Music fans - and those of us who write about music for a living - utter Greil Marcus’s name with a certain hushed reverence appropriate to the man who wrote “Mystery Train’’ and “Lipstick Traces,’’ two of the finest books ever written about rock ’n’ roll. Writing about Dylan, Elvis, or the Sex Pistols, Marcus provided a tantalizing glimpse of the secret underground rivers of mythos coursing beneath the music. Marcus is undoubtedly attracted to Morrison for the same self-aware mythological quality. But where Dylan and Presley touched the musical godhead, Morrison groans under the burden of immortality. “I began thinking that there was a lot less here than met the eye. Why was there so little art that seemed to live up to its name, and so little music that lived up to that art?’’ Marcus, as it happens, is speaking about pop art, but in many ways, it feels like the truest statement yet made about the Doors themselves.
“The Doors’’ is a mixtape book, with each chapter devoted to a particular Doors song, and like a good mixtape, it hopscotches around, taking in Elvis (a Marcus obsession), the Manson murders, Van Morrison (subject of a 2010 book by Marcus), Neil Young, and Oliver Stone’s Doors biopic. Marcus is at his best when he listens creatively, returning from an exploration deep into the jungle of Doors songs with a report on what he has discovered: “As the music edged into its seventh minute,’’ he says of their cover of Elvis’s “Mystery Train,’’ “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 rightness of a machine tied to a road of iron, the machine achieving a lightness, a weightlessness, that makes the tracks disappear.’’ Then again, the Doors also make Marcus assemble sentences like this one: “There is the drifting chase after a blue bus, a chase that is a matter of someone walking slowly, deliberately, no matter how fast the bus is going, knowing that sooner or later he’ll catch it and climb on.’’ Jim Morrison: bad influence on writers and poets of all stripes since 1966. Even Greil Marcus, apparently.
