Released 1971
The Changeling
Love Her Madly
Been Down So Long
Cars Hiss By My Window
L.A. Woman
L'America
Hyacinth House
Crawling King Snake
The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)
Riders On The Storm
The Doors Workshop is now Forbidden, a restaurant, bar and lounge that taunts pedestrians with $14 plates of tapas. Should you be looking for it, you'll notice a fake-gold plaque memorializing the place as "the site of the Doors Workshop, where L.A. Woman was recorded and mixed." It's a shallow grave to the moment when the psychedelic era turned sepia — a final barbaric winter before everything got worse. Myths and memories mutate, swamps get drained, but the blues just get older. (Jeff Weiss, L.A. Weekly, Jan 2012)
It is summer, 1979,and I am 13 years old. It is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. But I do not believe in prayer. The radio is tuned to a local AOR station. I am learning the Mysteries of Rock. But AOR is not quite AOR yet. The deejays still have some freedom to play with their programming. For a little while longer (within a year, that will all have changed). Tonight the deej is praying for rain. He plays The Who's "Love Reign O'er Me," and all of Side 3 of Electric Ladyland (the "rain" suite, as I will always think of it, henceforth). And then he intros a song by The Doors.
I know little of The Doors. It is 1979. But I know that Jim Morrison is hot, sexy, and dead. I know from the face glowering from the cover of No One Here Gets Out Alive, which sits prominently in every best-seller stack that I pass. I know the excerpts from same that ran in Rolling Stone, another touchstone in the Mysteries. I know this Morrison is a Dangerous Character, out of control, a troublemaker, his face, bearded and sinister, winks at me from the pages. The radio makes a sound of thunder, and rain. The song is different. It is long and slow and quiet. It is late nights. From that night on, I will always associate The Doors with long, hot summer nights....
I've long said the Doors discography was bookends. Six albums. First and sixth great; second and fifth weaker but still good, middle two duds. If you put it on a graph it would look like a smile. Say what you will; there aren't too many bands/artists whose last album is probably their best. They were done when they made this album. You can hear it. They were tired. It's been a long night, and the bar is closing down. And the band is playing one last, bone-weary set for the remaining drunks and hangers-on. Because they're tired, and running low on ideas, and no one's listening, they go back to the blues. And because they're done, and no one's listening, they can tell the truth
I had money ... I had none but I never been so broke that I couldn't leave town...
and in the blues and the truth they find that one last flash, that one last moment to reach for, and take, inspiration, power, music
I'm a changeling .... see me change...
By now shaman Jim was gone. Look at the cover. John Densmore looks nervous and scared. Is it that uncertain future his band faces? Look at Morrison. In the past he was always front and center. Now he crouches down in the lower right. Bloated and bearded and bleary. His demonically-handsome features sinking into booze flab and dissipation. Was it only four years ago? Only the demonic remains.
Don't ya love her as she's walkin' out the door ... like she did one thousand times before
Once upon a time (was it only four years ago?) he would've gone after her. Once upon a time she never would've wanted to leave. But that handsome stud she hooked up with has let himself turn into a fat, drunken old slob. And he's too tired to get up. So he'll just hum to himself
All your love is gone ... so sing a lonely song... of a deep blue dream ...
Towards the end, Morrison once said The Doors were essentially a blues band. I don't entirely buy that (he could just as easily have said they were a cocktail lounge jazz band; it would have been almost, or just, as true). But they could stomp a blues as well as any white boy (and stomping is what most white rockers have done with the blues, at their best, since day one)
I said WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! WAR-DEN! ... Won't you break your lock and key
He's beginning to rouse now, like a sleeping snake, starting to uncoil itself (I suspect Jimbo would have liked that metaphor. Or at least been amused by it)
BABY! BABY! BABY! ... won't you get down on your knees
and he's getting hungry. The fact that he doesn't sound much different from any riled-up belligerent drunk who's just woken to find himself in the tank doesn't diminish it one bit. In fact it makes perfect sense.
So having nothing better to do, he lays back and listens to traffic. "Windows started tremblin',
with a sonic boom ..." he observes, adding an extra "boom", for no particular reason other than that it clearly belongs there.
A cold girl'll kill you ... in a darkened room
The band has been warming up so far. Their energy has risen, kundalini-like. It's time to pick things up. A shattering chord rings out. Discordant. Startling. The music starts to build behind it. The bass picks up, a running, surf-like figure. Robbie picks off some bent notes. 1 .... 2 .... 3... the band starts to groove hard.
Morrison comes up out of his chair. Like James Brown, pulling himself to his feet one last time, to shout please please PLEASE. He is mush-mouthed, unintelligible. The words come out in a rush, a slurred mumble/shout. Only bits and pieces are clear. Little shards of imagery; "about an hour ago," "which way the wind blow,""Hollywood bungalow," "lucky little lady,""City of Night". The groove gets harder. We are driving fast now, through the City of Night
Drive thru your suburbs, into your blues, into your blues...
Like the other Morrison, he repeats himself, taking a line over and over, worrying it, playing with it; into your blues. The groove gets lighter, more playful
I see your hair is burnin'
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar
The groove gets harder
Drivin' down your freeways
Midnite alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman...
So alone, so alone
This is Chandler's L.A. Dark and seedy and too warm and hazy
Motel Money Murder Madness ... change the mood from glad to sadness
We round the corner, the car slows down, the journey is ending. Time to stomp again
Mr. Mojo Risin', Mr. Mojo Risin'
He shouts again and again ... and again. The music builds. A tribal stomp. And then swings back in. Circular motion. The serpent eats its own tail.
Side one is the warm up (and, like most of the great rock and roll albums, L.A. Woman definitely has sides). The band is cooking now. "L'America" is an older, wiser version of the music of the earlier Doors albums. Mysterioso organ and acid-hazed visions.
I took a trip down to L'America, to trade some beads for a pint of gold
It could have come from Waiting For the Sun. Or even The Soft Parade. Yet their is a wink in his voice. Morrison has finally come to accept how fundamentally full of shit he is. And to revel in it
C'mon people, don't ya look so down
You know the rain man's comin' ta town
Change the weather, change your luck
And then he'll teach ya how ta...find yourself
It's a blues trick. A good one, too.
Like the gentle rain
Like the gentle rain that falls
in two lines, he's smoked The Celebration of the Lizard, blown away all its pretense and hokum, with two lines that manage to make something as simple as "gentle rain" sound vaguely sinister. You can laugh at Morrison ... he would, in fact, encourage you to do so. But, as Lester Bangs noted, he felt the chill, and lived it.
Every great rock and roll album has its duds. But the duds on every great rock and roll album are redeemed by .. something. "I see the bathroom is clear," he intones on "Hyacinth House," (dud in question), daring you not to see that he's pulling your leg. But then
Why did you throw the Jack of Hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to play
Those words may sum up the whole album. They may be the best he ever penned. This is all I have left, he seems to be saying, throughout the night. I will give it to you. And then I will go. But the journey is not over yet. The music turns ominous. Morrison still has something to share. "I wanna tell you 'bout Texas Radio and the Big Beat," he intones, "it comes out of the Virginia swamps, cool and slow with plenty of precision, with a back beat narrow and hard to master." It is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. We are going to the Undiscovered Country. "This is the land where the Pharaoh died," he tells us. "Out here on the perimeter there are no stars, out here we is stoned - immaculate."
The band is winding their way around the blues, John's beat is all authority, Robbie's guitar figures scale the music, like climbing a pyramid
I'll tell you this
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
And then the night is ending. The music is ending. The Doors are ending. But there is one last tale to tell. The energy is spent. Morrison will lower himself back into his chair. He will clutch the microphone one last time. The band eases in. There is no hurry now. The heatwave has broken. The rain is coming. A sound of thunder in the distance. "Into this world we're thrown," Morrison observes, "like a dog without a bone."
There's a killer on the road ... his brain is squirmin' like a toad
Is this the same killer who awoke before dawn (was it only four years ago?), put his boots on and chose a face from the ancient gallery?
If you give this man a ride sweet memory will die
We are warned. The sixties, too, are over. This is a dangerous place. It's not like we haven't been telling you that, The Doors might be saying. The song is long. It meanders. Ray's cocktail-lounge keyboards ride a lazy, late-night groove. Robbie's guitar slithers through the song like a (crawling, king) snake. Morrison is awake now. Clear-eyed. He hasn't sounded this lucid all night. For a moment it is the clean-shaven, slender Lizard King again. His words are the most pared-down, tersest we have ever heard from him. Ever will hear from him.
Riders on the storm ... riders on the storm...
And the music peters out, slowly. And the band quietly leaves. The few patrons gather their things and wander out into the night. The chairs are on the table.
It is November, 2012. It is cold out, but in here it is a very hot night. We're having a heatwave that's lasted many days. The kind of night that the heat will keep you up till the wee wee hours. The kind of night you pray for rain. I believe in prayer. The stereo makes a sound of thunder, and rain.
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