Greil Marcus: IV & "L.A. Women"

[Robert Mahnke]

You write that you can hear “L.A. Woman” being played “between every
other line” of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 Los Angeles detective novel
Inherent Vice. Could you talk about why you made the correlation
between Pynchon’s work and that song?

“L.A. Woman” is recorded in 1970 and comes out in 1971. Inherent Vice
is set in 1970, just as the Manson trial is about to begin. And
both—the book explicitly and the song not explicitly—is really
shadowed by Charles Manson, by the crimes he and his family committed,
and the specter of more crimes of death and destruction and revenge
whether for real reasons or completely random, is just hanging over
Los Angeles and a lot of the country at that moment. And both
Pynchon’s book and “L.A. Woman” seem to capture both that sense of
dread and fear, but also a sense of the absurd, the ridiculousness,
the craziness of that moment too, and to laugh at it. “L.A. Woman” is
a very funny, loose, free, open piece of music, and Pynchon’s novel is
hilarious and scary and upsetting and confusing. And its hero is an
almost 30-year-old private eye named Doc Sportello, and he’s part of
the atmosphere in the song “L.A. Woman.” He’s the kind of person whose
radio plays Doors songs. And maybe he’s too cool to be a fan of the
band. Who knows? That’s not the point. Both Pynchon and The Doors are
drawing maps of L.A., one in a song and one in a detective story.

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/12/greil-marcus-on-why-the-doors-still-matter/249697/