The ride of a lifetime! (The Doors - The Doors)

Member Name: Rumblefish

Product:	The Doors - The Doors
Date:	28/12/00 (122 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Every track a classic.

Disadvantages: None.

Released in 1967, the Doors’ eponymous album remains one of the most breathtaking debuts in rock history, and immediately established the Jim Morrison legend. The themes that were to dominate the group’s career – death, sex, excess, and despair – are carried along by exuberant performances by each band-member, and Morrison’s theatrical lyrics and delivery.

‘Break On through (To The Other Side)’ is an explosive opener, driven by Morrison’s full-throttle vocals. The bluesy ‘Soul Kitchen’ is followed by the mournful ballad that is ‘The Crystal Ship’, before the lusty ‘Twentieth Century Fox’, and the slurred rendition of ‘Alabama Song’ (“Show me the way to the next whiskey bar / No, don’t ask why…no, don’t ask why!”)

Then comes perhaps the definitive Doors song, ‘Light My Fire’, wherein Ray Manzarek’s keyboards, Robby Krieger’s guitar, John Densmore’s drums, and Morrison’s vocals all combine to form one of the greatest rock and roll tracks of all time. The return to more distinctly un-PC fare with the cover of ‘Back Door Man’ is followed by rocker ‘I Looked At You’, the slow-burning ‘End Of The Night’, and the rock philosophy of ‘Take It As It Comes’ (“Time to live, time to lie / Time to laugh, time to die”).

The very final track, simply called ‘The End’, is a feverish but harrowing epic, Morrison’s lyrics made up of doom-ridden poetry and nightmarish Oedipal fantasy. The track was memorably used cinematically by Francis Ford Coppola in 1979’s APOCOLYPSE NOW, and it is still a potently bleak and affecting composition today.

The Doors would approach but never quite reproduce the sheer brilliance of their first album in the years that followed. It is essential listening for anyone with the sli
ghtest interest in rock music, and a record brimming with emotion and sexuality.

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