The Doors

Reviews

“Nobody reads a song like Greil Marcus, whose prose is as passionate and omnivorous as the music he loves. Here he travels by way of Thomas Pynchon, Pop Art and Charles Manson to bring the chaotic, majestic, death-haunted Doors back to doomed and haunting life.”

“No one thinks or writes like Greil Marcus. He has a genius for putting the aural dream-language of music into words, for making you ‘hear’ songs you thought you knew as if for the first time. Not just hear but, as he puts it, ‘feel on your skin’ well after the song is over. Because ‘the story it’s telling is still going on.’”

“I can’t remember why I skipped the Doors the night they played at my high school, but Greil Marcus’ new book pours salt into that old wound. No one pays better attention to the implications of the spaces between notes, elevating those spaces to monuments, and making the songs as strange and important as the first time you heard them. His defense of popular culture has never been stronger or more welcome.”

“Mr. Marcus’ acute and ardent new book…[is] among his best…Mr. Marcus’ achievement in The Doors is to isolate and resurrect this band’s best music and set it adrift in a swirling and literate cultural context…The Doors will never mean to me what they mean to Mr. Marcus. But this book means more to me than most rock books.”

“Greil Marcus is an American original whose reflections and digressions are always thought-provoking.”

“‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,’ goes a famously derisive quote whose provenance is mysterious but which is often attributed to Elvis Costello. Greil Marcus’ body of work stands as a repudiation of that quote as well as, perhaps, its embodiment…While he’s unsparing in his criticism of the band’s lesser work, Marcus holds out the possibility that at their best, the Doors hit on something much greater than themselves.”

“[A] fine new book…Published on the anniversary of the band’s last album and its singer’s death in Paris, the book comes to grips with the Doors without being derailed by the legacy of the egomaniac behind the microphone…Marcus is America’s greatest living cultural observer because he’s less interested in whether a CD or movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ than what it contributes to a larger picture…His passage on ‘Light My Fire’ is the best ever written about a record that most people barely can hear in an old way anymore let alone a new one.”

“When Marcus is full-on into ecstatic writing mode, spending several pages at a time detailing the most minuscule subtleties of a performance—and this book is all about the Doors as a performing band, more than as writers or icons—the rush is more than contagious…The way Marcus is able to construct an engaging narrative out of a tune that was recorded on a lousy cassette recorder in the middle of an ancient auditorium produces small miracles of revelatory rock writing…And, suddenly, Marcus does make you remember what an anomaly their particular brand of noir was in the late 60s…along with how few of today’s Phish bootlegs will be prompting entire books in the 2050s. Marcus is just the discriminating wheat-from-chaff separator the Doors have long been in need of to reconfirm their legend among the intelligentsia.”

“With an astounding breadth of knowledge, Marcus unmasks The Doors in his latest missive from the cultural trenches.”

“A relentlessly beautiful and insightful evaluation of the music of the Doors…An impressive tribute to ‘the revolt the Doors momentarily embodied, and acted out,’ as well as to Jim Morrison’s artistic attempt to move beyond the hatred he felt for the band’s pop success.”

“Marcus’ books have always combined a historian’s scrupulousness with facts with an alertness to the larger-than-life dimensions of what British critic Nik Cohn once called ‘Superpop…the image, hype and beautiful flash of rock’n’roll music.’ As rock’s first self-conscious mythographers, the Doors are such a perfect subject for this approach that it makes you wonder why Marcus waited so long to write a book about them…The triumphant sections of The Doors re-create the sensation of hearing these songs for the first time. There’s a thrilling blow-by-blow account of ‘The End,’ two great takes on different ‘Light My Fire’ performances, and many marvelous evocations of particular passages of playing…The closer that Marcus sticks to the music, the better; he draws strength from its inexhaustible vigor.”

“Marcus minutely dissects the Doors and their songs in his familiar bombastic yet mellifluous style.”

“It’s a passionate book, with Marcus focusing on fifteen or so songs in the Doors’ canon, combining a whole lot of close listening with an erudition alternately staggering and bewildering. Marcus clearly loves the Doors, but not unreservedly.”

“Marcus eagerly strips the Doors of the psychedelic clichés that have attached to them…[His] enthusiasm is often infectious.”

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