The Doors (2 page)

They lose the beat, the song slips, they have trouble finding their way back into the verses, stumbling over the steps back into the fanfare that opens the song, that closes it, that marks Morrison's stride back into the music, that tells you something is about to happen, that makes it clear something has.

It's a relief when Morrison is back at the center, when there are words to attack, when there's a song to take back and rebuild, on the spot; at seven minutes and fifteen seconds into the song it's a thrill. But the song isn't there for Morrison either. The hundreds of thousands of times the song has been broadcast on the radio without the solos the musicians have just found and lost have left the song without a body, just head, hands, and feet, spinning, flailing.

Densmore brings it back, with one single hard shuffle that breaks a line between the verse, with its bad rhyme of “mire” and “pyre,” and the chorus, a pattern of five strokes that says,
Time's up. Put up or shut up.
And that does it: for the first
time, the song is absolutely present, an event taking place as you listen. For the last minute of the performance, the sense of will and strain is so strong that Morrison might be down on his knees, pushing the song through a wall. Every time Densmore leaps to the front of the sound, the certainty that the song will break through is overwhelming; in the next instant, when Morrison takes Densmore's place, desperation builds on itself. Now it's Manzarek who's shouting from behind, all excitement—

 

ALL RIGHT!

 

—then with excitement wrapped in fright—

 

GO!

 

—fright that the wall may hold, that for all that Morrison puts into “Try to set the night on fire,” it won't happen.

When the song finally crashes to a close, you can't tell if it happened or not. As the song ends they're still pushing, the wall is still holding. The song is over but the story it's telling is still going on. You can't hear it but you can feel it on your skin.

 

Jenny Diski,
The Sixties
(New York: Picador, 2009), 9, 87.

“Light My Fire,” Family Dog, Denver, September 30, 1967, from
Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs
, a collection of audience and fans' concert recordings (Rhino Handmade, 2003).

Manny Farber, “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,”
Film Culture
, 1962. Collected in
Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber
(New York: Library of America, 2003), 535.

Come On Baby, Light My Fire,
directed by Lou Campa (J. R. L. Productions, 1969). According to Movies Unlimited, “A goody two-shoes anti-marijuana campaigner [Tina Buckley] is abducted by a group of perverts who take her to the home of a drug kingpin, played by Gerard Damiano of ‘Deep Throat' fame. Soon, the doors of submission and domination are opened when she's forced to become their sex slave.”

L.A. Woman

A
S THE TITLE TRACK of the Doors last album, released in April 1971, three months before Jim Morrison died in Paris, his ideal of following in the footsteps of Rimbaud replaced by an image of Marat dead in his bathtub, “L.A. Woman” emerged over the years, until after four decades you could turn on your car radio and find all eight minutes of it still talking, jabbering, this bum on Sunset Strip going on about a woman and the city and the night as if someone other than himself is actually listening. You can hear it there, anytime—and you can hear it playing between every other line of Thomas Pynchon's 2009 L.A. detective novel
Inherent Vice
, set in the spring of 1970, just before the Manson trial is about to begin, a time when, as Pynchon calls it up, the freeways eastbound from the beach towns “teemed with VW buses in jittering paisleys, primer-coated street hemis, woodies of
authentic Dearborn pine, TV-star-piloted Porsches, Cadillacs carrying dentists to extramarital trysts, windowless vans with lurid teen dramas in progress inside, pickups with mattresses full of country cousins from the San Joaquin, all wheeling along together down into these great horizonless fields of housing, under the power transmission lines, everybody's radios lasing on the same couple of AM stations.”

The book is a love letter to a time and place about to vanish: about the fear that “the Psychedelic Sixties, this little parenthesis of light, might close after all, and all be lost, taken back into darkness . . . how a certain hand might reach terribly out of darkness and reclaim the time, easy as taking a joint from a doper and stubbing it out for good.”

At the very time in which Pynchon has placed his story—about a rock 'n' roll musician supposedly dead of a heroin overdose who turns up in his old band unrecognized by his own bandmates (“Even when I was alive, they didn't know it was me”), a disappeared billionaire developer, a gang of right-wing thugs called Vigilant California, a criminal empire so vast and invulnerable even to speak its name is to make the earth tremble, the first, primitive, bootlegged version of the Internet, and an old girlfriend—people were already talking about the great hippie detective novel. About a dope deal, of course—and an outsider version of Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer. Roger Simon's Moses Wine—starting out in 1973 with
The Big Fix
and still on the case thirty years later, wasn't it. In 1971 Hunter Thompson played the role well in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” but soon dissolved in his own aura. Pynchon's Doc Sportello somehow realizes the fantasy.

About to turn thirty, he lives in Gordita Beach, halfway between Hermosa Beach and El Segundo, though not on any real-life map. He thinks of himself as John Garfield; he's the same height. On his wall is a velvet painting he bought on the street: “a Southern California beach that never was—palms, bikini babes, surfboards, the works.”

He thought of it as a window to look out of when he couldn't deal with looking out of the traditional glass-type one in the other room. Sometimes in the shadows the view would light up, usually when he was smoking weed, as if the contrast knob of Creation had been messed with just enough to give everything an underglow, a luminous edge, and promise that the night was about to turn epic somehow.

That's as good a description of “L.A. Woman” as any other. It has the textures of ordinary life, and everything about it is slightly off, because the epic is what it's reaching for, but without giving itself away, without makeup, cool clothes, photo shoots, or any other trappings of Hollywood glamour. Robby Krieger's guitar is in the front of the music, thin and loose, intricate and casual, serious and quick as thought. Jim Morrison is in the back of the sound, as if trailing the band on the street, shouting that he's got this song for them, a new-type song for a dime, it'd be perfect, and you can see the Morrison who's singing, a man who in 1970 did look like a bum, a huge and tangled beard, a gut hanging over his belt, his clothes stained. The voice is full of cracks and burrs, and an inspiring, crazy exuberance, a delight in being on the streets, in the sun, at
night under neon,
Blade Runner
starring Charles Bukowski instead of Harrison Ford—this bum doesn't shuffle down the street, he runs, stops, twirls, runs back the way he came. Maybe the city doesn't want to see him, but he's in love with the city and that's the story he has to tell. He's not blind. “Motel money, murder madness,” he muses to himself; he can see the fear the Manson gang left in the eyes of the people he passes even as they avert their eyes from his, but he's not afraid, and he knows he's not the killer they're afraid of. The whole song is a chase in pieces, the guitarist tracing half circles in the air, the singer dancing in circles around him, the guitarist not seeing him, the singer not caring.

In
Inherent Vice
there are set pieces lifted, as they have to be, from the likes of
The Little Sister
or
The Chill
—the visit to the big mansion, the hero doped up in the locked room. What is new is Pynchon's depiction of the economy of the hippie utopia as altogether heroin-driven, a suspicion that flits around the edges of the first pages of the story and drives the last sixty pages like a train. What's new in the detective-story novel is Sportello himself, a one-time skip tracer who's graduated into the world of the licensed PI, beach-bum division, and Sportello's nemesis, the infinitely manipulative LAPD homicide detective Bigfoot Bjornsen, who could have stepped out of H. P. Lovecraft. “It's like,” he says, “there's this evil sub-god who rules over Southern California? who off and on will wake from his slumber and allow the dark forces that are always lying there just out of the sunlight to come forth? . . . bye-bye, Black Dahlia, rest in peace Tom Ince, we've seen the last of those good old-time L.A. murder mysteries I'm afraid. We've found the gateway to hell, and it's asking far too much of your L.A. civilian not to want to go crowding on through it,
horny and giggling as always, looking for that latest thrill. Lots of overtime for me and the boys I guess, but it brings us all that much closer to the end of the world”—and you can almost see Squeaky Fromme, not to mention four or five previous generations of Southern California mystics and psychics, perched on his shoulder, smiling like Natalie Wood.

Manson's shadow is everywhere, whether it's Sportello and a black militant arguing over who's hotter, Fromme or Leslie van Houten (“Submissive, brainwashed, horny little teeners,” says Sportello's old girlfriend Shasta Hepworth, “who do exactly what you want before you even know what that is . . . Your kind of chick, Doc, that's the lowdown on you”), or Sportello and three other people in a car pulled over for no reason they can see. “New program,” says a cop, “you know how it is, another excuse for paperwork, they're calling it Cult-watch, every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult.” It's a joke people use because the punch line is all around them, until Manson changes into a story so sensational no one thinks to look behind it, into “a vortex of corroded history,” into what Don DeLillo, in
Great Jones Street
, a novel set about the same time as Pynchon's, called “the true underground,” where presidents and prime ministers “make the underground deals and speak the true underground idiom,” where “the laws are broken, way down under, far beneath the speed freaks and the cutters of smack.”

Out of all this, Pynchon can produce a beach joint where customers argue convincingly “about the two different ‘Wipeout' singles, and which label, Dot or Decca, featured the laugh and which didn't.” He can craft a shootout that turns on a line that in any other hands would be ridiculous, but on Pynchon's ground feels right—a line that to get off the ground
needs a whole book behind it, a line that hits the note the book needs to lift itself into the air. “He waited till he saw a dense patch of moving shadow, sighted it in, and fired, rolling away immediately, and the figure dropped like an acid tab into the mouth of Time”—a moment that fades into an ending so delicate and tragic in its apprehension of all that is soon to pass away it could change places with the last page of
Tender Is the Night
.

You can hear the last pages of the story Pynchon tells in “L.A. Woman” as the Doors played it at the end of 1970, in Dallas, on December 11, the day before their last show, in New Orleans. “It also looked like a crime scene waiting on its next crime,” Pynchon writes; if you had that image in your head, you might hear it playing out as, from the stage of the State Fair Music Hall, “L.A. Woman” begins. It's spooky, immediately calling down night fog. On the tape that survives, the band sounds very far away. Morrison screams out an enormous
Yeeeaaahhh!
and then there's nothing, only a beat moving without a destination. Even as something like music begins to take shape, all you hear is restraint, a refusal to move—a suspension that would turn a corner the next night, the Doors' last night, when in the midst of his performance Morrison began to slam his microphone down until the boards broke, then sat on the stage and refused to move or sing. Pynchon could have reviewed that show: “It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbid-den because it didn't have to be.” Or rewritten it as a dream: “Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool's attempt to find his way
back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the future it did.”