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Doubleday, 1990).
    Paul Williams, “Rothchild Speaks,” Crawdaddy! March 1967. Collected in Williams, Outlaw Blues: A Book of Rock Music (1969) (Glen Ellen, CA: Entwhistle, 2000).
    Kim Gordon, “‘I’m Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams,’” Artforum , January 1983, 55.
    Dave DiMartino, “‘Uh-Oh, I Think I Exposed Myself Out There’” (quoting himself from an article published 1981), BAM , March 8, 1991.

When the Music’s Over
    A T COBO HALL, in Detroit, in 1970, the band kicks off a song with what Jon Landau, writing in Rolling Stone in 1968, called “aimless, washed-out organ music.” “Waaaaal, we’re gonna stop the show. Gonna stop the show,” Jim Morrison says, and the band stops. “Hello, Detroit.” Ray Manzarek plays the organ equivalent of a rim shot behind Henny Young-man. “Hello, Salt Lake. Hello, Washington, D.C. How ya doin’.” Robby Krieger does the same. “Minneapolis, how ya doin’? Hey, Seattle—nice to see ya . Dallas, Texas. Hi, y’all.”
    â€œThis was a device Jim used to keep the audience from becoming too comfortable,” Krieger said in 1997. “He wanted them to have that feeling ‘something’s wrong, something’s not quite right.’”

    It was an instinct Morrison followed from the start. On January 6, 1967, the Doors played their first show in San Francisco, at the Fillmore Auditorium. The Doors had yet to be released. Not even a rumor in the Bay Area, they were third-billed under the Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel, a forgotten local band with one cute hit, “Hello Hello.” “We get up on stage, and Bill Graham introduces us,” Ray Manzarek said almost forty years later. “‘We’ve got this band from Los Angeles . . .’ And people are booing Los Angeles,” which is what people in San Francisco automatically did: Los Angeles was cheap, it was plastic, it was money, it was Hollywood, it was fake, and it made San Francisco seem like both a small town and the last outpost of civilization and good manners. “We come on stage and Jim says, ‘“When the Music’s Over.” Play “When the Music’s Over.”’ I said, ‘Why are we gonna start with “When the Music’s Over”? It’s a long song, it’s slow. We want to just get onstage and kill them with “Break on Through.”’ Jim said, ‘No, I’ve got a feeling, man. Put everything you can into your playing’ . . . and it just exploded.”
    This was before audiences were too cool to show up for third-billed bands, or taunted anyone who wasn’t headlining: people were curious. New bands were appearing and disappearing by the day; you never knew when a show might be a historic marker, a dividing line between past and future, or a last chance. Still, fourteen or fifteen minutes of a wandering piece of music that barely was a song, random phrases and passages of near silence heading in no apparent direction, pretentious pronouncements (“What have they done to the earth? What have they done to our fair sister?”) and self-consciously poetic imagery (“I want to hear / The scream of the butterfly”) punctuated mainly by convincingly psychotic
screams—if anything was likely to produce walkouts, this was. Unless the first notes of the thing went straight through you and ricocheted back again from the other side, leaving you feeling as if your legs were water, which those notes could do.
    The piece appeared on record nine months after The Doors , in September 1967, closing out Strange Days . 6 There were strong songs all across the record—“Strange Days,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Unhappy Girl,” “People Are Strange.” “My Eyes Have Seen You” was a driverless car revving its engine, cutting its gas, the engine revved higher, the gas cut