The Doors by Greil Marcus Page B

one LP, “The Unknown Soldier” began with faraway, echoey sound effects. Boots marched through the song from the left speaker to the right, from one side of the room to the other, from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. It ended with easily rolling, everything’s-all-right riffs from Robby Krieger over the sound of cheering crowds rushing through the suddenly warless streets: the Doors’ own V-V Day, unless it was Vietnam’s V-USA Day. It was not stirring, except for the hokey segment in the middle: the soldiers marched, Jim Morrison called out “Present! Arms!” you heard a rifle lock and load, John Densmore played a long military drum roll, and there was a rifle shot. Loud, brittle, harsh. A quick sound, and the band went back to the song too quickly. The shot didn’t hang in the air—but it was still frightening. In 1968, that sound—sudden, despite the fanfare; louder than
you expected, because you could guess what was coming; louder than you were expecting, if you’d heard the record before—sudden, loud, brittle, harsh—was not a metaphor. It carried events inside of it. As you heard the sound, you saw what happened.
    Neither Martin Luther King, Jr., or Robert F. Kennedy had been shot when “The Unknown Soldier” was released as a single in March, but people were already asking, incessantly, under their breath, maybe when either man appeared on the nightly news, which could be almost every night, if it would happen, and when it would happen. It had already happened, with John F. Kennedy, with Malcolm X: the most unsettling thing about the line “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car” on Waiting for the Sun , in the musically incoherent “Not to Touch the Earth,” was that it wasn’t specific, wasn’t necessarily about JFK; it was an image floating over the tableau of everyday life.
    The story carried by that rifle crack was happening with police and people in the streets shooting to kill in Watts, Newark, Harlem, Detroit, in race riots so fierce, so ambitious, you could feel the nation cracking. It was happening every day, thousands of times over, in Vietnam. It was happening in Germany, when the student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot; in Czechoslovakia, when the Soviet Union erased Prague Spring as if to laugh at the naïveté of French students and workers with their May days; in Mexico City, where government forces shot uncounted hundreds of protesting students, and then spent forty years keeping both the bodies and any public memory of the killings buried. But in the United States, the specter had as much power as the fact. In 1965, Phil
Ochs had fantasized that, after Highway 61 Revisited , a set of songs about the country rushing down its own spine as a police car turned on its siren and gave chase, Bob Dylan would not be able to get on a stage: “He’s gotten inside so many people’s heads—Dylan has become part of so many people’s psyches—and there’s so many screwed up people in America, and death is such a part of the American scene now.” The declension in the phrases, the way they fade away from each other, as if they don’t want to hear each other, is as musical as any song Ochs ever wrote. For many reasons, some of them not from another country than the one Ochs was describing, except for one night to gather with others to praise Woody Guthrie, Dylan did not set foot on a stage in 1968.
    What the Doors didn’t have to remember in 1968, as they tried to find a way to make “The Unknown Soldier” convincing, not a joke, was dread. In 1968 dread was the currency. It was what kept you up all night, and not just the night Bobby Kennedy was shot, when before his death was finally announced Norman Mailer swore he’d give up an arm if Kennedy lived; dread was what made the promise believable when Mailer wrote about it. That was because people all