Post by darkstar3 on Feb 8, 2011 19:15:06 GMT
Newsweek
This Way To The Egress
Nov 6 1967
Unit recently, the thunderous San Francisco sound, with its electronic overdrive, had California’s sonic highway all to itself. But lately, above the roar of the feedback, has been heard the sound of Los Angeles, a challenge spearheaded by the music of The Doors – vocalist Jim Morrison, pianist-organist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
The impact of The Doors has been forceful enough to drive their album (called simply The Doors) to the top of the charts, to make one song, “Light My Fire,” one of the best selling singles of the year, and to win sales of nearly half a million copies for their just released new album, Strange Days. The special appeal of their poetic, theatrical songs in unholy praise of forbidden joys is to college audiences like the students at the University of California at Santa Barbara, whom The Doors were haranguing with their message last week.
They came out on stage not to entertain but to preach, with all the disdain and cold fury of a revivalist preacher confronting an audience wallowing in sin. Once singer Jim Morrison gets going, it’s hard to say whose soul he’s trying to save, his listeners’ or his own. Tall, ascetic-eyed, angelic faced, he grinds out his songs with gyrating hips and a flat, full bodied anguished voice that substitutes orgasmic cries for hallelujahs. “The only time I really open up is on stage,” the shy twenty three year old Morrison told Newsweek’s John Riley. “I feel spiritual up there.”
In contrast to the raucous San Francisco groups, the blues oriented Doors are softer and smoother, blend in and out in a complex variety of melodic, rhythmic, and instrumental changes, punctuated by odd abrupt silences. They can sound as plaintive ass Hawaiian strings, as decadent as Kurt Weill or as vigorous as Chuck Berry. But for the most part, they use their electrified instruments to invoke, with the chill of cold steel, weird, eerie twangs and rumblings that echo the doomsday lyrics of their sensual, primordial songs.
In such songs as “Strange Days,” “People Are Strange,” and their remarkable eleven and half minute nightmare, “The End,” The Doors describe and subscribe to chaos, to a world of alienation where night is preferred to day, to a Halloween world where darkest human impulses into consciousness. What they deplore in such existentialist songs as “Crystal Ship,” and “Unhappy Girl” is anything that interferes was absolute personal freedom. And what they advise, in such exhortative songs as “Break On Through,” the orgiastic “Light My Fire,” and “Moonlight Drive,” is to break the rules, taste the forbidden fruit, usually in a frankly sexual encounter.
The perverse and rather fuzzy salvation of which they sing, and the obtuse language with which they communicate, reflect The Doors’ own spiritual search and youthful confusion. Krieger and Densmore eat macrobiotic foods and study meditation with the Beatles’ mentor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Morrison lives in a shack in Laurel Canyon. They no longer use drugs. “That was a transitory stage,” says Manzarek. And Morrison, who writes most of the lyrics adds: “It’s a search, an opening of doors. We’re trying to break through to a cleaner, purer realm.” While they were their hair long, they choke on the label “hippie.” “Think of us as erotic politicians,” says Morrison. After that there seems to be nothing left to say.
END.
This Way To The Egress
Nov 6 1967
Unit recently, the thunderous San Francisco sound, with its electronic overdrive, had California’s sonic highway all to itself. But lately, above the roar of the feedback, has been heard the sound of Los Angeles, a challenge spearheaded by the music of The Doors – vocalist Jim Morrison, pianist-organist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
The impact of The Doors has been forceful enough to drive their album (called simply The Doors) to the top of the charts, to make one song, “Light My Fire,” one of the best selling singles of the year, and to win sales of nearly half a million copies for their just released new album, Strange Days. The special appeal of their poetic, theatrical songs in unholy praise of forbidden joys is to college audiences like the students at the University of California at Santa Barbara, whom The Doors were haranguing with their message last week.
They came out on stage not to entertain but to preach, with all the disdain and cold fury of a revivalist preacher confronting an audience wallowing in sin. Once singer Jim Morrison gets going, it’s hard to say whose soul he’s trying to save, his listeners’ or his own. Tall, ascetic-eyed, angelic faced, he grinds out his songs with gyrating hips and a flat, full bodied anguished voice that substitutes orgasmic cries for hallelujahs. “The only time I really open up is on stage,” the shy twenty three year old Morrison told Newsweek’s John Riley. “I feel spiritual up there.”
In contrast to the raucous San Francisco groups, the blues oriented Doors are softer and smoother, blend in and out in a complex variety of melodic, rhythmic, and instrumental changes, punctuated by odd abrupt silences. They can sound as plaintive ass Hawaiian strings, as decadent as Kurt Weill or as vigorous as Chuck Berry. But for the most part, they use their electrified instruments to invoke, with the chill of cold steel, weird, eerie twangs and rumblings that echo the doomsday lyrics of their sensual, primordial songs.
In such songs as “Strange Days,” “People Are Strange,” and their remarkable eleven and half minute nightmare, “The End,” The Doors describe and subscribe to chaos, to a world of alienation where night is preferred to day, to a Halloween world where darkest human impulses into consciousness. What they deplore in such existentialist songs as “Crystal Ship,” and “Unhappy Girl” is anything that interferes was absolute personal freedom. And what they advise, in such exhortative songs as “Break On Through,” the orgiastic “Light My Fire,” and “Moonlight Drive,” is to break the rules, taste the forbidden fruit, usually in a frankly sexual encounter.
The perverse and rather fuzzy salvation of which they sing, and the obtuse language with which they communicate, reflect The Doors’ own spiritual search and youthful confusion. Krieger and Densmore eat macrobiotic foods and study meditation with the Beatles’ mentor, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Morrison lives in a shack in Laurel Canyon. They no longer use drugs. “That was a transitory stage,” says Manzarek. And Morrison, who writes most of the lyrics adds: “It’s a search, an opening of doors. We’re trying to break through to a cleaner, purer realm.” While they were their hair long, they choke on the label “hippie.” “Think of us as erotic politicians,” says Morrison. After that there seems to be nothing left to say.
END.