THE DOORS

THE DOORS steadily opened for this psychedelic band that began in 1965 Los Angeles which took its name from the Aldous Huxley's book "THE DOORS of Perception" taken from a William Blake quote. One of the more interesting and unique bands of the 60s, THE DOORS pretty much caught the world by storm beginning with their eponymous album number 1 and pretty much continued to do so until Jim Morrison's early passing at the age of 27 in 1971.

This album was recorded in 1966 and released right in the year of the Flower Child 1967 and didn't initially shoot up the charts but once "Light My Fire" was released it pretty much captured the spirit of the era and caught on quickly and surprisingly holds up quite well after many decades later due to the musical integrity embedded into the controversial (at the time) subject matter and the ever so erratic behavior of Morrison which pretty much always led the band into fields of public land mines until his demise. The music itself is very well composed melodically, stylistically and true to the era but somehow this sounds great to me despite not being around at the time to take in its temporal splendor.

This brilliance was basically the musical genius of Jim Morrison's poetic prowess mixed with Robby Krieger's musical songwriting genius. The music basically incorporates the best of 60s psychedelic pop hooks and songwriting techniques but adds a healthy dose of cultural interpretation in poetic prose and nice early progressive prototypes such as the excellent album ender "The End." Although they played second fiddle to The Beatles in 1967 only peaking at #2 on the Billboard album charts behind "Sgt. Pepper's?" this album is just as brilliant on a totally different playing field. I was resistant to THE DOORS' music for the longest time just because of the overplayed singles on Classic Rock radio, but once i actually heard their albums as a whole it became clear what all the hype was about. This was a band for the ages and now nearly 50 years later this album still sounds as excellent as when it was released. At least it does to me.