Greil Marcus(Faber Music)
THE most highbrow of rock writers, Greil Marcus comes from that extravagant and highly personal line in American criticism that includes Pauline Kael and Harold Bloom. There's an intellectual spaciousness in his work that always makes him worth reading and an excitement in the line he treads between perceptiveness and over-reading; even if occasionally he must be the only person who can hear some of the things he writes about, he can make you hear things no one else would have had the imagination to find.
His new book about the Doors isn't a conventional history of the band. In a series of chapters, highly variable in length, Marcus reads the songs, at times in the live versions that appear on bootlegs or in special edition out-takes, and then he reads around them. Montage and free association are his anti-method.
He looks at Thomas Pynchon's Venice Beach 1970s-noir detective story, Inherent Vice, for instance, as the prose counterpart to LA Woman, or slides persuasively from The Crystal Ship (''As you slip into unconsciousness'') to a burnt-out psychedelic pop star called Skip Spence, to an obscure novel, Loose Jam, about Vietnam vets succumbing to madness.
It's an approach that works well when the different elements illuminate each other but some of the chapters can get a bit scattered: after a couple of pages on Twentieth Century Fox, he wanders off into reflections on pop art and his own 1950s childhood. The material is too generalised, except as ''context'' of the most unattached kind, with too little to say specifically about the Doors.
Largely, though, Marcus's unpredictability keeps the book lively, challenging. He even likes Oliver Stone's famously terrible - or mostly terrible - movie, arguing one of its unimpeachable strengths is how compellingly it restages the Doors's theatre of affront and chaos.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/book-reviews-20120303-1u9c6.html#ixzz1o6luwlEJ
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