Into the Slipstream: The Two Albums of the Post-Morrison Doors
Jim Morrison fucked up. He royally blew it when he overdosed on heroin had a heart attack in his bathtub on July 3, 1971. Pam Courson found him dead, blah blah blah — it’s been rehashed so many times that one would think a movie or 25 would be made of this tale (he said ironically). But — and there is a big, big but here — he did not screw up as bad as the remaining members of the Doors.
In April 1971, a month after Morrison “quit” the band and hot footed it to Paris to chill and lead a poet’s life, the Doors released L.A. Woman, a fantastic album by many standards, and the best one of their careers. It’s a filthy, dirty blues album masquerading as a rock record. Jim’s writing is at its nastiest, his self loathing only surpassed by his appetites for booze, piles of drugs, and teenage girls. He is the crawling king snake. Kind of gross, actu
ally. But you just can’t stop listening. It compels you. By the power of the unwashed leather pants of Jim Morrison, it compels you!
The production, done by the band instead of Paul Rothchild, who departed after the five couldn’t get together on how to advance the demos of some of the tracks that would make it into the final cut of the album, is exquisite in the way it harnessed Los Angeles in 1970, before it got insane with cocaine and heroin in the late Seventies. It’s both booze and horsepower driven. It’s like those weekends where you start drinking around six in the evening and don’t stop until you have to go to work on Monday. Yet during those 48-ish hours, you have a solid buzz but you never topple over the edge. A slightly greasy, belladonic haze. That’s L.A. Woman.
Though Morrison swore off touring (and most venues wouldn’t book the Doors due to the idiotic charges of lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, profanity, and drunkenness, stemming from the infamous Miami, Dade County, concert where a noticeably drug-addled Morrison rambled on), there was the possibility of the next album. Morrison had talked to Doors drummer John Densmore and was open to the band coming back together. The things that could have been.
And then Morrison had to die.
One can imagine what the rest of the Doors thought. Disbelief. Pain. Doubt. Hell, their friend died. But they were still a band. They soldiered on a trio. And man, the results were nothing short of awful.
The first mistake was that Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek decided they would share vocals on the next record. Other Voices (1971) is all over the place thematically, musically, and lyrically. “In the Eye of the Sun,” “Hang on to Your Life,” and “Down on the Farm,” the third written before Morrison’s death, invoke what could have been.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtkqqcbfiYg
Picture Jim oozing these vocals, growling and swaying like the enigmatic, bluesman-cum-lounge singer that he had become. Manzerak tries to hard to be the anti-Jim, and Krieger’s vocals sound weak and thin, lacking any weight and sense of grand accomplishment.
Musically, it didn’t fare much better. The orchestrations were less elaborate, more jazzy, more — more Ray. You can feel him tightening a grip on the creative control of the band instead of being a partner, as he was when Jim insisted they all share credit as the Doors. Other Voices was politely received and garnered enough commercial success to push the band to complete a second album as the Doors.
Full Circle (1972) was the last album by the band as they stepped further away from the line that brought them into the spotlight of rock ‘n’ roll a brief six years earlier. The nine original tracks meander from one genre to the next. World beat, light rock — it’s a mess. Morrison, from the beyond, glaring at the three remaining members as if they had sacrificed the incorrect chicken to gods of music. Trying to make it through this album in one listen is almost impossible to do without multiple water breaks and plenty of fresh air.
It wasn’t until 1978 that Morrison would be resurrected with the Doors for An American Prayer, a very nice collection of Jim’s recorded poetry laid over foundations of groove the band recorded. It’s an inspired piece, fearless in the way the band members accepted that even in death, Jim Morrison was the voice and the heart of the Doors. He sure was.
Until next time, children.
