The Doors - Morrison Hotel

When I got to high school, I seemed to need to get a New Favorite Band, as it was pretty clear that Yes wasn’t quite going to cut it with the ladies.  Besides, I was trying to find something really cool.  The kind of band that when I was talking to people older than me would be impressed that I knew inside and out, and loved, and that people my age and younger would be impressed in my devotion to a sort of unheard (at least anymore) kind of band.  I don’t know why I decided The Doors would fit that bill, but until I really got into Punk, they bridged the gap between Yes and The Sex Pistols nicely for me.  I think this was the first album by them I bought, and Morrison Hotel is still probably what I consider to be their best album.

What ended up happening is that about the same time I got into The Doors, everyone my age started digging them.  So much so that by the time I was a senior, Danny Sugarman wrote a book about Jim Morrison and The Doors were actually selling more records than they ever had.  So for me, The Doors were like one of my first pet bands that went out and got uber popular.  I kind of dropped out of that fandom when I got married (pretty young by these days standards, but if it were 1929 I’d have had a long bachelorhood!).  Mostly because I slowly decided Jim was kind of an idiot, and I felt that way for a long time.

But time heals and all that.  So right now I’m listening to the same copy of Morrison Hotel I owned in high school, and it must have come into my collection after I bought my first Dual turntable, because it’s in great shape.  I’m listening to it the way I listened to most of my records at home, on headphones.  I used my speakers a lot too, but I loved my headphones.  They were some kind of Radio Shack branded things  made by Koss.  I had them for years and they were pretty good.  I just got a pair of Grado’s  and there’s probably no comparison, but I’ve got to say that the bite to Robbie Krieger’s guitar that just pierces through everything is really satisfying.  Especially at the moment.  I really didn’t listen to these guys anymore for years and years, but I never got rid of their records because I paid for them with my own money back when it was damned hard for me to come up with record money, and I hoped that some day (like today maybe) I’d sit down and listen to some Doors and hear some of what made me really think these guys were the shit.

I’ve really got to think a lot of it had to do with Robbie’s guitar.  Sure, I probably haven’t let Roadhouse Blues play all the way through on the radio in 20 years, but man, I just played it twice!  That guitar sounds like a switchblade through a leather jacket.  It’s just a great noise.  I think it’s part of being an American kid to feel that I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer is one of the most profound statements in Rock for at least a few years.  I guess we called this stuff “classic” for a reason back then.  Robbie kills it on Peace Frog, too.

Ray Manzarek has to get some credit, too.  I know, he can be hard to take in interviews these days (I’d rather hear him talk about X but he only talks about The Doors), but he sounds pretty cool on this record.  He plays nice blues piano on The Spy and he’s a little understated with that merry-go-round gimmick he could get going sometimes.  I tend to think that John Densmore was certainly as good a drummer as you were gonna find anywhere back then, and I really like how he holds Queen of the Highway together.

Now, the big star is always Jim Morrison with these guys, and I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that for a poet he was a pretty good rock ‘n roll singer.  I think a lot of people in that field are much better writers (at least of rock songs), and his poetry seems more than a bit pretentious to me (but seventeen year old me would have wanted to kick my ass for that).  But Jim had a great voice for a rock ‘n roll singer.  As Cheetah Chrome would have put it, he had balls.  I mean, Maggie M’Gill is a pretty pedestrian little blues shuffle, and Jim’s lyrics are mediocre at best, but I think it’s every bit as great a way to end the album as Roadhouse Blues was to open it.  It’s all Jim that propels it to something else, and I have got to give the guy credit for that.

My record is in nice shape, too.  It’s not an original pressing, it has a butterfly label instead of a red one but it does have the nice gatefold sleeve.  You can hear a little surface noise.  Maybe I need to clean it, but the jacket is pretty much perfect.  No seam splits, no mashed corners.  I did a good job taking care of this one since 1977 or 78!