Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Feb 12, 2005 17:08:16 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."
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."