The Doors - Morrison Hotel

1969 was not a good year for The Doors.  They were all set to tour the States as a headliner, and then they played a show in Miami.  This was THE Miami show where Jim Morrison allegedly “whipped it out.”   As a result, tour dates got canceled.  To compound things, they recorded and released The Soft Parade.   The Soft Parade has a multitude of sins – brass, strings, and for the most part, bad songs for which the added brass and strings cannot compensate.  It might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but producer Paul Rothchild didn’t do the band any favors by adding these extra instruments to Doors songs.  Brass, strings, and Doors songs just don’t mix.  It worked on one song – Touch Me.  Otherwise it sounds like cocktail music.  To compound these matters, Runnin’ Blue is a hoedown, complete with fiddles and mandolins.  A hoedown on a Doors record - are you kidding me?  Paul Rothchild had them do so many takes on The Soft Parade to achieve perfection that any life that might have been in the songs was sucked right out of them.  There are two good songs on The Soft Parade – Touch Me and Wild Child.  The latter is just the Doors playing, and this was the first hint at Robbie Krieger playing a raunchy guitar tone.  The only problem with Wild Child is that it’s too short [2:38].  The Soft Parade committed an unforgivable sin – it bores me.  If the Doors wanted to terminate their career even earlier than they did, they could have kept making records just like The Soft Parade.

Morrison Hotel was the album the band needed to make after The Soft Parade.  Gone was the Lizard King from 1967-68.  Gone was the psychedelic trippy stuff from the first two albums.  Gone were the brass and the strings, and most importantly, gone were the bad songs.  Morrison Hotel is a back-to-basics album with a bluish tinge.  With this album the Doors transformed themselves into a bar band.  The first side is labeled Hard Rock Café.  Side Two is Morrison Hotel.  Side One has the hard, blues-rock songs, and Side Two has the quieter ballads.  Engineer Bruce Botnick wrote that the songwriting well had run dry for the band, so they had to create material from scratch in the studio.  The purveyors of the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain got their name from this album.  The original Hard Rock Café was a bar located in the skid row section of downtown LA.  The band popped into the place for a beer after they did the photo shoot for the cover at the original Morrison Hotel.

Roadhouse Blues – The direction of the Doors music hinted at on Wild Child shows up here.  Robbie Krieger owns Roadhouse Blues.  This is the first indication that the Doors morphed into a pretty good bar band.  When I was college puke I thought the Doors was just a drug band until a friend said “no, they’re a beer band!”  With words like “I woke up this morning and got myself a beer…” who could argue the point?  That being said, the poet in Jim Morrison was still there – “the future’s uncertain and the end is always near…”  Given his lifestyle as a raging alcoholic, perhaps he knew his time on Earth wasn’t going to be long.  That’s John Sebastian on the harmonica under the pseudonym G. Puglese.  Lonnie Mack plays the bass here.  On the deluxe version of Morrison Hotel, you’re treated to 30 minutes of takes before the band nailed it.  For the first few takes, Ray Manzerek plays an electric piano.  It was only later that he switched to acoustic piano.  You can hear Paul Rothchild chew Robbie Krieger’s ass, so that may account why his tone and attack sound especially angry on the released version.

Waiting for the Sun – What was wrong with this song that it couldn’t go on the album of the same name two years earlier?  The answer – nothing.  Waiting for the Sun maintains the energy level from Roadhouse Blues, but when you listen to Morrison’s singing, you can tell it was an earlier recording.  His voice is not ragged here as it was after The Soft Parade.  This song has one of Jim Morrison’s best lines anywhere – “This is the strangest life I’ve ever known…”  For Jim Morrison this could have applied to when he first experienced stardom in 1967, or the aftermath of the Miami incident in 1969.  The inclusion of this older song on Morrison Hotel is proof enough the band was out of new material

You Make Me Real – This one is another stomper like Roadhouse Blues.  Unlike Waiting for the Sun, it was a new song.  Instead of playing the organ, Ray Manzerek plays a cool tack piano.  It gives the song a bar room feel.  Robbie Krieger makes his presence known – he isn’t overshadowed by Manzarek’s keyboards. 

Peace Frog/Blue Sunday – Peace Frog is Robbie Krieger at his funkiest, even more funky that on Soul Kitchen.  He gives the wah-wah pedal quite a workout.  The imagery from this song is fairly vivid – “Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile egg-shell mind…” was something Jim Morrison remembered from a car trip through a desert when he was a kid.  And there’s blood everywhere – the town of New Haven [where Morrison was arrested on-stage in 1967], Venice, the streets of Chicago, etc.  Blue Sunday is a very calm ode to Morrison’s girlfriend/common-law wife, Pamela Courson.  It’s a nice counterpoint to the craziness of Peace Frog.  One segues into the other.  If you hear them separately, it feels a bit strange.

Ship of Fools – Nothing to see here - move along…so I usually do.

Land Ho! – As much as I detest the hoedown [Runnin’ Blue] from The Soft Parade, this sea shanty rocks hard enough to be interesting.  I figured “what the hell - Morrison was a Navy brat, let him have fun with it.”  Robbie Krieger still plays with the nasty tones from Side One, but Ray Manzerek switches from acoustic piano to a cheesy organ [a Vox Continental, I think].

The Spy – Long before Sting wrote about stalking in Every Breath You Take, the Doors had this quiet piano tune.  Manzerek’s piano is the instrumental focus.  Morrison is sufficiently sinister about knowing “your deepest, secret fear…” The song has only one verse [sung twice], but that doesn’t prevent it from being a good song.

Queen of the Highway – This is a song for Pamela Courson.  She was his Queen of the Highway, and he was the “monster, black dressed in leather…”  At least he was self-aware of his own boorish behavior.  The deluxe version of Morrison Hotel features a jazz version of this song.  They were correct in discarding that version for what was eventually released.

Indian Summer – Need any more proof the songwriting well was dry?  This is an outtake from their first album from 1967.  It too is about Pamela Courson.  It’s not a bad song, but it isn’t the Doors’ best one either.  Indian Summer is just…there.

Maggie M’Gill – The opener Roadhouse Blues, Lonnie Mack plays the bass on this one.  For Morrison Hotel, this is as bluesy as the Doors would get.  The previous three songs were a bit of a slumber, but here the band snaps awake with this jewel.  For the most part Maggie M’Gill is a single-chord A Minor song [I like minor-chord blues]; Robby Krieger plays a particularly nasty slide.  Ray Manzerek's organ [a Hammond B-3 this time, I think] provides great atmosphere.  The line “Now if you’re sad and you’re feeling blue, go out and buy a brand new pair of shoes…” cracks me up every time I hear it.  This song is a preview of things to come on LA Woman.  It sounds great when played back-to-back with The Changeling [the opening track from LA Woman]. 

Morrison Hotel was the first Doors purchase I ever made.  First impressions being what they are, I was most impressed with Morrison Hotel.  I picked a good one to buy first [I got LA Woman at the same time]. Unlike The Soft Parade, Morrison Hotel does not bore me – far from it.  This album marked a creative re-birth of the band as well as a return to greatness.

Jim Morrison - Forty Years Gone

Forty years ago today, a 27-year old rock star was found dead in a bathtub in Paris, the apparent victim of a heart attack. How do 27-year old guys drop dead of heart attacks? In the case of Jim Morrison, we’ll never know. Nobody performed an autopsy, the band’s manager saw only a sealed coffin and a grieving common-law widow when he arrived in Paris. Conspiracy theories abound…was he really dead? If he was dead, was it a drug overdose? If he wasn’t dead, where did he go? To truly disappear from sight and stay disappeared the way Jim Morrison has for the past forty years, there can be no doubt – he’s dead. Forty years after his death I think it’s pretty safe to draw that conclusion.

I didn’t get into The Doors until I was a senior in high school. It happened in the most unusual set of circumstances. It was a week before we seniors were due to graduate, and my AP English class had time to kill, especially since we had already taken the AP exam. Our teacher, Mrs. Gray, brought out a record player and an album. The album was The Doors’ Absolutely Live. She put on Side 4. Out of this tiny record player came The Celebration of the Lizard. It had a series of poems, some storytelling backed with music by the other Doors. That was the hook. It was different, it was strange, it was eye-opening. A few days later I spotted a paperback book in the local Waldenbooks bookstore. It was called No One Here Gets Out Alive. It was written by Jerry Hopkins [who had also written a biography of Elvis] and Danny Sugerman, who later became The Doors’ manager. A fairly thorough book, it documents the Doors’ meteoric rise to fame and Jim Morrison’s equally quick crash that ends in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. It was a fascinating look at how a guy, the son of a US Navy Admiral, can evolve from this shy person who wouldn’t even face his first audience into the Lizard King and then into this wild, drunken, out of control burned-out rock star.

The book got my attention, but I wanted to hear the music these guys made. Apparently the book got the attention of a lot of people because The Doors still sell over 1 million albums a year. The first two albums I bought were LA Woman and Morrison Hotel. Once I digested those, I bought The Doors and Strange Days. I couldn’t help but be struck by how much the band’s music changed in a just a few short years. The Doors had Light My Fire, the first song Robby Krieger wrote in his life. Just think about that for a second – you’ve just written your first song, and it goes to Number 1 in the country. Where do you go from there? But I digress. The Doors had more than just Light My Fire. There are two covers – Howlin’ Wolf’s Back Door Man and Kurt Weill’s Alabama Song/Whiskey Bar. The rest of the songs are all Doors originals, including the finale The End. It originally started out as a song Jim wrote about the break-up with his girlfriend [I’ll never look into your eyes again…]. Where he got the part where he wants to kill his father and have sex with his mother, I’ll never know. But as a teenager, this is some pretty wild stuff.

There’s more of the same on Strange Days. The music is dark, mysterious. Ray Manzerek’s organ often gives the music a kind of carnival-like feeling. Robby Krieger had been trained in Spanish flamenco guitar, so his guitar adds another exotic character to the music. He didn’t use a pick, and given his flamenco training he could play chords and lead lines at the same time. Robby often played bottleneck, which made the music even more interesting. John Densmore was influenced by jazz, so he didn’t always play a steady rock beat like most rock drummers would. Jim drew his inspiration from the works of Blake, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche. He also drew inspiration from copious amounts of LSD. The Doors didn’t have a proper bass player. Ray Manzerek held down the bottom end in live performances with a Fender bass keyboard. He has said that his left hand was the Doors’ bass player while his right hand was the Doors’ keyboardist.

I don’t say anything about the albums Waiting for the Sun or The Soft Parade because there’s not much to say. Some of the music on those two albums is pretty good – some of it is rubbish. Morrison Hotel and LA Woman were the last two albums The Doors would record in Jim Morrison’s lifetime. Compare and contrast the last two albums with the first two and you get two different bands. Where the first two albums are dark, mysterious psychedelic works influenced by classic literature and lots of drugs, the last two albums saw The Doors become a bar band that could play hard rock and roll. This music was influenced by the blues and lots of alcohol, much of it consumed by Jim. Here’s where you get music like LA Woman, Roadhouse Blues, You Make Me Real, Peace Frog/Blue Sunday, Love Her Madly. I like to hear Maggie M’Gill and The Changeling back-to-back. Hearing LA Woman and Roadhouse Blues back-to-back is another thing I like. My iPod playlist for this period looks something like this:

Wild Child / Maggie M’Gill / The Changeling / Love Her Madly / LA Woman / Roadhouse Blues / Waiting for the Sun / You Make Me Real / Peace Frog/Blue Sunday / Land Ho! / The Spy / The WASP [Texas Radio and the Big Beat] / Riders on the Storm

When You’re Strange is a biographical movie about the Doors. Unlike other biographies were you have interviews with the people involved, this movie relies completely on film clips. The movie is narrated by Johnny Depp. The thing about the movie that caught my eye was the footage of Jim out in the desert. I wondered to myself if it was from HWY: An American Pastoral, a short film Jim made in 1969 [details of which are in No One Here Gets Out Alive]. My instincts were right – those clips were indeed from that movie. That’s NOT a guy playing Jim Morrison for the movie – it is Jim Morrison in the flesh. Getting that footage for this film was quite an achievement. If you have already read No One Here Gets Out Alive, then When You’re Strange won’t provide many surprises. There is one thing I saw in the movie that I did not know before. I always thought the group got their name from the Aldous Huxley work The Doors of Perception. According to When You’re Strange, the name came from a line in the William Blake poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The line reads If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. One thing the movie captures very well is how chaotic Doors shows could be. The crowds stopped listening to the music and they wanted to see a spectacle. There are many clips of fans rushing the stage, in concert after concert, only to be tackled by cops before they could get to Jim. You can hear audio from the infamous Miami show where Jim was reported to expose his penis to the crowd [did he or didn’t he?]. If I have a complaint about the movie it is the use of all those Vietnam clips. Did they really need to be there?

Jim Morrison died forty years ago. It’s hard to imagine what he would look like today. I can imagine what his music would be like though. While he was in Paris the band started working on another album, just waiting for him to return from Paris to add his vocals. He never did return, but The Doors finished the album. Its title: Other Voices. It’s not bad – too bad you have to get it as a two-for-one import these days [Full Circle, their final album, is also on the CD]. The Doors didn’t survive too long after Jim’s demise. They left a fairly decent body of work. Such was the appeal of Jim Morrison even ten years after his death that Rolling Stone ran a cover with Jim’s picture [see above]. The caption: He’s Hot, He’s Sexy and He’s Dead. He’s still hot, and he’s still dead. I’m not sure about the sexy bit, but my 17-year old niece sure likes him. :-)