Musically speaking it sounded like it had not paid attention to the innovations of the the past by such albums as theBeatles album Abbey Road, Jimmy Hendrix Electric Ladyland, Miles Davis Bitches Brew. Nor does it appear were the musicians aware of the innovations that occured in 1971, that year albums Can's Tago Mago, the Yes Album, Van derr Graaf Generator H to He, these albums are light years ahead of LA Woman. To me the album falls completely flat, it sounds like it came out just after the release of the song 'Wild Thing' (by the troggs if i'm correct).

In My opinion the only reason people bother with the Doors is firstly Jim Morrison was good looking, lived the wild rock n' roll lifestyle and died young. According to the rulwes of pop culture matrydom if you look good, live hard and die young you are an immortal legend. Also to reinforce that was Oliver Stone's movie, which resulted in Morrison's sanctification to a devine musical authority, and the resulting pop culture magazines eg the Rolling Stone Magazine.

So in the end I think LA Woman was a dud, it was a Turkey when it was released and still is a Turkey today. But because of Morrison's sainthood decleared by the pop culture authrities many people do not question the quality (or lack of) on this album.

After all Saint Morrison is on posters and tee shirts at your local music store.

In my opinion if Jim Morrison was still alive today , the Doors would not have the high status today, and Jim Morrison like Tom Jones wuold be now singing in Las Vegas and considered at the same level as Tom Jone, not the rock 'God' who died young.

As a result I give this LA Woman 2 stars.

Thankyou for your time.

Says the person who gave Revolver 2 stars........

 

I disagree. It's great fun and a magnificent blues rock album.Not a masterpiece like their first two but still great.

Love this LA Woman album!! Easily their best!! Their proggiest if you ask me.

 

 

BroSpence wrote: LA Woman is a fine album.  I had to listen to it about 3 times before I really started to catch on to it.    I don't know why hate Soft Parade. That's a good one too.  Personally, I think the first album is a bit boring.

 

Soft Parade is unfortunately overloaded by strings and horns section. But the title track is pure dynamite. One of my favorite.

 

The debutr album is a bit over-rated, but still quite fine and Strange Days is good too.

 

    ....negativity came into the room.... Stop comparing obsessively. If you compare Beatles, VDGG, Can, Yes, Miles Davis and the others you've mentioned with  The Doors  it doesn't make much sense because their music is so different. I always take each album for what it has to offer. Therefore...

 

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.

 

For those of us "of a certain age," we "were there" to experience the impact some of these ground-breaking, "important" albums and artists (ITCOTCK, SEBTP, Foxtrot, Brain Salad Surgery, Sgt. Pepper's, etc.) made at the time, and we may thus often treat the albums with a certain nostalgic reverence. (We rate with a view to the album's place in rock/prog history, and our own lengthy, happy, youthful history with it.)

 

With NO disrespect intended, I often find myself assuming, when I read some post saying how this or that widely-loved classic is "overrated"  (still hate that word because of what it implies about the album's fans), that the writer must be much younger than I, and just wasn't there to feel what we did when the music was fresh and new, and really stood out from the prevailing norm. (Thus, I tend to take such disparaging, counter to the majority statements with a HUGE "grain of salt.")

 

I also think,  when classic albums inevitably garner a lot of gushing praise, that new listeners may approach them with the unrealistic expectation of being "blown away" (you'll see that a lot in their subsequent reviews: "from all of the previous reviews, I was expecting to be blown away, but I wasn't), or of having some sort of revelatory, life-altering, quasi-religious experience.

 

What do others think? Is there a generational, "you had to be there" kind of phenomenon at work in these cases? we see it time and again: 40-something reviewer gives top rating, teen reviewer knocks it down because 'it didn't blow me away."

 

Or is it just the innate cynicism of youth? Yes, I was a teen, and I have a teenage daughter, so I have some experience with the "everything sucks, especially what you like, Pops) mindset. (I'm not saying this is necessarily a factor here.)

 

 

 

I'm not insulting his intelligence, I'm just trying to say that he wasn't the "poet" that many consider him. I think it's the result of all the media hype surrounding the band and everything about it, praising the guy to sometimes ridiculous extents. Yes, I happen to know a few things about poetry, and no literary critic in their right mind (and sober) would take his poetry seriously. Of course you can like the lyrics, of course they can offer you a compelling scene or a moving image, there's nothing wrong with that. But don't mistake it for serious poetry.

I don't know very much about him (although it's impossible not to know at least a few things when everybody talks about the same guy even after fourty years, as if little had happened in the meantime), so I may be wrong about his reading habits. But his influences are few and generally unfiltered/obvious. Reading does not make you a good writer (not even a good reader for that matter), and neither does a high IQ, so your argument doesn't hold.

Please don't take any of this as an offense; I am simply tired of people making icons out of certain characters for the most inappropriate reasons and on no reasonable grounds. Of course there is more to these things for the people who directly experienced them (like Peter said), but even they should be able to judge objectively after a while.  

 

Yes, Ray Manzarek's literary taste is most definitely a warranty for great poetry.

Of course I know the lyrics, I'm not talking about things I'm not familiar with. There is the occasional nice metaphor, of course (after all, the guy was trying), but there is nothing truly personal in there, he didn't have a poetic voice of his own. And, besides that, writing symbolism in the 1960's wasn't exactly keeping in time with the progress of literature.

Actually, you know, if you want to think he wrote great stuff, go ahead - who am I to try to make you think differently?

 

Haha, I don't know, about ten thousand other things probably. From the old guys, for instance Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Blake, just to name those who probably influenced Morrison and his generation to a various extents. Or Walt Whitman, I don't know... Then T.S. Eliott in the first half of the past century, Dylan Thomas of course - if I were to try and follow some kind of logical path... or maybe not so logical. And then there was Ginsberg, whom I'm not familiar with, but knowing he was more or less the mentor of the so-called "beat" generation, I would guess he was more than his disciples managed to be.

There were many individual voices following valid literary currents in the twentieth century - modernism, surrealism (from which sprang all kinds of strange experiments with form and language like dadaism), later various deconstruction techniques began to be employed, and literature was transformed heavily with the arrival of postmodernism. In a picture of the twentieth century, Morrison didn't create poetry that was historically valid (yes, he was representative of his time and his generation's ideology to a certain extent, but not relevant to the history of literature). His language was not his own and was not up to par with his contemporaries.

I am inclined to agree.

 

Morrison was a ROCK poet, very much "of his time" and a voice for his generation. As with early Yes lyrics, his words were often abstract, and evocative to his "turned-on" contemporary audience, but don't bear too much scrutiny simply as timeless poetry.

 

If future generations ever study Jim's lyrics, I think it will be in history or political science (perhaps psychology) classes, not English literature or poetry classes.

 

I like the lyrics, but I see them for what they are: cool 60s-70s rock lyrics, from a very original, charismatic guy.

 

The words need the music, and the late 60s psychedelic Haight-Ashbury setting, for maximum impact. As with Anderson's Yes lyrics, to view them in isolation, purely as "poetry," is to miss the point and do them a disservice.

 

 

Age is irrelevant to this argument, I know many people of the 60s and 70s generation that consider the Doors overrated partially thanks to Oliver Stones movies, most people in my aga group and younger think the Doors are fantastic, but 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, LA Woman is light years behind these albums. As for my generation and younger have you noticed they arn't cynical about music otherwise they would not buy all the slop that is marketed today.

In time, I've come to find L.A. Woman to be my fave among the Doors' albums because it sounded like their most relaxed, as if they knew they were going to take a "break" once they were done with this one. It also seems to encompass all their styles through their career. Then to top it, it has 3 of their classic "radio" hits - Love Her Madly, L.A. Woman, & Riders on the Storm. True, the music wasn't as "far out" or "progressive" as some that was put out that year. But I don't know that such "competitions" are what musicians should or would worry about, whether in 1971 or any year. And what's more, there is one track that you could always blow away your typical non-Doors' fan's mind with - you wait 'til they've had a few brews, then drop the needle (sorry, anachronistic remark), I mean cue the CD to "Been Down So Long" & scream the first few lines of the lyric along with J M. Then ask them if they actually know what sort of music the Doors played. 
This is the end. of the post. or maybe not ...
P.S. Morrison was one of "rock''s more famous lyricist. Sometimes overrated, sometimes too easily dismissed for his so-called artistic & poetic pretentions. But then, it's not as if we progsters' couldn't name a few of our own wordsmiths who've been tagged with the same critique.
P.P.S. The Doors best known song (arguably) - Light My Fire was completely written by Robbie Krieger, with the final arrangement coming out of group effort. Djou wanna guess how many folks believe Jimmy boy wrote those words

it deserves at least 4 out of 5 stars

this album is the music maturity it's self if you consider the music style of their previous albums

better listen to it again

 

Underrated, if you ask me.

 

"Riders on the Storm" is genius - sure, Jim's voice was trashed, and in many places, you can tell he's not connecting like he used to - the drunken buffoon side of him is strong in places - notably on the title track, but in other places, the whole thing comes together like magic - as with previous Doors albums. The chemistry was still there, even if part of Jim wasn't.

 

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.

I can hardly see any prog link at all. Anyway, The Doors were not a prog band and only their first two hold some psychedelic moments which could be related to prog.

 

I have rated this album with three stars because of its inconsistency and lack of great moments, because IMO four great tracks out of ten are just not enough for a masterpiece.

 

Take care.

 

While I won't presume to judge how much this guy knows about Morrison, I can tell you for certain that he knows jack about Rimbaud and Blake.