Crystalline arpeggios descend through the minor scale on a marimba and creamy electric guitar against a huge black space. Morrison croons the title twice in a gentle croon. He's breaking up with her, asks her not to cry and, whether he tells her or just thinks it, struggles to remember what she looks like.
He won't need her picture until they say goodbye. Meantime, the lines of the face he perhaps all too briefly loved are being consumed by carnival dogs. These aren't the lines of age but the defining shape of her face. Carnival dogs? Well, it's Jim Morrison who in the same lyric mentions insanity's horse adorning the sky and later in the album. But I don't think this is a high school poet image as it has a real potency. I see scavenger mutts wolfing down her image. He's young and loved by multitudes. Everything's a carnival and when its dogs see his lover's face unattended they go for it. When he looks back he just sees darkness, the brief bright flashes of the chords not helping.
The music is extra smooth here, the brittleness of the marimba offset by Robbie Krieger's rich slide on the Gibson. The drums whisper only when the chorus needs a little support. Mostly, it's Jim and the same croon he used on Crystal Ship that breaks a little here and there for texture before returning to cold cold satin.
And it is cold. He is worried that he can't see her but the worry is about the faculty of imagining, not her. Her shelf life up, her last commercial over, he's already somewhere else right there in the same room. This, eerily, is the voice of the alpha, he no longer cares for her because his physical system is losing that capacity. Beneath the charm of the lights and the winner's unconscious skill at dissembling care there is the great sucking void that salivates for its next fill. And it all sounds so silky.
But that is just how the doling of pain feels to the victor in this: I'll put some extra work in because I'm good at this. Then, well at least I've got the photo.
The Doors were a rangey outfit, covering warfare down to the micro-personal, expressing this with music both mature and fun (seldom has serious musical scholarship sounded so much like a party) and over it the voice that ran from whispers to almighty screams. They were as much at odds with their flower power era as the Velvet Underground on the other coast except The Doors had hits and played huge venues which they filled. That was always going to make a difference but the seriousness and self awareness evident in so much of their output can be both inspiring and confronting.
In this one the disturbance comes from it being impossible to tell how much Morrison is describing his own wall-eyed sexual cruelty and how much he is just letting go and have it describe itself. The song comes and goes without banging or whimpering, the shiny black libido swims away and the lone and level darkness flows eternally.
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