#0093: The Doors []

Aside from Oliver Stone's film, I fucking hate The Doors.  Mostly because they are as overrated as Bob Dylan.  The more you try to push something in my face, the more I will openly detest and ridicule it.  That attitude has connotations far beyond music but I don't wanna open that particular can of worms here.
I borrowed a Doors album from the library when I was a teenager.  It was painfully dull.  I'm gonna try to open my mind on this but, y'no, good intentions and everything.

To say I fucking hate The Doors is to be a little misleading as I am quite happy to sing along to the radio or the jukebox when Light My Fire, Riders On The Storm or the opening track on this deluge of shit, Break On Through is playing but here's the thing.  The songs are just not good enough. 

Morrison writes a short poem and maybe the band has a jam that he fits that over.  It doesn't really matter.  There has been no thought put into developing the idea any further than the core hook and its lead up.  There are plenty of songs I love that are structurally very simple but a ton of work has been done on the arrangement to keep them interesting.

Break On Through's opening keyboard sound is gutsy and the riff is as strong as any Ray Charles or AC/DC intro you can name.  Words start, singer can sing, what's the problem?  Why is it that by the end of only two and half minutes I've already switched off?  It's the keyboards.  The cunt wants a solo on everything.  Is he the only guy that can?  Or is he the only guy who _thinks_ he can?  If you don't have players who are adept at soloing then don't put solos in your fucking songs.  Play to your strengths. 

The keyboard solo on this is pitifully inept.  He insists on using this high reedy organ noise that passes thru my ears like a knitting needle doused in drain cleaner.  He then just stabs hamfistedly at the keyboard or plays these widdly widdly patterns - they're not even runs - just very small 3-5 note things that are normally used as ad hoc ornaments to embellish a wider tune. 

On Soul Kitchen, he keeps jabbing away at the keys like as if he's got nothing to say but feels he has to talk to be present.  He keeps doing this while there's a guitar solo going on that I can't hear cuz he's playing an accompaniment with a soloing voice and it's too loud in the mix.  It's just fucking atrocious.

So much for my restraint but barely six minutes in and I'm already on the edge of rage.  The Crystal Ship is only bearable cuz it's a piano solo not that infernal organ but it is at least a track I sort of like all the way thru.

Another couple of songs in and I realise I've been sold a pup on the vocals as well.  He can sing in that he has a strong voice but he doesn't actually have any feel for key.  This is why when he begins any tune, he's coming in on the same note (relatively speaking).

Light My Fire is no exception.  Quite aside from it being a strained and eventually awkward trip thru the rhyming dictionary, that good old minor third vocal is hammered well and truly into the ground so far you'd have a better chance of finding Keith Bennett.  The keyboard intro is proficient and tuneful and the mix is okay but then it goes into that extended instrumental section and keyboard solo (which I'm sure everyone is familiar with) and I'm just ready to peel, chop and cook these motherfuckers.

And it doesn't let up.  The latter half of this flagrant blasphemy of any musical term applied to it continues to needle my brain with that clingy, wittering girlfriend of a sound from Back Door Man all the way to Take It As It Comes. 

The definition of ambivalence is the relief I felt knowing I was on the last track and the realisation that it is eleven minutes and forty three seconds long. 

Its title, "The End" is dripping with irony, for it seems not to have one.  After about two and a half minutes of Morrison's directionless moaning, the guitar attempts a sitar impression that more readily puts me in mind to check him for signs of a stroke.  By four minutes, I am on the verge of tears.  The drums are doing the most work.  They are at least staying in time.  The twat on the keyboard is just aimlessly wiping his fingers across the keys with no real care or attention to what the drummer is doing.  The bass player could be unconscious for all we know.  Over all this, Morrison defies all rhythm, meter, tone and expression with words I don't even want to listen to.  You know when you hate someone so much and every word they speak just makes you want to smash their stupid face in with the nearest thing that weighs more than a shoe? 

Eight minutes forty.  Drums speed up.  Do not kid yourself into thinking this will somehow cause the remaining three minutes to pass any more quickly.  The piece comes to a cataclysmic crescendo at ten minutes and should stop there.  But Morrison comes back in with one more verse.  Couldn't tell you if it's a repeat of the first or not cuz I'm sitting in a pool of my own piss right now, waiting to be sectioned.