[_Journalized_11.15.2011_]

So, let's talk about The Doors. Not that it's a burning issue, but let's talk about The Doors in the Twenty-First Century. (No, not The Doors of the 21^st Century.)

Nov. 8 is when Ms. Brown and I sat down at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston to watch Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger play a set. It is one of the very few ticketed performances on which we have walked out before it was over. I can count the total number of such shows on one hand, and in so doing I'd have enough free fingers to type this sentence without too much trouble.

I should frame my thoughts on the Manzarek/Krieger show with my attempt at justifying an interest in The Doors long after the age of twenty-five.

Well, eighteen. And truthfully, no justification needed. Listen to a giant chunk of their catalog again, if you haven't recently, and you'll hear a dangerous-sounding band with a great singer. A touch of melodrama in Mr. Morison's delivery, yes, but one must frame that with the understanding that he was a very young man — say, twenty-four to twenty-seven years old in the span of his prominence. So, he gets a free pass on some of the melodrama.

It's a dangerous-sounding band with a great singer who is a fine writer. Great writer? Not always; but very, very good within the parameters of his genre. He pushes the boundaries of style and form when it comes to blues-inflected psych-tinged rock-and-roll in the late 1960s. The band has its detractors, and that's fine, but if you'd like to see what happens when a very, very good writer gets a chance to present his work in a way that is brilliant, watch some of the concert clips in the film When You're Strange. Morrison was an uncommon performer. Even with all the lights on, his stage work is scary, strange, energizing, and to even the half-educated eye, informed by experimental theatre, performance art, and a slew of ideas and practices about which perhaps this very young man was aware, but maybe not. Maybe he was just that good.

Now, Nov. 8. Take away Morrison, obviously — and all of the considerations I've just offered regarding his art and his craft — and put on stage an aged Ray Manzarek (keyboard player) in what looked to be a kind of Cosby-era zipper sweater, and also Robby Krieger (an extremely small man, who seemed to be wearing chinos and an XXL soccer T-shirt). With them comes the typically anonymous and rock-solid drummer, the one who replaces uninterested members of such quasi-reunion acts. On vocals: a man who seemed to be playing the part of Val Kilmer, circa 1991. The bass player: apparently the janitor from a Philadelphia boxing gym: tiny, probably Asian, wearing a tracksuit with red piping along the arms and legs.

And so it begins, and for just a moment it might be all right. But it is not. It turns out to be not all right at all.

Sometime, during the second song of the set (after the utterly predictable opener: "Roadhouse Blues"), I remember it to be "Break on Through," the bank enters a bit of an instrumental break. This might have predicted a satisfyingly independent musical direction for the show — familiar songs in not always familiar ways — but what happens is a deal breaker. That is, Manzarek begins to shout into his microphone: "Open the doors of perception! Open the doors of perception!" Well, it's a shout-singing kind of thing. It doesn't stop with this hammy offering, though. He goes on: "Marijuana! Smoke a little weed, yeah! Mary-ju-wannnnah! LSD! LSD! Get high!"

Now, this is the first time I think to myself that it is time to go. But at forty bucks I imagine some sense of satisfaction will arise from attending the event for at least forty minutes. A dollar a minute is apparently my price for mild-to-moderate suffering. I'm available for parties and other functions . . .

It gets worse. Manzarek's bizarre and awful ideas manifest in new and stomach-churning ways. Every time he speak-shouts between songs, it sounds like he's introducing the circus. Maybe, I try to believe for a moment, he's playing the part of vaudeville barker. No, he is not, and as the show goes on in this fashion I begin to think that this is the kind of bullshit that their late lead singer would have hated.

The lead singer of the night, as it turns out, does his best to stay out of the way. His name is David Brock, and he used to front a Doors cover band called Wild Child. Looks like Val Kilmer. Sings more than a little bit like Jim Morrison. Mercifully, he doesn't pull too much in the way of shtick on the stage, but he did do this: sometime around the third song, he says to the assembled: "How does it sound? We want to give you a good time, this evening, all right?"

No, not all right at all. No at all, Mr. Brock.

See, I didn't go see Manzarek-Krieger show so that they could give me a good time. So that they could entertain me. I went so that I could watch and see something like: how do these two musicians make a kind of music, a kind that has always been a little off, a little threatening, a little bit mad and worthy of going a bit mad to, yourself (if that's your thing).

Instead, what I found was a couple of aging fellows doing a Las Vegas review. "Heeyyyyy, everybody, now for a little song we like to caaaallll: 'Liii-ght My Fiiiirre. Hope you remember this one!!"

Now, this doesn't diminish my enjoyment of The Doors, when it comes to listening to their albums. I find that to be surprising, in retrospect, but it really doesn't. What it does do is help me to understand that it's not the music of The Doors that matters, really. It's a horrible cliché, I suppose, but it's the singer. It's the singer getting it across. If nothing else, Morrison got the song across to the listener. Like it or not, you can't say he wasn't going for it most of the time. These guys at the Wilbur, though, in 2011 . . . they weren't going for anything, save maybe a little payday.

I've got it: have you ever watched those public television revue concerts? You know, the ones they broadcast around the time of fundraisers: themed concerts like Legends of Doo-Wop? Manzarek and Krieger were doing that show, for that audience. Awful, awful shit. I finally leaned over to Ms. Brown and said: "You wanna' get out of here?" She leapt from her seat. I don't blame her at all.