14th October 1967
Columbus Ledger GA
"Drama the kind that grabs your lapels and shoves you against a wall, is being reborn in a thousand clubs, discotheques and halls across America. It doesn't use sets, lighting and actors in the usual sense. It does use the rawhide-thong vocal chords of people like Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors. Morrison floats to the microphone, hangs limply on it, looking aside and down. Then his butterfly hand raises the microphone up, his body goes taught, his eyes look wildly in a personal darkness, and he forces his wild voice into the mike. It emerges from the amplifiers turning the room blue with hot, electric thunder. Then quietly, one hand cupped over his right ear, he begins to sing. It's theater." "The New Generation: Theater with a beat," San Francisco Chronicle via the Chicago Tribune. September 28, 1967 
Movie Teen Illustrated
October 1968 THE DOORS
“FOR GOOD OR BAD WE TRY TO DO THE UNUSUAL”Music By The Doors verges on the classical.
The pop group made of four young men from Los Angeles – Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore – boast 1967’s number one single, “Light My Fire,” and the number one album,
“The Doors.” Both were a first effort. Adding rock to Bach, to be general, had made their music
something more than a month’s gig on the top pop.
Morrison held the clue:
“While it’s true that our music has classical influences, what we’re playing is contemporary classical, not something out of the 15th century. Sure we use chords and harmonies out of Bach, but they’re flavored with the musical language of today and the rhythms of today.”
Organist Ray Manzarek spoke up after Morrison with the same idea in a different shade: “Audiences are a lot smarter than they’re usually given credit for. They realize that what we are doing is art – something timeless – not just a tune that makes the top 40 and disappears after six weeks.”
The facts bear Manzarek out. “Light My Fire” sold more copies than any other single and was on the top of the charts for 17 weeks. Their album was on the charts for 26 weeks. But ironically the group started out with no such lofty amibitions.
“We thought we were just going to be another rock group,” says Morrison. “Then we started recording “The End.” It’s a twelve minute song and it took us thirty hours in the studio to get it just right. It was then that we realized we were different from other groups, We were playing music that will last for years, not weeks.
One thing the group can’t explain is their popularity with so many diverse audiences. Paul Newman has been to seven of their concerts and offered to write the liner notes for one of their albums. Novelist Norman Mailer heard them once and made the very same offer. Even the teenybopper shares this enthusiasm.
rison has supplanted Beatle John Lennon as the sex symbol of the sneaker set. When the Doors appeared on one television show, Morrison needed a special police escort of ten men to get from his hotel to the theatre and back unharmed.
The group’s live performances also require well planned security measures because of the electricity they create on stage. Guitarist Robby Krieger commented: “We try to connect everybody in the audience to everybody else. We want them to become one mind, one entity. We are revivalists as well as musicians and want our audiences to undergo a religious experience.”<br>
As for the “Beatles” trips into mysticism. Manzarek commented: “The Beatles are today’s newspaper. They’re on top of everything that happens in a superficial way. Their albums are listened to once and then discarded. When we create songs, we feel the lyrics should be able to stand up as poetry, otherwise we won’t bother putting lyrics to our music. As a matter of fact, a publisher has asked us to put all our lyrics in book form.
Now that the group is established, comparisons are inevitable, and the Doors are most often compared with The Rolling Stones. Drummer John Densmore sees the connection” “If you look at the Beatles and Rolling Stones as two sides of a coin, the happy and the dark, then I can see the comparison. For good or bad, we do the unusual in our music. We’re not afraid to sing about unpleasant subjects, however, we are not going to be careful to make our statements in our music, not our in our lives.”
HULLABALOO
October 1967
The Doors In New York
The Doors were in New York for the third time for some concerts and a three week gig at Steve Paul’s Scene. It was not quite the same as their two previous trips to New York. Last fall, when they were playing here for the first time, they were virtually unknown except to the innermost circles of hippies and groupies. Early in the spring, when they returned, their album had been released and was a big underground item – big enough to keep it in the national charts around number 100 and big enough to keep the club in which they were playing chock-full of the in crowd every night.
But now we were in the midst of a Doors boom. Their album and single were number one on the West Coast, and the week prior to their arrival in New York, both had jumped about thirty points (which is very fantastic) on the national charts. In three weeks, they would be Top 10, album and single, and no new group since The Monkees had seen their first albums go Top 10. We were transporting, in our limousine from Newark, daisies and superstars – and we all knew it.
Even while they were here, the phenomenon was growing bigger. Everyone came to see them, and I arrived at the Scene one night to find Jim Morrison and Paul Newman talking about the title song for a movie which Newman was planning to produce. And when I called the directors of the Central Park Music Festival to arrange for passes for The Doors to the Paul Butterfield concert, I was told to have them enter the theater one at a time or they would be in danger of being rushed. Which I told them – but they came in together anyhow and were rushed and loved it. If they had stayed another week, they would have needed bodyguards. Their exit was well timed; the day after they left, we had a request to use The Doors in a singing deodorant commercial and I think everyone was relieved not to have to make a decision about that offer.
The Doors played their last set at The Scene on a Saturday night. At 3 am, when all the paying customers had left, Steve Paul locked us all in and gave a party for the boys, who had been the biggest draw in the history of his club. And on his part, Steve had been a good and groovy employer; I remember John asking Jim why he (Jim) would get to the Scene so well in advance of the time they had to perform, and Jim answering, “Well, I like to hang around Steve Paul and listen to him rap. He’s funny.” Anyhow, there was a case of champagne for the closing night party, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t quite chilled because everyone was happy, slappy, and tired, and it was a beautiful party. Robbie did his imitation of a shrimp, and Jim found something lying on the floor which looked like a balloon but wasn’t, so he blew it up and let it go, whereupon it landed in Ingrid Superstar’s champagne glass, which made Jim laugh, and everyone loved each other without any uptightness. It would be good if everything the Doors ever have to do ends so nicely.
