ALIVE, SHE CRIED

CAUTION This album has been included on the double CD "In Concert" (released in 1995). If you are interested in The Doors, this is the one you need. "Alive, She Cried" although being a fragment of it, is still a valuable recording. It can be found in the CD format, but it is very expensive. My recommendation therefore is only to bother with "In Concert". This live album is made of several recordings. Actually, the reason it took so long to put these on the market, was not a marketing tool to help the sales of the book "The Doors" by Danny Sugerman (one of their former manager). The surviving trio knew about those tapes but could never found them. They offered a (financial) reward to several storage facilities to eventually find them. And they did. The tapes were actually wrongly labelled and therefore nobody put attention to these for a very long time (almost fifteen years). About dubbing, here is what Ray will say : "We fixed a few glaring errors. There were a few F chords when there should have been G chords on my part ... "whoops" ... "look out there, hold it" ... Inebriation takes over when you're on stage and sometimes you don't quite hit the right chord ... so that's the only thing we did ... correct some glaring errors". This album opens with "Gloria". The rock anthem from the band "Them". Krieger recalls about the date : "Late '66 before we really made an album or anything and then ... so what happened was we were doing a show in L.A. at the Aquarius Theater at our soundcheck. We were gonna record the show you know, so at the soundcheck we ended up doing "Gloria" and that's where this cut came from. I only have one source from a concert at the Aquarius (excellent sound by the way) but it dates from 1969, so I do not know about the one Krieger is referring to. About "Them", he will add : "Well, we played the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with Them when Van Morrison was still with Them, and one night at, I think it was the last night of the gig, we all got pretty soused and we ended up all getting on stage together and playing "Gloria". It's too bad nobody taped it". Lyrics from this song are rather sexual-oriented (you can read more about them in my review of "In Concert". This version of The Doors is very good and fits perfectly with their repertoire. The version of "Light My Fire" is really brilliant (clocking at almost ten minutes, which according to Ray is the longest available. He said : ""Light My Fire". The longest version of "Light My Fire" - 10 minutes; 9 minutes and 51 seconds worth of music. Jim does "The Graveyard Poem" in there ... A great moment of rock music. "You Make Real" is a great and violent rock song (almost punkish during the first part). The rhythm is tuely rocking like hell. It is a confirmation (if needed) how great the band was on stage. There is no comparison with the studio version available on "Morrison Hotel" which sounded like an old revival song.

"Texas Radio and the Big Beat" featured here, is an earlier release of the track from their last album "L.A. Woman". As Krieger will mention in an interview (1983), this might well be their first ever recordings of that song (1968). It will evolve quite a bit till 1971 to give birth to the full track as we know it.

"Love Me Two Times" was recorded for a TV live session (in Denmark). During the same interview I already have referred to, Ray will add : "Yeah, it's live from TV. They were filming it and recording it at the same time" while Robbie recalls :"It's ten o'clock in the morning. No people there. It's quite odd really".

"Little Red Rooster" is a cover version from a song written by Willie Dixon (Led Zep will also cover a few of his songs). It will be performed with the folk singer John B. Sebastian (which I know only from his Woodstock appearence). This song is a heavy bluesy one : with sliding guitar, harmonica and tutti quanti. Like early Led Zep bluesy ones (not talking about their own like "Since I've Been Loving You" of course) have never been my cup of tea. Same feeling with one. Still, Manzarek adds some nice keyboards here, which makes this track a little more bearable. This track was recorded at Felt Forum, New York (no dates provided).

The album closes with "Moonlight Drive". This version is also rather different from the studio recording ("Strange Days"). Almost double in lenght. The slide guitar effects are more in the foreground and the piano sound has been replaced by the typical organ sound. Nice though.

Three stars for this good document.