FEATURE:
Light My Fire
The Doors’ Legendary Eponymous Debut Album at Fifty-Five
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WITH a few classic albums…
IN THIS PHOTO: The Doors in New York in 1967/PHOTO CREDIT: Joel Brodsky
celebrating big anniversaries in January, I am going to write about a couple of the biggest. The Doors’ sensational debut album was released on 4th January, 1967. Ahead of its fifty-fifth anniversary, I wanted to go deeper into an album that ranks alongside the best ever released. Recorded between 19th and 24th August, 1966, The Doors contains some of the band’s very best material. Break On Through (To the Other Side), The Crystal Ship, Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), Light My Fire, Back Door Man, and The End can be found here. Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore are sensational and so powerful right through The Doors. Although some have criticised Jim Morrison’s lyrics as being somewhat lacking, shallow or pretentious, I feel that his writing and vocals are wonderful. Paul McCartney claimed that, following the album's release, he wanted The Beatles to capitalise on The Doors’ musical style for their upcoming album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Considered to be one of the all-time great albums, I know that there will be commemoration and investigation on its anniverssary. Before coming to a couple of reviews for The Doors, there is an article from 2017 where Albumism marked fifty years of a brilliant album:
“The Doors as a concept, band, or debut album, should have never existed. There is no father to their style, and so far, there have been no legitimate sons. These four men, along with their first and best work, continue to be an army of one.
The Doors unveiled their debut album fifty years ago today. It is a 44-minute song suite that still sounds, in equal parts, groundbreaking, exhilarating, and deeply disturbing to this day, a half century later.
1967 was the year that the rock “album,” as we know it, truly began. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Velvet Underground & Nico. Are You Experienced?!? Axis: Bold as Love. Piper at The Gates of Dawn. Disraeli Gears. They all dropped in this single, very special year. Unique, not only for the rock album’s evolution, but for the entirety of popular culture as well. In film, it was the year that ushered in the “auteur era” in filmmaking, with Bonnie & Clyde and Easy Rider striking the match that would burn on through the seventies, into Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull at the dawn of the Reagan era. It was the “Summer of Love.” It was the “Season of The Witch.” You had to pick up, every stich. Meanwhile, the spool this time period unraveled, produced a string we’ve been looking to gather up, ever since.
Let’s get back to what we’re really here for: The Doors. This was a debut album, brought to you by a four-piece band, from the land of sun. The guitarist, Robbie Krieger, had only spent six months playing his instrument by the time the group was signed. Their drummer, John Densmore, was principally trained in jazz. Their keyboardist, the late great Ray Manzarek, was a maestro in multiple disciplines, who proved himself proficient on both the Hammond B-3, and Fender Rhodes.
The Doors were also a band, inexplicably, without a bass player. You need bottom? If you were The Doors, you didn’t. While if you were the type of listener who felt them, the bottom was already the environment you and The Doors occupied. The Doors were the darkest dream gone bad you ever had. In the brightest, sunniest spot you could find. When you get back, we’ll drop a line.
Fifty years ago, The Doors dropped a mind-blowing piece of work, in the form of their self-titled debut, which still stands the test of time. If you try to tell me that there’s a rock album made in the last twenty years that can say the same, I will tell you that you’re lying. Never mind the bollocks. Don’t let any recent skinny-jean scene, hyped by Pitchfork, fool you. The Doors, was and still is, some true-blue voodoo.
Unlike many of the rock records prior to 1967, this was an album that existed for purposes far beyond just its two singles. For my money, “Soul Kitchen,” with its three-and-a-half minutes of organ-stabbing groove, coupled with flirtatious guitar tickle-riffing and carousing lyrical deliverance, is this entire album’s most undeniable cut. The Doors, who famously lifted their name from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 autobiographical essay The Doors of Perception, take Huxley’s inspiration back to its original source material, legendary poet William Blake, deploying Blake’s beautifully apocalyptically Dionysian verbiage on the haunting lilt of “End of The Night.”
Morrison sells Willie Dixon’s blues classic “Back Door Man” in a way that none of the British Invasion blues-rock fetishists, like Clapton or Plant, ever could. He does so not by adoringly imitating a style he could never fully capture, but by using his own unbridled, youthful swaggering menace, plus his urgent bark to the proceedings. The hot, soon-to-be-dead guy is something the men might not know, but the little girls understand.
If we wanted to nitpick The Doors, we could probably quibble a bit over some of its less transcendent tunes. Once you get past its time-period-beholden, sardonic reversal of fellow LA rock band The Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” “Take It As It Comes” is disposable. “I Looked At You” borders on being better suited for cleaner-cut LA-based acts like The Mamas & The Papas, or even The Monkees. Neither relative hiccup, is enough to distort nor distinguish this album’s flame at all.
And then….there’s “The End,” the album’s conclusion, both literally, and figuratively. This song, is damn near twelve minutes of madness, which encapsulates the best of what this band and its singer could do, as well as the best of what their medium has to offer”.
Even though we associate The Doors with the big hits, I think that the lesser-heard songs are worth fond listening. Twentieth Century Fox and I Looked to You are incredible. A complete and varied album with plenty of passion and wild alongside more nuanced Blues, the Californian band followed up their debut quickly with Strange Days in 1967 – a mere eight months after their debut arrived in the world. AllMusic said this when they reviewed The Doors:
“A tremendous debut album, and indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a knockout punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose. "Light My Fire" was the cut that topped the charts and established the group as stars, but most of the rest of the album is just as impressive, including some of their best songs: the propulsive "Break on Through" (their first single), the beguiling mystery of "The Crystal Ship," the mysterious "End of the Night," "Take It as It Comes" (one of several tunes besides "Light My Fire" that also had hit potential), and the stomping rock of "Soul Kitchen" and "Twentieth Century Fox." The 11-minute Oedipal drama "The End" was the group at its most daring and, some would contend, overambitious. It was nonetheless a haunting cap to an album whose nonstop melodicism and dynamic tension would never be equaled by the group again, let alone bettered”.
Before finishing off, I want to quote a review from Rolling Stone. I like how there are comparisons with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Doors definitely stirred something inside of Paul McCartney and the band:
“The Doors arrived in 1967, the same year as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; both were psychedelic touchstones and among the first major rock discs that truly stood as albums, rather than collections of songs. But whereas the Beatles took a basically sunny view of humanity, the Doors' debut offered the dark side of the moon. Their sound was minor-keyed and subterranean, bluesy and spacey, and their subject matter — like that of many of rock's great albums — was sex, death and getting high. On "End of the Night," the band invited you to "take a journey to the bright midnight."
The key to the band's appeal was the tension between singer Jim Morrison's Dionysian persona and the band's crisp, melodic playing. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger's extended solos on the album version of "Light My Fire" carried one to the brink of euphoria, while the eleven-minute epic "The End" journeyed to a harrowing psychological state. Scattered among these lengthier tracks are such nuggets as "Soul Kitchen" ("learn to forget") and Morrison's acid-drenched takes on the blues ("Back Door Man") and Kurt Weill ("Alabama Song"). Though great albums followed, The Doors stands as the L.A. foursome's most successful marriage of rock poetics with classically tempered hard rock — a stoned, immaculate classic”.
A happy fifty-fifth anniverssary to the inspiring, enduring and mesmeric The Doors. The album and Light My Fire were inducted into the GRAMMY Hall of Fame. In 2015, the Library of Congress selected The Doors for inclusion in the National Recording Registry based on its cultural, artistic or historical significance. It is no wonder The Doors has received such high acclaim and accolade! It is an L.P. that I love as much now as I did when I was a child. Take some time out today to listen to this almighty debut…
TO the end.