TV Review: “When You’re Strange: A Film About the Doors” (PBS American Masters)

Not that I'm aware of. The producer credit goes to Dick Wolf's company.

Oh, I'm not a big fan of the Doors, though I liked a lot of the LA Woman-era stuff and many of their famous tracks. I must be one of those few people in the middle. A moderate. Heh heh.

I think the problem is when you listen to people like Manzarek talk about the band in the many decades since its demise, he sounds kind of delusional about what they were doing. It's not even like he's self-aggrandizing. He is, but I think he genuinely believes The Doors were the conduit of some cosmic dimension to a new musical realm. If you know you're exaggerating, then it's just bragging and self-promotion. If you really believe your own hype, then it moves into the realm of severe neurosis.

Anyway, I recorded the digital stream on PBS, so I'll burn it on a DVD and watch it later.

As I mentioned above, there is no problem with Manzarek, or anyone else, evaluating the band several decades later. DiCillo exclusively uses footage from the era, with no modern interviews.

Thanks for sharing some great thoughts on the film.

I think the best that any documentary can do is leave clues at the scene of a potential crime. The crime here isn't about who did what or why things were done the way they were done, the crime IMHO is my own failure to come away from a media experience without having being changed in some way for engaging that experience.

That change is invariably always to do with triggers of our curiosity and nature of exploration. We are all changed in that regard but like the word “wet” we dry quickly after we have soaked ourselves in this media. This experience will always evaporate unless we find something to ensure that we don't just return to our dry natural state of being.

In the Doors documentary, my focus became channeled on Densmore. Yes Kreiger was the one who wrote the first hit but its Densmore that Morrison reached out right at the end, it was Densmore that was the first to react to the “elephant in the room” and consequently as I know understand it was Densmore who took out a law suit (along with the Morrison family and the girlfriend of Morrison) to protect the “The Doors” name.

For me not to commit a crime of walking away empty handed, it behooves me to follow the clues on the Denmore trail.

I found what I was looking for in a single Densmore article that Drummerworld featured :

John Densmores Article
http://www.drummerworld.com/drummers/John_Densm…

Then the pieces gelled it for me. It was far more than just about “improvisation”. What I read in this article in turn made me see the documentary anew, from the worldview presented in Densmore account.

I noted from reading the Densmore article just how emergent their music was and then it is upto me to take those lessons and see how I can import them into the music of my own existence.

It would then be inconsistent to me to say that I like The Doors music but then treat media without the addition of any new context. The Doors never made music that way, so then the biggest crime I commit is to fail to explore The Doors as a mosaic, as experimental randomness. If I am therefore utterly logical about The Doors, then I have learned not one thing from the “The Doors of Perception” that lent its name to the group.

This documentary therefore requires me to improvise with it. I therefore am at fault if I simply follow the production value of Tom DiCillo. There is no music in my words if I serve only to comment on the documentary, there is no improvisation in my thinking if I try to be an expert, and no extension of feeling that I can do with my own thinking what The Doors had clearly done with their own music.

Densmore talks in the above mentioned article about mixing in so many different and varied resources and influences and most importantly at one point, that he did not know what he was doing. The documentary itself showed that The Doors were not constrained in their creative thinking. Something of a higher order magnitude of innovation emerged because the four of them did far more than just knit together their strengths – they became weavers of discovery.

Then the film itself demonstrates that weaving, that ability to follow on from each others cues, to listen to each other and add not only as a form of jazz thinking but sophisticated linkages into other genres of music, into the heart of their own desires and to become weavers of discovery.

My biggest crime would be to walk away from this documentary and not gain an individual appreciation how they mixed the spectrum of these explorations and experiments and then arrive at one point to write an entire album in the space of one week. This feat that may actually been helped when Paul Rothschild decided that he had enough of the group. Yet they also managed to utilize Rothschild's experience and so this teaches me that as a group they were incredibly adaptive, they are worth viewing as a group simply on that one dynamic alone.

I remember learning about The Eagles, how they were not happy with being channeled into more ballads than they wanted to perform, but this was never the case with The Doors, such channeling would have destroyed their unique chemistry to think outside the box.

At some future date (not now) but it will be interesting to watch that documentary again just to see how it did (or if it did) change some of my perspectives about how to live an adaptive but personally creative life. How to engage my own experiments without becoming lost in those experiments?

That Morrison lost himself in these constant experiments is not something that I can learn something from, but in Densmore, WOW ! I can learn so much, so much.

What I can learn isn't that Densmore was a drummer or that he was the complete opposite of a Ringo Starr, for whatever Densmore did is really Densmore's own business – but as student of observing Densmore, just that one article from Drummerworld is enough to show me some new riffs on life, choices that I can make for myself.

Like you I am not a “Doors” fan but I do love their music, and like you I want a better understanding, but not about the group but about the dynamics of my own learning.

I can then utilize The Doors as a catalyst for my own learning while always remaining a student of my own experience. If I think that way, then I will be able to see more and learn more. I am not into cult worship, I am not into the making of things into bigger than life – the potential crime here for me isn't about annointing Densmore, Kreiger or Manzarek or to do justice to their respective contributions, but that I could see for myself that sense of dynamic collaboration and not come away with any lessons that I can apply to my own life.

I respect Ken Shane's response about sharing but The Doors were not about sharing, they were about exploring – for if all I achieve is to share, then the potential crime here would be my own conformity or in more direct terms, a failure of my own imagination.

[Em]

Another way of looking at cash grabs is that it tests our own individual prudence. Yet in the music business I also look at the behavior of this entity that is described as “the fan”. When ticket touts can offer seats that have a perceived scarcity value, it is no longer just a cash grab phenomena, it is a mania.

Of course the artist is traditionally been on the receiving end of those who manage contracts and the business end of music, but because we are apt to become “fans” of specific artists, our insights into other forms of music diminish.

When I threw out some of my thoughts about The Doors in August 2009 I did so as uninformed opinion, with that superficial viewpoint which comes with exposure to the music alone:

http://alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/33302

The difference nine months later is that firstly I am writing my thoughts out in the company of intelligent people rather than in isolation and I bothered to study the background of the band rather than rely simply on the foreground of the Doors music. This ebb and flow is interesting to me because I can see in the difference of my own approach how easily I can dumb myself down or embrace servitude.

What is really interesting personally for me over the last 24 hours is how reviewing “The Doors” music in the chameleon guise of that way they produced music led me to reading William Blake for the first time and in so doing, realizing that I can never see this poets writing the way that Morrison did, for sometimes we try to become the artist rather than realize ourselves.

I also took a peak at “The Doors of Perception” as per Aldous Huxley and then looked for what others did using such expressions as a catalyst for their creativity. One of those things is reviewing the Doors of Perception conference that is about design thinking.

Then I questioned why would I read William Blake simply because Jim Morrison did. That is the “servitude” part or blind followership. I can see the importance of standing on the shoulders of the great, I can see the importance of the local music scene where there is an undiscovered “Jim Morrison” whose gift was in the juncture between canvas art and sheet music.

This reminds me also of the background of John Lennon and his friend Stu Sutcliffe and how that artistic impulse led Lennon to find Yoko Ono (or whatever their chemistry was).

I then look at Van Gogh and how a different century can price an artists work, that he died poor while his artwork sold for an astronomical sum. Art is in the cash grab domain because it does turn into investment capital.

Those who pursue “Rock Music” do want to be seen as “artists” in their own right, just as comic book artists want their genre to have “status”. A feature of the Renaissance period exhibits the role of artist compensation in the form of “benefactors” – there was intense competition between those we consider as the “greats”.

I do have an impulse of “purity” myself, and that is why I try to inject in my thoughts a statement that I am not an expert on a particular art form, that I am learner traveling laterally through various thought forests and observing for my own sake.

That I find in “The Doors” music or John Lennon's music creation, an approach which I can identify with my own perspective, is the fundamental source of fascination. Art therefore isn't a communion of purity, it is a way of seeing and thinking rather than judging and valuing.

I have said all that I need to express in these three contributions here, all that I have left to say is to personally thank you and Ken for raising the quality of this experience because I did feed off both of your intellects – I did recognize that I am in the company of intelligent men and not simply ships passing in the night. For that I thank you both.

[Em]