So The Changeling starts things off with a confident soul strut and an odd manifesto about someone who is everywhere and nowhere, observing, feeding and reporting, eventually as omnipresent as the air itself. Love Her Madly fires out bright and chopping, an expression of lust that is leering and clean at the same time. Been Down So Long is a hard bashing blues stomp of hard times and jail at the end of them. Cars Hiss By My Window is a brooding blues with slithering licks and a step or two into the cinema off the corridor into a room where a cold girl will kill you in the dark. Jim wails at one point and it sounds like one of Robbie's wah wah solos. Dark and stark and lazy and deadly.
L.A. Woman is the first of the two side-ending epics that had become more or less formula with Doors albums. This open chorded jazz rock workout which is all energy and streetlight drives. It's a kind of Morrison take on Elvis' Viva Las Vegas but instead of wishing there were more than twenty-fours hours in a day the singer has long lost count and there are just moments and sometimes sleep. The lady in the lyrics is easily blurred between a human and a city of them. And through the nightscape comes the strange chant that set the band's own Paul-is-dead style folklore. The anagram Mr Mojo Risin is repeated from a break to become a rallying "risin' risin'!" People whose days were long units of speculation considered this forensic evidence that Morrison was alive (and living in Africa for some reason, ask them). All that said this big excited workout does feel like a goodbye.
L'America begins with a proto-metal riff that builds to tell the tale of European invaders with the eerie croaking cry about returning like the gentle rain. Hyacinth House let's us take a break from the blues with a bright clean electric guitar figure that includes the vocal melody whose word evoke Greek legend and perhaps Morrison's exhaustion from rock stardom. A witty sidebar into Chopin from Ray's organ solo seems only inspired by the main tune rather than any commentary on the material but it's too charming not to work. Crawling King Snake is a glacial blues, a cover of a mean as mustard John Lee Hooker number.
The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat) thumps out in hard landscape of strutting blues beneath Morrison's declaiming vocal that describes a vision of outsider life. It's not utopian nor religious but heavy with life-affirming ritual. Lest this should sound a tad hippyish in leaning toward the pagan side of the street it's a world that has ditched all gods and is ready for a kind of freeform anarchy, crawling from the swamps through civilisation to a new world that is sometimes hedonistic and pleasuresome and sometimes plain terrifying.
We're almost there but there are things about this album which illustrate why I'm not doing the seventies as years the way I did the sixties on this blog. We are entering a time which I not only didn't experience first hand as a fan of these bands but didn't encounter later the way I did to the '60s acts. This means that I had to more aggressively look up bands I had little to no knowledge of and then when I heard them almost zero enthusiasm for. This era was marked by a few forces that I do not enjoy like prog and blues forward rock that really took over most of the scene. Prog rock frankly embarrasses me. The first music I was an active fan of was European Classical and the likes of Yes, Genesis and Emerson Lake and Palmer made it sound like an old uncle trying to be hip. And blues ... Well, this might sound strange but blues with me is like an old James Bond movie: once I found it magnetic and compelling but as soon as I went past it it got so samey and flat I could never go back. For anyone who has any interest in where a lot of rock music came from you need to get acquainted with blues. It's not the only point of origin but it informs almost everything that followed. It just leaves me cold, now.
So, while there is much to admire about L.A. Woman as a record its insistence on blues scales and playing all but beg me to resist it. It's a record so single-minded that it feels designed to be heard as a single suite of songs but I cannot easily listen without skipping. I just don't like blues. See also funk or prog. This album has all of that and, while it does pass through a good range of moods, cinematic and literary it doesn't play for me like a single work the way that Strange Days does. All bands must move forward but we don't have to follow them. All this said, we're about to hear the last track and it's one I'll never tire of.
Sounds of rain in a forest, distant thunder. Bass, and electric piano emerge and are joined by the guitar and drums. The groove is tight but low key, moving forward automotively. The vocals appear strangely, buried, the main voice bolstered by a whisper in unison: Riders on the storm, riders on the storm, into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown. There's a killer on the road but that's not the spookiest thing about the song. There's a sickly blend of melancholy and danger, a kind of resignation to existential threat that lives in the shadows or just comes down with the rain, there in nature and the city. When he tells the girl that she's got to love her man, Morrison is pleading for the continuation of the human race. Maybe, he's just observing the endless continuation of life in spite of the lethal dangers surrounding it. It's LA in the early 70s, LA after Manson and it's no fun any more. Ray Manzarek's tinkling Rhodes piano suggests rain but just as easily evokes futility. Morrison ends repeating the line of the title, whether the riders are from Revelation or just everyone alive going with the storm. With a few outgoing thunder claps in the next county he exits stage left, never to return.
The Doors are a strange case. If you get into them enough to listen to the records more than once each you will know effortlessly that the band really was a unit, despite the dominance of the 27 Club member. Even on the first LP his face is gigantic by comparison and his voice, reaching from the croon to a scream, and the words, letting the darkness between the hedonistic lines ooze out, so it's forgivable to consider the band his. But the music is that of a band of musicians who had come to understand each other intimately, bringing their own expertise to the arrangements. It really wasn't just Jim and the others.
But then, after this set he quit and decamped to Paris. The band kept the name and produced two further albums in two more years. They would have sought Morrison's voice for the first, Other Voices, but he died before that could happen so they went ahead. Two years later, after a second LP as a trio they admitted it and disbanded. From our perspective we might feel like shaking them and telling them to stop or at least change the name but we weren't there and it's easy to forget that from their perspective they were the same musicians who brought the sound to the years of greatness, just minus the guy who sang and wrote the words (and not all of them). But years? If you've ever got behind a mic and had as little as a drop of encouragement from an audience you will harbour the ghost of that adrenalin until you die. The three-piece Doors played Carnegie Hall and filled it. They'd gone ahead with shows when the Jimster was too wobbly to rub two syllables together. Manzarek had a pretty strong Jagger like voice. It's clear to us but to them, then, the clarity showed them the same old road.
The comparison closer to my time is with Joy Division. How could you go on without the guy who wrote words that inspired a generation so? Well, not easily but their sound was already changing and the new one was working. Change the name and stop pretending you were the same and go on as a new band. No one expects the old one anymore. That's exaggerated, of course, but that is the longer view and does describe the progression. It seems so obvious to us that The Doors should have done this and set an example. And we're annoyed that the fade of Riders On the Storm is not the end of The Doors and that two records that mixed well played but unexciting jazz rock and novelty numbers (like that bloody Mosquito number sung in brown-face!) stubbornly remain after everyone else has left.
Like everyone who really did get into rock music I worshipped my share of idols. Morrison I knew about form a few articles that happened while punk had started and I was curious about them as, like the Velvet Underground, they were decidedly non-hippy. There was a bleakness and snarl to them that put them closer to punk than all the likes of Steely Dan, the Doobies, The Eagles and whoever else plagued the punk years with their hell of numbing perfection. When Apocalypse Now began with The End which I heard for the first time in that context, I needed to know more. The Doors back catalogue (minus Other Voices and Full Circle) made it back into the shops and we gave them a second life. While I never quite worshipped Morrison I found him frequently inspiring. Then I read No One Here Gets Out Alive and was pretty much turned off rock hero worship forever (that book is toxic!).
But the better legacy remains and I recall without need of nostalgia a morning of drizzle in Townsville, cane toads croaking in rhythm in the wet, the quiet stink of rotting gardens and mould, when Riders On the Storm crept out of the radio and sounded like where I was. I didn't catch the words so much as understood them, someone, somewhere, knew, like I did at all of fourteen or so, that something was wrong in the world, something would always be wrong with the world.
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