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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
The
Best Of The Doors
The Best of The Doors delivers exactly what it promises.
Rather than relying solely on the hits, this collection
also mines the darker, and often richer, recesses of The
Doors material resulting in a fairly representative statement.
The hits are here: "Light My Fire" with Ray
Manzarek's keyboards on a dizzy, psychedelic spree; "People
Are Strange," with Morrison's tortured psyche barely
being held in check; "L.A. Woman," with its
bluesy sexuality. More important, favorites of fans are
here, like the controversially (at the time) explicit
"The End," which was one of the first of Morrison's
forays into narrative poetry. In hits like "Break
on Through," "Hello I Love You," "Roadhouse
Blues," and others, The Doors melded psychedelia,
blues, hard-edged rock, and poetry from the edge like
no other band before. The Best of The Doors is a trip
in every sense of the word. --Steve Gdula
Morrison Hotel
The next-to-last Doors album, recorded prior to Jim Morrison's
still mystery-shrouded death in a Parisian bathtub, eschewed
much of the band's previous penchant for baroque musical,
poetic, and philosophical pretensions (this was, after
all, the back-to-roots era of the Beatles' Let It Be,
the Stones' Let It Bleed, and Dylan's Nashville Skyline).
Instead, the Doors circa 1970 wisely seeped themselves
in a bluesy, no-frills approach that might have hinted
at creative exhaustion in a lesser band. Instead, the
Doors of "Roadhouse Blues" and "Peace Frog"
reinvented themselves into arguably one of the greatest
bar bands ever, with Morrison's well-documented demons
frolicking in a welcome new ambience. "Waiting for
the Sun" and "Ship of Fools" may hearken
back to the band's cabalistic and Kurt Weill leanings,
respectively, but framed in an edgier, more effective
way. --Jerry McCulley
The
Doors
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.
--Billy Altman
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