Free The Doors by Greil Marcus Page B

frightening challenge. Called “Someone to Love” then, it was “Like a Rolling Stone” stripped of its carnival metaphors: if you find yourself on your own, like a complete unknown, what are you going to do then? Die doped-up and gang-banged in a crash pad a block off the Haight, or live a new life? The band finds a fierce rhythmic count to step up the tension—the pressure—between each chorus and the next verse, a breach that seems to open up the ground beneath their feet, and Slick comes off of it every time more outraged, disgusted, contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t have the courage to face the truth, throw away the past, and not look back. It’s staggering: you’ve walked into this dodgy little place and here’s this nice-looking person on the stage all but threatening you with a spiritual death penalty, and turning you into a jury that convicts yourself.
    There is a sullen, hateful, dangerous edge in the music—when Slick says “the garden flowers all are dead,” they are dead—an edge muffled in the music everyone else made. Only the Great Society brought it to the surface, for a few months thrilled by the chance to ask a question no one wanted to answer: how do you get from here to nowhere?

    It was a kind of heedless prophecy. The Great Society—which sometimes billed themselves as the Great!! Society!!—didn’t want to hear the bad answers: who would? But they were there in their music, and you can hear so much of the fabled San Francisco Sound, today, as an effort to fight off the sorts of stories implicit in the music of Moby Grape, Skip Spence, the Great Society, and the Doors. I think of a forgotten novel called Loose Jam , by one Wayne Wilson. It came out in 1990; when I listen to Skip Spence, Grace Slick, the Doors, it comes right back.
    In Morro Bay, a town a little under two hundred miles south of San Francisco, a fat, balding man named Henry has a nothing job, an embarrassment for a guy on the edge of forty, but he’s not complaining. Then his old pal Miles shows up. Miles—Henry’s Vietnam buddy and former bandleader, a one-legged, one-time Voice of a Generation, turns Henry’s world upside down without half trying. He’s more irritating than compelling—the reader wants him to leave even more than Henry does. What is compelling is the inexorable slide of the narrative from orderly, structured occurrences into chaos: a sort of match from the artistry and confidence at the beginning of that first Moby Grape album—the thrilling charge of “Fall on You” and “Omaha”—to the hidden corners and darkened rooms at the end of the album, the people who walked off the record into rooms worse than that.
    Very quickly, Henry’s hard-won belief that life is governed by some inherent, given set of limits—a belief won through countless defeats, compromises, and willful refusals to remember a life that promised anything else—seems impossible to credit. As the present breaks up—Henry’s job lost, his house wrecked, his would-be girlfriend stolen—Vietnam returns in
flashbacks, and you begin to recognize Henry clutching for the underside of middle-class gentility as a version of Hemingway’s Nick Adams, hanging on to his fishing pole in “Big Two-Hearted River” in the aftermath of the First World War. But as it is portrayed here, Vietnam was—is—not a war but a charnel house. It’s not a situation constructed to realize some geopolitical objective, but a situation constructed to strip off all morality, all constraint, and not at anyone’s My Lai, but back at camp, among one’s fellows, as the urge to murder seeks its closest target. Such celebrated Vietnam novels as Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato or memoirs on the order of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War were fundamentally, no matter how phonily, about ethics; Wayne Wilson