Doors LA Woman grossly overrated

Cheesecakemouse wrote: Dick Heath wrote: Jim Garten wrote: Cheesecakemouse wrote: ...compare LA Woman to everything else happening in 1971 and it is quite a poor album compare it to the Yes album or Meddle by Pink Floyd Why compare? LA Woman is a completely different album to Meddle or The Yes Album by a completely (stylistically, culturally & most importantly, musically) different kind of band; you could just as easily compare, say, Zappa's 200 Motels and Aphrodites Child's 666... 2 more prog albums released in 1971 but with no other connection.   I agree, it is no-brainer to make such parallels. It is only the liberals on this site who employ the term progressive as an (nearly) all encompassing definition for rock. And it is an age thing to some extent, in that if you were around at the time of release, LA Woman was a classic West Coast Rock-LA sub-division LP, and nobody made comparisons with the emerging British prog scene, that was different rock - although the encompassing term  'underground music' may have been used. So it is plain daft to compare this album musically or content-wise with concurrent ones released by Yes or Floyd (who were still known as a psychedelic band at the time and separate from the newer progressive music groups like Yes).   Make comparisons with the concurrent Jefferson Airplane release (post-Volunteers - JA in rebellion), as the music press did in those days: The Doors and JA tour of  the UK  was unofficially known as the battle of West Coast bands, LA v SF divisions), or Spirit's 12 Dreams (IMHO Spirit's belated psychedelic masterpiece, made before the band fell apart - in part to become the pop rock Jo Jo Gunne).  And it is unwise to compare with any Zappa output, since Zappa had essentially rejected that West Coast hippy freak thing - as had Velvet Underground. If you want to compare against a mainstream US prog band of the period you'll have difficulties, after Touch (1968/9) there was a bit of gap before Todd Rundgren's Utopia or Kansas got into that scene.   What I do remember was the LA Woman LP was greeted as the Doors doing more blues  less psychedelia - LA Woman/Riders was released as a double sided single a couple times by Elektra to reasonable sales.   BTW Jim Morrison had put on a lot of weight because of his booze habit  by this time and at least one Doors' biography suggests the beard was grown to hide his double chins. Less of a pretty boy. What you all are saying is that you can't compare anything with anything so therefore by all your logic you should rate all your reviews 5 stars since you can't compare it anything else. And while your all at this what are your views about hip hop remeber you can't compare.

You're blowing what they said completely out of proportion.  They said you can't compare L.A. Woman (a blues rock album) to Fragile or  Meddle which were both in a completely different genre.  That doesn't mean you can't compare LA Woman to Strange Days, or LA Woman to some Canned Heat album.  You can still compare what you like vs. what you don't like.  And what you're saying about giving everything 5 stars makes no sense either because in order to decide whether something is good you do not need to compare it to something else. 

My views on Hip-Hop are that it is a wonderful thing be it Hip-hop graffiti, b-boy, music.  As long as it sounds good to me.  See? I didn't compare what I think of hip-hop to anything and still noted that I like it. 

If I were to recommend it thru comparison I could say something like

--You may like west-coast hip-hop if you enjoy the fusion of  verses and choruses with various rhyme schemes set to original compositions that may or may not sample various songs.  West coast hip-hop music is similar to the funk music of the 70s.  Parliament/Funkadelic was a heavy influence on the genre and you could easily compare the use of synthesizers in the music of Dr. Dre to that of George Clinton's projects.  Furthermore, the beats and rhymes of west coast hip-hop music and most all hip-hop music for that matter are very funky.  One can even argue that hip-hop music and rock and roll are very similar as both genres make use of rhymes and depending on the rock band, a good groove. --

When trying to compare the Doors to Yes and Floyd this is about as much as can be done:

--On L.A. Woman, the Doors focused more heavily on their blues roots.  Having originally fused both blues and psychedlia together on their early recordings, the band was then falling apart and I suppose back to the blues seemed like a good idea.  At the same time bands like Yes and Pink Floyd were experimenting with different styles too.  Pink Floyd had initally started as a psychedelic band but was expanding out to a more mature and sometimes more focused style of space rock.  They were still drawing on long song forms, but the psychedelic nature of the songs had changed probably in part to the loss of Syd Barret's mad ideas.  Yes was another progressive rock band that had more influence from the classical field.  All 3 styles are from the Rock genre, but separate into different categories.  Even though each band has typical rock instrumentation they speak different languages.  The Doors find it more fit in speaking like Howlin' Wolf, while Yes was more in touch with Crosby Stills & Nash and Brahms, and Pink Floyd  combined experimental composers and folk/blues.--

TheProgtologist wrote: Uroboros wrote: TheProgtologist wrote: he was a brilliant lyricist and poet.   No, he was not. He was a kid who had probably read some Rimbaud and most definitely some Blake and thought it would be cool to mumble something in a similar style as lyrics for his songs. He built up some kind of childish, incoherent imagery with lizards and stuff and he probably also thought shamans were cool or something, cause he kept bringing that up if I recall well. Like the Mercury Rev guys nicely put it in a song some time ago, "I'm alive! she cried - but I don't know what it means". He was not a poet, and I wouldn't call him an inspired lyricist either, although you might argue that some things sounded decent enough in the context of one song or another.   "He was a kid who had probably read some Rimbaud and most definitely some Blake"   Do you know anything about the man?He was a voracious reader with a near genius level IQ,so don't insult his intelligence.   What you think of any of his work is all a matter of taste and opinon,isn't it?I like his poetry and his lyrics,and the imagery he used.   I'm a blue collar guy,I guess my tastes aren't as "refined" as yours.

The title track, 'Love her madly' and 'Riders on the storm' are truly great tracks, the latter being a masterpiece.  The rest of the album is pretty much 'filler', but by anyone's standards it is still a pretty decent album.