A Little Game Called Go Insane

By Michael Ventura

УBeware, there is one more step inside the door.Ф

Isak Dinesen

We played 'Light My Fire' too damn many times - so many times, that maybe some of us have forgotten how to hear it. We quoted "I am the lizard king" out of context way too often. We gazed at Jim Morrison's fatally photogenic lushness for too long, and left too many flowers on his grave. 'Break On Through' played in the bedrooms of too many fantasies that didn't manage to break through. Books about The Doors spent too much time on bestseller lists. Writers like me waxed on how phenomenal it was only one keyboard, one guitar, one drum-set, and one voice, could create such a cavernous, sonorous, flexible yet hard-driving sound; we all came up with the same adjectives and reached pretty much the same conclusions, and then repeated them for as long as anyone could stand it. The word "shaman" has gotten as worn and soiled as a dollar bill that's been passed from pocket to pocket for thirty years. Which is to say: through an understandable but unfortunate penchant for repetition, the people for whom this music was once new have smudged the thrill we felt when these songs first came out of nowhere and beckoned us to follow their dark and shining call - while young people who hear it fresh, and feel now what we felt then, have to fill in the blanks of time with our hoary old interpretations of that era, the inevitable radio arid recording packaging through which the music reaches them. We don't leave them much space for an interpretation of their own.

So everybody thinks they know what The Doors are all about. Just because we've had three decades to muse upon them. Everybody thinks they can open these doors of magic and close them again at will. (Even though Morrison died because he couldn't shut those doors behind him.)

Everybody, that is, except the people who were there, on stage, and in the studio, making the music - everybody except The Doors themselves. And now they've decided to strip us of what we think about them. They've decided, right here, right now, in this box-set, to expose us anew to their raw mojo. That's why this is a box like no other - but then The Doors never played by the rules. And that's what made us love, hate, and respect them. Play these CDs, listen (or rather, subject yourself) to the audacious numbers they've selected/ and you pass through their door.

Are you sure you really want to?

For it's the door these men went through long ago, when they were still boys, and from which they've never returned. Not really, no matter how quietly and respectably and con-structively the surviving Doors live now. See, their door doesn't lead to any Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame (though they were "inducted," as we used to say of the draft) - a museum where the music is treated like some sort of sport and all you need's a good average (high sales figures, juicy legend) to get in. No, their door opens not to a hall of fame but to a hall in flames, and why would you want to charge into a burning building?

A burning building of sound. A building that's burned for decades without extinguishing itself, an urban version of the Bible's Burning Bush. Not 'greatest hits' music, but dancing-around-the-Burning-Bush music.

Right from the first cut you know that if you're looking for some nostalgic rush, go buy a Beatles box/ Nobody's selling nostalgia here.

Opening this set is a live recording of 'Five to One', done in Miami in 1969, and it may stand your hairs on end. Jim Morrison's voice is a shock: not the soft, throaty, mellifluous tones of the studio recordings, but a bawdy, overbearing, crazed and almost certainly drunken voice.

Confronting his audience, us, then and now: "Nobody here gonna come up and love me, eh? Alright for you, baby. That's too bad. I'll get somebody else. Yeahhh!" Then when he hits the line "No one here gets out alive," it's not an abstract or metaphorical idea. There's an alcoholic old codger screaming through this young man's voice, someone who's weighed all the reasons people give for listening to this music and has found those reasons severely inadequate. He sees through us all and he stops the music to say what he thinks of us:

"You're all a bunch of fuckin' idiots! Lettin' people tell you what you're gonna do! Lettin' people push you around! How long do you think it's gonna last?! How long are you gonna let it go on?! Maybe you like it! Maybe you like being pushed around! Maybe you love it! Maybe you love gettin' your face stuck in the shit! You love it, dontchya?! You are all a bunch of slaves! Whata you gonna do about it what are you gonna do about it whata you gonna do about it ???!!!"

It's a demonic voice, not trying to be at all beautiful or seductive- The audience, as if to prove Morrison's point, applauded. But that audience is grown up now, and most of us have proved his point to a fare-thee-well, selling out every last thing we could find to sell, so will we still feel like applauding when we hear this now? And will we want our children, and theirs, to listen? Doesn't this music show us up for what we were and what we've become?

Krieger's guitar screams along with Morrison's voice, Manzarek and Densmore up the ante of the madness, until Morrison comes back with something that isn't going to make our No-Smoking-In-The-Family-Values-Nineties happy:

"Now come on, honey, now you go along home and wait for me, sweetheart, I'll be there in just a little while. You see I gotta go out in this car with these people - and get fuuuucked uuuup." Then he swings back into the lyric, Krieger and Manzarek going nuts behind him while Densmore's drum is unforgiving, running over, leaving no room for doubt.

But they're not done yet. (And remember: this is just the first cut on this box set.) Just to make it crystal-ship clear, Morrison rants some more: "Hey, I'm not talking about no revolution! Fm talkin" about havin' some fun! I'm talkin" about love love love love grab your fuckin" friend an" love him, COME ON!"

As if to demonstrate the difference between Doors-up-close-and-dangerous and Doors-snug-in-the-studio, the maddened 'Five to One' is followed by a dulcet 'Queen of the Highway', an outtake from a 1970 session. The Doors are letting you know they have many faces, many impulses, and they've forgotten none of them. This music is an invitation to take love to the point of madness, and beyond. That's the door that The Doors were and are about.

So maybe you shouldn't listen to this music. Maybe you should stay away from it. Because it's not good for your peace of mind, and was never meant to be. For this was always music about absurdity amidst a quest for meaning, cruelty within a longing for tenderness, erotic ecstasy that threatened to overflow into erotic oblivion - a demolition derby of impulses and revelations that climaxed, as The Doors stated so plainly, in a little game called go insane.

The version of that tune in this box-set is the original demo, Manzarek playing a demented carnivalesque honky-tonk piano riff while Morrison screeches with a voice that seems to come not out of his throat but out of his spinal cord. It's a sound that strips all possible romanticism from insanity, and yet insist on both its truth and its inevitability. If you don't explore this part of yourself, the music says with no let-up, then you don't know yourself. And there isn't a song here that isn't overtly or covertly about exactly that: Go insane, because you already are insane if you'd only admit it, and you won't know yourself if you don't explore it. Stare into the darkness until you can see. The Doors suggest that what you find isn't always pretty but it's better than being blind. Turn out the lights. Now, look.

You may or may not agree with that message, but that's this music. "All the children are insane." A line recognized as truth by a considerable population of young people for three decades.

I submit that this stanza, if you want to call it that, is why The Doors have remained so present, so current, to the young of the last thirty years. Because The Doors weren't saying that the world was insane, or the sixties were insane, or the Vietnam War was insane, or our parents were insane/ or history was insane. The Doors said over and over that we were insane- And we responded because that's how we've felt. Several times in this box Morrison reiterates, "I ain't talkin' about no revolution, I ain't talkin' about no demonstration," because in the light of our personal and collective insanity, our civilization's insanity, revolution seemed just more of the same. What The Doors' music was about was not revolution but transformation. Revolution was pointless because nothing could satisfy our lust but transformation.

When this music was being played three decades ago, many thought that rock 'n' roll would make possible the transformation of which The Doors sang and played. But The Doors had seen through that already. Included in this box is a drunken studio set, which, like most of this material, is released here for the first time- Morrison

saying over the music, "Now I didn't wanta be the one to lay it on you, sweetheart... I used to think I had the whole thing sewed up. Then I realized: rock 'n' roll is dyyyyyyiiiiiing, baby. Rock is dead... HELP! HELP! HELP! I'm dying!"

It was as though The Doors could already see the sell-it-down-their-throats slick industrial machine that 'pop' would become; as though they already knew that writers would soon call it 'pop' rather than 'rock'; as though they knew that rock would inevitably become part of the problem rather than part of the solution - would become part of the problem no matter how much we loved it, part of the problem because we loved it, because our love itself was the whole problem. Underneath it all, love's needs and abysses and extravagances and compromises are what both haunt and drive these songs ("Hitler is alive, I slept with her last night"), so our love and need of rock 'n' roll would eventually kill it. We need look no further for the meaning of Morrison's death.

"I see the world as a great big dream/And all night long we can hear me scream," The Doors stated in one of their last sessions in 1971, pre-dating punk by several years and there's no point romanticizing any of it. just look at it, listen to it, feel its truth, feel its lies, decide for yourself don't be a stave, don't flinch.

Or as Morrison rapped it in the live 1969 version of 'The Celebration of the Lizard' presented here: "If everybody would kind of relax, take a few deep breaths, think about your eventual end... Don't worry, the operation won't take long and you'll feel better in the morning."

The Doors have given us, here, in this box, in this spectrum of music/ the full dimensions of their experience, their journey: the passion, the vision, the force, the fear, the risk. the consequences. No bullshit, pro or con, about the Sixties. No self-conscious attempt at affirmation or negation. No idealization of 'Jim'. (I put it in quotation marks because people who knew him say the name with a kind of sanctified aura its single syllable.) Simply: this is our journey, the highs and the lows of it, at its most raw- There is a great and beautiful power to be experienced on this journey; insight, even vision, laughter, foolishness, boyish pranks; and there is also much danger. Some don't get out of here alive/ and, if you follow this road, it may be you. These men, these survivors, aren't being coy about any of it.

Through the selections in this box, I hear them telling us:

"Hey - this is where we lived, in this dark dissonant place, this dark place that gleamed with a strange light... the lights in Jim's death-defying eyes, and the lights in our own hands as they made the music... lights we didn't fully understand, even though they were ours, and we don't pretend to understand even now. This was our experience, as raw as we can present it to you, stripped of hype and legend. The legend just gets in the way of the experience anyhow. After you listen to what's on these discs, maybe the songs you thought you knew so well will be naked and unpredictable again. But whatever happens, keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel."

It was always good advice.