing my experience with the art and legacy of this kid, this fucking kid, ya know? 27 seems impossibly young to die, now.

Something I've always been pretty fascinated with regarding Jim Morrison is the fact that he sings about wanting to fuck his mother. Or does he? Clearly, his unintelligible words after "Mother, I want to—" in "The End" are unintelligible on purpose, being as this is 1967, and the Beatles were at the same time getting a lot of shit for daring to release a song with the same initials as a semisynthetic hallucinogenic drug, so I've always pictured the 1960s as an uptight era, don't listen to the Boomers, the vast majority of Americans were just as afraid of immorality and taboo as they are now, and so of fucking course even Jim fucking Morrison isn't going to have the balls to crystal-clearly vocalize his intentions to fuck his mother. Actually, I've always heard the lyrics as "Mother, I want to rape you," with the "rape you" obviously being stretched syllabically past the point of comprehension, but c'mon, it's right there. Why don't we talk about this more? Most people are content to say "huh, Oedipal, ain't it?" and then wipe their hands clean and walk away. Something about the fact that Morrison is saying he wants to rape his mother remains extremely discomforting to me after all this time, and it's a discomfort that I've never really seen mirrored in anyone else. It could be related to the idea that for some fucking sick reason, incest has become normalized, like on porn websites. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've never been able to masturbate to "The End."

Ah, now, see, there goes sixteen-year-old Joe, trying to be edgy like his hero Jim Morrison. Ain't no room for that shit these days. You can't attack this art directly, not in your mid-30s. You kinda have to sidestep into it. Work around it. Use the tried-and-true method of "the art tells a story." At sixteen, Morrison is a wild god because he screams about raping his own mom. At 26, the line reads as insincere, like something a sixteen-year-old might spout, and it's embarrassing to listen to. At 36, I can appreciate the wink in Morrison's eye once more, that he understood exactly what he was doing, that he was closer to 36 in intellect than sixteen, that he wasn't trying to be cool, but instead was trying to be cringe, because that was more interesting. It added to the myth. He wasn't just a drunk disguised as a poet; he was a poet disguised as a drunk, too.

And yeah, that poetry extends—ironically, meta-ironically, I don't fucking know—into the baser instincts that he lets loose all over this fucking thing. Later on in "The End," after the mother-fucking, Morrison starts basically speaking in tongues, again masking the swear word, but less effectively this time, his "FUCK, fuck, FUCK me baby" barely censored, about as subtle as shooting holes through drywall with a shotgun. It's stupid, yeah, but at a certainly point it's so stupid that it becomes powerful. Opinions may vary.

FUCK me, baby, I remember every goddamn fucking inch of this fucking album. Every overwrought inflection of the devilish Morrison in shitkicking theater kid mode, I can close my eyes and hear it clear as day, even when the headphones aren't in my ears. In "Break On Through" when he bellows "deep mmm-WIIIIDE"? I mean, I really don't blame any wacko Christians in the late-'60s who believed he was the devil. Based on some of these line readings, he might've been. He eats more chicken than a man's ever seen! He lights another cigarette and learns to forget! He aims his arrows at the sun! He's asking us to not ask why when he tells you he's going to molest a kid! Who would tell you to try to forget such a thing besides the devil himself (and maybe the sitting U.S. president)?!?

There is mystery and intrigue all over this album, and deeply embedded within this band. That's the whole fucking thing with them. It's bizarre but never off-putting. I am just as amazed with this album and all its dark corners as I was as a teenager. It still feels fresh. But it's only this album, really. I don't feel the same way about subsequent Doors releases. I can't really say for sure why, but I have a couple theories. The first is that Ray Manzarek's organs start to sound a little cartoonish from this point forward, trending more toward carnival-esque than Satanic church (probably should've mentioned Manzarek before now, he's the not-so-secret sauce in this band's recipe). The second, and more likely if I had to guess, is that this is a "Jersey Shore Season 2" situation (not Situation). In that the cast of Season 1 was their authentic selves, and then the cast of Season 2 were playing off their characters that were established in Season 1. So too did Jim Morrison start playing to the expectations of his character after this point, whereas on The Doors, he is establishing that persona, and it feels real. 

Whatever, whatever, we're not talking about fucking Waiting for the Sun today (or Ronnie and Snookie for that matter), we're talking about The Doors, this masterful fucking album that has fucked me up so much over such a long time period, but never seems to settle into normality for me either. I don't take it for granted. I'm too old for that now. I'm nine years older now than Morrison ever was, and I promise I'm not gonna piss it away.

The legend of the Doors is not that pat. It cannot be summed up with some trite bullshit like "live life to the fullest," please don't get me wrong. What I'm trying to say instead is that there is a story here, and I still don't have all the pieces of that story. A lot of it remains in shadow, even after all this time. We're not even really sure how he died! I still sit down to listen to Jim Morrison yawlp about hallway snakes and the back of the blue bus and remain so fucking befuddled about what it all means, what his intentions actually were, whether this is all winking or just some of it, how much was a character and how much was a crack through which to view the truth self. That's the myth! The mystery is what makes it endure. I am closer to the answer than I was at sixteen or 26, but it still feels so far away. And I think if you're going to attempt to appreciate The Doors, you gotta lean into the mystery, and accept that the answers will never arrive. That's its value, that's the art, that at every age, there is yet more to discover, even after you discover a hitherto unknown guitar solo, and then spend twenty years memorizing every note.

GRADE: 4.5 pukes out of 5