Ray sat at his electric organ, head bowed, just looking at the keys.
John made a last-minute adjustment on his snare drum, and Robbie, looking like
Robert Mitchum's electric son, twisted dials on his amp and tuned softly.
Finally, after an unbearable wait, Robbie began, then John, and finally Ray. The
introduction over and over, evolving, complex, swelling.
Kaleidoscope was sold out. Ciro's was packed and all the people in the Western
Hemisphere were wedged around the stage, waiting, craning around anxiously,
recognizing the introduction.
And there he was; a gaunt, hollow Ariel from hell, stumbling in slow motion
through the drums. Robbie turned to look with mild disgust but Jim Morrison was
oblivious. Drifting, still you could have lit matches off the look he gave the
audience. There was a mild tremor of excited disbelief as he dreamed that he
went to his microphone. Morrison's clothes looked like he had slept in them
since he was twelve and he just hung there on the microphone, slack. Just for a
flash, his beautiful child's face said it was all a lie. All the terror, all the
drugs, all the evil. Gone! The
inhuman
sound he made into the microphone, turned
the carping groupies to stone. And in the tombed silence he began to sing;
alternately caressing, screaming, terraced flights of poetry and music, beyond
visceral.
For an hour on that Friday night, a modern American pop group called The Doors
got right out on the edge and stayed there. And because they are great and
because the edge is where artists produce the best, there occurred a major black
miracle.
The founder of the Theater-of-Cruelty, Antonin Artaud, poet-actor, described one
of his infrequent scenarios thus: "eroticism, savagery, bloodlust, a thirst
for violence, an obsession with horror, collapse of moral values, social
hypocrisy, lies, sadism, perjury, depravity, etc." To anyone who has ever
listened to The Doors at any length, this will appear to be a catalog of their
material, but that's just a part of the whole. This context of Artaud is more
than their ornamental design, more than a convenient rubric into which they
stuff their music. Among their contemporaries, The Doors are going somewhere
different.
Vaguely (pleased, disappointed: choose one) at his survival, Western man has
begun to look inside to see what went wrong, what went right, and to see if they
were ever the same thing. Order and chaos have new levels of meaning so that
today a flogging can have as much validity in art as an act of amative love. And
The Doors know it. This kind of irrationality is beyond dreams or madness and
their songs shock and do not tell logical stories. At the end of a good set, the
evil magic is out, and Morrison holds the only match in the Stygian darkness.
Help- lessly, you hope he won't decide to blow it out.
It is possible to go through so many changes when listening to The Doors, that a
beautiful, exhilarating dream and a nightmare can be the same. "I would not
try to excuse obvious incoherence by mitigating it with dreams. Dreams have
something more than their own logic. They have their own existence, in which
nothing but dark and intelligent truths appear." (Artaud, Morrison: choose
one)
The Doors are four men who are together; their vision is realized by all of
them. But it is Morrison whom the audience watches. They are attracted to him
with the same ambivalence that drives us to feast on calamity. Our perverse
nature is undeniable when we look upon things we fear the most. We cringe and
die a little inside, unable to take our eyes away while evil and death dance
nearer and nearer to our petty conception of immortality. But James Douglas
Morrison bathes luxuriously in it. He moves on stage, dancing with an
indifferent, expressionless attitude or seized with paroxysmal anger, his face
convulsed with a splendid fury. He has more natural disdain, more utter contempt
for his surroundings than anyone I have ever known. But when he stands,
throttling his microphone, staggering blindly across the stage, electric, on
fire, screaming, his is all there, waiting, daring, terrified, and alone.
And digging it.
The UCLA Daily Bruin
May 24, 1967