The Doors Bore While We Snore (Absolutely Live - The Doors)

Member Name: Templar19

Product:	Absolutely Live - The Doors
Date:	13/04/09 (312 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The album contains one interesting and unique sequence

Disadvantages: Everything else is bland and completely uninspiring

For a band that hobbled along uncertainly and indifferently for only five years, it's all the more surprising that the Doors left us such a large number of live recordings. There are currently around ten live albums available, a spate of them appearing over the last few years. However, the surprise lessens somewhat with the knowledge that most of these albums document various performances from the band's troubled shows in 1969 and 1970, a time when the Doors had waved goodbye to any hope of future creativity or prolonged spells of sobriety from front-man Jim Morrison. Only one album, Live at the Matrix '67, gives us a (brief) flavour of the band at its freshest and newest; the songs on the album were recorded in the spring of 1967 when the Doors were basking in the glow created by their first album (The Doors. January 1967), undoubtedly a classic of its time; although, like most 'classic' albums, it has its distinctly average moments.

But by 1970 the lithe literate leather-clad Morrison who had fronted the band at its peak had morphed into a bloated often-bearded dishevelled drunk barely capable of getting through a show. The Doors' decline was stark, both in terms of creative output and relevance. Only Jim Morrison's tragic (read 'squalid') death in 1971 saved the band's reputation for posterity, a reputation based more on Morrison's early fashionable 'look' and poetic pose rather than on musical excellence. Let's face it, the Doors released only three albums of note; the rest of their output (excepting four or five songs) was largely uninspired dross. It's just a pity that by the time someone got round to capturing the Doors' live sound, uninspired dross was the order of the day.

Absolutely Live was for years the band's only available live album. Originally released as a double album in the late summer of 1970, it features a 'mix' of songs largely recorded earlier that year. The plan was to edit and mix all the recorded material from several shows into the definitive Doors sound. Even single songs contain elements taken from different shows. The result may have been definitive, but if that were the case then it was a grim indictment of the band in question because Absolutely Live is actually a tepid, mediocre and sometimes dire one hour and seventeen minutes. The whole exercise, while claiming to be a search for perfection, was, I suspect, more an exercise in constructing songs where Morrison didn't forget his lines, miss a cue or howl at the moon. It's all rather synthetic, contrived and... well... sad. The fact that so many people seem to rave about this album proves to me at least that love is blind... or deaf.

To say this album is unremittingly bad, however, would be too much - there are a few enjoyable moments to brighten up the gloom - but overall the 'definitive' performance presented is spoiled by a major problem: the basic live sound of the band. The Doors were a four-piece - keyboards, guitar, drums and vocalist - which meant that keyboard-player Ray Manzarek had to double as bassist. This he did with a keyboard bass, but it also meant that he only had one hand left to cover all his other duties. The result is a tinny and insipid organ-sound throughout that grates increasingly as the album progresses. It doesn't help that Robby Krieger's guitar is contrastingly loud and Morrison's vocals are often flat and grungy. This musical arrangement no doubt sufficed in the claustrophobic club settings of the band's youth but in the large auditoriums where the songs for this album were recorded the sound is woefully inadequate. Why the band didn't employ a separate bassist (as they often did in the studio) and thus allow Manzarek to fully flex his considerable musical muscles is anyone's guess.

The songs themselves are a mixed bag of bluesy standards, album tracks and long jams. Things actually get off to a reasonable start with a tight cover of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love?, but the musical imbalance quickly becomes obvious. Krieger's gutsy slide-guitar clashes badly with Manzarek's mousy organ, a keyboard sound more reminiscent of a pub singer in a back-street boozer banging out the old favourites on a Casio Mini than a seminal band supposedly wowing the faithful at a seminal time. Things then go from bad to worse with a four-song medley, the highlight of which is a truly terrible rendition of Alabama Song that even our pub singer would have been ashamed of. Morrison's distracted vocal gives the impression of a singer going through the motions. Only a reasonable performance of Five To One rescues things a little but even that is spoiled by the bloody tinny organ. "Is there a BASS PLAYER in the house?" we scream.

Build Me A Woman deserves only a mention before we head into the seventeen minutes of When The Music's Over, a lengthy and indulgent epic that was for the band's second album, Strange Days (Sept. 67), what The End was for the first. The studio version, despite its length, is an interesting and absorbing musical exercise, whereas here, live and in the raw, it is bland, uninspired and almost dies a death long before the finish. Things slow completely in the middle yet the lack of tension in band and audience alike is palpable. I almost expected to hear a phone ring and a loud voice announce: "Taxi for Kowalski." The organ sound changes for the better half way through and this must mean that some slick editing was done at this point, but it's not enough to save the song.

Yet as we turn for home things do brighten up a little. The upbeat boogie-woogie-style Close To You, sung by Manzarek, is tight-but-forgettable and then we heave a sigh of relief as we come across a song that is actually quite good. Universal Mind is a slow and maudlin effort with an interesting lyric that, for once, Morrison sings with some semblance of feeling. There is an up-tempo segment in the middle that sounds corny and lame thanks to (yep, you've guessed it) our tinny organ but this is not enough to spoil the song, especially as Krieger's crisp guitar for once saves the day. A loud six-minute rendition of the band's first single, Break On Through, completes this segment and the song is interesting due to the first two minutes being taken up with an odd "dead cats, dead rats" repeated lyric that was not part on the original release. The rest of the song is not too bad, although the delivery is again sloppy and loose and Morrison's head again seems to be elsewhere.

But just as we are beginning to think that the hour or so we have devoted to the above is just an hour down the drain, we are saved by Morrison's The Celebration Of The Lizard, a lengthy piece of performance poetry with musical background, the whole of which is surprisingly enjoyable, if a little creepy. The only part to feature on a studio album during Morrison's lifetime was the excellent middle-section, Not To Touch The Earth, which can be found on the band's third album, Waiting For The Sun. The whole Celebration lyric features on that album's cover. I've never personally subscribed to the notion of Jim Morrison, tragic poetic genius of Byronic proportions, but I really do like The Celebration. The words are lively, evocative and quietly impressive. A previously-unreleased recording of The Celebration Of The Lizard was included on the 2003 CD compilation, Legacy: The Absolute Best.

After that seventeen minutes of dark oddness, we have just one more song to listen to before the final curtain. Soul Kitchen, from the Doors' first album, was actually one of the first songs the band ever performed live and it's a laid-back, very 60s groove that explodes in the middle before settling back down again. The album version is enjoyable but here, despite being delivered well enough, it is bland and soulless and is probably the perfect finale to a largely bland and soulless album.

Absolutely Live is just not very good. There is enough on it to satisfy any Doors aficionados out there (and they will probably own it already) but for anyone else just curious about the band it's an album to avoid. All the tracks are available for download from iTunes or Amazon but apart from the several segments of The Celebration Of The Lizard, I can't imagine anyone wanting to do such a thing. However, if anyone out there DOES want to indulge their masochistic side, my advice would be to go for the In Concert album rather than Absolutely Live. In Concert features the above tracks as well as the whole of the 1983 release, Alive She Cried (seven tracks), and four other tracks. It's the best live Doors package around and it's also available for download.

But for anyone interested in checking out the Doors for the first time, avoid all the available live-recordings and simply concentrate on the band's first three studio albums - The Doors (67), Strange Days (67) and Waiting For The Sun (68) - all three of which are excellent. The band's final studio release, L.A. Woman (71), also contains three or four good songs that are well worth listening to. As for the rest of the band's output... Ignore.

Summary: A completely forgettable live performance.