The Doors by Greil Marcus

performance with the huge stomp! of a single shot on the snare—as someone said at the time, it was hard to imagine anyone hitting anything harder. But after that he hits everything else too hard. You don’t hear a beat. You hear nerves, or fear.
    Morrison steps into the song languidly, with no tension, no foreshadowing. Unlike Elvis Presley in his third and last appearance on the Sullivan show, in 1957, the only time he was shot from the waist up—with Elvis pointedly looking down at his own body, as if what the camera was now hiding was something he’d never showed when the camera was all the way
back, catching him from head to toe, he and his combo in action, playing to each other with joy, abandon, and speed—Morrison dropped no clues. He all but used the tune as a trampoline. “Girl, we couldn’t get much hiiiii,” he sang, letting the rest of higher disappear, letting it slip by as if it hadn’t been there at all, and while at least the sign of the offending word had been present, going out to the nation live, you could believe that in fact this was okay: okay for CBS, an honorable compromise for the Doors. “FIGH- YARRRRGH! YEAH! ” Morrison screamed just about a minute in, just before Manzarek begins a seven-second solo, squeezing the song into its single version, as if Morrison was making up for what wasn’t there. His scream was exciting. Nothing else had been.
    Morrison came off Manzarek’s solo as smoothly as before. He sang the first verse. He passed over the melody, licking the word fire as Elvis himself might have done, if he’d closed his 1960 post-Army comeback album Elvis Is Back! with “Light My Fire” instead of “Reconsider Baby”—as if, given what Elvis did to Lowell Fulsom’s signature song, infusing every word with a heat that has never cooled, there was any difference.
    For the refrain Morrison screamed “FIRE!” again. And then he pulled out all the stops; listening, it sounds as if he’s tearing off his clothes. His voice is suddenly rough, harsh, bearing down, an explosion of pressure. Densmore finds his footing, and gives Morrison his. It’s a different song, a different night, a different place; a different audience is called into being. Now every breath is deep, drawn from all the way down in the chest, the breath you draw before you’re about to leap; each breath is as strong, as sudden, as full of vengeance and lust as that moment when Densmore’s stick first hit the skin.

    Morrison’s diction coarsens, the words lose their beginnings and endings, the singer is rushing past the song, the song is coming up behind the singer like a wave, they meet at Morrison’s furious, inflamed higher , which here, with the song taking on its full body, carries no more musical or moral weight than any other word, note, phrase, sound—the sound, right now, of freedom. It’s shocking, how much pleasure freedom can bring: “Come on!” Manzarek shouts from the side in the last chorus, beside himself. Now they’re on the other side. After this, did the song ever need to be played again?
    Â 
    â€œLight My Fire,” The Ed Sullivan Show , collected on When You’re Strange: Songs from the Motion Picture: A Film About The Doors (DMC/Rhino, 2010).
    Elvis Presley, The Ed Sullivan Shows (Image Entertainment DVD, 2006); notes by GM.
    â€”——, Elvis Is Back! (1960). The 2011 RCA Legacy reissue comprises two CDs, including also the 1960–61 singles “Fame and Fortune,” “It’s Now or Never,” “A Mess of Blues,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” and “Surrender,” plus the 1961 album Something for Everybody , and the 1961–62 singles “I Feel So Bad,” “(Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame,” “Little Sister,” and “Good Luck Charm.” Like so many before and after him, Jim Morrison knew