OUT OF THE DOORS

...There is a tendency to dismiss it, to deride it, or perhaps to pretend it doesn't exist...

...Since Morrison played that role with such style and evident relish, the subject is one Manzarek knows something about, and the conclusion he comes to in the last number is revealing: Take delight in your own existence, he says, for you are your own guru...

...The singer fronted the group, but organist Ray Manzarek, then one of the cleverest and most inventive musicians around, was its center, the man who wrote most of the music, did all the arranging, and generally kept the band functioning as a unit...

...It is not easy, certainly, for a heterosexual man to analyze a male performer who possesses this sort of sexual magnetism...

...The book was a kind of extended fan letter, a personal fantasy...

...On Music OUT OF THE DOORS by bruce cook The recent death of Mama Cass Elliot under somewhat enigmatic circumstances brings back memories of Jim Morrison of the Doors, and the mystery surrounding his demise in Paris in 1971...

...But The Golden Scarab is good music in its own right...

...Nevertheless, he did everything he could to exhibit the Luciferean side of his nature, exploiting to the full those Dark Angel looks that reminded one of the "terrible Beauty" Yeats said was come in "Easter 1916...

...Filling out the organization were Robbie Krieger, the youngest member, a competent if not terribly exciting guitarist, and drummer John Dens-more, who was so out of sympathy with Morrison's mystical Freudian-ism that he quit a couple of times, only to be talked back by Krieger...

...He sings, too, in fine, relaxed style, with a parodic touch Morrison never had...

...He had a better voice-A pleasant, easy and surprisingly pure baritone -And his own special style...

...Of course, the same poet four years later reported a rude beast "slouching toward Bethlehem" to be born?the phrase Joan Didion borrowed for the title of her essay describing Morrison's entire generation...

...All along the way," she explained, "there were graffiti on the tombstones-spray-painted inscriptions like 'Light My Fire' and 'Morrison Lives!' and arrows that led right to where he was buried...

...Manzarek himself, heard throughout the album playing a variety of keyboard instruments, solos to good advantage on Chuck Berry's "Downbound Train...

...Right from the start their albums featured long, apocalyptic rambles through Freudian territory, extended walks with love and death that led into the miasmic purple center of the '60s revolt...

...These numbers were the group's best, but it was not for them that the Doors-And Jim Morrison-were best known...

...And there are a good many who do...

...The historical novelist Cecilia Holland, for example, was so carried away in her adulation (I found bare-chested poster photos of Morrison all around her home in Connecticut where I went once to interview her) that she even wrote a rock novel about the singer under a pseudonym, though she had never met him...

...Partly because of this, the Doors wrote material-especially in the early years -that displayed an intrinsic musicality lacking in the work of other bands...

...Normally, a critic will dwell on the artistic inadequacies of such types, ignoring the fact that artistic qualities are essentially beside the point...

...Since he was buried before word of his death was given out, and since the cause was said to be a heart attack —unlikely, at least, in a man only 28 years old—questions persist among all those who remember him...

...My friend said she set out with a mimeographed map provided by the cemetary authorities but could have found the gravesite without it...

...Still, the truth of the matter is that Morrison could sing rings around nearly every other male vocalist of his generation of rockers...

...The juice had gone out of them, and finally, predictably, they split up...

...He and Morrison had created the Doors after meeting at UCLA...

...Krieger and Densmore went off to England to form something called the Butts Band, with which they tried to get as far away from the old Doors sound as possible...

...Not to mention a little luck...

...A friend of mine who used to work for Elektra, the Doors' recording label, told me not long ago about a trip she took earlier this year to the Pere Lachaise cemetary in Paris to visit Morrison's grave...

...Moreover, he made theater of his sexuality, carrying it to almost ridiculous lengths in his concert appearances, and his fans loved him for it...

...When Morrison sang in "The End" of his desire to kill his father and fuck his mother-putting it just as plainly as that, leaving nothing open to interpretation, either for the critic or for the analyst-he was giving words to the spirit of his time...

...You are the only one that's gonna tell you what to do...

...But Morrison was fundamentally a crooner, a throwback to Russ Columbo and Bing Crosby-Although he would have been outraged at the suggestion...

...Following Morrison's death, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore stayed together as a trio...

...These were crudely, bombastically written-And for that, we have only Morrison to blame, for in every case, apparently, he wrote the lyrics he sang...

...You're a Lost Little Girl," "People Are Strange" and "I Looked at You," to mention, as they say, just a few, also have outstanding musical qualities...

...Most rock singers, employing a range of whoop and holler devices borrowed from blacks, bawl out their lyrics, shouting them over screaming guitars in keys that are too high for them to perform in comfortably...

...It includes jazz drummer Tony Williams, and features material that explores the territory where rock grows subtler and more complex, merging into jazz...

...As she described the scene, tears came to her eyes...

...As the title indicates, the collection of songs (all but one by Manzarek) is organized around a single topic-the search for a guru, a new master...

...At first listening, the music recalls the heavy, "intellectual" sonorities the Doors were known for...

...In fact, Manzarek is using the form of the Doors' old material to let us know what he thinks about the whole feverish shaman scene he was so much a part of only a little while ago...

...For the startlingly handsome Jim Morrison had a certain blunt charm and a profound erotic appeal...

...Using practically the same personnel he travels with, Manzarek has recorded an album, The Golden Scarab: a Rhythm Myth (Mercury SRM 1-703), an interesting piece of work both in itself and as an oblique commentary on Manzarek's years with the Doors...

...Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt are buried there, as are other writers, poets and artists of every degree and description...

...it is precisely the place this singer-songwriter who fancied himself a poet would have wanted to be laid to rest...

...Horse Latitudes," "The Unknown Soldier" and "The Soft Parade" were more of the same, song-scenarios that enabled Morrison, with his superb sense of theater, to act out his audiences' dreams of anger and frenzy...

...at the same time he had energy, intensity and honesty...

...The group takes off beautifully on a driving piece called "The Solar Boat...

...He was wild, excessive and undisciplined, a spoiled child...

...Now, however, he has returned, stronger than ever, and at this writing is touring with the new band he formed...

...For a while, Manzarek dropped out of music altogether...

...The grave is uncompleted...

...Yet fresh flowers had been strewn across the top...

...And the feeling persists that if he had lived long enough and written enough, he might really have made himself into the poet his admirers said he was...

...To be sure, there was more to tne Doors than Jim Morrison...

...Unfortunately, the LPs they made for Elektra didn't really click...

...it sinks about six inches below ground level and is not properly marked-just a placard with James Douglas Morrison and his years...

...Yet some, the Beat poet Michael McClure among them, praised Morrison for the rawness and ambitiousness of his lines...

...Jim Morrison's popularity can neither be explained or explained away on the basis of what he actually sang on a given record or at a particular live performance, any more than, say, Mick Jagger's can...

...Light My Fire" was one of the few rock ballads to be taken into the standard pop repertoire...

...In basic agreement at the beginning, they seemed toward the end to be pulling in opposite directions...

...All in all, Jim Morrison embodied the best and the worst of that turbulent period...

...The name of that song is "Oh Thou Precious Nectar Filled Form, or, a Little Fart"-A title that should help to convey the ironic, funny and, occasionally, even witty tone of the album...

...Manzarek is a survivor, and he has come through because he has the qualities that assure survival-skill, humor, intelligence, and discipline...