The Doors embodied foundation rock’s bacchanalian abandon, whereby all those little boys whose daddies didn’t or shouldn’t have come back from the war proceeded to prove Lacan’s dictum about the baleful effects of growing up without properly imbibing the patriarchal signifier. And speaking of patriarchal signifiers, I’m generally not all that keen on ramshackle 60s rock that was recorded in five minutes through a biscuit tin; I firmly believe that everything should sound like Duran Duran. Still, it would be peevish and disingenuous to deny that James and the lads wrote some colossal songs, that their drunken desert rock mien remains compelling, and that a lot of my favourite bands probably wouldn’t exist without them.
Mixed feelings then, like always, but enough about me, let’s talk about Jim; 1971’s L.A. Woman was the Doors’ sixth album, their last with the Lizard King, and thus, to all intents and purposes, their last full stop, if we overlook their three unfortunate post-Morrison releases. And by this point, from what I can gather, poor old Jim was fucked; drunk, bloated, and mere months from death at the tender age of 27. All the ingredients for a legendary rock sendoff were thus in place, and to tell you the truth, they kind of pulled it off, though I hasten to add that much of L.A. Woman is basic bar-band R&B.
By 1971, everyone and their mother had heard this kind of music a million times before, and even the Stones, purveyors of white-boys-do-blues par excellence, had taken a step away from it with the meatier Sticky Fingers. But the Doors also occupied more singular territory due to their two defining and most conspicuous features; Ray Manzarek’s demented electric piano, a jarring infusion of wide-eyed, coked-up insanity into the customary smoky underground nightclub frequented by suicidal middle-aged men and vampy failed actresses looking to entrap them; and, of course, Morrison himself, his Lizard King persona, his battered baritone vocals, and his sometimes preposterous, sometimes prescient lyrics.
By 1971, Jim was less the shrieking, shamanic swamp cult leader of the self-titled debut, more a bored, blasted, bloated wastrel who’d spent too many nights on the tiles, eaten too much fried chicken, and been in too many court rooms after repeatedly getting his dick out on stage. The psychedelic seer is still perceptible on songs like “L’America” and “The WASP”, forbidding meditations on the buried history of American colonialism and racism but, on the whole, Jim is busted. That’s not to say he’s mailing it in, though, because the washed up tone suits the record, underscoring the culmination of the Lizard King character arc.
It’s fitting that one of the songs here is about a snake, because that’s what Jim is by this point; a slithering, somnolent serpent, heaving itself through the streets of Los Angeles at 3AM in search of some doe-eyed herbivore to swallow whole. Or be swallowed whole by, because the consuming mother remains a key theme of the Doors’ thoroughly mental lyrics; unobtainable femme fatales who set fire to Jim’s life, but who he nonetheless “loves madly”, and who, even after he’s bagged them, remain tormentingly “unreachable” as they lie next to him in some seedy bedsit.
It’s not clear if these women are the cause or merely the effect of the flipside of the Lizard King persona; the consuming despair, the restless Changeling who cannot settle, who has been “down so goddamn long that it looks like up to me”, and who, on the jarringly sunny “Hyacinth House”, suddenly declares his chidlike need for a “brand new friend” to deliver him from his malaise. It all comes together on the crashing, cataclysmic, cocaine-fueled title track which, with its scattergun references to deserted freeways, midnight alleys, and loose, beguiling broads, so vividly invokes the frontier sleaze of 1970s Los Angeles that it might as well be directed by Roman Polanski.
And this is the key to L.A. Woman’s enduring appeal, because it’s hard to resist a record that is so utterly of its time and place, and which so completely conjures the mythology of rock’n’roll, right down to its architect’s impending and untimely death. This is all signposted on the closer, the eerily calm and profoundly sinister “Riders on the Storm”, with its chilling imagery of killers haunting lonely desert roads, and the feminine duty to resist the encroaching darkness through the civilisation-sustaining power of childbirth. As an epitaph to the Lizard King, it’s disconcertingly fitting and, of course, morbidly portentous, almost as if Jim saw the writing on the wall.
Rating: * * * *
Standout track: “Riders on the Storm”