Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 21, 2011 14:52:01 GMT
The Doors: Velvet Menace and Sudden Rage
Oblique visionaries, pioneering musicians, "missionaries of apocalyptic sex", The Doors cast a giant shadow forward over the new wave music and have come to symbolize the dark night of the modern American soul. Mat Snow revisits their back catalogue.
AS 1970 TURNED to 1971, a portly and luxuriantly-bearded Jim Morrison had lunch with a reporter from the Los Angeles Free Press. The conversation touched on many things: on Jim's recent and unresolved troubles with the law, on his latest film project, on the bluesy direction of the album his band the Doors were about to record — which would turn out' to be L.A.Woman — and, of course, on the band itself.
"I think the Doors' music and ideas were very timely," mused the Hemingwayesque singer. "They seem naïve now but a couple of years ago people were into some very weird things. There was a high energy level and you could say things like we did and almost half-ass believe them. Whereas now it seems very naïve. We may have been one of the first groups to come along who were openly self-conscious of being performers, and it reflected in our career as it was happening."
It's a curious tone Jim Morrison adopts, not only referring to the Doors — still an ongoing group — in the past tense, but actually going further: he seems to be consigning them to the attic of popular culture as a phenomenon whose time has been and gone. And, as if to disarm his critics past and future, he continues:
"I think that, more than writing music and as a singer, my greatest talent is that I had an instinctive knack of self-image propagation. I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few little phrases like 'erotic politics'. Having grown up on television and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people would latch on to. So I dropped those little jewels in here and there — seemingly very innocently of course — just calling signals."
And so, perhaps, it might have been. The Doors could, as Morrison anticipated, have ended up as just another period piece, occupying a position somewhere between Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge. But posterity had other plans.
By the end of this year, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will have his biopic of The Doors on the screens, the culmination of over a decade's reassessment of a group who've seen their stock steadily rise. A cornerstone of the '60s rock fan's record collection, the Doors cast a giant shadow forward over he new wave music and — if you will — aesthetic, which prevails to this day from Billy Idol to a host of lesser leather-trousered troubadours. More than that — and probably dating from the use of their song 'The End' over the strange and spectacular opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now! — The Doors have come to symbolise for many the dark night of the modern American soul. Or something like that.
And it all started when a 21-year-old film course drop-out was living on Los Angeles's Venice Beach, hoping to avoid the army draft and whiling away his time by ingesting large amounts of the fashionable (and still legal) hallucinogenic LSD. Soon, he started hearing voices...
"I was hearing in my head a whole concert situation," Jim Morrison recalled, "with a band an audience, a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just really taking notes at this fantastic concert that was going on inside my head... and once I'd written these songs, I just had to sing them."
Help was almost immediately at hand in the lanky shape of Ray Manzarek, a versatile keyboard player whose classical training was spiced with jazz leanings and a declared fondness for both Muddy Waters and Jacques Brel. He had known Jim at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and played with an outfit called Rick and the Ravens. Ray recruited Jim, then a drummer he had met an initiation lecture to the Spiritual Regeneration promised by the Mahesh Yogi (later of Beatles fame) called John Densmore, who in turn brought in a guitarist he knew from a Transcendental Meditation class, Robbie Krieger. Where British rock bands at the time drew their inspiration from art school and a taste for Americana, this Los Angeles combo was grounded in experimental filmmaking, fringe religions, and lots and lots of drugs.
Along with its residual members, the name Rick and the Ravens was jettisoned in favour of something more appropriate to the new consciousness. They were to be The Doors, earned after Aldous Huxley's book about mescalin visions, The Doors Of Perception, which in turn had quoted the artist-poet William Blake: "When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite." To which Morrison later added, with his gift for the deliciously enigmatic slogan: "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the Doors."
"We saw music as a vehicle to, in a sense, become proselytisers of a new religion, a religion of self, of each man as God," quoth Ray. "That was the original idea behind the Doors." The new religion sought its first disciples in a downmarket club on Sunset Strip called the London Fog. It was there, playing five sets a night for peanuts to an audience often consisting of a few drunks, the odd sailor on shore leave and the house go-go dancer, that the Doors developed — usually while under the influence — such epics as 'Light My Fire', 'When The Music's Over' and 'The End'. Audiences were hardly flocking to the Fog, so they were fired. But as luck would have it they were hired as the house band for the far smarter Whisky a-Go-Go, where they would attempt to upstage such headliners as Them, Love, the Seeds, the Turtles and the Byrds.
Record companies were dubious, however, until Love's Arthur Lee recommended the band to his label boss, Elektra's Jac Holzman. The deal was inked, and Elektra abided by their traditional commitment to left-field artistry by bunging them into Sunset Sound's four-track studio with producer Paul Rothchild; the brief, to make an album that as exactly as possible captured the uniquely spooky atmosphere of the Doors' now-renowned club act.
Recorded during a fortnight in September 1966, The Doors is one of rock's most fully formed debuts, a strikingly original album whose sensuality arose from the chemistry of the band — the velvety menace and sudden rage of Morrison's voice, the crisp, almost jazzy rhythms, Krieger's line in raga rock and blues bottleneck and Manzarek's mixture of Gothic doom and late-night classical jazz — rather than studio sweetening. Paul Rothchild recalled in the magazine Crawdaddy! how the 11 minutes and 35 seconds of 'The End' were recorded: "Midway through I was no longer producer, I was just completely sucked up into it. The studio was completely darkened, the only lights visible were a candle burning in the recording studio next to Jim whose back was to the control room, singing into the microphone, and the lights on the VU meters in the control room. The muse did visit the studio that time. And all of us were audience — the machines knew what to do!"
At first, however, the album failed to ignite the charts. That happened when an edited version of 'Light My Fire' was released as a single, rising in July 1967 to Number 1. Four months after release, the LP took off in its slipstream, and was only held of the top spot that summer (and Autumn) of Love by the all-conquering Sgt. Pepper. Suddenly the Doors, and especially the pervily-attired, poetising cheesecake that was Jim Morrison, were in that rare position of being pinned up on teenybopper walls and analysed as prophets of "Nirvana now", counter-culture-shock troops who seemed in their songs to unite sundry threads floating around California — pop psychology, sexual liberation, anti-war protest and the process by which a little learning in the realms of mythology and poetry might endow the most drug-addled pronouncements with the air of cosmic significance.
"I think there's a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And when they do come out, they can take perverse forms. It's the dark side. Everyone, when he sees it, recognizes, the same thing in himself... forces that rarely see the light of day."
The band's second album, Strange Days, was released in October '67 and gave musical shape to these dark and perverse feelings. Recorded on eight tracks with a proper bass guitarist rather than Manzarek left-handing the low notes on a Fender Rhodes piano, this album presents on its cover a street of carnival freaks — and within an exquisite air of languid alienation and deathly romance. "People are strange," goes one song, "when you're a stranger."
At this plateau of prestige and popularity, Morrison hatched his boldest plan yet. The so-called "Oedipal epic" of 'The End' and the apocalyptic 'When The Music's Over' (from Strange Days) were but starvelings of a mere 11 minutes each compared to the 25-minute multi-part 'Celebration Of The Lizard'. But Manzarek and Rothchild considered it too unwieldy to be recorded in its entirety for what was already shaping up to be a classic example of "that difficult third album". And Morrison was increasingly less inclined to fight his corner, as he was now busy cultivating his muse through imprudent quantities of drink, unsavoury boon companions and consequent gross unreliability.
"Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death, and therein lies salvation. The Doors are the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex," journalist Joan Didion succinctly summarised for her readers what the band were all about before reporting on a session she observed for the LP which would be titled Waiting For The Sun. An excruciating air of enervation hangs over proceedings, with the band hardly motivated enough even to talk to each other. The miracle is that the album is as good as it is. Where the songs on the first two albums were products of two years writing, rehearsal and performance, those on the third were cobbled together mostly in the studio. The two singles 'The Unknown Soldier' (the odd, scrambled sound of its coda enhanced on CD) and 'Hello, I Love You' (an anagram of any early tune by Jim's beloved Kinks) are great; the former not a big hit since its militantly anti-war thrust was too hot for airplay as Vietnam peaked, the latter's less demanding theme got it to Number 1. 'Not To Touch The Earth' was extracted from 'Celebration Of The Lizard' and is the album's most haunting moment. 'Five To One' gave rock's treasury of quotes "no one here gets out alive" and "you've got the guns but we've got the numbers". The rest is mostly filler.
With a new Number 1 album anyway, the Doors began to make waves also in Europe, and that autumn toured overseas in a bill with Jefferson Airplane, the London portions of which were filmed by Granada TV for the documentary The Doors Are Open. Before flying off, The Doors played the prestigious Hollywood Bowl, a show filmed and since released on video, and 23 minutes were excerpted for long-belated 1987 mini-LP, Live At the Hollywood Bowl. A remarkably proficient gig, contemporary reviews report, but lacking that whiff of spontaneity and brim-stone that made Doors shows so much the mind-boggling rituals they were cracked to be, even though it aired bits of 'Celebration Of The Lizard' not on Waiting For The Sun. Despite its niggardly length, the CD proves that not only did the band get it right on night, but that the first album gave indeed a faithful account of their live sound.
But as 1969 dawned, the band had in mind their own Sgt. Pepper. Thus the inflated production number that is The Soft Parade, album admired only by connoisseurs of perverse period detail. Not that $80,000's worth of brass, strings and bluegrass pickers vandalised otherwise AOK Doors material; rather, they merely gussied up a collection dignified by few songs of substance. 'Shaman's Blues' finds Morrison wearily treading water, while 'Wild Child' at least reprises his so-called "Dionysiac" persona on the back of a cracking blues-rock riff. The title track is an oddity worthy of the eccentric and now almost forgotten late '60s songsmith Jim Webb, leavened with the hippie satire of Frank Zappa.
The opening lines, delivered in spoof Bible-blasher style, find Morrison in excellent voice. Thereafter, its edges become audibly roughened by a liquid diet which was also thickening the Byronic rocker's jowls and waistline. Either by coincidence or design, the band retreated from the less-than-garlanded whimsies of The Soft Parade to the bedrock of their original musical vision — blues-rock.
During the making of Morrison Hotel (1970, subtitled Hard Rock Cafe), Jim had hanging over his head a court case arising from an incident in Miami in February, 1969, when he allegedly flashed at his audience. No laughing matter, this; if convicted, he faced not only a fine but months of hard labour in prison. Though he still drank, the protracted case sobered Morrison up in other respects, and he began to recant some of his more high-flown utterances — choice examples of which include "I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom", "I want freedom to try everything – I guess I want to experience everything at least once" and – with a knowing smile at the squares who he knew this would particularly annoy – "think of us as erotic politicians."
The track 'Waiting For The Sun' (though probably a relic from 1968) successfully retreads The Doors' knack for dynamic contrast betwixt bittersweet and brute force, as do 'Blue Sunday' and 'Peace Frog', whose eerie middle section recalls a traffic accident in New Mexico Jim witnessed as a child when, he speculated, the souls of the Red Indian victims entered him. It may not scale the heights of the first two LPs, but Morrison Hotel doesn't plumb the depths of the third and fourth. Curiously, 1970's double live album, Absolutely Live is unavailable in on CD; instead, the 1983 compilation of 1968-70 live cuts titled Alive, She Cried offers a soundcheck rendition of Them's 'Gloria' and a terrific account of Willie Dixon's 'Little Red Rooster' with John Sebastian guesting on harp.
And so to L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison's swansong with the Doors, though the group limped on for two addicts-only LPs afterwards. An almost unqualified masterpiece, each song has a clear identity, unlike the first two albums where each tune seems to be a facet of one complex theme. Los Angeles is, of course, the place and state of mind to which Morrison addresses himself throughout, from the torpor of 'Cars Hiss By My Window' to the rush of the title track. The hit single 'Love Her Madly' is in quintessential Doors style, but 'Been Down So Long' and 'The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)' stylise the blues without resorting to the self-conscious "artiness" that served the Doors so well at first before running out of creative steam. But as the track 'Riders On The Storm' — calm but menacing, bleak yet pretty, probably their finest seven minutes — sailed up the singles chart in July 1971, Jim Morrison died under mysterious circumstances in Paris, where he had been living for some months in order to find his poetic muse.
If you have to quit, quit on a high, goes the showbiz wisdom. Morrison certainly did that. But he also died just as the Doors had brilliantly proved they could evolve from a band who might well have been forgotten to languish in the old curiosity shop of '60s ephemera, to one poised for the '70s, like the Rolling Stones and Dylan.
"I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments," Jim Morrison once said. Sadly, he might almost have written his own epitaph.
Mat Snow, Q, November 1990
Oblique visionaries, pioneering musicians, "missionaries of apocalyptic sex", The Doors cast a giant shadow forward over the new wave music and have come to symbolize the dark night of the modern American soul. Mat Snow revisits their back catalogue.
AS 1970 TURNED to 1971, a portly and luxuriantly-bearded Jim Morrison had lunch with a reporter from the Los Angeles Free Press. The conversation touched on many things: on Jim's recent and unresolved troubles with the law, on his latest film project, on the bluesy direction of the album his band the Doors were about to record — which would turn out' to be L.A.Woman — and, of course, on the band itself.
"I think the Doors' music and ideas were very timely," mused the Hemingwayesque singer. "They seem naïve now but a couple of years ago people were into some very weird things. There was a high energy level and you could say things like we did and almost half-ass believe them. Whereas now it seems very naïve. We may have been one of the first groups to come along who were openly self-conscious of being performers, and it reflected in our career as it was happening."
It's a curious tone Jim Morrison adopts, not only referring to the Doors — still an ongoing group — in the past tense, but actually going further: he seems to be consigning them to the attic of popular culture as a phenomenon whose time has been and gone. And, as if to disarm his critics past and future, he continues:
"I think that, more than writing music and as a singer, my greatest talent is that I had an instinctive knack of self-image propagation. I was very good at manipulating publicity with a few little phrases like 'erotic politics'. Having grown up on television and mass magazines, I knew instinctively what people would latch on to. So I dropped those little jewels in here and there — seemingly very innocently of course — just calling signals."
And so, perhaps, it might have been. The Doors could, as Morrison anticipated, have ended up as just another period piece, occupying a position somewhere between Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge. But posterity had other plans.
By the end of this year, Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone will have his biopic of The Doors on the screens, the culmination of over a decade's reassessment of a group who've seen their stock steadily rise. A cornerstone of the '60s rock fan's record collection, the Doors cast a giant shadow forward over he new wave music and — if you will — aesthetic, which prevails to this day from Billy Idol to a host of lesser leather-trousered troubadours. More than that — and probably dating from the use of their song 'The End' over the strange and spectacular opening sequence of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now! — The Doors have come to symbolise for many the dark night of the modern American soul. Or something like that.
And it all started when a 21-year-old film course drop-out was living on Los Angeles's Venice Beach, hoping to avoid the army draft and whiling away his time by ingesting large amounts of the fashionable (and still legal) hallucinogenic LSD. Soon, he started hearing voices...
"I was hearing in my head a whole concert situation," Jim Morrison recalled, "with a band an audience, a large audience. Those first five or six songs I wrote, I was just really taking notes at this fantastic concert that was going on inside my head... and once I'd written these songs, I just had to sing them."
Help was almost immediately at hand in the lanky shape of Ray Manzarek, a versatile keyboard player whose classical training was spiced with jazz leanings and a declared fondness for both Muddy Waters and Jacques Brel. He had known Jim at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and played with an outfit called Rick and the Ravens. Ray recruited Jim, then a drummer he had met an initiation lecture to the Spiritual Regeneration promised by the Mahesh Yogi (later of Beatles fame) called John Densmore, who in turn brought in a guitarist he knew from a Transcendental Meditation class, Robbie Krieger. Where British rock bands at the time drew their inspiration from art school and a taste for Americana, this Los Angeles combo was grounded in experimental filmmaking, fringe religions, and lots and lots of drugs.
Along with its residual members, the name Rick and the Ravens was jettisoned in favour of something more appropriate to the new consciousness. They were to be The Doors, earned after Aldous Huxley's book about mescalin visions, The Doors Of Perception, which in turn had quoted the artist-poet William Blake: "When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite." To which Morrison later added, with his gift for the deliciously enigmatic slogan: "There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the Doors."
"We saw music as a vehicle to, in a sense, become proselytisers of a new religion, a religion of self, of each man as God," quoth Ray. "That was the original idea behind the Doors." The new religion sought its first disciples in a downmarket club on Sunset Strip called the London Fog. It was there, playing five sets a night for peanuts to an audience often consisting of a few drunks, the odd sailor on shore leave and the house go-go dancer, that the Doors developed — usually while under the influence — such epics as 'Light My Fire', 'When The Music's Over' and 'The End'. Audiences were hardly flocking to the Fog, so they were fired. But as luck would have it they were hired as the house band for the far smarter Whisky a-Go-Go, where they would attempt to upstage such headliners as Them, Love, the Seeds, the Turtles and the Byrds.
Record companies were dubious, however, until Love's Arthur Lee recommended the band to his label boss, Elektra's Jac Holzman. The deal was inked, and Elektra abided by their traditional commitment to left-field artistry by bunging them into Sunset Sound's four-track studio with producer Paul Rothchild; the brief, to make an album that as exactly as possible captured the uniquely spooky atmosphere of the Doors' now-renowned club act.
Recorded during a fortnight in September 1966, The Doors is one of rock's most fully formed debuts, a strikingly original album whose sensuality arose from the chemistry of the band — the velvety menace and sudden rage of Morrison's voice, the crisp, almost jazzy rhythms, Krieger's line in raga rock and blues bottleneck and Manzarek's mixture of Gothic doom and late-night classical jazz — rather than studio sweetening. Paul Rothchild recalled in the magazine Crawdaddy! how the 11 minutes and 35 seconds of 'The End' were recorded: "Midway through I was no longer producer, I was just completely sucked up into it. The studio was completely darkened, the only lights visible were a candle burning in the recording studio next to Jim whose back was to the control room, singing into the microphone, and the lights on the VU meters in the control room. The muse did visit the studio that time. And all of us were audience — the machines knew what to do!"
At first, however, the album failed to ignite the charts. That happened when an edited version of 'Light My Fire' was released as a single, rising in July 1967 to Number 1. Four months after release, the LP took off in its slipstream, and was only held of the top spot that summer (and Autumn) of Love by the all-conquering Sgt. Pepper. Suddenly the Doors, and especially the pervily-attired, poetising cheesecake that was Jim Morrison, were in that rare position of being pinned up on teenybopper walls and analysed as prophets of "Nirvana now", counter-culture-shock troops who seemed in their songs to unite sundry threads floating around California — pop psychology, sexual liberation, anti-war protest and the process by which a little learning in the realms of mythology and poetry might endow the most drug-addled pronouncements with the air of cosmic significance.
"I think there's a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life. And when they do come out, they can take perverse forms. It's the dark side. Everyone, when he sees it, recognizes, the same thing in himself... forces that rarely see the light of day."
The band's second album, Strange Days, was released in October '67 and gave musical shape to these dark and perverse feelings. Recorded on eight tracks with a proper bass guitarist rather than Manzarek left-handing the low notes on a Fender Rhodes piano, this album presents on its cover a street of carnival freaks — and within an exquisite air of languid alienation and deathly romance. "People are strange," goes one song, "when you're a stranger."
At this plateau of prestige and popularity, Morrison hatched his boldest plan yet. The so-called "Oedipal epic" of 'The End' and the apocalyptic 'When The Music's Over' (from Strange Days) were but starvelings of a mere 11 minutes each compared to the 25-minute multi-part 'Celebration Of The Lizard'. But Manzarek and Rothchild considered it too unwieldy to be recorded in its entirety for what was already shaping up to be a classic example of "that difficult third album". And Morrison was increasingly less inclined to fight his corner, as he was now busy cultivating his muse through imprudent quantities of drink, unsavoury boon companions and consequent gross unreliability.
"Their music insists that love is sex and sex is death, and therein lies salvation. The Doors are the Norman Mailers of the Top 40, missionaries of apocalyptic sex," journalist Joan Didion succinctly summarised for her readers what the band were all about before reporting on a session she observed for the LP which would be titled Waiting For The Sun. An excruciating air of enervation hangs over proceedings, with the band hardly motivated enough even to talk to each other. The miracle is that the album is as good as it is. Where the songs on the first two albums were products of two years writing, rehearsal and performance, those on the third were cobbled together mostly in the studio. The two singles 'The Unknown Soldier' (the odd, scrambled sound of its coda enhanced on CD) and 'Hello, I Love You' (an anagram of any early tune by Jim's beloved Kinks) are great; the former not a big hit since its militantly anti-war thrust was too hot for airplay as Vietnam peaked, the latter's less demanding theme got it to Number 1. 'Not To Touch The Earth' was extracted from 'Celebration Of The Lizard' and is the album's most haunting moment. 'Five To One' gave rock's treasury of quotes "no one here gets out alive" and "you've got the guns but we've got the numbers". The rest is mostly filler.
With a new Number 1 album anyway, the Doors began to make waves also in Europe, and that autumn toured overseas in a bill with Jefferson Airplane, the London portions of which were filmed by Granada TV for the documentary The Doors Are Open. Before flying off, The Doors played the prestigious Hollywood Bowl, a show filmed and since released on video, and 23 minutes were excerpted for long-belated 1987 mini-LP, Live At the Hollywood Bowl. A remarkably proficient gig, contemporary reviews report, but lacking that whiff of spontaneity and brim-stone that made Doors shows so much the mind-boggling rituals they were cracked to be, even though it aired bits of 'Celebration Of The Lizard' not on Waiting For The Sun. Despite its niggardly length, the CD proves that not only did the band get it right on night, but that the first album gave indeed a faithful account of their live sound.
But as 1969 dawned, the band had in mind their own Sgt. Pepper. Thus the inflated production number that is The Soft Parade, album admired only by connoisseurs of perverse period detail. Not that $80,000's worth of brass, strings and bluegrass pickers vandalised otherwise AOK Doors material; rather, they merely gussied up a collection dignified by few songs of substance. 'Shaman's Blues' finds Morrison wearily treading water, while 'Wild Child' at least reprises his so-called "Dionysiac" persona on the back of a cracking blues-rock riff. The title track is an oddity worthy of the eccentric and now almost forgotten late '60s songsmith Jim Webb, leavened with the hippie satire of Frank Zappa.
The opening lines, delivered in spoof Bible-blasher style, find Morrison in excellent voice. Thereafter, its edges become audibly roughened by a liquid diet which was also thickening the Byronic rocker's jowls and waistline. Either by coincidence or design, the band retreated from the less-than-garlanded whimsies of The Soft Parade to the bedrock of their original musical vision — blues-rock.
During the making of Morrison Hotel (1970, subtitled Hard Rock Cafe), Jim had hanging over his head a court case arising from an incident in Miami in February, 1969, when he allegedly flashed at his audience. No laughing matter, this; if convicted, he faced not only a fine but months of hard labour in prison. Though he still drank, the protracted case sobered Morrison up in other respects, and he began to recant some of his more high-flown utterances — choice examples of which include "I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom", "I want freedom to try everything – I guess I want to experience everything at least once" and – with a knowing smile at the squares who he knew this would particularly annoy – "think of us as erotic politicians."
The track 'Waiting For The Sun' (though probably a relic from 1968) successfully retreads The Doors' knack for dynamic contrast betwixt bittersweet and brute force, as do 'Blue Sunday' and 'Peace Frog', whose eerie middle section recalls a traffic accident in New Mexico Jim witnessed as a child when, he speculated, the souls of the Red Indian victims entered him. It may not scale the heights of the first two LPs, but Morrison Hotel doesn't plumb the depths of the third and fourth. Curiously, 1970's double live album, Absolutely Live is unavailable in on CD; instead, the 1983 compilation of 1968-70 live cuts titled Alive, She Cried offers a soundcheck rendition of Them's 'Gloria' and a terrific account of Willie Dixon's 'Little Red Rooster' with John Sebastian guesting on harp.
And so to L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison's swansong with the Doors, though the group limped on for two addicts-only LPs afterwards. An almost unqualified masterpiece, each song has a clear identity, unlike the first two albums where each tune seems to be a facet of one complex theme. Los Angeles is, of course, the place and state of mind to which Morrison addresses himself throughout, from the torpor of 'Cars Hiss By My Window' to the rush of the title track. The hit single 'Love Her Madly' is in quintessential Doors style, but 'Been Down So Long' and 'The Wasp (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)' stylise the blues without resorting to the self-conscious "artiness" that served the Doors so well at first before running out of creative steam. But as the track 'Riders On The Storm' — calm but menacing, bleak yet pretty, probably their finest seven minutes — sailed up the singles chart in July 1971, Jim Morrison died under mysterious circumstances in Paris, where he had been living for some months in order to find his poetic muse.
If you have to quit, quit on a high, goes the showbiz wisdom. Morrison certainly did that. But he also died just as the Doors had brilliantly proved they could evolve from a band who might well have been forgotten to languish in the old curiosity shop of '60s ephemera, to one poised for the '70s, like the Rolling Stones and Dylan.
"I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments," Jim Morrison once said. Sadly, he might almost have written his own epitaph.
Mat Snow, Q, November 1990