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.
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