Rolling Stone Magazine
RS 946
April 15 2004
The Immortals Issue
Top 50 Bands Of All Time
41) THE DOORS
By Marilyn Manson
Jim Morrison said it best: "All the children are insane," and he
meant it like I mean it. We are children revolted by the banality of
what people think is sane. When Jim rambled, quite profoundly, "Rock
& roll is dead," and "Hitler is alive. . . . I slept with her last
night," he knew then what we are choking on now. You can't change the
world, and if you try, you just end up destroying it. We love all
things to death. We leave the lights on, turn everything up to ten
and f**k everything we fear.
In tenth grade I was told to read No One Here Gets Out Alive, the
biography of Jim Morrison. Everything I'm interested in now got
started with that book. It made me want to be a writer, and I started
with poetry and short stories. We don't know what was really going on
in Morrison's head, but I liked trying to piece it together. The
immortality of his words, the mystery of his existence appealed to my
sense of fantasy. I found "Moonlight Drive" -- particularly when
accompanied by "Horse Latitudes" -- scary and sexually mystifying,
like Happy Days told by Ted Bundy. I read the poem in front of my
tenth-grade English class, and it was as awe-inspiring then as it is
now. Words like mute nostril agony and carefully refined and sealed
over always stung in the corners of my eyes.
I think the Doors still fit in because they never fit in in the first
place. They didn't have a bass player. The music often had nothing to
do with Morrison's words. The keyboard held everything together. Most
bands can get through a show if the keyboardist breaks a finger. Not
the Doors. Robbie Krieger played very odd guitar parts if you compare
him to Jimmy Page or Keith Richards. Yet all this combined into
something unique that grabbed people's attention.
Morrison's voice was a beautiful pond for anything to drown in.
Whatever he sang became as deep as he was. He had the unnameable
thing that people will always be drawn to. I've always thought of the
Doors as the first punk band, even more than the Stooges or the
Ramones. They didn't sound anything like punk rock, but Morrison
outshined everyone else when it came to rebellion and not playing by
anyone's rules. There are a lot of bands that seem to want to sound
like the Doors filtered through grunge or neogrunge -- whatever it
is. But it's all just ideas pasted on ideas, faded copies of copies.
If you want to be like Jim Morrison, you can't be anything like Jim
Morrison. It's about finding your own place in the world.
