"Changeling" is a kiss-off to L.A. — Morrison actually departs for the City of Light before the band and Botnick finish mixing the album. "Cars Hiss by My Window" is a Jimmy Reed moan of midnight desolation. "Hyacinth House" is a slice of canyon life, circa 1970 — a prayer to meet someone who doesn't want something. "Riders on the Storm" mirrors the city at its most hermetic and apocalyptic, the powder-enhanced fear that the near future will bring rain and hitchhikers carrying cleavers. The title track is the city's gleaming white underbelly, noir exposed to blown minds on Venice Beach.
Ditching mystic metaphors for sinewy, dirty realism, Morrison sings like a cripple with a cough: wrecked, filthy and flailing at real and imagined demons. All Doors albums court the darkness, but previous efforts burst with the goofball color of a bad acid trip. L.A. Woman is sullen and kidney-colored, full of the mysterious bruises of the diseased and drunk. It's microscopic Americana: hellhound blues, liberated jazz, Hank Williams and the big beat, Ol' Blue Eyes, Bo Diddley. It's a lawless AM radio station manned by a schizo, spinning dive-bar bands for people more damaged than he is — broadcasting live from La Cienega.
Photo by Paul Ferrara/copyright DMC
PHOTO COURTESY OF ELEKTRA RECORDS
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January 2012
Rhino Records has decreed 2012 "The Year of the Doors," with a two-disc 40th-anniversary reissue with alternate takes, a few covers and a "revelatory" look inside the Doors Workshop. There's a behind-the-scenes L.A. Woman DVD that does everything but hold a séance. Released this week, it marks exactly 41 years since the band finished their masterpiece. Fuzzy math, apparently, matters little to a failing industry — not when the Doors catalog is one of its last reliable sources of fossil fuel.
Don't confuse the extravaganza with 2010, when an official Doors documentary saw limited theatrical release. Or 1991, when Densmore wryly jabbed at "The Year of the Doors," estimating that it was the band's 10th such resurgence. That year Oliver Stone released his biopic The Doors — with Val Kilmer as an oddly convincing, comic book Morrison. In one scene, Meg Ryan throws a turkey at Kilmer and screams, "Jim Morrison, you ruined Thanksgiving again." Johnny Drama plays John Densmore. It's so unintentionally hilarious and vivid that it dulls the desire to separate fact and fiction.
There's no need for a year of the Doors when there's rarely an hour without them. Classic rock radio constantly offers both hits and deep cuts. And every few years, something else reanimates the catalog. In the late '70s, "The End" scored Martin Sheen's meltdown in Apocalypse Now. During the mid-'90s, The Basketball Diaries and Forrest Gump cemented the cinematic cliché: Nothing says "We're really in the late '60s" like the Doors.
Jim Morrison couldn't exist in the modern world: The Lizard King wouldn't tweet anything, and TMZ would shadow a urine-stained Jimbo stumbling out of Barney's Beanery with Nico in tow. Anyway, he dodged the indignity of being photographed at 45, fat and fluorescent. When Morrison slipped away in a bathtub in Paris in July 1971, there was no Malibu rehab offering alternative salvation. He was buried without an autopsy — circumstances ripe for conspiracy and conjecture. So the Morrison myth metastasizes, no matter how many ill-advised licensing deals or collaborations.
Synonymous as he is with the idea of reckless living, Morrison has captured the imagination of the rap and the punk worlds alike. He's worshipped by everyone from Lil Wayne to Iggy Pop. On Jay-Z's iconic Nas diss "The Takeover," Kanye West slyly acknowledges the ferocity of "Five to One," flipping it to dramatize Roc-A-Fella's march toward victory.
But the Internet offers music snobs unfiltered access to every obscure corner. "Cool" has become intrinsically locked into a fragile sense of scarcity. Cults can rise and fall in clicks. And there's nothing less exclusive than the Doors. They are the greatest eighth-grade band of all time. Like Holden Caulfield or Jack Kerouac, Morrison artfully conveys the eternal teenage conviction that everything is bullshit — and yet, by the time you're a senior in high school, their cover has been blown; they've become the favorite band for those who answer "everything" when asked what music they like. Walk into a sleazy dive in Hollywood, and Morrison's face will be above the bar in slurred watercolor.
The dead should make room for the living, but the Doors won't wither. And that might be why the band is the psych-rock bête noire for the latest generation of critics. Last year, The Village Voice quizzed 15 writers on the names of the four Doors. Nearly half answered with a variation on "I fucking hate the Doors." Idolator deemed them "The Worst Band of All Time." Craig Finn, frontman for acclaimed indie-rock act the Hold Steady, accused the Doors of "giving the green light to generations of pseuds." Even Conan O'Brien admitted on air that he doesn't like them.
During the '90s, the zeitgeist shifted from sincere and psychedelic explorations of self to sardonic, detached cool. To a subculture embodied by the acerbic, flannel-shirted, slacker nonchalance of Pavement, the Doors seemed as played out as paisley. Claiming to be a shaman shrouded by Indian spirits no longer translates, unless you live in a two-story teepee in Topanga Canyon. And while a thousand bands have artfully ripped off Pavement, everyone looks absurd imitating the Doors. They are the rock equivalent of "Don't try this at home."
