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"..That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully."
When we see it for the first time we understand that it is the parasite in her system speaking through her going through its laboratory-designed mechanism of seduction. We've seen the parasite raw. It resembles both a liver fluke and a turd and is transferred orally. But what we see is the face of a beautiful young woman and hear her cooing voice curling around the next victim like a swirl of cigarette smoke. We feel the danger ... and ache to be part of it.
The Doors had had a few years experience honing their stagecraft in the venues of Los Angeles by the time they got into a studio to record their first album. They had found how best to contain some numbers until they could fit anywhere and they had expanded some tiny romantic ballads into epics that could inspire, terrify or both. All that was needed was to get it down on tape. Oh, and the same stuff that would make that Cronenberg movie scene so eerie and alluring eight years later: performance, pure performance from internal forces that could make the infected rage after being delivered with a kiss.
I had picked up a retail cassette copy of Morrison Hotel in an op shop. It was just the tape, no case or inlay. I bothered as I had read two longish pieces about the legend of Jim Morrison in some of the music mags I read. This was late '70s so, with the deconstructive assault of punk all but tattooed on my arm, I found the admiration from writers who might have been as old as the unimaginable twenty-five suspect; they were praising him like a pagan demigod without conveying what it was that bade them so. Why? Well, the music was hard to get to. You could dig around the op shops, ask around in case your school friends had them in the older siblings' collections, or you could sit in front of 4TO on a Sunday morning when they were in golden oldies mode and wait. And then you'd just hear Light My Fire.
Ok, I'd heard Light My Fire and liked it but the whole funeral pyre schtick seemed as contrived as a theatre restaurant vampire. I'd read the lyric to The End in Endless Circle, a creative writing textbook from early high school. The lines didn't seem to relate to each other, had few rhymes and splodged into babble. Then when I put Morrison Hotel on and the initial ran na nan na nan na nannerly riff started up I almost turned it off and tossed it in the bin. I had spent hours, perhaps days, in the meagre fields of '60s pop music archeology in the mid '70s, esacaping the oaf rock of Hush and Rose Tattoo only to find this yobbo party from back in the era of gold and adventure. I let it run and smirked at the line about the future being uncertain and the end being always near, a token bit of Rimbaud (a name I knew from those articles about Morrison) and lived through the fade of blues rock cliche.
There are stellar moments on Morrison Hotel but it's so patchy that getting to them on a cassette was too much like hard labour. The tape got shelved. End of story. Light My Fire was a good song. Enough.
Cut to 1980. Having missed the start at the cinema I got home to Townsville for the Christmas holidays and persuaded Dad to see Apocalypse Now at the drive-in. The setting is important. It was North Queensland in December, hot and humid. Throughout the screening a gentle drizzle drummed on the car roof, military helicopters throbbed overhead, visible as black shadows against the purple overcast. The movie begins without credits. Where they would have been is a visual overture. A tropical beach hemmed by a thick dark green forest. The intense glare seems to phase in and out of focus just as it does to look on a Townsville beach. Choppers in slow motion cross the screen like circling predators. And swelling through this familiar visual atmosphere, tinkling at first and then swirling and snaking along a clean Gibson SG's fretboard, the drums and a keyboard base adding cicadas and throbbing temples to the mix, it comes. The choppers file past again, close to the forest and as the vocals start - This is the end, beautiful friend - a huge sash of napalm flashes and spreads along the foliage making the heat hellish and pressing the breath from every nearby lung. And, yes, these were the words that looked so amateurish and try-hard on the page. Now, here, they sounded like the Grim Reaper channeling Sinatra. I have never known a better matched of movie scene to sourced music. That's still the gold standard.
Ok, so now I needed to hear The Doors.
If the star had got a bit of retouching in the '70s by the early '80s it was unignorable. Getting to Uni with my Brisbane op shop radar honed and hearing the albums and the post-midnight drones about the greatness of the Doors my information calorie count went on assault. Then there were the rereleases and it all came home. First of the rank was the debut, the one with that song on it.
I took my reissue copy home the next Christmas holidays where it played beneath the screams from the pool outside the rumpus room or, more gently, crooned through moonlight with friends and liquor after hours as we chatted, wading or hanging from the edge rather than splashing. If you put it on after Joy Division (I only had the second album at that stage) you noted the connection and if you put it on after the B52s you cooled down into it and, given the circumstance or luck, seduced. Blues shouting, chanting rock choruses, smooth trip-outs, Brecht-Weill cabaret numbers and that big gluey epic capping it off. It was 1981. The Russians were blowing up Afghanistan, the Americans were getting antsy and the creepy phrase Cold War Two blared its way into news commentary. A war mongering B-movie star who would describe the USSR as the Evil Empire was in the White House and his best mate, Maggie Thatcher was pressing the UK into the dirt of the gutter. The wrong fingers were too close to the big buttons. The Doors, played fourteen years after first release, just felt like home.
But is it any good?
The cover was a warning. The name of the band was the album and the soon to be iconic art nouveau font loom large but larger still is the great big face of Jim Morrison, beautiful and frowning like a young Lord Byron takes up a full half of the cover. The half of his face is in shadow and that's where you'll find a group portrait of the other three, the people who made the most sound on the record, posed like a group from a framing shop sample photo. The back cover is more egalitarian but that's the back. Was that a compromise (like the censored lyrics) by a band eager to get their first album out? What little I knew of the band and their personalities (though I could guess at Morrison's) seemed at odds. A band that insisted all original songs be accredited to the whole band let's this EDDIE and the Cruisers look be the one? That would never happen now without annotated self-aware irony. But, no, whether they liked it or not, the great stick-it-to-the-man Doors let the record company do the talking on that one (they'd have a chance to reverse that image on Ed Sullivan soon after).
Anyway, so I dropped the needle in the groove. And ...
Side 1 begins with a Latin sizzle on the ride cymbal and what sounds like a Fender bass pretending to be a tuba but is really a Rhodes piano bass. Hang on, need some explanation, here.
I'm basing this article on my listening of the original mix as heard on an '80s reissue. This means that I'll be thinking of that mix and edit rather than the magnificent hi-res digital one released in 2007 by Rhino. Normally, I wouldn't go into it too much but there are real differences here. First, the recent releases of the back catalogue are full remixes and edits from the ground up (where possible) and presented as the kind of remasters that would be done on a contemporary album with the capabilities of digital audio and modern sound systems. This means (IMHO) that they not only sound better than when they were on vinyl but you get to hear what the editing job on the original didn't deliver (missing lyrics, for example) and something more like the band would have released if allowed. I'll be referring to the differences where significant but for the most part my guide will be the 1967 presentation.
Why put that there instead of at the end in a Listening Notes section? Well, the bass riff on the Rhodes bass piano is important. The sound isn't like a bass guitar, it's like something else entirely. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, a whizz on the ivories and a solid thinker on tone, made up for the bass player that the band chose to do without by playing one of these (here's a demo) adding a unique sound on the bottom end but also doing so with a classically-trained verve (if you think classical players don't have verve you need to listen to more classical music): his bass playing is great. However, if you compare the original mix with the more recent revisit you will hear great big Fender basses in some of the songs in the latter that the earlier mix buried (possibly to blur the difference with the keyboard bass). The piano bass was the sound of the live lower end of this band and as a hyped up and polished version of the live show on this album, that's important to know. Anyway ...
Ray plays a jazzy arpeggio on the piano bass and introduces us to the fuzzy but boomy sound of the live band's nether lands. All through the album it rises beneath the crisp top and dominates, giving the listener a ride on the back of a seamonster at midnight: smooth but murky and dangerous. First big lesson from the first few bars of the first album: it's not all Jim. So ...
Latin sizzle and big boom bass. Robbie Kreiger comes in on his Gibson SG, lightly distorted it is almost indistinguishable from the bass but playing a counter figure, note against note. Then the voice, urgent high but muscular: The day destroys the night, the night divides the day. Try to run try to hide. And then, screamed: Break on through to the other side, break on through to the other side, yeah! The low rumble, the expansive sizzle on the percussion (John Densmore is listed on the album credits as percussionist, not drummer), the zapping guitar and the bellowing voice put me into a landscape of hills shaken by a storm. I was already associating the band with cinema from Apocalypse Now but this made a movie of its own. The tortured hills had no gothic heroine nor anything supernatural but they were spooky. Separated from this only by an imagined glass door, I slid it to one side and entered the storm. Jim's recalling nights of pushing the boundaries with his companion (could be drugs, could be bigger, could be drugs and something bigger) when the acid was legal and the dark of L.A. summer nights endless. The original mix truncated a repeated cry of "she get high!" to "she get -" which, not knowing otherwise, sounded like he was pushed to the brink of his description by the power of the memory and couldn't finish the picture. The freed "she get high" is almost a disappointment to hear in the new mix but that's what he sang to the mic in the Studio and to the other girls with islands in their arms and countries in their eyes at the Whisky and the Kaleidoscope.
Soul Kitchen begins with a more pedestrian figure on the organ, staccato chords, sharp and white. the piano bass comes walking in underneath. The snare kicks the drums in and Robbie's Gibson, more vigorous up the fret board, bends through a tight funk lick. Then Morrison: Well, the clock says it's time to go now ... the cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes, streetlamps share their hollow glow ... still one place to go ... This is the same couple from the song before but after a few too many nights on the other side, lying exhausted, waking up for sex and top-ups, sharing cigarettes by the infernal red light of a sign through the window. The sensual weariness gives way to a screaming chorus that settles (and this is where the first bass guitar is smuggled in) A spirited solo by Krieger sounds as tired in this setting.
I never lived like that. There were episodes here and there, some stretched into weeks or months but never a life. No one lives like it, they just remember it that way. But when you're fifteen, hormonally insane, and can't tell the difference between your orgasms and the ones you hear on records, you think you're going to live like this, tangled in the sheets with an other whose fingers talk in secret alphabets in places where it's always closing time. The song ends without a reprise of the chorus which lets you know it's not just another pop song but suggests with the "all night, all night ..." groan that, exhausting as it gets, there's more. One final bellowed repeat and the song ends, looking out on the dark between the tracks.
Then we get something like the other side. Morrison starts with a rising figure, crooned: Before you slip into unconsciousness I'd like to have another kiss, another flashing taste of bliss, another kiss ..."
The melody steps down as it reaches up and a gentle keyboard and guitar ebb and flow swells around. What starts as a lullaby becomes a series of shared memories, continuing desires and, after a gorgeous piano solo, a shouting vision of the ship of the title, filled with a thousand girls and a thousand thrills and so a million ways to spend your time, a boy's own spectre of masturbatory abandon. But, then, "when we get back I'll drop a line." He'll write a letter? He'll dose himself with a mass of LSD? It's gone from romantic to self-pleasing to fleeing the scene. For years I thought the last line was "jump the line" meaning, to me, absconding, having taken his fill. Dunno, but this first indication that the band is much more than a set of three-chord blues shouts raises the stakes well above the already impressive introduction. The tone is hedonistic but the mood is dreamy and veers to the melancholic. Ships dock, perhaps delight, but always move on. Or they sink. I know better but I would love to think that this was the Doors' answer to the Seekers' Morningtown Ride.
Twentieth Century Fox is one I still think of as filler but it's short and welcome in the sequence. I'd never pick it out to listen by itself. It starts with a guitar lick that sounds cliched now but probably signalled hard rock then, curly and bluesy. Jim variously admires and dismisses a local godess of the scene. But is she? She's got the world locked up inside a plastic box. Her moniker might mean that she's a corporate identity, a big poster image with all enticing synthetic genitalia. Maybe that's just a tv set or the notion of the mass media (as it was termed then) and its home in the band's native L.A. Up to you. Either way, it's pretty clever. The original mix of this is chunky with edges softened by the suppressed highs that plague this record but the 2007 remix pushes a giant picked Fender bass centre stage and makes it a monster rocker. When it comes up I'll wait for that bass to come in. Not the original sound but yummy.
Alabama Song is a Brecht/Weill standard that starts with Ray Manzarek combining Piano Bass with the Vox organ in a clipped un-rock 2/4 beat (oom-pah oom-pah oom-pah). "Show me the way to the next whisky bar, oh don't ask why ..." The change of mood and pace is abrupt and dramatic. The band fall into the Teutonic Wemar thump under words of desperation and depravity with a similarly abrupt change to 4/4 for the chorus which swings whimsically by contrast. And in comes the Marxophone sounding like a big clanging street piano. Because this is done with such intentional coldness it clears the table of the campiness that contemporary rockers added to pastiches of the jazz age (e.g. Little Miss Queen of Darkness by the Kinks or the soon-to-come When I'm 64 by the Beatles). It feels more like the band reaching back and finding something akin to their present.
A sharp snare hit launches Light My Fire and Manzarek plunges into his Bach-like intro, sounding both old world and innovative at once. The arrangement spaces out underneath the vocals in a kind of big spooky jazz vamp. This one is almost too familiar to talk about. It's the song that many people use as a Doors signifier. Well, it's all there: the bright garage organ, a mix of jazz and psychedelia without ever blanding into fusion, a love song that mixes imagery of groovy romance with funeral pyres, a great Morrison vocal that goes from a Sinatra croon to a violent scream. All I'll say here is that the sheer sexiness of the groove in the verses with the band in fine slinky form (Robbie Krieger's finger-style chording on the clean SG working perfectly with Densmore's restless shuffling) allow what might have been a slightly shadowy bubblegum song into an epic. Apart from Mazarek's plodding and overlong keyboard outing which never quite feels like a solo the flow of the track reaches a strong median between live abandon and studio crafting. Krieger's fluid and beautiful soo enters the lull after Manzarek's excursion and feels like a new act in the story rather than a token guitar solo. Stately and grand at first, it eventually joins the mob on the street and yanks some time-challenging stutters out which are taken up by the band to a conclusion that needs to end in the Bach riff and the big screamed repeat of the second verse and the refulgent final chorus where the sky itself is burning. One last baroque riff and exeunt omnes. End of Side One.
Side Two opens with the most serious attempt at a straight electric blues number. It's a cover of a Willie Dixon's Back Door Man and is magnificent, enough to compel this blues infidel to listen eagerly every time. A thudding bass on the A, shrill organ riff, cold but driven, and Jim yelping like a dog. "Ahm a BACK - DOOR - MAY-EN!" It's a growling threat on the make through the streets, predatory but pointedly consensual. This hunter doesn't hit, he seduces. His biggest boast outside of his rampant virility is the creation of cuckolds. The title might suggest a preference for anal but should be taken more literally. He steals into other men's houses and takes what they assume the marriage vows have secured them. Whether Morrison identifies or aspires is difficult to tell what he does is play a role. While there were white blues bands aplenty at the time and cabaret acts like Classics IV whose publicity shots had the singer in a werewolf mask, The Doors approached their blues performances as character pieces. Not character pieces like a VCA grad auditioning for neighbours but a Brando in full immersion. Right up to Crawling King Snake, Jim sounds like he's testifying rather than evoking. And the band is playing without the academic reverence which turned me off white blues to begin with but something more like the lunging emotion that emerged and set after nights of band/audience give and take. Of note, again, is Krieger's guitar playing, stabs, bends and muted rhythm. If his solo is a touch more ordinary than on other songs in the list his rhythm playing makes up.
I Looked at You is a basic proposition. We spy each other, mutually attract and it's on. No turning back. That's the gist of the lyric. The music goes from a brisk trot to a storming chorus. If it weren't for the force that renders the plainness of the lyric into a real urgency this one might sit beside Twentieth Century Fox as a filler but, starting from silence and jetting to the final orgasmic yeahs, it fills the formula of a generic rock song well but takes it further by removing the valentine card images.
A falling sigh on the slide guitar opens The End of the Night. After a tiny pause the organ meets the fall with a rising figure. The two fuse in a single phrase rising and falling like water. "Take the highway to the end of the night .... take a journey to the bright midnight." Slow and eerie, this is the albums most cinematic song. Drawing from Blake and Celine as well as his own stock of boundary-pushing alienation, Morrison tells us what it's like to be on the outer edge irrevocably and by choice. The slow arrangement ebbs and flows around his vocal as a whimpering slide solo emerges from the gloom which ends in an ominous snare roll before Morrison re-enters screaming the lines again. Some are born to bliss and some are born to the end of the night. The language is a lot plainer than in other Morrison lyrics and the statement feels genuine as a result. The croon followed by the shout is already typical at this stage in the album but in this number there's a conviction to it that doesn't feel like acting (which, of course, might mean that it's the only real acted one).
Take it as it Comes starts with everyone in a brisk gallop. "Time to live, time to lie ..." At first it's like an answer to the Byrds' cover of Turn Turn Turn but Ecclesiastes is not on the menu here. The smooth energetic rocker with a fast but highly colourful keyboard solo from Ray variously croons and shouts about the good stuff you can see if you slow down. It's not everything in its season but, hold back and take everything you can. I often confuse this with I Looked at You but this is a much fuller piece and includes a lovely stripped back final verse where an arpeggio on the bass dominates under the vocal before the final chorus storms back in. As this is an album fresh from live performances this song like all of them ends cleanly rather than in a fade which is more typical of the era. The elongated final line "move - ing ... way ... too ... faaaaast!" screams home and everything ends with the dying of a crash cymbal.
Which brings us back to do. The downward glissando on the guitar and the whispering cymbals. The haze of organ and Jim comes in: This is the end, beautiful friend.
I'm back in the car with Dad as the drizzle on the roof thickens the tropical air and the opening of Apocalypse Now fades in on the drive-in screen, real choppers throbbing overhead. I'm listening to it for the first time as an album track a year later, again in Townsville, an afternoon scotch and dry in one hand, its ice cubes liquefying rapidly. The shrieks of children from the pool are muted by the splash of dive bombing other kids. I'm at any number of University parties in cooler Brisbane where this song always ends up on the turntable among the Birthday Party, Banshees, Bauhaus and anything else. I'm somewhere with a guitar noodling around the D chord, gently hammering on the D from the C#, trying to work out how Krieger had done it, not suspecting he played all of the Doors guitar parts without a pick, a Flamenco player's fingertips guessing at sitar style without quite making it from chords to raga. Later, Melbourne, another summer night. Rain. All of that, every time.
The interplay of the instrumentalists carried cleanly from the stage show. The song had started as two verses of melancholia, boy bids farewell to girl. After year of playing that the middle grows so big it's almost the whole set, a spooky epic of Oedipal murder and transformation. The guitar coils and uncoils, slithering here and rising to a scream there with Krieger's perfect control of his amp's breaking point. Densmore avoiding the snare, preferring the hiss of cymbals and thunder of the tom toms. Manzarek grounding on the Piano Bass, avoiding the third so Robbie could change from major to minor at will. The organ variously fluid, shimmering like heatwaves or freezing into block chords. And there was Jim, sometimes centre stage sometimes darting around it, finding the shadows and the spotlight, peering through the cracks in the walls at the killer who woke before dawn. I know, I'm getting carried away but I just put it on for reference and had to stop typing just to listen again with my eyes closed. This is one the great moments of my listening life, as arresting as my first hearing of Mozart's 40th symphony and its terrifying counterpoint (my first fandom was for classical). And while the band went on to do it longer, better, funnier or scarier live I had no idea of that. All I knew was that it happened like this in the recording studio once. I also had an inkling that it had got that way by being played to ragged perfection in dark and sweaty clubs which brings us back to do, again.
This is a live album the way that Please Please Me was: it came from the clubs. While the Beatles debut is as clean as you'd expect, the rumble and danger is under the surface, only perceptible in the promise. The Doors is a record from the other end of the same decade when more was allowed, from a Los Angeles that housed all the dangers of Hamburg and many nightmares beyond it.
So, yeah, it's good.
The overriding sense from my first hearing of the album (well, every one up until 2007) was a kind of cowl of cloud smothering the high end. The bass is everpresent but it's the lower mids that dominate from the guitar to the vocals. Only John Densmore's snare and cymbals cut through and then not always. The strange thing is that it feels intentional, as though cutting the treble that would make it pop out on contemporary radio and record players would draw the fans in to turn it up, dim the lights and listen harder. On the systems I first used to hear it in the 80s the lack of brightness was a frustration. There was nothing to bring the sound into the younger ear without cost. You can't remove reverb once it's there and you can't add treble once it's gone. I wondered if the distant storm of the sound was meant for the relaxed and intoxicated. The CD release didn't improve things as it only presented a cleaner version of the mud. I bought the box set Perception eagerly in the late '00s as I read it was a remix from the ground up. Also, I was and remain a sucker for rejigging the '60s to surround sound. The box contained both DVD-Audio and CDs. I still have it and still trot it out. Really, you won't hear a spookier rendering of The End or Riders On the Storm outside of it.
The newer mixes, overseen by original engineer Bruce Botnick, were a promise delivered. All the extra bits censored ("She get -" was back to "She get HIGH!" and all the naughty words and orgasmic breathing and grunting were back in The End). And EVERYTHING sounded more defined. All the bits deemed naughty were restored. She got HIIIIGH! and the Oedipal consummation over the freakout in The End was back in (as it had been when used in Apocalypse Now, mind you). Mostly, for me, though, the Fender bass has been moved up. It's presence in Twentieth Century Fox takes that clever filler and makes it welcome in the sequence. The cool arpeggiated chunky line in Take it As it Comes drives like a mofo and the contemporary ear is delighted to hear the range from this rich low end to some crisp highs. It's not the original mix (which also had some draggy pitch problems) but listen to the thudding, bass enhanced opening to Back Door Man and dare to disagree.
The Doors established themselves in the venues of a Los Angeles of tough rooms and nascent hippydom that accepted anything alternative to a tired mainstream culture. Like the best courtships, the band offered its audience something that felt friendly and too hot to hold at the same time. The mix was some stunning musicianship that was saved from flavourless perfection by the gleeful taunting chaos of a frontman who knew his Baudelaire from his Bo Diddley* and just how much sex his every blink communicated. If you're put off by that thought and consider a glancing acquaintance with Jim Morrison tells you all you need to know about the band, give this one some air. It really does make sense when you hear it.
* This joke borrowed from monologue Scanlon by Barry Oakley which, I saw around the same time I first heard this album, at La Boite Theatre down the road from where I lived.
