[Today: The Doors go out on a high note...]
The Doors consistently served up an apocalyptic mixture of blues, booze, and scorched earth. In particular, lead singer Jim Morrison seemed hell-bent on taking the self-destructive, larger than life path of most resistance – fighting with police officers, agitating Ed Sullivan, drinking himself into vocal incompetence, and berating his audiences like an overbearing schoolmaster. On L.A. Woman he sounds like a fighter who’s gone ten rounds – slurring and bleary-eyed, surviving on guts and instinct and a swollen ego – and he never sang better. The best blues are lived-in, and by 1970, the self-anointed Lizard King had brawled and drank and jackassed his way to emeritus bluesman status.
On album opener ‘Changeling’ he belts out some of the toughest vocals of his rarely soft career. By all accounts Morrison was an inconsistent performer in the studio, and often relied on alcohol to help him get his vocal takes. But here he leaves nothing on the table, lashing into every syllable of every song. “Well, I’ve been down so Goddamn long/That it looks like up to me” he sings on ‘Been Down So Long’, and he doesn’t sound like he’s making it up. To prove the point, he turns in a near-definitive take of John Lee Hooker’s ‘Crawling King Snake’.
This album is filled with minor Doors classics – ‘L’America’ ‘The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)’ and ‘Love Her Madly’, to name but three. But it’s also home to two very major classics – the title track and ‘Riders On The Storm’. ‘L.A. Woman’ is perhaps the quintessential song about the City of Angels, a searing, majestic, venomous song that sounds three times better when played in a speeding convertible on a hot day. Meanwhile ‘Riders On The Storm’ has Morrison putting on the killer mask and imagining what it’s like to become unhinged, with a brain that’s “squirming like a toad”.
The title track contains the phrase “Mr Mojo Risin” which was an anagram for “Jim Morrison”. But Morrison was very much on a descending arc, and this album was released a mere four months before he died of a heart attack in a bathtub in Paris. On L.A. Woman he sings like a man who knows that time is running out, with minds still to be turned, and cities yet unburned.
Listen: L.A. Woman
Tags: Jim Morrison, L.A. Woman, The Doors
19 June 2008 at 4:05 pm |
I love this record. Actually, it was my second RECORD ever…my mom gave it to me after she gave me the 1st Jertho Tull LP… MASTERPIECE… genius of course… dead unfortunetly…damn
30 August 2008 at 11:37 pm |
[...] ships wreck, and flirtations are bandied about. This is an album with a dark side a mile deep – the type of music that was seemingly invented and perfected in Los Angeles. But in spite of its dark subject matter, [...]
17 November 2008 at 3:48 pm |
“The Doors: Live At The Matrix 2-CD Set
Live in San Fransisco March 7 & 10, 1967
Available 11/18″
13 October 2009 at 9:39 am |
[...] Segovia | The Segovia Collection The Band | Music From Big Pink The Doors | L.A. Woman Nick Drake | Pink Moon Slayer | Diabolus In Musica The Benedictine Monks Of Santo Domingo de Silos [...]
29 October 2009 at 1:10 pm |
[...] In America is the evil twin to The Doors 1971 album L.A. Woman. At the outset of the 70’s, Jim Morrison looked around and found America severely wanting, [...]
12 February 2011 at 10:24 am |
[...] a big league death wish, and a dump truck full of symbolism. But he was a first-rate rock star, a bluesman at heart, and possessed a genuinely compelling speaking voice. An American Prayer was released in November [...]