Music Review by Bill Rendall

The Doors

The self titled debut album of The Doors was released around the time of the summer of love but the Doors didn't sing about wearing flowers in your hair. The band's frontman, Jim Morrison, sung about the darker side of life and used serious literary works as lyrical inspiration.

The Doors is a timeless album. This can be attributed in part to the producer, Paul Rothchild. He deliberately avoided gimmickry and trendy effects. For example, he prohibited the band's guitarist, Robby Krieger, from using the wah-wah pedal which was all the rage at the time.

The only thing that dates this album is the stereo mix. Stereo was in its infancy at the time and the mix on my copy of the album is not true stereo. The drums and bass are panned hard left and the guitar and keyboards are panned hard right.

The Doors had unusual instrumentation for a rock band. They didn't have a bass player. In live performance Ray Manzarek played a keyboard bass with one hand while playing the organ with the other. On studio recordings they used session bass players.

Robby Krieger didn't play typical rock guitar. He had a background in flamenco style guitar and often wove single note guitar lines into the music instead of playing rhythm chords.

The most successful song on the debut album is 'Light my Fire.' The album version features a lengthy solo which was edited out for release as a single. The single was a number one hit and was successfully covered by Jose Feliciano a while later. This was the first song ever written by Krieger. Not a bad start to a song writing career. Apparently he needed one line to complete the song and Morrison supplied the typically dark line about a funeral pyre.

The highlight of the album is the epic 'The End' which later featured in the film Apocalypse Now. It takes rock music into previously uncharted territory, way beyond the constraints of a three minute radio song. It meanders along with a loose, informal structure for over eleven minutes. The lyrics start in a straight forward manner about a relationship breakup but turn into an Oedipal nightmare. Weird scenes indeed.

Most of the songs on the album were written by the band but there are also two covers taken from their live set. One is Willie Dixon's 'Back Door Man.' The other is 'Alabama Song' from a Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht opera, the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Although the latter song is musically divergent from the rest of the album it is consistent with the theatrical nature of the Doors.

The Doors' debut album is a classic and was released at a turning point in rock history when the album became more important than singles to many artists.