Post by darkstar3 on Feb 8, 2011 19:16:21 GMT
TIME
Pop Music: Swimming To The Moon
Jan 24 1967
“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.” This twenty three year old Jim Morrison states the philosophy behind The Doors, the rock group for which he is chief songwriter and singer.
Not surprisingly, The Doors are based in Los Angeles, where they find their peciular mysticism perversely congenial. “This city is looking for a ritual to join its fragments,” says Morrison. The Doors are looking for such a ritual too – in Morrison’s words, “a sort of electric wedding.”
The search takes them not only past such familiar landmarks of the youthful odyssey as alienation and sex, but into symbolic realms of the unconscious – eerie night worlds filled with throbbing rhythms, shivery metallic tones, unsettling images. Swim to the moon, they sing, and “penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide.”
Preaching passion of both the metaphysical and physical order, The Doors have a style at once more plaintive and dramatic than the droning, hypnotic waves of sound such as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. They startle and bemuse with a uniquely mournful and moody tone that shade’s Morrison’s dusky voice seamlessly into a dark textured background; the haunting organ, piano and bass of Ray Manzarek, twenty four; the sinous guitar of Robby Krieger, twenty one; the nimble drums of John Densmore, twenty two.
When The Doors finally bring of their electric wedding it may well take the form of a small scale musical play. The prototype is “The End,” their enigmatic, eleven and half minute string of visions apparently revolving around an Oedipus situation, in which Morrison portrays several roles – some behind a red mask. Last week, opening and engagement at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, they introduced “The Unknown Soldier,” and anti-war philippic with martial music, shouted commands, the loading click of a rifle, and shots mixed in with instrumental passages.
The Doors ultimately envision music with “the structure of poetic drama.” Such a forbidding structure could cramp their financial fortunes, which at the moment are wide open: Both of their albums, The Doors and Strange Days are among the top five on the sales charts; “Light My Fire” has been one of the smash singles of the year. But they don’t seem worried, since the more complex forms come closer to fulfilling their apocalyptic imagination. Says Morrison, “We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.”
END.
Pop Music: Swimming To The Moon
Jan 24 1967
“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.” This twenty three year old Jim Morrison states the philosophy behind The Doors, the rock group for which he is chief songwriter and singer.
Not surprisingly, The Doors are based in Los Angeles, where they find their peciular mysticism perversely congenial. “This city is looking for a ritual to join its fragments,” says Morrison. The Doors are looking for such a ritual too – in Morrison’s words, “a sort of electric wedding.”
The search takes them not only past such familiar landmarks of the youthful odyssey as alienation and sex, but into symbolic realms of the unconscious – eerie night worlds filled with throbbing rhythms, shivery metallic tones, unsettling images. Swim to the moon, they sing, and “penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide.”
Preaching passion of both the metaphysical and physical order, The Doors have a style at once more plaintive and dramatic than the droning, hypnotic waves of sound such as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. They startle and bemuse with a uniquely mournful and moody tone that shade’s Morrison’s dusky voice seamlessly into a dark textured background; the haunting organ, piano and bass of Ray Manzarek, twenty four; the sinous guitar of Robby Krieger, twenty one; the nimble drums of John Densmore, twenty two.
When The Doors finally bring of their electric wedding it may well take the form of a small scale musical play. The prototype is “The End,” their enigmatic, eleven and half minute string of visions apparently revolving around an Oedipus situation, in which Morrison portrays several roles – some behind a red mask. Last week, opening and engagement at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, they introduced “The Unknown Soldier,” and anti-war philippic with martial music, shouted commands, the loading click of a rifle, and shots mixed in with instrumental passages.
The Doors ultimately envision music with “the structure of poetic drama.” Such a forbidding structure could cramp their financial fortunes, which at the moment are wide open: Both of their albums, The Doors and Strange Days are among the top five on the sales charts; “Light My Fire” has been one of the smash singles of the year. But they don’t seem worried, since the more complex forms come closer to fulfilling their apocalyptic imagination. Says Morrison, “We hide ourselves in the music to reveal ourselves.”
END.