Free The Doors by Greil Marcus

stage and, as on Strange Days in its last moments, takes the song back to that opening promise, that first apprehension of portent and dread. “When the music’s over”—was it “Turn out the lights,” or “Turn up the lights”? Night to night, city to city, year to year, it wasn’t the same.

    â€œHello to the Cities,” from “The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be,” in The Doors Box Set (Elektra, 1997).
    Robby Krieger quoted in notes to The Doors Box Set (Elektra, 1997), 34.
    Ray Manzarek quoted in The Doors with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (New York: Hyperion, 2006), 73.
    â€œWhen the Music’s Over,” Strange Days (Elektra, 1967).
    â€”——, Sam Houston Coliseum, Houston, July 10, 1968, collected on Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade, 2003).

The Crystal Ship
    W HO WRITES MOST of your songs?” the late Greg Shaw asked the Doors in San Francisco in 1967, just after the band’s March dates at the Matrix, a congenial little box of a club. “Jim writes most of the lyrics,” Robby Krieger said. “I noticed that some of your songs are very strange, like ‘The End’ and ‘Moonlight Drive’ and a few others,” Shaw said. “A strong mood of death running through a lot of them. I mean, it almost seems as if you lost your mind once, sometime in your past, with these songs as the result. I get the impression from like, ‘End of the Night’ particularly a real feeling of Celine, Journey to the End of the Night, and from ‘The End’ and many of the other songs, of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Really strong moods.” “I don’t know,” Jim Morrison said. “Compared to some of the stuff I’ve heard in San Francisco, I don’t think it’s too strange. It’s pretty straight stuff.”

    â€œThe streets are fields that never die,” from “The Crystal Ship,” from The Doors , a song the band played at the Matrix, was a captivating image; so was “Speak in secret alphabets,” from “Soul Kitchen,” also from The Doors , which they played right before “The Crystal Ship.” As images they hovered, and as ideas, they rang. On the page, maybe as you let them play in your head, they seemed transparent, to explain themselves immediately, but as Jim Morrison sang them, they didn’t.
    Greg Shaw was right about death. Who knew what shore Morrison’s crystal ship, or his own ship, was headed for? Listening now to the ineffable take of the song from The Doors , and to the more insistent, expansive performance from the Matrix, the song is pitched between dream and waking, speech and silence, fantasy and act, death or the next morning. It doesn’t light. Morrison’s balance over the weightless, hesitating figures in the music—the first two words of the song let out in the echoing silence of an empty house; a swooping, sealing bass note; Ray Manzarek’s high, slipstream organ; most of all, the stoic, wrap-it-up climb in John Densmore’s repeating sets of taps on his snare or cymbal to mark the shift from one movement, one point of view, to the next—calls up a sleepwalker on a tightrope. The physical body of the performance is that of a single breath exhaled across two and a half minutes, and it could be a last breath.
    The oddness of the first words—“Before you slip into unconsciousness”—
    Be
fore
you
slip
into
unconsciousness

—throws you off, pulls you down, right from the start. This could be sleep, it could be an overdose, inflicted by the singer or the person he’s addressing; it could be murder, suicide, or a suicide pact. Or simply someone about to pass out drunk. From beginning to end—the floating drift across the music—Morrison presents the situation with absolute equanimity. He raises his voice, his volume, only once, near the end, when he sings the