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.