The Doors Read Free Page A

did.”
    In Dallas, after almost three minutes, Morrison begins to sing, directly, conversationally, without pressure, with long waits between lines. As anyone will be able to hear months later, when L.A. Woman appears in the stores, the bum on the street is present, but not as he will be then; this man is more damaged, his speech slurred, his demeanor distracted, someone screaming at himself, tearing at his clothes.
    As the performance takes shape all four of the musicians sound as if they are so sure of the song they can trust it to keep going even if they seem to stop playing it. And they do seem to stop, over and over again, less playing the song than listening to it. The characters in the song—the man singing, the city, the woman the man is chasing in his mind—are specters, figments of each other’s imagination. And then, after the bum is replaced by a preacher, who declaims and chants, from a little bit softer now to a little bit louder now, a little bit louder now, until risin’ risin’ risin’ risin’! sweeps through the music, a spell is broken. Everything is clear. The bum is just a bum, the city is just streets and freeways, the woman is just the last person the bum saw before he opened his mouth.
    Near the end, after more than fourteen minutes, the band, playing the song like a theme, begins to drop away. You can almost see the drummer, the guitarist, and the organ player leave the stage as a stranger walks out of the wings and onto the stage as if he had no intention of being there but is willing to make the best of it. “Well,” he says, just like a friend would say if you ran into him on the street, no attitude, no pose, “I just got into town about an hour ago”—what’s new?

    â€œL.A. Woman,” L.A. Woman (Elektra, 1971). The first and only Doors album not produced by Paul Rothchild, who had quit; their new producer, Bruce Botnick, who had engineered their previous albums, gave the band a freedom in the studio, a sense of ordinary life, that they were ready to use.
    â€”——, State Fair Music Hall, Dallas, December 11, 1970, from Boot Yer Butt! The Doors Bootlegs (Rhino Handmade, 2003).
    Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 19, 254–55, 86, 6, 209, 304, 179, 101, 327, 83, 351, 314.
    Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 231–32.

Mystery Train
    C OMING OFF A SEAMLESS seven minutes of “Roadhouse Blues” in Pittsburgh on May 2, 1970—a Corvette shifting through five gears again and again, just to show off how smooth the transmission is—the band paused, and Jim Morrison took a breath. “People get ready,” he crooned, holding up the Impressions nightclub brotherhood anthem like a racetrack flag—“People get ready / For that train to glory”—but that wasn’t the train the group was about to take out of the station.
    For more than three slow minutes, with the guitar counting off the pace of an engine picking up steam with scratchy clickety-clack and the organ moving much faster, trees and rivers and strip malls passing by as you looked out the window, the song grew until Morrison could jump it. He got on at the right time, but the music didn’t need him: it was loose, taking its own shape. He sang for a few moments, the rhythm
reforming thickly around his gross, slobbery voice, everything slurred, then gave the tune back to the band, then came back, then threw it away again.
    The song went on, picking up new titles as it continued through ten, twelve, finally nearly fifteen minutes—“Away in India,” “Crossroads Blues”—but it was all one song, all one attempt to get somewhere, to get out, to cross a border. As the music edged into its seventh minute, it seemed to have developed a mind of its own: you can hear the song musing over itself, the wheels feeling the tracks, the engine wondering at the