Sphinx's Music Blog - The Doors (1967)
Welcome back to Sphinx’s music blog! Today I’ll discuss one of the greatest debut albums of all time, The Doors eponymous album that was released on January 4th, 1967. Hitting right at the core time frame of psychedelic rock’s rise, I particularly like the strong jazz and blues influence that pours into this album. Co-founding member and keyboard/organist extraordinaire Ray Manzarek had a jazz background and grew up with the blues in Chicago. The other co-founder and most famous member of the group, vocalist Jim Morrison, brings on a fury never heard in popular music at the time. It’s the combination of these two members that make this album and all other Doors albums so memorable, with great singing and lyrics that are backed behind great jazzy rhythms and melodies that spill out the blues in an accessible way to all listeners. This album peaked at #2 on the chart, with The Beatles masterpiece Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band claiming the top spot (definitely an album that will be explored at some point).
Left to Right: John Densmore (Drums), Robby Krieger (Guitar), Ray Manzarek (Keyboards), Jim Morrison (Vocals)
The album begins with The Doors at their rawest and most punk of anything they will ever do in my opinion. Break On Through (To the Other Side) is a great rocker and introduction to the group. We hear the bossa nova drum beat by John Densmore start up the tune, with Manzarek’s piano bass coming in followed by Robby Kreiger’s guitar swooping intro. The song runs fast and intense; you truly think Morrison and company are going to break on through your stereo to the other side. I think this song truly epitomizes some of the earliest “break-throughs” of seeing rock and roll have this stronger rebellious nature, with Morrison’s screaming and his lyrics “she get high” be so controversial that they had to remove “high” from the original pressings. This song tells you nothing is going to stand in this bands way, and clearly Jim Morrison’s life encompasses this with his reckless abandon that cost him his life only four years later.
“Soul Kitchen” strikes up next, and as the title says, this is such an awesome soulful song with a great leading line coming from the Vox Continental organ. The blues are all over this song, and it’s just a simple song paying homage to a late night out with “still one place to go”. I especially love the reformed verse after the first chorus that is slightly augmented to give it that cool jazzy feel. This song sets up a formula for many other later Doors songs to exist that use the organ to introduce the song and melody to the listener (I’m thinking “When the Music’s Over”, “Touch Me”, and “Hello, I Love You” for instance).
The pretty ballad “The Crystal Ship” shows off Morrison’s poetry next. Listen to how well he puts his words into the structure of the song, particularly the line “the time you ran was too insane”. It’s beautifully conveyed, and shows how the band aren’t just hard drivers. “Twentieth Century Fox” is a fun witty track that has a great groove, followed by “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)”, a unique track that uses a marxophone, and is a cover from a German poem that became part of an English opera (you can’t make this up).
From here we get probably the most famous Doors track of all time - “Light My Fire”. Lyrically, it’s a fantastic piece with clever rhyming. I mean “no time to wallow in the mire, and our love become a funeral pyre”? Amazing. The melody itself, first introduced by the Vox organ is a complicated be-bopping jazz line that I just love. After Morrison sings, the full length track (not the radio-edit cut version) breaks into two jazz solos that I have literally memorized in my head. They are so melodic that you are convinced Manzarek and Krieger are full time jazz musicians. Finally, we can’t forget the famous story with this song. The Doors were going to perform the song on the Ed Sullivan show, but Morrison was told not to sing the “girl we couldn’t get much higher” line and practiced it that way during rehearsal. However during the live taping he sang it, and Sullivan was furious saying they would never play on the show again. Morrision famously stated back “hey man, we just did the Ed Sullivan show”.
We then hit side two with the great blues track “Back Door Man”. Man, is Jim coming in hot on this one. The track was made famous by Howlin’ Wolf, but Morrison gives him a run for his money on his interpretation of this masterpiece. Again, it sounds like he is setting up the stepping stones for punk.
The album moves into three short numbers: “I Looked at You” that definitely absorbs the Byrds/Beatles psychedelic sound with a hint of surfer rock; “End of the Night” an organ led spooky and haunting slow track, and then “Take It As It Comes”, a fast rocker with a nice driving beat.
The end of the album finishes with well, “The End”, a 12-minute epic of a song bringing in strong mystical and Eastern/Near Eastern tones and sounds. The improvised guitar is top-notch by Krieger, but this track is all about Jim. With haunting lines like “This is the end, beautiful friend, this is the end, my only friend the end…..” it’s a true expose of Morrison’s poetry. There’s a spoken word section that includes a retelling of Oedipus. Then somehow Morrison gets away with saying “Fuck Fuck Fuck!!!” over and over again without anyone catching what was said. There are tons of theories on this track and it’s meaning; I’ll leave it for you to make your own opinion on it. This song was done in only two takes.
There we have it. This album has been placed in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as a piece of artistic significance, and has stood the test of time. While the band only made it through for four years, the music and influence they have had on rock is enormous. Morrison is arguably the first “bad ass” of rock, but we also see such poetry out of him that we start to see rock music take on a more artistic form as well.
I listened to this album with the 50th anniversary pressing I picked up in 2017. It came with the original mono vinyl, two CD’s of the mono and stereo pressing from 1967, along with a third CD from a concert in California in 1967 of 8 of the 11 tracks. Since this is the original, it omitted the “high” in “she gets high”, which is a bummer but true to what actually happened. Luckily I have other versions of this album that have it.
Have opinions on this album or The Doors in general? I’d love to chat about it! Send a message either on social media or on the Gamezilla Media discord. In addition, if you love gaming and movies, check out the five podcasts on Gamezilla Media, and consider being a patron on Patreon! Spotify playlist below!
Sphinx