“Jesus, we do sound like the Doors!” For someone who long refused to extend his record collection any further back than 1979’s Unknown Pleasures, this statement from Joy Division bassist Peter Hook always struck me as perplexing. Yes, obviously, neither Jim Morrison nor Ian Curtis lived to see their 30th birthdays, but rain-swept Mancunian post-punk vs. sun-kissed Californian psychedelica? Chalk and cheese, surely. But it just goes to show what I know, because after a month of subjecting myself to tortured proto-goth jazz music, I can confirm that the Doors indeed marked the point when the Apollonian day of besuited Beatlemania was first divided by the Dionysian night of rock-to-top-yourself-to. Still, the following selected playlist is a bit predictable, because if you want my opinion, the gulf between the Doors’ historic highs and forgettable lows is glaring. That’s what happens when you pressure the artists into releasing new material every six months, plus they occasionally die.
1. Break on Through
This menacing hymn to Byronian romanticism is how the Doors introduced themselves and, in a way, it’s all here; the slow, unsettling build; the feral explosion; the “other side” of pure jouissance where language, reason, the name-of-the-father, and the pre-frontal cortex have been binned off in favour of the lustful lizard brain.
2. Light My Fire
Jim wasn’t very good at love songs – swampland soothsayers who speak in tongues rarely are – but this is maybe the closest he comes to one. Unsurprisingly, he equates amor with emotional and experiential intensity – lighting fires, getting higher – rather than taking out the bins on a Tuesday morning to make Pamela’s day easier. The real star of the show is Ray Manzarek’s organ, which traverses the mix like an arrant arachnid.
3. The End
Overblown, self-serious, and as always, Jim hovers between mad-eyed shaman and precocious adolescent who read William Blake and feels exceptionally pleased with himself about it. Still, “The End” is an affectingly chilling comedown to conclude the debauchery of the debut record. It starts as a subdued, hypnotic breakup song but, by the last verse, the barbarians are sacking Rome, and all the children are insane. Someone forgot to take their medication again.
4. Strange Days
The Doors’ celebrated debut is a crashing, cataclysmic, drunken bar crawl across the deserted highways of the Californian wilderness. Strange Days is the aftermath; a sinister, psychedelic funfair, its title track a ghoulish rendering of the collateral damage from the flower power fallout, an entire generation whose casual joys were destroyed by too much of a good time and Naked Lunch.
5. People Are Strange
The legions of brain-fried zombies produced by one bad trip too many shamble into view once more on the macabre “People Are Strange”, a lopsided vaudevillian dancehall skip that I do not recommend anyone listen to while walking around the Frankfurter Bahnhofsviertel.
6. Touch Me
Strings? A brass band? “I’m gonna love you til the stars fall from the sky?” Which cruise liner are we on and what’s Jim Morrison doing at the breakfast bar? The prom queen fluttered her eyelids at the leather-jacket wearing, cigarette-caning bad boy, and now he’s started listening to Robert Knight. Typical. Still, “Touch Me” makes the playlist on sheer incongruity alone.
7. Roadhouse Blues
After the bizarre digression of The Soft Parade, the Doors played the classic “back to basics” card for Morrison Hotel. In my opinion, though, they overdid it, and the result is altogether too rockabilly. “Roadhouse Blues” is a case in point; engagingly riotous, but it’s missing some of their brooding, literary pretentiousness.
8. Love Her Madly
Said brooding, literary pretentiousness is very much back on the menu for L.A. Woman, the Doors’ final L.P. before Jim’s untimely death at the age of 27. The entire album is haunted by the spectre of the consuming mother and, though “Love Her Madly” is unusually conventional for the philosopher-poet Lizard King, the romantic distress seems especially acute, even by his reliably tormented standards.
9. L.A. Woman
There she is again; the beguiling, cigarette-smoking dame to kill for; a mysterious spectre of forbidding femininity spooking freeways, midnight alleys, topless bars, and seedy motels. Jim sees her ghost everywhere and wants to join her, I fear, but at least the morbid fuck first bequeathed us this epic, careening refraction of his Oedipus complex through the gloomy prism of a Philip Marlowe novel.
10. Riders on the Storm
After half a decade of fire and fury, the Doors’ Morrison-era oeuvre culminates with an eerie blues-noir leviathan, a tale of lonely desert roads patrolled by remorseless killers, a sense that civilisation itself hangs in the balance. Crumbs. “Riders on the Storm” is such an elegant artistic full stop that the rumours of Jim faking his own death seem momentarily credible.