A tremendous debut album, and
indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing
the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a
knockout punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave
with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim
Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose. "Light My Fire" was
the cut that topped the charts and established the group as stars, but
most of the rest of the album is just as impressive, including some of
their best songs: the propulsive "Break On Through" (their first
single), the beguiling Oriental mystery of "The Crystal Ship," the
mysterious "End of the Night," "Take It as It Comes" (one of several
tunes besides "Light My Fire" that also had hit potential), and the
stomping rock of "Soul Kitchen" and "Twentieth Century Fox." The
11-minute Oedipal drama "The End" was the group at its most daring
and, some would contend, overambitious. It was nonetheless a haunting
cap to an album whose nonstop melodicism and dynamic tension would
never be equaled by the group again, let alone bettered.
by Billy Altman, Amazon.com
On their 1967 debut album, the
Doors more than fulfilled the promise of their infamously challenging
gigs around Los Angeles throughout the previous year. Whether belting
out a standard like "Back Door Man" or talk-singing such originals as
"The Crystal Ship" and "I Looked at You," leather-clad vocalist Jim
Morrison exuded both sensuality and menace. The mixture, on the
outsize album finale, "The End," helped rewrite the rules on rock song
composition. None of this would have worked, though, were it not for
the highly visual instrumental work of keyboardist Ray Manzarek,
guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore, whose work on
tracks such as "Take It As It Comes" and the lengthy hit "Light My
Fire" virtually defined the rock-blues-jazz-classical amalgam that was
acid-rock.
Product Description
THE DOORS, first released in January 1967, is one of rock music's most
famous debuts. It hit #2 in Billboard®, and delivered the #1
signature smash "Light My Fire" plus "Break On Through," "The Crystal
Ship," and "The End." In-depth essay by Ben Fong-Torres (a principal
Rolling Stone writer during the Doors heyday). Three bonus tracks
include alternate takes of "Moonlight Drive" and a previously unissued
version of "Indian Summer."
by Jim Allen, Barnes & Noble
When the Doors emerged in
1967, the world of rock had never seen anything quite like them
before. Their closest relatives were probably New York's Velvet
Underground, who also mixed poetry with decidedly anti-flower-power
rock. But where the VU came from a gritty, more urban context, the
Doors were influenced by the freewheeling approach of '60s West Coast
psychedelia -- mostly in that they were a reaction against it. On the
band's eponymous debut, a dark, lyrical sensibility stands at odds
with the LSD-tinted visions of the Grateful Dead et al., but the
depths to which the Doors' penetrating, unsettling visions were
explored could only have been possible in a community set free by the
psychedelic revolution. With their lack of a bass player, Ray
Manzarek's semiclassical keyboard flourishes, John Densmore's jazzy,
impressionistic drumming, and Jim Morrison's surreal, iconoclastic
lyrics, the Doors were virtually without precedent in rock 'n' roll.
On The Doors, they used blues (Willie Dixon's "Back Door Man"), pop
("Light My Fire"), and even Brecht-Weill art song ("Alabama Song") as
vehicles to express their unique sentiments. While the catchy "Light
My Fire" was the band's breakthrough hit, it is the groundbreaking
11-minute epic "The End" that showcases the band in all its
improvisational, poetic glory.
The Doors: Jim Morrison
(vocals); Robby Krieger (guitar); Ray Manzarek (keyboards); John
Densmore (drums).
Additional personnel: Larry Knechtel (bass).
Recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders, Hollywood, California.
The Doors: Jim Morrison (vocals); Robby Krieger (guitar); Ray Manzarek
(keyboards); John Densmore (drums).
The first Doors album was an important development in the evolution of
rock, representing the dark underbelly of the '60s counterculture, the
Jekyll to the Beatles/Beach Boys' Hyde. The Doors were the antithesis
of windblown Californian pop. Dark, brooding and alienated, every
element of the quartet's metier was unveiled on their debut album. In
Jim Morrison they posessed one of rock's authoritative voices, while
the group's dense instrumental prowess reflected his lyrical mystery.
Highly literate, they wedded Oedipian tragedy with counter-culture
nihlism and, in "Light My Fire", expressed exotic images previously
unheard in pop. Howlin' Wolf, Brecht and Weill are acknowledged as
musical reference points, a conflict between the physical and cerebral
that give THE DOORS its undiluted tension. Or you can just enjoy it as
a brilliant album that sucks you in as it breathes out the '60's.
by Parke Puterbauch, Rolling
Stone, issue 921, May 1, 2003
The Doors arrived in 1967, the
same year as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; both were
psychedelic touchstones and among the first major rock discs that
truly stood as albums, rather than collections of songs. But whereas
the Beatles took a basically sunny view of humanity, the Doors' debut
offered the dark side of the moon. Their sound was minor-keyed and
subterranean, bluesy and spacey, and their subject matter -- like that
of many of rock's great albums -- was sex, death and getting high. On
"End of the Night," the band invited you to "take a journey to the
bright midnight."
The key to the band's appeal was the tension between singer Jim
Morrison's Dionysian persona and the band's crisp, melodic playing.
Keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger's extended solos
on the album version of "Light My Fire" carried one to the brink of
euphoria, while the eleven-minute epic "The End" journeyed to a
harrowing psychological state. Scattered among these lengthier tracks
are such nuggets as "Soul Kitchen" ("learn to forget") and Morrison's
acid-drenched takes on the blues ("Back Door Man") and Kurt Weill
("Alabama Song"). Though great albums followed, The Doors stands as
the L.A. foursome's most successful marriage of rock poetics with
classically tempered hard rock -- a stoned, immaculate classic.
Break On Through
