Psychedelia, blues, rock 'n' roll, folk, iconographic lyrics, explosive stage presence. The Doors with "leader" Jim Morrison, one of the most expressive frontmen of all time, "marked" the 60s and left their sound mark as a legacy for future generations. The beginning was made with the self-titled album "The Doors", which was released on January 4, 1967, the same day as the first live performance of the "Jimi Hendrix Experience". Morrison presented his own allegorical lyrics in the midst of a "peace and love" movement, paying homage to his favorites, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, and calling for more general questioning and disobedience.
Recorded in August 1966 at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, produced by Paul A. Rothchild, the disc was reissued on CD on July 18, 2000 by EastWest with the original, uncensored performances of "Break on Through" and "The End" .
The historic tracks included on the record, "Light My Fire", "The End", "Whiskey a Go Go", emerged through the band's experimentation and "jamming" while performing at the London Fog club in Los Angeles in which did not attract a large number of customers.
It was these experiments that piqued the interest of Jack Holtzman of Elektra Records, who, ecstatic by the raw talent of these unripe twenty-somethings he saw before him, gave them their first contract. Recordings for their debut album began on August 24, 1966, three days after they were fired from the club they were performing at because of the lyrics to the song "The End".
All the tracks were recorded in just one week, with Morrison catching up and destroying the band's equipment after an LSD overdose. The album's first single was "Break on Through" but it was not warmly received by the public, as it never entered the Top 100. Thus, it was followed by "Light My Fire" which reached the top of the US charts, selling over a million copies. The piece is the first one written by Robby Krieger, while its original duration was over 7 minutes, as it was played live, without bass, with the organ accompanying Morrison's voice, which appeared like a contemporary - for his time- cursed poet, in front of his audience. A real, psychedelic manifesto.
"Break on Through" is clearly influenced by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band's Shake Your Money-Maker and the sounds that shaped and defined the band's identity.
Along with the record, of course, came to the surface stories of... censorship, since Electra from the beginning and "precautionary" decided to change the verse "She Gets High" that was heard in the first recording of "Break On Through (To the Other Side ).
This behavior of his also led to his arrest during the concert at the New Haven Arena in Connecticut on December 9, 1967, when the uniformed officers thought the performer was addressing them.
And "Moonlight Drive" arose from improvisations by Morrison and Ray Manzarek in 1965 in Venice Beach, when they were fellow students at UCLA film school. It was supposed to be on "Doors" but was released on "Strange Days".
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's arranged work, "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)," is an ode to decadence and musically echoes the opening track of Joseph Cotton and Orson Wells' "The Third Man."
On the album version, Morrison changes the line "Show us the way to the next pretty boy" to "Show me the way to the next little girl", however in live performances he used to sing both versions. For the recordings, Ray Manzarek plays both keyboards and bass.
The track, however, that caused the most reactions and analyses, was "The End", which closes the album, while also closing the band's performances. The lyrics refer to death and come from Morrison's experiences, with direct references to his family and the myth of Oedipus. In fact, in his biography that accompanied the first release, Morrison wrote that his parents had died, which of course was not the case. Musically, the band was influenced here by Indian music.
In an interview, Morrison stated that indeed, the piece contained the myth of Oedipus. "Obviously there's a similarity, but every time I hear it it means something different to me. I really don't know what I was trying to say. It started out as a farewell song for a girl, and now I realize it's a farewell to childhood. To be honest , the piece is whatever you want it to be." "The End" also appears on the soundtrack of Francis Ford Coppola's "Revelation Now" (released in 1979, eight years after Morrison's death), "dressing up" the first sequence.
The success of the first album immediately led to the second, 'Strange Days', in 1967, while in July 1968 they released the chart-topping 'Waiting For The Sun'. "The Doors" was ranked number 42 on Rolling Stone's Top 500 Greatest Records of All Time.
We close the article with - perhaps - the best live take-off of the lizard King and his great company. Because as he himself recited, "Music is your only friend, Until the end".
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