Doors of Perception

It was on this day - Saturday November 15th - in 1966 that The Doors signed their deal with Electra Records to record seven albums. They managed six albums in their career, and that wasn't all that many for a band with such a huge and lasting effect on rock music. The Doors sure packed a big influence into their music. Their style and lyrics were unique enough in that day and age that the band stood out from the pack. 

First and foremost, The Doors had no bass player, an oddity in the music business! Instead, keyboardist Ray Manzarek provided bass lines on his Fender Rhodes piano bass while creating melodies on his Vox or Gibson electric organs. 

The band wasn't too crazy about their agreement to release Break On Through as their first single.... with lyric changes to get radio play. Their lyrics about getting high were considered a bit too much for the general public back then. Yeah.... just listen to rap music nowadays, or even twenty years ago, to see how far things have come. Anyway, Break On Through has an interesting history. Even though it is now one of the The Doors' most popular songs, it originally didn't even crack the Top 100 in the States. 

I first heard The Doors on rock radio in the late 70's. The tunes played most back then were Break On Through, Light My Fire, Hello I Love You, Roadhouse Blues, L.A. Woman, and Riders on the Storm. There was one night when that station played the entire L.A. Woman album, and that was when I fell in love with the weird and hypnotic song The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat). I remember chowing down on that near-trance track with the headphones on, loving Morrison's spoken word lyrics. 

All I knew of The Doors for decades came to me via radio and my Best of the Doors tape... and later the CD. I also read the David Dalton biography of Morrison and The Doors. But boy, was I missing out on a lot of fine music. Finally, within the past decade, I snapped up their six studio albums and was able to fill in the gaps and understand the true impact of this quartet out of Los Angeles. Morrison's lyrics, like "his brain is squirming like a toad", either annoyed or impressed listeners. The man's words were often interesting enough, certainly visual and jarring, poetic, and sometimes controversial. But it was the beauty of the instrumentation - the cohesive elements of the band - that made a big impression on me. 

Robby Krieger's guitar style wasn't your typical rock'n'roll. Not very often, anyway. Stuff like The Changeling and Roadhouse Blues were pretty straightforward rock, but then we had influences from other genres creeping into songs like The Crystal Ship, The End, Spanish Caravan, and Indian Summer. Classical, jazz, non-Western music, and so on. Krieger's ability on the instrument  is obvious on every song, whether it was a "hit" or not.

The Doors might not get the same attention as The Stones or The Beatles when folks talk about the 60's, but they set standards for live performance, especially the image of the singer/frontman. It can't be denied that Jim Morrison made a huge mark on the rock world in that respect. He, along with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, established the template for rock star singers.... all swagger and sex appeal, and Morrison took the bad boy image to extremes unmatched at the time. Band-mate Manzarek himself said Morrison "embodied hippie counterculture rebellion". Dangerous and volatile, Jim appeared cool as a cucumber.... until he had roused his audience into a frenzy with his antics. Great rock'n'roll!