The Doors

The Doors
Perception (40th Anniversary Box)
Rhino/Elektra/DMC
November 21, 2006

The Doors are the perfect band when you’re 17, waking to life’s possibilities and pulsing with 10,000 volts of libido. In that impressionable state, an extravaganza like “The End,” with its Oedipal drama and entrancing guitar-as-sitar aura of mystery, sounds like the most profound and intense moment of your life. Singer and cult leader Jim Morrison even invoked sensualist poets like William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud—so did Bob Dylan, but Morrison made it sexier. Factor in the attractive shape of his life arc, its mythic hurtle through reckless hedonism to an early death at age 27, and it’s easy to see why his music, his leather pants and his lizard fixation have endured for 40 years of teenagers.

Maybe no one older than 17 should have an ounce of time for a pop singer who anointed himself an “erotic politician.” Wasn’t this Californian Adonis a pig of a human being, a (literally) stinking drunk, an egomaniac who rampaged over most everybody he dealt with? Aren’t his poet-as-prophet pretensions insufferably clunky and self-aggrandizing? When he goes into revolutionary mode (“Five to One,” “The Unknown Soldier”), doesn’t the skin crawl off your bones in embarrassment? Worse, isn’t the music dated and overblown, from epic song-suites like “Celebration of the Lizard” to the bleary blues jive of “Back Door Man”?

Well, Morrison is hardly short for company when it comes to rock assholes who overdid the liquor, and his psychedelic doggerel is no more cringe-worthy than John Lennon in LSD mode. People forget Jimbo’s sense of humor, manifested in his surreal ad-libs—“cobra on my left, leopard on my right” in “The Soft Parade”—and the knowing zest he brought to his shaman-as-buffoon persona. As for the music, most of it still sounds pretty glorious. It remains an unusual sound, not just because of the lead-instrument prominence of Ray Manzarek’s ornate keyboards, but because of the way the Doors expanded driving R&B with a cinematic clarity, thanks to spacious, glistening arrangements and production (more vivid than ever in this fabulously remastered incarnation). Robby Krieger’s guitar solos are elegantly restrained and succinct, while John Densmore’s drumming is deft enough to make a waltz rhythm swing on “Shaman’s Blues.” In keeping with the spirit of the late ’60s, the Doors salted in all kinds of unlikely flavors: flamenco on “Spanish Caravan,” German cabaret with their cover of “Alabama Song,” cocktail jazz with “Riders on the Storm.” They even anticipated disco, bizarrely, with one segment of the audacious 8:41 “The Soft Parade.”

Perception includes the six studio LPs recorded before Morrison’s 1971 death in Paris (which did wonders for French tourism), plus DVDs of performance footage and outtakes highlighted by the demo of “Celebration of the Lizard.” You can retrace the band’s journey from the bold entrance of The Doors (their best, if most overexposed, album) through Strange Days (their darkest and most psychedelic), onto Waiting for the Sun (their most confused and least satisfying), The Soft Parade (their funniest and most underrated) and the supposed return-to-bluesy-form of Morrison Hotel (their dreariest and most over-esteemed), before ending with L.A. Woman (their most accomplished and poignant).

Morrison’s version of “the blues” owed as much to Frank Sinatra as to Muddy Waters, and his sonorous majesty made him one of rock’s true originals. Many in the legion of Jim-itators are rock greats in their own right: Iggy Pop converted Morrison into the sexless monomania of punk rock, while Patti Smith adapted his persona to become the world’s first female-rocker-as-shaman. Joy Division’s Ian Curtis translated the baritone-booming doomy side of the Doors into goth, and Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell updated Morrison’s excess-as-the-road-to-the-palace-of-wisdom shtick.

So is there any wisdom to be found at the end of that highway? In hindsight, Morrison’s freedom-chasing looks more like irresponsibility, the lust for “experience” closer to selfishness. Yet in an era when 17-year-olds are confronted by a resurgent puritanism that seeks to roll back the real gains of the ’60s and constrain pleasure and adventure, there’s a certain imperishable truth and urgency to Morrison’s warning that “no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.” In a strange way, he was a true American patriot, his spirit as large as the land itself.

Download: “End of the Night,” “Strange Days,” “The Soft Parade,” “Peace Frog” Simon Reynolds