1970@50: MORRISON HOTEL - THE DOORS

In the turbulent wake of the Miami incident ("ya wanna see my prick?") The Doors were looking down the barrel of a live circuit that didn't want them. The court case was dragging and Jim wasn't winning anymore. He was getting smashed and swaggering to a decreasing circle of worship. That's seen as the reason the band abandoned the extended arrangements of the coldly received Soft Parade and get back down and dirty to a basic blues rock. The good news is that their personality as a music unit would never quite allow that so we didn't get the oppressive scholarship of the Claptons or Mayalls but the bad news is that they almost lost all the diversity of what made moments like Spanish Caravan or The End so great. The result is an album made of old and new recordings that never feels cohesive with great parts constantly getting elbowed out by what sounds like filler. As I'll say later, my first impression of this album was not a good one. How does it scrub up to a more recent spin?

Roadhouse Blues: This loses me from the first notes as a distorted guitar sounds out a ranting blues riff that's picked by the band with a tack piano. Morrison comes in shouting about driving safely and adds some existentialist shading. But, while it's played with real passion and becomes a muscular workout I just can't stand this song. The only reason I listened to it recently was to write this.

Waiting for the Sun, by contrast, is one of my favourite Doors numbers. The whole band starts at the same time. Sighing ride cymbals, slide guitar, tic tack bass and eerie organ shimmers move together in a slow cinematic descent. Morrison's broken croon enters with lines about how beautiful he finds summer, addressed to someone offstage. There's a sudden big swag of brass that bursts in at the end of each line. The chorus kicks in with an intensity that eases back into the next verse. The following chorus adds another repeat of the title as the brass and band intensify to a powerful extended middle eight that insists on the word "waiting" and continues to gain momentum until the final octave doubled vocal: "waiting for you to tell me what went wrong". This might normally but to a solo but everything tightens and quietens as Jim croons, extending the syllables: "this is the strangest life I've ever known." And then screams in encouragement as the band and the brass hammer out the riff in the verse. One final verse and chorus and extended final line finished with a hammering final bolt of brass.

It's magnificent and when I first heard this (on a cassette given to me) I understood what baby boomer journalists had meant when they talked about the power and the sex of the band. I marvelled at how different it was in arrangement and force from anything else on the album and learned, much later, that it had been carried over from the album that bore it's name. Later, still I learned that it was part of the Celebration of the Lizard suite intended for that record. Again later, I heard the live and then the studio recording of that on the re-releases where it works much better than here.

You Make Me Real begins with a nimble blues figure on piano. The band bashes in with a complimentary riff and Jim bellows about a girl. The difference is in the title. Jim feels fake or insubstantial, maybe fame and the adoration of masses have wasted him. But when he's with this 'un his flesh and blood gain body and he plunges in with roaring virility. All good except that it's such macho blues rock that I usually skip it.

Peace Frog begins as a kind of hot bitumen funk riff and commits to the chanting feel of the opening. All the lines begin with the word blood until a spoken section over a spooky breakdown tells of the child Jim absorbing the spirits of a carload of dead native Americans who'd been in an accident that the Morrison family had driven past on a highway. The funk workout resumes with some double tracked Morrison and lifts the album up almost as high as Waiting for the Sun. It ends on a crashing major chord which starts Blue Sunday.

Blue Sunday is a pretty straight love ballad with a Spanish flavour. Morrison's crooning of the simple but heartfelt lyric is set in languid clean electric guitar, shimmering organ and slinky drums as well as a loping bass. I could easily listen to this by itself.

Ship of Fools is a perky gospel tinged number with an apocalyptic theme and a classically influenced middle eight about a figure called Mr Goodtrips who sounds like the Pied Piper of Armageddon. The band swings back into the rave up southern church music to the fade out. The humour of this one is so instantly appealing I always leave it on after Blue Sunday.

Land Ho! kicks in with a jaunty strut down the scale as Morrison strides in with a tale of the sailing men of his family and the women who loved them. A brief middle section parts the curtains of family legend, wades out into the minor in a change that sounds like the band is used to doing this live, and a few lines about the solemnity of sea venturing ends in an imagined toll. A gap of a breath before Jim yells: "Land ho!" and the big strut resumes with Morrison bellowing out a drinking song back on shore to the fade.

The Spy opens with a slinky slide figure, supported by tack piano, snakey bass and jazzy drums as Morrison croons a blues lyric as the spy in the house of love who knows everything about the girl he's singing to including where she goes, her dreams and her deepest secret fear. One verse three times, each travelling from a feline sneak to a powerchording chorus. This possibly features Jim's lowest recorded note.

Queen of the Highway lifts like discarded wrapper from the asphalt as a tale of a girl who falls for a monster in black leather, a kind of folk tale for the Easy Rider generation. The next verses, though, do something interesting by suggesting a lineage as the children of the biker and the supergirl respond to their own wildness. The music is more soul influenced than bluesy with tasteful electric piano and supportive bass guitar (these new masters really redress the balance on the myth of no plucked bass on Doors records) and characterful guitar from Krieger. Despite the hints of modern paganism or nihilism or Dionysism or etc-ism in the story this pleasant number lilts rather than rocks or slinks. Neither Wild Child nor The End but I do leave it on.

Indian Summer is a gentle declaration of love that drifts and shimmers like a mirage at the end of a highway. It's an old recording from before the first album but is as welcome a change of texture and temperature as a glass of cold water on a hot day.

Maggie McGill is a sharp edged walking blues that tells of finding relief where you can from the disasters of living. If you do this and go down to Tangy (or Tangent) town at least the people there know how to get it on. The last verse offers the strange lines about someone being the illegitimate son of a rock and roll star. Outside of whatever Frank Zappa and confederates were up to, this might be the first comment on the consequences of the decade gone and its near religious acceptance of rock music as godhead with numberless bastard children rolling out of rock and roll cars each worshipped at a decreasingly small circle of influence as their volume rises. It ends with Morrison growling that he's just an old blues man watching it all and has been forever. That might well have been the last we heard from him and it would have made a fitting final statement ... from the twenty-six year old malcontent.

I was dreading this. It's albums like this that made me think I should just finish the @50 series at the close of the '60s. The late '60s and early '70s are a time when I really have to think in exceptions. This is from the perspective of someone who wasn't into the music as it happened but discovered it at least half a decade late and the motive for the discovery was a dissatisfaction with the music of the mid to late '70s. The stripping back process that followed psychedelia and gave rise to waves of rootsiness, prog rock, heavy metal, barely identifiable strutting macho 12 bars, country rock, jazz-rock ended in a pop music that sounded perfected and old. It's why when I went back to listen to glam rock I had to except David Bowie, and Led Zeppelin from metal, and so on. It's why I can find nothing of interest in anything by The Band, The Faces, Rod Stewart, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and many many more. Partly it's because I'm not feeling the reaction they express and partly because the push of punk and post punk wiped them out before I was tempted to give any of them a fair trial. This is the first Doors album in the Morrison sequence that I don't really care about. It was also the first one I heard.

My sister's boyfriend was a luthier. He once lent me a 1966 Stratocaster for a week which blew my head off. He was a good musician and a knowledgeable one (my sister picked for musicality, apart from anything else). We had many enlightening chats about rock music and at one point he gave me a commercial cassette of Morrison Hotel that he'd picked up in an op shop sortie. There was a journalism-led revival of the cult of Morrison at the time and I'd devoured the mythology. He came across as a poet who wrote with a quill dipped in dark matter and sang by night for a rock and roll band. At first I quite liked the strut of Roadhouse Blues but found the rant na rant na rant rant na riff annoying and posey. It was Waiting for the Sun that got me with its lyrics from the dawn of paganism and thunder on the horizon scenery. I barely registered any of the other tracks they were all too bluesy and musically uninteresting to me.

When the Doors revival hit my peer group, aided hugely by The End playing over the opening of the cult epic Apocalypse Now, I took my time in getting a reissue of Morrison Hotel but it was the only legit place to go for Waiting for the Sun so at the halfway mark of the '80s I found a second hand copy. I listened to all of it. No change. Still just that one. I bought the DVD-Audio set of all the Morrison Doors albums (if you still don't know, there were two made after his exit) which had this sounding splendid in surround sound but even the best audio quality could not lift the drabber tiles of this patchy platter to the heights of its few great moments. And then there's L.A. Woman! Maybe I won't keep this up longer than this year.

1970@50: THE MADCAP LAUGHS - SYD BARRETT

It's a shambles of barely finished scraps, false starts and unintentionally drifting rhythm and lyric lines that either hang in the air or die with the breath that formed them, a complete mess that any reasonable artist or producer should have been too ashamed to release. Release? Wiped, more like, with an industrial magnet. Thankfully, it was recorded by Syd Barrett who, effectively was his own producer (see below for explanation of this) so we have it all the way down the decades. I was influenced by this album before I'd heard a note of it.

Why? Because I read about Syd Barrett and what I read bore no resemblance to his old band Pink Floyd. Liking Pink Floyd took decades. For a while back in the late '70s my favourite '60s music was psychedelia. Starting with the Beatles offerings I foraged where I could to find more. Not easy then and where I was (Townsville) where if you found anything it was second hand and so virtually by chance. But a friend of my sister had a copy of the first Pink Floyd album and that, coupled with what I knew of his strange, wild ways was enough. It was three years before I heard this disc but I was already a fan of it.

A slinky slide into an open E chord opens Terrapin in just enough time before Syd comes in with a voice that could not have come from anywhere but upper middle class England. "I really love you and I mean you." A familiar A-G-E  from Arnold Layne and the years of blues that had inspired him and we repeat. "The star above you crystal blue." A light electric guitar provides a dozy accompaniment as though stirring from a snooze on a long warm afternoon. Declarations of love blend with a description of  animal freedom, under the water with the sun streaming through. An instrumental verse so laid back it just sound as though Syd forgot to sing. Bridge again. Repeat last verse end on a strum which speeds up just before the cut off. A breezy song of simple pleasures.

No Good Trying stumbles through the door and only just manages to keep its feet. The deep Syd voice comes in urbane and assured despite his staggering. She shouldn't bother with any of her elaborate disguises or personae or anything else she wants to pretend; he will know. Syd's acoustic is all but buried, mostly audible by the pick sound. Around him a psychedelic band thunders, the drummer struggling to provide a backbeat. It's the drum fills that make it sound so unstable. The band was brought in later (most of Soft Machine) and they struggle. Syd isn't keeping time so beats are added to some bars and lost from others. A stinging organ note after the first verse brings everything together for a moment but once it's gone we're back to the shambles.

Love You is a rollicking ball of cute as Syd tells of an extended flirtation. It sounds like his Fender playing unplugged but mic-ed up rather than an acoustic. Tack piano like the one on Bike. The tempo is kept well enough and it's upbeat so the band doesn't have as much to fight against. Syd is almost disciplined here so his word jams work rhythmically. This would convey the experience felt by a fashionable young thing being approached by a beauteous alpha boy who talked like a Lewis Carroll poem and whose eyes made her the most important woman in the room. But that was before and while this sounds like Syd at the time, I mean afterwards, there's a sadness to it which makes each winking moment grind with a kind of void horror.

No Man's Land starts with a electric cranking before bursting into full psychrock with what reads like a scary trip as the band grinds around him. Guitar tone breaks, drums machine-gun and a big bass drives everything from underneath. A brief pair of verses about a kind of compressing horror before an instrumental verse plunges on. Syd speaks something under the music, calmly, saying a lot but to whom and what about? There's a strange creepiness to it. The song comes to a halt with a jamming looseness but the point has been made and made decisively.

Dark Globe is a solo performance, just Syd and his acoustic guitar. Syd pleads with the memory of a departed lover to remember him after a traumatic parting which he likens to a physical collapse. Some lines that sound like words salad ("I'm only a person whose armbands beat on his hands hang tall") start sounding more like private meanings than nonsense on every listen after, perhaps only she would understand. Two verses of identical form (well, as identical as Syd wanted them) reach to a wailing beg: "Won't you miss me? Wouldn't you miss me at all." His voice almost breaks near the top of its range. She isn't just a memory to him, she's there in his mind's eye, in the room, gazing back. She doesn't even need to shake her head. It's not just Syd playing for the emotion rather than the time signature here. He's pounding the strings as he soars to his prayer person to person or person to apparition. The recording is clean and airy around the glittering storm. It's no wonder that it was left like this. No backing band would do anything but steal from it. It's left, a spiking glow in the dark studio, wondrous, beautfiul, but too frightening to approach.

Here I Go is the kind of pretty boy cute number that Donovan had made his own. Like Donovan, Syd could put a little sting in the tail or just be playful but here he lets a little of the nightmare out in the opening lines: "she said a big band is far better than you." The last three words descend the steps to the lowest of his range as though he's asking her down to a cellar with the lights off. But then it strips to life with a kind of jaunty shuffle as he meets another girl who, though she's not so groovy, at least likes him and it's all hunky dory by the end. A side-ending song. Anyone who whinges about how a decent recording with top notch musicians would have made this one a classic should know or remind themselves that this airy anodyne fluff was one of the few done WITH a band. It wasn't all No Man's Land.

A big acoustic chopping chord is answered on the off beat by a big clean electric chord and we're off. The drums, bass and guitars build a kind of moving cubby house moving with wobbly steps forward as Captain Syd calls out orders and reports on strange sightings from the crow's nest. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the octopus ride." Aaah. All the swirly shifting images makes sense. The octopus here is a kind of real octopus but also one of those big whirling fairground rides, spinning and lifting. If Syd's timing and its relationship with a post hoc backing band hadn't existed it would have been necessary to invent it. This song wants you disorientated and out of sorts. It could be a bad trip with dragons and scattered needles or everything that went through your head as a kid on a ride trying not to explode with nausea. A strange barely controlled quiet moment happens but it's about being lost in the wood. Isn't it good? Isn't it bad? We gear up again for full speed and the ride begins anew, giving us the title for the whole album: "well, the madcap laughs at the man on the water ..." Eventually Syd is left to respond to one pendulous line with another. They don't need clear meaning, they just need to stave off the great collapse. "Please leave us here, close our eyes to the Octopus ride." And the song trails off to a soft, if abrupt, finish.

Golden Hair emerges slowly out of the dark with a modal melody fashioned some time around 1346. An organ drone smoulders quietly as a cymbal is played expertly for atmosphere. At magic hour the sound of her singing draws him into the pool of her light and he begs her to appear, not to join him down there, just to give sight. Syd's beautiful setting of James Joyce's poem brings it to warm life and remembers to include the eye-widening eeriness of love. Utterly enchanting.

Long Gone begins with single strings playing the vocal melody in a corvine minor key. Syd comes in a the bottom of his range but soon soars to the top of his voice, harmonising with himself as the organ moves to the front to hold him up. That three times but not really as what he is telling a story. I think of it as what happened when the narrator of Golden Hair did break through and break into her room. She was long gone, either physically absent, comatose, or deep in madness, aloof and beyond anyone's love. The louder verses wail with fear but always fall back to the weary statement of her absence. Scary song.

She Took a Long Cold Look opens straightaway with those words. It's another solo Syd and guitar (and his lyric sheet when he turns it over halfway through the song) as his strumming plays a non-swinging pair of chords as he describes someone who does not love him or is difficult to love. She likes to  be "extreme just to be extreme" like "a broken pier on a wavy sea". He descends into a kind of trippy introspection and finds that he can breathe even as the water streams over him as he sees only the sky.

Feel seems to be a series of images with something trying to push through them. Another solo effort it sounds like a run through rather than anything finished as he tries cadences here or finding his place there, either attempting to placate the microphone before him or unaware of it. "Alright," he says after the last chord. Alright, let's finish it later or alright, that'll do?

If It's In You begins with a false start as he loses his pitch on a high winding wail. He talks to the producer and starts again. It's no better but he's committed now and goes on. There are clear verses in this but they are made of fragments and images that feel like the barest of sketches. He tries for an Indian influenced mellisma on the word thinking, stops and starts frequently and ends somewhere.

Late Night brings all this back to form. We start with a band in place as a slide swoops up and the down like a golden pendulum. A atmosphere is peaceful and contemplative. The verse only slightly disturbs this with a tighter pace. In a downward tumbling melody Syd describes a lost love and pains of separation but does so with the recall of moments of togetherness with some bringing the kind of passion that must be kept to a whisper or a longing for a kind of childlike innocence. The choruses rise in a gentle pain: "inside me I feel alone and unreal and the way you kiss will always be a very special thing to be." The faster pace trails off and rests in the opening figure of the slide rising and falling, the night around it offering sleep and dreams.

So, what's the deal, here? If you got into Syd Barrett through his Pink Floyd output with its tighlty constructed singles and jammy but directed psychedelic album tracks you might have expected more of that, perhaps more folky, given the absence of the band. But if there was an Arnold Layne there was also an Apples and Oranges. If there was a Lucifer Sam there was a Jugband Blues. Things just don't work out the way we prefer them.

Syd was certainly troubled but the range here from the high form of the last track to the mess of the one before it speak less of a chaotic mind than a highly active one. The difference between the two numbers might not be a good day versus a bad one or Syd with or without his medication but that they were both released regarless of readiness. Some early commentators on this record considered its release to be an act of cruelty.

Would this sound better if he'd worked with a band and taken a group of people familiar with the material into the studio to soar to greater heights than with the old band? Maybe, but I doubt it. Partly, Syd was just like that. If John Lennon dropped or added a beat here or there in songs like Across the Universe or All You Need is Love he had a supportive group and astute producer to either correct or accomodate it. The jamming aesthetic that Floyd would keep to for many an album after he left were not just tolerant of his wandering musicality but encouraged it. It's more a case that this record at its clearest presents that artist without embellishment, mind going fast, fishing around for chords or ways to get the thoughts out while the studio clock was ticking, partially indulged and partially dismissed by the producers exhausted by it. This is why I said at the start that he was producing himself as each case of the roll call that eventually included his old band mates: everyone eventually had to fold themselves around what was happening in front of the mic.

Me, I don't think the worst of this is charming or original but painful. Then again, the best of it wears its chaos on its sleeve and thrives in the results, cranking and crashing around an uncertain terrain without a care. Whether he was insane or more creative than even he had control over he was able to front up with some songs that only those who came after would sound like. (When I finally got a copy while at University I was so obssessed with this record and its creator that I would slur "see ya later" into "SydBarrett" to see if anyone would notice.)

David Bowie's albums from this time, The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory plunder the aesthetic. They are more disciplined by a massive order but were made in admiration of this moment of melee. Bowie's false start and chat to the producer at the beginning of Andy Warhol on Hunky Dory is a direct tribute to Syd (to the point of it being a lift from the start of If It's In You). When paying tribute to the bands of his youth in the Pinups album, his recreation of the madness that was See Emily Play is one of the rare rock covers that reaches the spirit of its original. And ask yourself who comes to mind when you hear Long Gone or Octopus? It's just that it works the other way around. And it might not have been just Syd but after this album Bowie dropped that Anthony Newley "'ow's ya farver" London from his vocals and started sounding more like himself.

As to the rest it's fair to say that like the Velvet Underground or The Stooges or indeed Bowie, anyone at the beginning of a creative life who hears this album will be influenced by it, will want to sing about toadstools and lightning like they've just come from Devonshire tea, will want to wrest free of the cover band rigidity of repeating instead of renovating, will want, through this most other of artists, to become themselves.