It opens with a bang. Actually two bangs. Tell All the People blasts up with big Revue style brass as well as good but standard bass playing augmenting the band. Morrison comes in with his best Cranky Franky croon, telling everyone to follow him ... down. It's like a Messiah but from Vegas with a kicking chorus line and a band in sequined suits. For all that it flows easily and Jim's vocal is pure mastery and the aural jutxaposition of the ringadingding delivery of what might have been mistaken only months later as a kind of Manson call to action carries a pleasant jarring effect.
Touch me is far more recognisably Doors. A funky pulse on the rhythm section and keys leads to the most macho stammer in history: c'mon c'mon c'mon now touch me babe. And the brass pours in like golden syrup. The lusty choruses alternate with a velvety croon over a string section and beef up to a joyous brass supported pre-chorus. There's a genuinely jazzy sax solo before the whole repeats. It's infectious and punchy. And then the final bambambambam on the brass there's a deep voice intoning something I never made out until the recent hi-res remasters. "Stronger than dirt!" Gotcha, I think.
And then after those two it's as though the brass section called it a day and left and the band went, "ok, let's just do the rest normally, then". And this is the problem that a lot of people have with this album: two big show stoppers and a bunch of routine tunes that run into each other. That's a pity because they are mostly perfectly fine Doors songs that would add to any of the other albums. They're just overshadowed. I wonder if this is sequencing.
The opening pair of tracks are clearly distinct songs but they are only two of three that have expanded orchestral arrangements that put them in the same set. This means that side one of the original release starts with two massive numbers and then seems to slowly deflate. Imagine instead of that using the two larger scaled numbers to sandwich the others and you have some real momentum. Start with BAM, go on a small journey of discovery with Jim in Shaman mode and end with BAM before the grinding blues of the opener of side two with its superior sequencing. OR put some brass on the others on that side (all of them could take it) and you've got a Vegas show but still the Doors. Anyway...
Shaman's Blues starts as a slinky groove that hardens along the way to something more bluesy. Kreiger's guitar is so heavily distorted it sounds cool and violin-like. It's the tone he found on Five to One on the previous album and discovered later by the likes of Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew and anyone who bought an ebow. Here it repeats a sinewy descending figure that plays through everything but the breaks during which it soars. Morrison comes in with his chanting lyric about never being another one like you. He could be singing about a shaman or, I think more likely, his self image as a kind of leader with imposter syndrome. It's a strange piece and if if wasn't overshadowed by the two large scale opening numbers it would get more attention. Its persistent chanting and serpentine figures on the bass, keyboards and guitar really compel.
After a barely audible chant the band breaks into Do It, another blues groove but with more sass. Morrison starts in with a simple plea to listen to the children before addressing them a the ones who will rule the world. This mixes with a more personal sexual plea but that might just be Jim intentionally confusing it. Again the refrain of Please, please, is quite mesmeric. It's a minor but listenable Doors number.
Easy Ride is the kind of goofy knockabout ragtime they were trying to replace the Brecht Weill song of the first album. It comes across as a sexual provocation with plenty of tinkly piano and cheeky swipes on the guitar. It's such a self conscious jokey thing and teeters so close to becoming embarrassing that I usually feel like skipping it. It's often said that The Doors were a solid precursor to prog for their blend of styles like blues and classical. Here they precursed the goofy prog rock naff filler track on every album by bands like Yes, ELP or Genesis. Not a great claim but definite fame.
Side two begins in familiar territory with a fuzzy blues riff, some patter from Jim and the band kicks in to support creating a big driving groove for Wild Child. The lyrics confuse Jesus with his mother but pretty much goes into what might be something obscure and deep or word salad. It's brief, sounds tough and compells through its music alone. The final spoken line "remember when we were in Africa" feels like a tease ... or a mic test.
Running Blue starts with Morrison singing a jaunty lament for Otis Redding, throwing a prety little girl with a red dress on for good measure. The song kicks in with the kind of syncopated rhythm that drives the first two songs, big and spacy but here with brass. Morrision's verses are about missing Otis Redding. Then Robbie Krieger chimes in for the chorus sounding like Bob Dylan in a bluegrass mode. This never works however often you hear it but turns into the sound between Wild Child and the next one.
Wishful Sinful is a rock Sinatra with dramatic bass, big string section and solid dynamics. It's a plain enough ballad with pretty images written by Krieger and sung with great charm and power by Morrison. I have put this song on to listen to by itself many times. The string arrangement is timeless and is augmented, as never before or since on a doors number, by reeds which sit perfectly in the setting. A magnificent track.
In the tradition of epics for the closing track on the bands albums along comes the title number and it's a doozy. Morrison spits out a memory in character about a person in seminary school who said we can petition the lord with prayer. He repeats the phrase with utter contempt before screaming: "You cannot petition the lord with prayer!"
Then, a meltingly beautiful lute and harpsichord descending figure plays under Morrison's crooning plea for sanctuary before he brings it to a hard halt. A cocktail jazz shuffle follows with words about travel before a kind of plinking travelogue theme plays under paradoxical imagery of mothers carrying babies to the river and leather riders selling newspapers before the next halt: The monk bought lunch!
A slow and sleazy blues groove slithers up and pretty much levels out for the rest of the song as Morrison with other voices begins quietly at first but soon rises to a scream with a series of paranoid imagery of dogs, violence, guns. The soft parade has now begun. You could read a lot of Vietnam and the violence of repressed protests of the time, the two high level assassinations of the year before and a lot of other things but this works as well now as it did then. What at first appears deluded or hallucinatory (some of Jim's patter earlier talks about it being the best part of the trip) forms into a screaming recognition of danger in the streets and violence in the corridors of power. If The End was a trippy lament and When the Music's Over an epic funeral dirge The Soft Parade is the sound of Hieronymous Bosch at his canvas, containing the bloody chaos in a vision of hell. When the chanting voices turn to senseless repetition ("calling on the dogs") a huge reverbed Morrison reutrns to sternly intone: "When all else fails we can whip the horse's eyes and make them sleep and cry!"
That last line made me wish that Morrison had been alive to take part in Live Aid's We Are the World.
In the end the soft parade is about contemporary American life. The rat race, the army, the squares and the boy scouts. The hunter was now a soldier and set children on fire instead of finding food. The dogs were not wolves anymore but the minions of security guards and police. From the screamed climax of the song to the droning call to the dogs this song feels like the end of a career. Morrison had two more albums in him before he left and they are my least favourite. Apart from a few standouts (and there are great tracks on them) they feel lost and pointless to me. It's this one, the one that Doors fans slip into the rest of their collections away from the sacred five, that I still find compelling as a kind of aberrant statement, a warning to anyone listening not to get too comfortable, a whispered invitation to get out the side door and run.
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