The Doors Read Free Page B

rightness of a machine tied to a road of iron, the machine achieving a lightness, a weightlessness, that makes the tracks disappear.
    As soon as Morrison came back, all of that was gone, smeared with florid vowels, shapeless words. Again the band finds its way back to its first rhythm, that scratch, and again Morrison flattens it, throwing bits of blues songs out the window, forgetting them as soon as he does; when you’re picking blues lines out of the air, there’s never any end to them, they’re just used tickets, and worth as much.
    In the mid-sixties, when the Doors began, when “Mystery Train” first entered their repertoire, Elvis Presley was a joke. The shocking black leather blues he conjured on national television for his 1968 Christmas special was unimaginable after years of movie travelogues, of hula hoops and shrimp, of a world where a racetrack was just another beach—where, as Elvis himself once put it, he had to beat up guys before he sang to them. But in 1968, when Elvis sang “One Night”—after climbing mountains and fording rivers all across the frontiers of “Tryin’ to Get to You,” going back again and again to Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do” as if it
were a talisman of a treasure he couldn’t name, each time deepening it, dropping words in search of a rhythm the song didn’t even know it wanted and now couldn’t live without—what returned was the sense of awe, of disbelief, that greeted him when he first made himself known.
    In the years before that, his “Mystery Train,” recorded in 1955 for Sun Records in Memphis—before, so the story went, the money machines in Hollywood and New York turned him into a sausage—had over time acquired a patina of purity. There was an elegance in the recording that couldn’t be denied. With Elvis’s direct, frank tone and the spare accompaniment, the performance was a veil of simplicity and elusiveness: how could anything so plain feel so otherworldly? The coolest DJs, the most sophisticated connoisseurs, chose “Mystery Train” as their one transcendent Elvis-object—less, it seemed, to signify the genius a poor country boy had traded for money and renown, but to show that even the dumbest rube could, for a moment, stumble on the sublime.
    â€œMystery Train” was the bohemian’s Elvis: a small, perfectly crafted work of art, with a charge of unlikeliness that took it out of the realm of craft and into the realm of event, something that once present in the world could neither be repeated nor taken back. Those who knew celebrated it like the expatriate Argentine intellectuals and dandies in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch obsessing in Paris over Bix Beiderbecke and Bessie Smith, but there was none of this in Jim Morrison’s “Mystery Train.” He had his own Elvis obsession—unlike any rock ’n’ roll singer since “Heartbreak Hotel” devoured the world’s airwaves, he had Elvis’s Greek-god looks, his seductive vampire’s hooded eyes; like Elvis he communicated the disdain of the beautiful for the ordinary world. But he faced “Mystery Train”
as if it were itself an object of disdain: something that had to be wrecked. It was more than a year since the night in Miami that left Morrison facing felony charges for indecent exposure and the Doors banned across the country. Well before that, Morrison had come on stage drunk, sometimes babbling, lashing out, sometimes at the crowd, sometimes at phantoms only he could see; he appeared on stage in a fog of self-loathing, and he could hate the songs he had to sing as deeply and as expansively as he could hate his bandmates, his audience, and himself. As he gropes his way through “Mystery Train,” the feeling in the performance is that the song needs someone as close to Elvis Presley as Jim Morrison could imagine himself to be to