It looks like November is going to be a good month for Doors book releases. I’ve already written about The Doors FAQ coming this November, and now, noted rock and cultural critic Greil Marcus is releasing a book in November, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Wild Years.
Marcus is best known for his books Bob Dylan, and Mystery Train which put rock music in a much larger context of American literature. It looks like he’s going to be doing that for The Doors. At the time of this writing there’s not much information available about the content of Marcus’ book, although it may follow the form of his Bob Dylan book, in which he said, “Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan
made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people’s responses.” Here’s the press release from the publisher (Public Affairs Books).
“A fan from the moment the Doors’ first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morrison was found dead in Paris and the group disbanded, one could drive from here to there, changing from one FM pop station to another, and be all but guaranteed to hear two, three, four Doors songs in an hour—every hour. Whatever the demands in the music, they remained unsatisfied, in the largest sense unfinished, and absolutely alive. There have been many books on the Doors. This is the first to bypass their myth, their mystique, and the death cult of both Jim Morrison and the era he was made to personify, and focus solely on the music. It is a story untold; all these years later, it is a new story.”
The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Wild Years will be released November 1, 2011 on Amazon.
Another Doors book related note: John Densmore’s much anticipated book, The Doors Unhinged (it is unknown whether the book will retain that title) won’t be published until the spring of 2012.
Comments