Thank you, Greil Marcus

I’m no fan of the Doors — Owen’s and my paragraphs on them in the intro to The Worst add up to one of the few parts of that book I still like — but Marcus is the guy who wrote Mystery Train and Invisible Republic, so I read when he writes a book about them. Marcus hasn’t changed my opinion of the band’s built-for-condemned-Econo-Lodge-cocktail-rooms music, but he did crack me up, something the Doors never did (intentionally). At the end of the short chapter about “The End,” the most theatrical of the band’s solemn, unfriendly songs, Marcus slips in a perfect reference to the Firesign Theatre, my favorite comedy troupe other than my kids. A whole volume of The Doors is a bit much, but anyone who can find room for the Firesign Theatre in Jim Morrison, territory that should repel the Firesigns’ welcoming humor but in Marcus’s hands fits perfectly, is a writer I will follow anywhere.