Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 15, 2005 9:54:11 GMT
Ignited by the success of 'Light My Fire,' the first two Doors albums introduced rock audiences to the tortured mind of Jim Morrison and his world of dark and strange possibilities.
In 1967, the Doors released their first two albums, The Doors and Strange Days, within 10 months of one another. It was an extraordinary feat of productivity, made more noteworthy by the fact that both albums spawned hit singles, while The doors went Platinum within months of its release. The surviving members of the group have various explanations for their prolific year. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, prone to spouting hippie wisdom, attributes it to "an intense visitation of energy" caused by the societal earthquake unleashed by the Vietnam War and a burgeoning youth culture. Robby Krieger, the group's pragmatic guitarist, merely shrugs his thin shoulders and notes that the band had been playing together for a few years and had a lot of good material ready to roll.
In any case, the band certainly had a busy year. More than 35 years later, both albums remain rock landmarks, so far ahead of their time that they never became dated. While most of the band's contemporaries long ago began sounding as frozen in time and place as Austin Powers, the Doors' music remains fresh and vibrant in a new millennium.
At the dawn of 1967, when the Doors appeared on the national scene, the hippie aesthetic was on the verge of exploding into America's mainstream. The Doors rode that crest to stardom with "Light My Fire," the song that in 1967 became the soundtrack to the Summer of Love. but they also saw beyond the dippy flowers-in-your-hair utopianism so popular at the time. Several years before it became apparent to everyone else, the Doors exposed the dark side of the psychedelic revolution in eerie songs like "The End." That epic, which closes The Doors, begins as a funeral dirge and ends nearly 12 minutes later with singer Jim Morrison ranting about fucking his mother and killing his father.
These aren't exactly typical hippie sentiments, but the Doors were always chock full of oddities. They were a rock trio with a jazz-oriented drummer, John Densmore, and they had no bass player -- Manzarek ably substituted by fingering a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass with his left hand while playing a Vox Continental organ with his right. Morrison was himself a bundle of contradictions, a strikingly handsome teen pinup and magnetic frontman who was also a poet and a deeply tormented alcoholic. And their secret weapon was a shy, spacey physics student named Robby Krieger. A flamenco guitarist who had been playing electric guitar for only six months when he joined the band, Krieger had a marvelous melodic knack. But even he wasn't aware of his gift until he wrote "Light My Fire," his first song and, of course, one of rock's most enduring classics.
"I really learned to play as a member of the Doors," he says. "I just tried to sound like myself -- I consciously avoided copying Chuck Berry or B.B. King because that's what everyone was doing. I tried to come up with the right part for the song and play something that would complement Jim's singing."
Krieger joined the band in the summer of '65, shortly after Manzarek's two brothers had quit. His presence jumpstarted the struggling, unnamed group. "The Doors did not really exist until I brought Robby in," says Densmore. "He added not only a great lead presence but incredible songwriting, which none of us knew he possessed."
With Krieger onboard, the band members began writing in earnest. They were still auditioning bass players in January 1966 when they were hired to play four nights a week at the Sunset Strip's London Fog. At this point they had about 25 original songs, including "Light My Fire," "Break On Through" and "The End," which was still a fairly simple ode to lost love. The band was signed and dropped by Columbia Records and seemed on the verge of breaking up when the Fog fired it after four months. But the female booker at the Whisky a Go-Go, L.A.'s premier club, had an open lust for Morrison, which helped the band become the Whisky's house band, a coveted gig for any group. The Doors, as Morrison had christened them, built a loyal following while opening for everyone from Van Morrison's Them to the Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. Following a tip by Arthur Lee, leader of Love, Elektra Records signed the Doors to a one-year, one-album contract with two one-year options and an advance of $5,000.
Thrilled with the deal, the band entered Sunset Studios to record its debut with Paul Rothchild, an Elektra house producer who had just gotten out of jail on a marijuana charge. In the studio, the group was anything but relaxed.
"We were all kind of freaked out and intimidated by the studio," says Krieger. "We were used to playing really loud, and suddenly our volume was brought way down because it would be too echoey to capture. It was a big adjustment.
Volume wasn't just an incidental matter; the band's entire sound was based on playing at very high decibels, something necessitated by Krieger's insistence on pushing his Fender Twin Reverb to the point of distortion. "In those days before decent overdrives, you had to be at 10 in order to get the speakers vibrating right and get the sound breaking up," Krieger says.
Initially, Manzarek was opposed to Krieger's high stage volume, primarily because he couldn't hear himself play. At the time Manzarek was playing an electric piano. Pushed to compete for volume, the keyboardist switched to playing the Vox organ that has become a hallmark of the Doors' sound. "My piano just didn't have the volume to compete with Robby and his Twin Reverb cranked to 10," Manzarek says. "I needed something to defend myself, so I got an organ and said, "'You're playing through a Twin Reverb, and now so am I. Let's go at it, sword to sword.' And we would just slash that Whisky a Go-Go audience with our sheets of sound."
In the studio, the band members used their stage gear, which had been upgraded thanks to the Elektra advance. Krieger played a Gibson Melody Maker and an SG through his Twin Reverb, augmented by a Gibson Maestro Fuzz. The guitarist needed this early pedal to compensate for the lower volume and resultant lack of natural distortion. Despite the band's hesitations, the debut album, recorded on four tracks, was completed in six days. After a single day of stumbling around, the Doors cut "Break on Through" on day two, then kept right on rolling.
Says Krieger, "Despite our comfort, we were able to do everything quickly because we basically just set up and played live, and we had been playing those songs for so long that we really had the material down cold. Everything was cut in one or two takes, usually with all of us playing live and Jim singing along, though he almost always redid his vocal later."
On the third day, when the band was going to record "The End," Morrison dropped acid and spent most of the day pacing the studio changing, "Fuck the mother, kill the father. Fuck the mother, kill the father," mirroring the song's dramatic and shocking lyrical climax.
"We were going, 'Yeah, right, Jim, but we've got to record. How about singing?' " recalls Krieger. "We finally got him into the studio for two takes, and we nailed it -- the vocal is actually Jim's live take. And then we thanked God, because we knew we weren't going to have too many cracks at it. But to this day, I don't think that particular version of 'The End' was anywhere near as good as the way we played it many other times."
"Actually, all the songs on the first album were skeletons of how we really played them," the guitarist continues. "It was just a combination of not having any studio experience and doing everything so fast. I also think that studios are, by nature, limiting. You cannot get the sound of five big amplifiers on a little piece of tape."
The band recorded for three more days, then spent two weeks mixing, and the album was finished. Released in the first week of 1967, The Doors surprised everyone in the group with its cover photo, which featured Morrison dominating the foreground and the other three members positioned deep in the background. "Nobody liked that," Krieger says. "Jim was adamant about it being the Doors, not Jim Morrison and the Doors. " They were more pleasantly surprised when Elektra sprang $1,500 to promote the album on a huge billboard on Sunset Boulevard, the first such prominent rock advertisement.
The album had such a good buzz and sold well in the Doors' hometown but did not immediately make much of a national impact. "Break On Through," the first single, made it to number 11 in L.A. with the help of incessant request calls to local radio stations by the band's friends and families. Nationally, the single peaked at 98 on Billboard's Hot 100. Right after the album's release, the Doors traveled north and made their first appearance at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, rock's premier room. They were paid $350 and billed third to the Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel. They returned three weeks later and were billed below the Grateful Dead and Chicago bluesman Junior Wells. For two months, the band didn't leave California, and neither did its impact.
In 1967, the Doors released their first two albums, The Doors and Strange Days, within 10 months of one another. It was an extraordinary feat of productivity, made more noteworthy by the fact that both albums spawned hit singles, while The doors went Platinum within months of its release. The surviving members of the group have various explanations for their prolific year. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, prone to spouting hippie wisdom, attributes it to "an intense visitation of energy" caused by the societal earthquake unleashed by the Vietnam War and a burgeoning youth culture. Robby Krieger, the group's pragmatic guitarist, merely shrugs his thin shoulders and notes that the band had been playing together for a few years and had a lot of good material ready to roll.
In any case, the band certainly had a busy year. More than 35 years later, both albums remain rock landmarks, so far ahead of their time that they never became dated. While most of the band's contemporaries long ago began sounding as frozen in time and place as Austin Powers, the Doors' music remains fresh and vibrant in a new millennium.
At the dawn of 1967, when the Doors appeared on the national scene, the hippie aesthetic was on the verge of exploding into America's mainstream. The Doors rode that crest to stardom with "Light My Fire," the song that in 1967 became the soundtrack to the Summer of Love. but they also saw beyond the dippy flowers-in-your-hair utopianism so popular at the time. Several years before it became apparent to everyone else, the Doors exposed the dark side of the psychedelic revolution in eerie songs like "The End." That epic, which closes The Doors, begins as a funeral dirge and ends nearly 12 minutes later with singer Jim Morrison ranting about fucking his mother and killing his father.
These aren't exactly typical hippie sentiments, but the Doors were always chock full of oddities. They were a rock trio with a jazz-oriented drummer, John Densmore, and they had no bass player -- Manzarek ably substituted by fingering a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass with his left hand while playing a Vox Continental organ with his right. Morrison was himself a bundle of contradictions, a strikingly handsome teen pinup and magnetic frontman who was also a poet and a deeply tormented alcoholic. And their secret weapon was a shy, spacey physics student named Robby Krieger. A flamenco guitarist who had been playing electric guitar for only six months when he joined the band, Krieger had a marvelous melodic knack. But even he wasn't aware of his gift until he wrote "Light My Fire," his first song and, of course, one of rock's most enduring classics.
"I really learned to play as a member of the Doors," he says. "I just tried to sound like myself -- I consciously avoided copying Chuck Berry or B.B. King because that's what everyone was doing. I tried to come up with the right part for the song and play something that would complement Jim's singing."
Krieger joined the band in the summer of '65, shortly after Manzarek's two brothers had quit. His presence jumpstarted the struggling, unnamed group. "The Doors did not really exist until I brought Robby in," says Densmore. "He added not only a great lead presence but incredible songwriting, which none of us knew he possessed."
With Krieger onboard, the band members began writing in earnest. They were still auditioning bass players in January 1966 when they were hired to play four nights a week at the Sunset Strip's London Fog. At this point they had about 25 original songs, including "Light My Fire," "Break On Through" and "The End," which was still a fairly simple ode to lost love. The band was signed and dropped by Columbia Records and seemed on the verge of breaking up when the Fog fired it after four months. But the female booker at the Whisky a Go-Go, L.A.'s premier club, had an open lust for Morrison, which helped the band become the Whisky's house band, a coveted gig for any group. The Doors, as Morrison had christened them, built a loyal following while opening for everyone from Van Morrison's Them to the Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. Following a tip by Arthur Lee, leader of Love, Elektra Records signed the Doors to a one-year, one-album contract with two one-year options and an advance of $5,000.
Thrilled with the deal, the band entered Sunset Studios to record its debut with Paul Rothchild, an Elektra house producer who had just gotten out of jail on a marijuana charge. In the studio, the group was anything but relaxed.
"We were all kind of freaked out and intimidated by the studio," says Krieger. "We were used to playing really loud, and suddenly our volume was brought way down because it would be too echoey to capture. It was a big adjustment.
Volume wasn't just an incidental matter; the band's entire sound was based on playing at very high decibels, something necessitated by Krieger's insistence on pushing his Fender Twin Reverb to the point of distortion. "In those days before decent overdrives, you had to be at 10 in order to get the speakers vibrating right and get the sound breaking up," Krieger says.
Initially, Manzarek was opposed to Krieger's high stage volume, primarily because he couldn't hear himself play. At the time Manzarek was playing an electric piano. Pushed to compete for volume, the keyboardist switched to playing the Vox organ that has become a hallmark of the Doors' sound. "My piano just didn't have the volume to compete with Robby and his Twin Reverb cranked to 10," Manzarek says. "I needed something to defend myself, so I got an organ and said, "'You're playing through a Twin Reverb, and now so am I. Let's go at it, sword to sword.' And we would just slash that Whisky a Go-Go audience with our sheets of sound."
In the studio, the band members used their stage gear, which had been upgraded thanks to the Elektra advance. Krieger played a Gibson Melody Maker and an SG through his Twin Reverb, augmented by a Gibson Maestro Fuzz. The guitarist needed this early pedal to compensate for the lower volume and resultant lack of natural distortion. Despite the band's hesitations, the debut album, recorded on four tracks, was completed in six days. After a single day of stumbling around, the Doors cut "Break on Through" on day two, then kept right on rolling.
Says Krieger, "Despite our comfort, we were able to do everything quickly because we basically just set up and played live, and we had been playing those songs for so long that we really had the material down cold. Everything was cut in one or two takes, usually with all of us playing live and Jim singing along, though he almost always redid his vocal later."
On the third day, when the band was going to record "The End," Morrison dropped acid and spent most of the day pacing the studio changing, "Fuck the mother, kill the father. Fuck the mother, kill the father," mirroring the song's dramatic and shocking lyrical climax.
"We were going, 'Yeah, right, Jim, but we've got to record. How about singing?' " recalls Krieger. "We finally got him into the studio for two takes, and we nailed it -- the vocal is actually Jim's live take. And then we thanked God, because we knew we weren't going to have too many cracks at it. But to this day, I don't think that particular version of 'The End' was anywhere near as good as the way we played it many other times."
"Actually, all the songs on the first album were skeletons of how we really played them," the guitarist continues. "It was just a combination of not having any studio experience and doing everything so fast. I also think that studios are, by nature, limiting. You cannot get the sound of five big amplifiers on a little piece of tape."
The band recorded for three more days, then spent two weeks mixing, and the album was finished. Released in the first week of 1967, The Doors surprised everyone in the group with its cover photo, which featured Morrison dominating the foreground and the other three members positioned deep in the background. "Nobody liked that," Krieger says. "Jim was adamant about it being the Doors, not Jim Morrison and the Doors. " They were more pleasantly surprised when Elektra sprang $1,500 to promote the album on a huge billboard on Sunset Boulevard, the first such prominent rock advertisement.
The album had such a good buzz and sold well in the Doors' hometown but did not immediately make much of a national impact. "Break On Through," the first single, made it to number 11 in L.A. with the help of incessant request calls to local radio stations by the band's friends and families. Nationally, the single peaked at 98 on Billboard's Hot 100. Right after the album's release, the Doors traveled north and made their first appearance at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, rock's premier room. They were paid $350 and billed third to the Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel. They returned three weeks later and were billed below the Grateful Dead and Chicago bluesman Junior Wells. For two months, the band didn't leave California, and neither did its impact.