The Doors are the perfect band for when you’re seventeen, a time when you’re waking up to life’s possibilities, the future’s a wide-open frontier, and ten thousand volts of libido pulse through your flesh. In that highly impressionable and lusty state, a Doors classic like “The End”, with its Oedipal psychodrama and entrancing guitar-as-sitar aura of faux-Oriental mystery, sounds like the most profound and intense thing you’ll ever hear. Factor in the attractive shape of Jim Morrison’s life arc, its mythic surge through reckless hedonism to early death ensuring no embarrassingly twilight-of-the-idol comebacks or je-regrette-everything VH1 confessionals, and it’s easy to see why The Doors endure as the ultimate band for clever teenagers craving music that rocks hard but has some book-learnin’ under its belt.

Yet there are potent arguments in favour of the proposition that nobody much older than seventeen should really have an ounce of time for the man or his band. Wasn’t Morrison a real pig of a human being, a (literally) stinking drunk egomaniac who rampaged over most everybody he had any dealings with? Aren’t his poet-as-prophet pretensions insufferably clunky and self-aggrandising? When he goes into “erotic politician” counterculture-revolutionary mode (“Five To One”, “The Unknown Soldier”) doesn’t your skin just crawl off your bones and leave the room in embarrassment? Finally, the music itself—most of it’s kinda dated and overblown, surely? All those epic song-suites like “Celebration of the Lizard”, or worse, the dreary bleary blooze of “Backdoor Man” and “Maggie McGill”?

Yet Morrison is hardly short for company when it comes to rock’n’roll assholes who overdid the liquor, while his psychedelic doggerel is really no more cringe-worthy than John Lennon in LSD mode. People always forget Jimbo’s sense of humor, manifested in his surreal ad-libs—“cobra to my left, leopard to my right” in “The Soft Parade”—and the sheer zest with which he threw himself into his shaman-as-buffoon persona. As for the music—most it still sounds pretty darn glorious.

It remains an unusual sound, not just because of the lead-instrument prominence of Ray Manzarek’s ornate keyboards but because of the way The Doors combined driving rhythm-and-blues with a cinematic clarity, thanks to spacious, glistening arrangements and production (more vivid than ever in this fabulously remastered incarnation). Robbie Krieger is an under-rated guitarist, his solos elegantly restrained, piercingly poignant, and mercifully succinct, while John Densmore’s drumming is deft enough to make a waltz rhythm swing on “Shaman’s Blues.”

The meat of the sound is hard-funking blues, but the Doors salted in all kinds of unlikely flavours: flamenco on “Spanish Caravan,” musique concrete on “Horse Latitudes,” Weimar-era cabaret with their cover of Brecht & Weill’’s “Alabama Song,” cocktail jazz with “Riders on the Storm,” They even bizarrely anticipate disco with one segment of the audacious song-suite “The Soft Parade.”

Perception contains all six studio albums the Doors recorded before Morrison’s death, bolstered with the inevitable out-takes (a highlight of which is the demo prototype of “Celebration of the Lizard”) and partnered with DVDs of performance footage. You can retrace the band’s journey from the bold entrance of The Doors (their best album, if suffering slightly from over-exposure) through Strange Days (their darkest and most psychedelic album), onto Waiting For The Sun (their most confused and least satisfying), The Soft Parade (their funniest and most under-rated) and the alleged return-to-bluesy form of Morrison Hotel (their dreariest and most over-rated, while still containing plenty of gems) before winding up with LA Woman (their most accomplished and poignant). The latter’s title track, a freeway-rolling travelogue across Los Angeles with Morrison imagining their home city as a sad-eyed woman, is a last gasp of ragged glory that—and this is a rare example of the benefits of knowing your rock history—sounds all the more grand and moving because the singer wouldn’t be much longer for this world.

Morrison’s version of “the blues” owed as much to Frank Sinatra as Muddy Waters, and his sonorous majesty of tone and commanding cadences made him one of rock’s true originals as a vocalist. One measure of this eminence is how so many of the legion of Jim-itators are rock greats in their own right. Iggy Pop converted Morrison into the pure sexless monomania of punk rock, while Patti Smith adapted his persona to become the world’s first female rocker-as-shaman. Joy Division’s Ian Curtis translated the baritone-booming doomy side of The Doors into Goth, while Echo & The Bunnymen and Simple Minds conversely picked up on the music’s panoramic grandeur and wonderlust. And Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell updated Morrison’s excess-as-the-road-to-the-palace-of-wisdom shtick.

And is there any wisdom to be found at the end of that highway, or along the way? This is a more pinched era than the Sixties, its sense of adventure and entitlement often seeming impossibly remote. In hindsight, the freedom-chasing can look more like irresponsibility, the lust for “experience” weirdly close to a sort of spiritual greed. Yet in an era when seventeen year olds are confronted by a resurgent Puritanism that seeks to roll back the gains of the Sixties, forces of anti-life looking to constrain the scope for pleasure and adventure, there’s a certain imperishable truth and urgency to Morrison’s warning that “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn”. In a strange way, he was a true American patriot, his spirit as large as the land itself.

Source: RenoldsRetro

"L.A. Woman" is a 1971 classic rock song by the Los Angeles group, The Doors.

The song is the title track on The Doors' 1971 album L.A. Woman, the final album recorded with singer Jim Morrison.

"L.A. Woman" was recorded in West Hollywood, completed in January 1971, and released as single in April 1971 — following the San Fernando earthquake that rocked Los Angeles.

At nearly eight minutes in length, the song was written by John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzerek and Jim Morrison.

Fourteen years later, Ray Manzarek directed a music video for "L.A. Woman" in 1985, which premiered on MTV.

During the song, Jim Morrison repeats the phrase 'Mr. Mojo Risin' — an anagram of "Jim Morrison".

The song's lyrical references to freeways, hills on fire and a Hollywood bungalow make it clear that the song's setting is Los Angeles, California — not the state of Louisiana (LA) as some have suggested.

Long labeled a total 'guy song',"L.A. Woman" remains a recording that bars and night clubs rely on to get males dancing, thirsty and buying drinks — especially in Southern California.

After 40 years, The Doors still have a major hit on their hands. "L.A. Woman" is one of the most popular songs ever recorded about Los Angeles — and the best L.A. freeway driving song ever. 

Source: Californiality.com

New York, NY (Top40 Charts/ Shore Fire Media) A rare Jim Morrison poem is featured on the new celebrity charity album Prayer Cycle 2: Path To Zero (Across The Universe Records, 5.10). The untitled poem is read by Morrison and was originally recorded by late Doors producer Paul Rothchild.

When EMMY-winning 'Prayer Cycle 2' composer Jonathan Elias learned of the previously unreleased recording, he immediately took action to obtain the rights. "It means a great deal to me to be able to use Jim Morrison's work, as a fan and someone who has a profound respect for his legacy," said Elias.

The subject of the poem is a wrenching account of the plight of Native Americans in Los Alamos, NM.

'Prayer Cycle 2' will be donated to Global Zero, an international organization dedicated to the abolition of nuclear arms. Out this spring, PC2 is already being lauded for its all-star cast of celebrity guests including Sting, Sinead O'Connor, Robert Downey, Jr. and Angelique Kidjo as well as its sweeping, genre-defying sound. 

Source: top40-charts.com

So long after their explosive heyday The Doors and Jim Morrison retain their gold-standard of cool.

Like all major acts they’ve been incorporated, corporatized and accessorised to the nth degree – a pair of Doors-branded Converse All-Stars anyone? Of course not everyone however buys into the myth of Morrison as the epitome of rock n' roll shaman dispensing visionary wisdom.

As David Crosby caustically wrote about such myth-making in his 1998 CPR song, Morrison, "I've seen the movie and it wasn't like that."

Strip away the fables surrounding Morrison and The Doors and what are we left with? The answer, or at least something approaching part of it, tantalisingly hovers in and out of view on this 2 CD live bootleg.

Although these tapes will be well known by hardcore Doors fans, this is the first time they’ve seen the official light of day. Massaged into life by Bruce Botnik (engineer on those original Paul Rothschild produced albums), they offer a glimpse, as Ray Manzarek observes, of the band having fun.

Playing a sizable chunk of their first album and half of their follow up record (yet to be laid down in a studio), the rest of the set is upholstered with a few greasy-spoon standards.

The Doors at Marty Balin’s (of Jefferson Airplane) club, The Matrix. This was about 5-6 months before “Light My Fire” gave The Doors worldwide fame and notoriety.

Just a few weeks on from the release of their debut, word about the band’s impending canonisation does not appear to have reached the handful of punters who turned up to Marty Balin’s nightclub in San Francisco, and who can be heard offering only the politest of applause between numbers.

Without the catalyst of audience reaction and in the face of such indifference, the sparks rarely fly and despite Manzarek's assertion about the extent to which this meant the band could stretch out and experiment, we have a performance that only occasionally smoulders, never quite ever catching fire.

In truth, there’s little evidence here of a group that matches essayist Joan Didion’s description of The Doors as "the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex." Morrison’s celebrated "wardrobe malfunction" was still a couple of years off.

Though he would become the patron saint of the rock-star-in-leather-trousers look, here Morrison stands awkwardly at the microphone oozing something between lounge-singer schmaltz and half-hearted karaoke chutzpah that’s a few shot-glasses short on Dutch courage.

Die-hard Morrisonologists will however be cheered by the inclusion of alternate words grasped from his poetic writings and scattered about in songs such as a pulsing cover of the old Them stomper, Gloria and their sinuous classic, The End.

With Kreiger's blazing guitar solo on When The Music's Over, and Manzarek's faux-classical noodling, there's a lot of potential waiting to be called upon.

However, at The Matrix we’re in the company of a somewhat quaint and reserved bar band, prone to stretches of timorous research, rather than anyone dropping their trousers in the face of the establishment.

That would all come later and with it, quite literally in the case of The Doors, the stuff of legend (Sid Smith - BBC). 

Source: PHROCK Blog