Last November, the backlash to the backlash began with the publication of Greil Marcus' The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years. The book is a rebuttal of decades of derision: The éminence grise of rock criticism recontextualizes the band amidst Thomas Pynchon, Pump Up the Volume and assemblage artist Wallace Berman. Isolating bootleg performances of the band at its most intense, he illustrates its persistent transcendence over 40 years of intense hate and hagiography.
"Lester Bangs once called [Morrison] the Oafus Laureate, and that was someone who loved the Doors and flipped over L.A. Woman," Marcus says by phone. "There was something ridiculous, pompous, stupid and megalomaniacal about Morrison that puts people off. He would do things to guarantee him trouble. He instinctively recoiled against authority but was smart enough to make his contempt dramatic, funny and challenging."
Photo by Paul Ferrara/copyright DMC
PHOTO COURTESY OF ELEKTRA RECORDS
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Indeed, the critics who attack Morrison's self-seriousness ignore the smirk. In a phone interview, the venerable Beat poet Michael McClure calls Morrison "the best poet of his generation." In The White Album, Joan Didion writes that the Doors are the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, praising their music for insisting that "Love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation."
With Morrison's death came a different strain of salvation. The passage of time never eroded the myth; the L.A. Woman stays forever young.
Morrison is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. If he were still alive, he'd be 68 years old. At the close of 2010, Florida governor Charlie Crist finally pardoned him for those misdemeanor convictions, still under appeal at the time of his death.
A decade ago, Ray Manzarek left Los Angeles for a farmhouse in Napa, where he grows heirloom tomatoes and bok choy. Robby Krieger is still in Benedict Canyon, although he no longer owns bobcats. Densmore stays in the Pacific Palisades, not far from the boyhood home that was fatefully bulldozed for a three-way on-ramp at the intersection of the 405 and 10 freeways.
Idle at the intersection of La Cienega and Santa Monica today and you'll see everyone but Jim Morrison. The City of Night has become another gentrified crossroads offering "puppy presents" and frozen yogurt. The Tropicana is deader than Sandy Koufax's left arm, replaced by a Ramada. Duke's is now on Sunset, next to the pay-to-play Whisky. The strip clubs are a flower shop and an Al & Ed's Auto Sound. Monaco Liquor and the Alta Cienega still stand, though; sin never falls out of fashion, and Morrison's old room, #32, has become a shrine.
The Doors Workshop is now Forbidden, a restaurant, bar and lounge that taunts pedestrians with $14 plates of tapas. Should you be looking for it, you'll notice a fake-gold plaque memorializing the place as "the site of the Doors Workshop, where L.A. Woman was recorded and mixed." It's a shallow grave to the moment when the psychedelic era turned sepia — a final barbaric winter before everything got worse. Myths and memories mutate, swamps get drained, but the blues just get older.
