The Doors - The Doors

Released - January 1967

Genre - Psychedelic

Producer - Paul A. Rothchild

Selected Personnel - Jim Morrison (Vocals); Ray Manzarek (Organ/Piano/Bass); Robby Krieger (Guitar); John Densmore (Drums); Larry Knechtel (Bass)

Standout Track - Break On Through (To The Other Side)

I've got a theory that 1967 is the year rock music grew up, and the creit for that can largely be attributed jointly to the Doors and the Velvet Underground. Prior to '67, any sense of real introspection or intelligence or complex craft in music belonged either in jazz or folk music, with rock 'n' roll being a genre largely dedicated to servicing the pop market and producing radio-friendly, danceable singles. That all started to change with the burgeoning hippy counter-culture in the mid-60s as taboos were burst open and artists felt more inclined to make music that experimented with form and content. But even in early psychedelic records like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds or the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the mood still feels largely family-friendly. Artists were willing to flirt with allusions to drug use (the long-standing rumour of the hallucinogenic meanings behind the Beatles' "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," for example), but weren't yet keen to use music as a place to delve into truly dark, taboo subject matter in the same way that the beat writers had done in literature in the 50s - rock music was very much playing catch-up to the likes of William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Then along came Lou Reed and Jim Morrison, happily penning epics that openly discussed Oedipal, incestual impulses or hard drug use, and intelligent, theatrical rock music finally put in an appearance.

It's an oversimplification of what really happened, perhaps, but there's no denying that the arrival of the Doors' self-titled debut album in 1967 heralded in a darker, scarier, more outlandish approach to rock music than anybody had yet taken. To me, The Doors feels like a record that fulfils a very similar function to the Velvet Underground's debut The Velvet Underground And Nico, but operates almost as an opposite extreme to it. Both contain lengthy, theatrical works of art rock that explore drug use and perversion, but while Lou Reed & co. feel like they explore the earthy, gritty, jagged edges of the subject matter through their abrasive, discordant guitar jams and scratchy, lo-fi production, The Doors feels like a more spiritually-minded, imaginative approach to the same idea, taking flight as opposed to dragging along the ground (that's not meant to disparage the Velvet Underground, whom I love, merely to try and emphasise their differences).

The Doors' sound, then, is not built out of scratchy, screeching guitar noise but is largely sculpted around the crystal-clear chimes and buzzes of Ray Manzarek's organ, with Robby Krieger's guitar twanging and clanging in between it but rarely shouldering the bulk of the work. As such, the Doors sound somehow colder, clearer and more airborne, the shards of organ music bursting in the air as Jim Morrison's incredible voice soars over the top. That voice, again, is in marked contrast to Lou Reed's - whereas Reed would flatly monotone his way through his songs, Morrison's highly theatrical vocals roar and scream and belt out above the music, the man as much an actor as a singer. The highly declamatory tone he adopts on "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" positively ooze charisma, while the screams of "Break On Through (To The Other Side" and "The End" are the stuff of legend.

By the time the Doors got round to recording their debut album, they had spent a year or so playing residencies at the London Fog and Whisky A Go Go clubs in Los Angeles, having formed in mid-65, and had taken that time to really explore their songs and find the space within them, taking their cue from the emerging psychedelic jam-based rock epics beginning to emerge on the West Coast scene, particularly in the hippy Mecca of San Francisco. So songs like "Light My Fire" and "The End" become sprawling epics, but always anchored and never losing focus, always held in place by a band that can obviously follow one another's impulses and leads implicitly. "Light My Fire," of course, became the album's big single (albeit with Manzarek's lengthy organ solo redacted) and has been schmaltzily covered so many times that you forget the sense of insidious, seductive danger that seeps from the original via Morrison's creepily deranged vocal.

"Break On Through (To The Other Side)" is perhaps the finest song on the album, a perfect 60s psychedelic rock song, anchored by an effortlessly catchy bass riff and lifted by Morrison's damaged wailing as he screams the title over and over again, the song obviously becoming an anthem of sorts for psychedelic rock everywhere in its entreaty to break down the barriers of conventional music and of conventional thought. Proving themselves highly adept not only at composition but at interpretation, the Doors also include two exemplary covers here. Their version of "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)," a song originally composed by the legendary German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht and his songwriting partner Kurt Weill, is verging on definitive, with its spooky organ riff and absurd, parping horns, all matched with Morrison's superbly detached delivery. The fact that David Bowie, of all people, someone who seems perfectly attuned to the self-conscious, gothic, macabre theatricality of Brecht and Weill, turned in his own cover version years later that is vastly inferior to the Doors' own version says a lot about how perfectly Morrison & co. treat it here. Then there's their cover of Willie Dixon's blues classic "Back Door Man" (previously featured on this blog on Howlin' Wolf's self-titled 1962 album), which becomes a slowly menacing beast here, its sinewy guitar and metronomic bass pulse matched up with Morrison's animalistic howling.

The final song worthy of special mention is, of course, "The End," the sprawling 11-minute epic that begins as a spookily pretty, softly spoken ballad as Morrison gravely intones "This is the end, my only friend, the end," and builds into a terrifying maelstrom of noise unerpinning Morrison's spoken-word rantings that erupts into a horrifying Oedipal confession in its closing minutes ("Father, I want to kill you, mother, I want to fuck you," a guttural howl that got the band thrown out of London Fog plenty of times as they gradually worked up the song there). It's here more than anywhere else that the Doors feels like it anticipates the early work of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - an odd comparison to make, perhaps, but I came to the Doors only this year having been a huge Nick Cave fan for years and was struck by just how many early comparison points could be found here on this record, nowhere more so than on the gothic, macabre spoken-word rantings of "The End," where even the vocal delivery seemed reminiscent of Cave's own work on early records like 1983's From Her To Eternity. Morrison's influence, then, clearly extended far beyond the psychedelic rock scene of the late 60s far into the post-punk era and beyond, inspiring anybody who looked to make dark, frightening and intelligent rock music with a flair for theatricality.

Jim Morrison, of course, would never live to see much of the enduring legacy he would leave behind him. After steering the Doors through further successes through the next few years, he was found dead in a Paris apartment in 1971. The lack of an official autopsy or cause of death ever being provided means he remains to this day a fixture of conspiracy theories, but in the wake of his death the Doors folded soon after, aware that without his charismatic and dangerous presence at their head, there was a huge hole in the band that couldn't be filled. The Doors are another one of those fairly recent additions to my record collection who have definitely impressed me enough for me to want to hear more, but I just haven't got round to it yet. For now, then, I only have this superb debut to judge them on, but it's clear just from this that their reputation as one of the finest purveyors of art rock is well justified. It's a dark and imaginative and frightening and boldly ambitious record, and paved the way for the increasing complexity and maturity of rock music in the late 60s. A must-listen.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Jim Morrison; Robby Krieger; Ray Manzarek & John Densmore except where noted.

1. Break On Through (To The Other Side)

2. Soul Kitchen

3. The Crystal Ship

4. Twentieth Century Fox

5. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) (Bertolt Brecht & Kurt Weill)

6. Light My Fire

7. Back Door Man (Willie Dixon)

8. I Looked At You

9. End Of The Night

10. Take It As It Comes

11. The End