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By Root 426 0

became a Number One best-seller last year, all the Doors’ LP product began to move in a big way again. Now there is the inevitable talk of a movie of Morrison's life, with (shudder) perhaps equally inevitable hints that John Travolta might have the starring role. The first question that would occur to anyone might be that asked by the first person I told I was doing the article: “Yeah, just why is there this big Doors fanaticism all over again, anyway?” The answer to that is not so hard to find, though in the end it may be questionable just how much it really has to do with the Doors. I’m reminded of the younger brother of an old girlfriend—he recently graduated from high school, and still lives with their parents in Detroit, and when she told me he was playing in a rock band and I asked her who his favorite artists were, she said: “His three favorite groups are the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Doors.”

Think about that for a minute. That kid is now entering college. The Doors broke up ten years ago this July—well, okay, Morrison died then, and if you want to call the trio that went on after his death the Doors you can, but nobody else did—and Cream and the Yardbirds have been dead since ‘68–’69. Sure all three of them were great groups, but were they all that epochal that somebody who was in elementary school when they scored their greatest triumphs should look back to them like this, to be holding on to them after that many years? Yeah, the Beatles were one thing, but Cream?

Perhaps a more apposite question, though, might be can you imagine being a teenager in the 1980s and having absolutely no culture you could call your own? Because that's what it finally comes down to, that and the further point which might as well be admitted, that you can deny it all you want but almost none of the groups that have been offered to the public in the past few years begin to compare with the best from the Sixties. And this is not just Sixties nostalgia—it's a simple matter of listening to them side by side and noting the relative lack of passion, expansiveness, and commitment in even the best of today's groups. There is a halfheartedness, a tentativeness, and perhaps worst of all a tendency to hide behind irony that is after all perfectly reflective of the time, but doesn’t do much to endear these pretenders to the throne. Sure, given the economic climate alone as well as all the other factors it was a hell of a lot easier to go all-out berserk, yet hold on to whatever principles you had in the Sixties—today's bands are so eager to get bought up and groomed and sold by the pound it often seems as if even the most popular and colorful barely even exist, let alone stand for anything.

So what did the Doors stand for? Well, if I remember correctly, back in 1968 when I was living in a hippie crash pad in San Diego, California, all my roommates used to have earnest bull sessions far into the night about the “Death Trip” the Doors were supposedly on. Recall this one guy used to sit there all day and night toking on his doob and intoning things like “Genius… is very close to … madness …” instead of doing his homework, and he had a high appreciation of the Doors’ early work. Me, I always kind of wanted Morrison to be better than he actually was, like I wished all his songs could have had the understated power of, say “People Are Strange” (Faces look ugly when you’re alone/ Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted...) and, like many, it was only after being disappointed that I could learn to take the true poetry and terror whenever it could be found and develop an ever-increasing appreciation for most of the rest of Morrison's work as prime Bozo action.

As for the Poet himself, Hopkins’ and Sugerman's book is primarily interesting for what it apparently inadvertently reveals. In the foreword, on the very first page of the book, Sugerman lets go two sentences which have stopped more than one person of my acquaintance from reading any further: “I just wanted to say I think Jim Morrison was a modern-day god. Oh hell, at least a lord.”

It is never