Metamorphosis

"Let's start with a song you guys know," I said, "Light My Fire." It was early afternoon, the boys all had slept here overnight and we were all wearing the same clothes as we had on the night before. The pounding in our heads, or at least mine, had been reduced to a dull thud.
"Easy enough." Johnny said, they looked at each other and went into an album perfect rendition of the song. No mistakes except what was on the album, a clean, antiseptic feel to it, technically perfect, but there was no soul to it, nothing of themselves in it.
"No, no, no," I said, "you guys are making it sound too much like the album. We have to make it sound spontaneous."
"Man, I thought that's what you said people wanted to hear, the songs?"
"Yeah, but Brian was right, we can’t give them what they can hear on the radio, but if we give them a show that was like a Doors show they'll feel that integrity. They may not know it with their heads, but they'll 'know' it with their souls. Here, listen to this." I grabbed a bootleg from the bookcase and put it on the stereo, from the speakers came the notes that open the song.
"See, it should sound like we're inventing it right at the moment."
"We?" Brian asked, "how do we do that?"
"I don't know, you're the musicians." They looked at each other, and for a split second I really thought they were going to put down their instruments and walk out. It was like one of those scenes in a movie where everyone has a gun drawn on everyone else and it's either everyone gets blown away, or someone uncocks his gun and everyone breathes a sigh of relief.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Johnny asked.
"I don't know," I said, "you guys are the musicians, you take care of all the audial details." They all looked at each other, again.
"Audial? What's that?" Johnny asked, and the rest suppressed a smile while I looked puzzled, "man, there's no such word as audial."
"I don't know, man, just don't make the tuning perfect or something, and I'll sing a little off key."
"We won't have any problems there." Ian joked.
"What about your part?" Johnny asked, "what's this 'performance' you're going to do?"
"Start Light My Fire again, and I'll show you." As the band played I sang the first verse, "you know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar." I delivered the lines in the deliberate almost languid delivery that Morrison had used finally screaming the last line into the instrumental, "try to set the night on fire!" Then I stood hanging on the microphone with my eyes closed, feeling the music, like Morrison did. As they went into the instrumental I twisted away from the microphone doing a few of Morrison's patented staccato Indian hops.
"Hold it, hold it," I heard Johnny saying as the music stopped. "That, uh, seems a little flat, doesn't it?"
"That's what Morrison did for this song," I said, "he usually left the stage as an excuse to have a beer while the band played the solo's. Don't worry it'll work itself out. Here, I'll show you." I went to the dining room and rolled out the videotape player and TV.
"Cool, visual aids." One of them said sarcastically.
"What's that?" Johnny asked.
"It just came out, The Doors Live at the Hollywood Bowl." I held up the cover of the tape I had watched the night before after everyone else was asleep. We watched it from beginning to end. When it was over, there was a second of silence of the boys looking at each other.
"That's it! That's going to be our show!" Brian said incredulously. He picked up the videotape cover and read off the back 'the greatest agent provocateur of Rock ‘n’ Roll', the guy just stood there for most of the time, he barely moved!"
"Look, things he did are documented in the book. It's not really what something is, but what people expect that something to be, if we give them what they expect, they'll be happy."
"I've been looking through this." Mitchell said, holding up a copy of The Compleat Lyrics of The Doors, "I just don't see it either. I thought there was supposed to be so many levels to The Doors' songs, they all seem pretty simple."
"A lot of that was insinuated by Morrison and the music added the mysterious feel to it." They looked skeptical, "look, most lyrics are pretty simple. And Morrison liked it that people were reading all these deeper meanings into his lyrics. He thought art was a two way street and the audience brought something to the experience too."
"You know what the songs mean?" Brian asked.
"I like to think so." I said.
"Why was he so hung up on serial killers?"
"That's an easy one. It's your own death, that's the killer on the road that we're all going to pick up one day on the trip of life, death."
Mitchell, who was still leafing through the lyrics book said, "some of the lyrics, you know, it sounds like he was just using things he saw around him."
"Yeah, I'm sure he used things he saw in everyday life in his lyrics, but Morrison read a lot, especially Mythology. He understood the symbolism behind the things he used, you have to give the artist credit for transforming life into art. You can't dismiss it because you know he was at Robby's house and saw his cats and then wrote about lions or panthers."
"What about Five to One?" Five to One has been the subject of speculation since the instant Morrison put together the combination of the ratio's 5 to1, and 1 in 5 into the song. “I read that the numbers meant the number of baby boomers to those over thirty.”
“I heard it was the ratio of pot smokers to non pot smokers.” I smiled, knowing Morrison must have gotten a good laugh as people all around him volunteered explanations of what the five to one ratio meant, and every one of Morrison's associates has a different version of what they say Morrison confided to them the numbers represented.
"Maybe, five to one means us as a band." Mitchell said, "the five of us against the world."
“No, it’s nothing that simple, you’ve got to remember Morrison was a genius, it’s nothing as mundane as statistics.”
“Then what is it smart ass?”
“OK, I’ll tell you, Morrison liked the poems of William Blake, right?” They nodded agreement, “well, in the Songs of Experience or Songs of Innocence, I don’t know which one I get them confused but it talks about the five senses each person has, five senses to one person, five to one.”
“Then what’s the 1 in 5?”
“The reverse, one person has five senses.” They all looked at me and as the thought exploded in their minds they all got excited.
“That makes sense!”
“You’re a genius, how’d you think of that?”
“It’s not my idea, but I think it’s the right one, but don’t tell anyone it would ruin the mystery, now can we get back to work?”

Over the next few weeks, as we moved on to other songs we hit a snag I hadn't anticipated. It was easy to find the guitar tabs and arrangements for the hit songs, Light My Fire; Touch Me; Hello, I Love You; Love Her Madly, but for the lesser known songs the guitar tabs and arrangements for those songs simply didn't exist. There wasn't the information available as there is today, it was like being out in the wilderness. So Johnny and the band had to work out the songs one by one. We’d listen to the live album and my bootlegs starting and stopping them over and over again until they got the sound right, sometimes it went note by note, even the video helped in that we could see exactly how they were playing, where their fingers were on the guitar, or where their hands were over the keyboards or drums. It was a time consuming and tedious process, but it had the unintended side effect of teaching them how to build a song from the inside out.

It also taught me a few things about music. For instance, they gave me what I thought was some bullshit musical theory that they tried to make sound mysterious, but what it boiled down to was you weren't supposed to change tempo in the middle of a song, which The Doors did. I also learned John Densmore should have had a better rapport with Morrison, the drummer is an uncontrolled element in a band because it's almost impossible to tell a drummer how to play something, there’s no way to notate or have sheet music for the drums, the drummer is the one chaotic element of a band. As the weeks went by I found solace in the music, to float along in the notes, lost on a river, to give yourself to the music, the moment, to really let go, to feel free and scream! It was only a few weeks before that I was making fun of the band for ‘feeling’ the music as they played, but I learned to love the members of the band and their talent, how Brian cradled the guitar, and during L.A.Woman did a slide that gave me hard-on, how Mitchell mashed the keys of the organ to create the discordant Doors sound, or Ian the Indian staccato of the drums. I don’t know if we became friends but we did learn to respect what the others brought to the band.

After a day of practicing I would lay awake on my bed into the night, the room darkened, the light from the TV flickering like lightning at twenty-four frames per second. I watched the tapes of Morrison over and over again memorizing his every move, and intonation, and likely as not, falling asleep and dreaming of when it would be my turn. As they mastered each song, I worked out the theatre, sometimes I instinctively knew when to fall, or dance, I could see Morrison in my mind's eye doing it. The key was spontaneity and feeling it, and then acting it out that would recreate Morrison's mind-set.

(The Last Stage is available on Kindle, Nook Books, or if you would like a signed copy of The Last Stage they're available from my website (only $20!) at Jymsbooks via Paypal (jymwrite@aol.com, please don't forget your mailing address!)

Chapt 14: The Practice Gig