Lester Bangs was right
The other day I was over at a friend's house, watching some of ALMOST FAMOUS. It used to be that I would watch the radio station interview with Lester Bangs and look at his statement about the Doors as being an eccentric viewpoint by an opinionated guy. "Jim Morrison? He's a drunken buffoon masquerading as a poet." But watching it again, I realized that I was agreeing with him now. While I've claimed to like the Doors ever since my high school years, when was the last time I actually listened to any of my Doors CDs? I dare say it's been years.
The Doors are a big band for high schoolers getting into the uncharted realms of "classic rock." With Morrison's lyrics and the funereal music, they feel serious and deep, especially compared to innocuous contemporary pop. "Morrison's words are poetry," we tell ourselves, sometimes through a pot haze, sometimes not.
But when I came home and popped in one of my Doors CDs, I had one of those Tom Wolfe, can't-go-home-again moments. Most of their songs are pretty unlistenable. Maybe if I still smoked pot, I might have gotten that old feeling back, but I'm afraid those days are gone. A few songs hold up- "L.A. Woman" especially- but most hardly justify the grandiose claims we once made. The groovy organ solos now feel like drug-fueled dicking around, no less wanky than the guitar noodlings at a Dead concert ("I know my friends always charged me $35 bucks to listen to them dick around on guitars"). And poetry? Saying Morrison wrote his lyrics as poetry isn't necessarily a compliment- couldn't the same be said of any wannabe songwriter who rhymes "mire", "wire", and "pyre"?
I think what I responded to at that age, more than the lyrics or the music, was the pageantry and the pretention. Morrison played a dual role in his career, a rock'n'roll artist and a doomed musical messiah. He conveyed these roles in his music and his short life, and we believed him, as the young are apt to do. But divorced from this belief, the music just isn't the same. Nowadays, I yearn for music, not mystique. Bangs extols the virtues of the Guess Who- "they've got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic"- and I took have my favorites. Yet I can't help but feel a bit like a kid who just found out that there's no Santa Claus. I know the truth, and objectively I should be satisfied. But Christmas won't be quite the same anymore.
posted by Paul C. @ 10:36 PM
3 Comments:
I agree completely with this short article. My journey of falling for the mystique over substance with the Doors (specifically the idea that Jim Morrison wrote great or meaningful lyrics, which I now do NOT believe) began in my teenage years, peaked in college, then ebbed as I matured. One thing to point out though - the lyrics rhyming mire, fire, and pyre were from Light My Fire, which was one of the songs written by the Doors "other" songwriter - Robbie Krieger (NOT Jim Morrison).
i dunno... i recently defended the doors in an email between friends by saying that it was precisely the pretension and clunkiness that i always liked about the band. they took some interesting risks, went directions no one else even thought of, and weren't afraid to go over the top. were they always excellent and ingenious? not by a longshot. but the long-winded, dreary tunes were the exception, not the rule. "light my fire" "when the music's over" "the soft parade"... those were spread out over three different albums. "not to touch the earth" was the only portion of a really, really pretentious song/theater cycle to survive the editing process and wind up on a studio album.
and i find the comparison to the grateful dead utterly fatuous. the majority of the doors' tunes were pretty tightly focused, even if they weren't always toe-tapping gems. the dead, on a good day, left more threads hanging than a black widow on lsd.
i'd give "morrison hotel" a listen again. even hunter thompson, in later life, gave it props as one of the strongest albums of the 60s. sure, morrison probably took himself a little too seriously, but i have yet to hear a band quite like them.
I felt the same way, but recently I've heard some interviews of Iggy Pop (who Lester loved) and Iggy talks about using Morrison's work as inspiration for his own works.
Also, It's been said that Iggy was pretty aimless in his live performances until he saw the Doors play in L.A. After that, what you got from Iggy was what you've seen for decades now, which is his way of bringing the Muse (music) to his audience as a shaman.
So, if Iggy says yes to Jim, how can Lester or any of us argue? Unless, of course, you hate Iggy too.
On the other hand, I think Morrison himself would agree with Bangs that he was a buffoon. If you've ever seen him interviewed, that's exactly how he portrays. But he knew how to bring the muse.
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