The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years

The Doors: a lasting voice, or psychedelic trash? To Greil Marcus they can be both-in the same song. More Doors songs can be heard on the radio today, forty years after Jim Morrison's death, than those of almost any group of their era. Sparked by that fact, and with the deep focus of a critic engaged with his subject, Marcus both revisits a parade of great performances and explores why and how the Doors have endured with their spirit and menace intact. He makes plain that the Doors are at the heart of what Leslie Fiedler called "the mythic life of their generation," and dramatizes how their music still shimmers with the dread that in their time hovered over a country convulsed by assassination and war, and over a city terrorized by the specter of the Manson murders-a dread that, in different forms, with different faces, is with us still.-From publisher description.