1968 at 50: WAITING FOR THE SUN - THE DOORS

The first thing you might take note of here is the cover art. Unlike the debut with the band members dominated by Morrison or the circus performers in the street of Strange Days we get the type of band shot that would be posted to a bedroom wall if you stretched into a rectangle. The band stand side by side, no one bigger than any other, in some long grass. The sun is behind them. It looks warm. The band name in the characteristic blocky font is behind them and the title beneath in a more exotic lettering. It looks like someone wants to outrun some hype. It looks hippy, not Nietzchean. When you hear the bright colours of the keyboards, the classical guitar and notice the near total absence of blues based rock you might start thinking pop. But this is a record that aims to mess around with your expectations. It's clean but it's dirty.

It starts with a micro snare roll, getting the band's attention. And then it's straight into a light grind which sounds like a synthesiser to a post-1970 ear but is probably a combination of organ, bass and fuzz guitar. The riff will be familiar to any Kinks fan as its note for note and the same scansion as All Day and All of the Night. Jim Comes in with the chorus: "Hello, I love you. Won't you tell me your name?" Let me jump in your game. It would be moon/June except the verses open up to a running commentary of the dark, beautiful woman causing a chaos of attraction around her as she walks along in the L.A. sun. With more sex=paganism imagery we build to a scream as the fade out pours into silence and Jim is reduced to a moaned: "I want you." It's a fun song but the creep it holds for today's listener can't be gently erased. Jim's horny and says so. The summer of love has grown out into any other summer and a rock star's thoughts turn to the birds and the bees.

A soft dive from a bass guitar and we're into a smooth jazzy shuffle with bip bop guitar and synchopated organ chords so muted and staccato you wonder if it isn't actually a Fender Rhodes. Morrison comes in lightly: "She lives on Love Street. Lingers long on Love St..." Jim talks about the girl he's with and the Venice Beach lifestyle she leads, admired like the goddess in the last song but more of a hippy queen.  An acoustic guitar is added for the piano solo before Jim starts talking about the store where the creatures meet. "I guess I like it fine ... so far". Happy go lucky or usey? If feels light but we know better as he la las into the fade.

Not to Touch the Earth starts with chromatic wavy lines played on guitar, bass and organ. It's a toppling rhythm. Morrison with lines about not touching the earth and running. What follows is a list of paranoid images about mansions, outlaws, snakes 'n' such building a sense of panic and danger. This leads to a crashing dissonant end with Jim mumbling underneath: "I am the Lizard King. I can do anything. This would qualify for the "psychedelic non sequiturs" one contemporary critic complained of but for the fact that it is the only remnant of the side filling epic Celebration of the Lizard recorded for the album but not released until decades later. A version of it was caught on the Absolutely Live double set. It carries a lot more power than the studio version. Not to Touch the Earth was the longest continuous sequence that also felt like a finished song. As such it slots in fine in the original sequence, giving us a little of the raging band of the previous two albums while also feeling like it's from the same sessions as the rest of this one.

Summer's Almost Gone is a beautiful languid lament for the passing of the season. You could read it about aging or the passing of any happiness but all you only need to let it pour in with its gentle twilight beauty. Ray gets a gorgeous piano solo.

Wintertime Love is a solid oompahpah waltz with the band churning through a passable beerhall ode to the pleasures of indoor life during the cold months. It never quite feels like a novelty number as the arrangement is so dynamic and well wrought but it only really seems to be there to answer the previous song. That said I wouldn't have the album without it. Morrison coming across like Sinatra doing Mr Kite gives it a place in history.

Side one closes with a song thick with cinema. In fact the band thought so, too, as they made their own video for it despite it not being a single. An eerie high organ figure sounds as Morrison solemnly croons for us to wait until the war is over for the Unknown Soldier. The band kicks in after a breath with a forward marching rhythm as Morrison describes the horrors of war reported at the breakfast table. A break has the band marching to Morrison's sergeant goading. A pause and a gun shot. The eerie organ slinks back as we're bade make a grave for the Unknown Solider. The previous rock forward motion kicks back in with a slightly modified lyric before breaking into a joyous bright motif as Morrison screams: "It's all over. The war is over."  This still doesn't sound tokenistic or corny the way that Fixin' to Die Rag from the same era does. The dynamics of the arrangement that feel like a tightly edited film sequence prevents that. A minor masterpiece.

Spanish Caravan might have been an indulgence for Robbie Krieger's talents and left there. But it's a lot more. Opening with a beautiful Flamenco flourish of minor and 6th chords on the classical guitar it quickly forms into a brisk traditional dance. Morrison croons the lyrics about the mystic caravan from the distant past, making the flat lines undulate with form they don't deserve. The next pass at the verse is in full electric mode with Krieger and Manzarek doubling on a fuzzy new figure which rocks like its birth year. Morrison doesn't rise to a scream as he might but adds more power with his lower register croon.  It comes to the kind of crashland the album has spent a side establishing but still feels stately and adventurous all at once. Generally, if the song wasn't a Morrison-led number it was Krieger. This could go either way with band forged masterworks like Light My Fire or embarrassingly naff ditties like Running Blue. Here, the  approach to take it to the band worked. The opening sequence is lifted openly from an old Spanish piece but the band was sued for a detail from Kreiger's playing later in the song.

My Wild Love is a capella but for percussion it is entirely vocal with Morrison adopting a creaky moan in his story of a woman who tries to outrun a debt with the devil. Two melodic figures, one for each line in a couplet rise and fall while the claps and tinkling beneath give it the fell of a cross between a chain gang chant and Native American song. The rest of the band follow the melody but in wordless moaning stopping and starting according to the dynamics of the piece. Morrison doesn't start screaming until the final verse, falling back to the moan for the last lines about her endless race from the Devil. Of all the styles attempted on this most eclectic of Doors albums this is the least expected.

We Could Be So Good Together is a snarly blues rock going little further than the title with Morrison's narrator promising the world to his intended while gleefully admitting it's all lies. The band are in tight form with good interplay between the keyboards and fuzz guitar. Little more than that but it doesn't outstay its welcome and rocks fine.

Yes, The River Knows provides relief with a piano-led croon that might be about a romanticised suicide or a more metaphorical drowning in love or rejection. It strikes me that the lyric is kept vague enough to allow the meaning you want but the lusciousness of the piano and Jim's croon and the downward falling cadences don't let a lot of brightness in.

Five to One is the closest thing on this album to the two previous with its rant rant rant assault in the bass and guitar and Morrison's taunting vocal. This is the song that the irksome worshiping biography No One Here Gets Out Alive comes from. What starts as a call to action to all the youth and hippies to band against the established order and use their numbers. This rises to a searing solo from Krieger but that ends in a breakdown where Morrison describes something more likely, the hippies falling into dejection at the greater society leaving them to rot unless they throw off their floral crowns, join the mainstream and make it in their prime. There's no revolution here, it's all broken ideals and sellout. The Doors were no more hippies than the Velvet Underground and this sour (but appealing) joke on the wistful love generation that they will end up as war fodder or wise up as consuming drudges is as clear a statement as any the band made to their generation,

The lightest sounding of all the Doors's records, Waiting for the Sun contains this kind of middle finger hiding in the family portrait more than a few times. Breezy to strident it is never less than easy to listen to and belies the purported end of Jim's notebook songs to produce a band that could start from scratch with a developed (if not quite new) sound. With a renewed vigour for wicked tongue lashing and arch jokes on the summer of love and then with added sheen in the arrangements and production achievements Waiting for the Sun showed the world a band that could shed its old scales and reveal a streamlined new skin ready for shrewder business. Then Jim got drunk. But that's another story.