Pedalling an all-together darker take on all this were the
Doors. Known to everyone except his mother as the Lizard King, James Douglas
Morrison was psychedelia’s own beat poet. He looked from the outside in at the
hippie ideal, and one only needs to read the lyrics to ‘The End’ to see that – ‘lost
in a Roman wilderness of pain/all the children are insane’ spoke volumes of
a bleak world deluded in a haze of joint smoke and flower petals.
Recorded on the 5th July 1968, this concert received a partial, posthumous release in 1987. It does promote a grumble from the off, a
handful of the tracks here having already appeared on other releases, but this
CD/vinyl/DVD sees the show appear in its entirety for the first time. From intro to, err, ‘The End’, the restoration process has
done wonders to these, frankly, bootleg-standard recordings. Just three years
old and shining brightly, the band grasp the milestone with a carefully
constructed setlist. On heavily improvised cuts ‘Back Door Man’ and ‘Light My
Fire’, Jim’s poetic flights of fancy are reeled in, never becoming trying. What
beggars the belief is the volume of quality material the band possessed at this
point; in four years they released six studio albums, a feat unimaginable
today. American radio staple ‘Hello, I
Love You’ does a wonderful job of reinventing the Kinks’ ‘All Day and All of the Night’ into
something much more sensual; Morrison’s alley cat croon comes alive with the
song’s stampeding conclusion.
Any pharmaceuticals involved are on the backburner, with
Morrison in a cheerful mood and drummer John Densmore insisting they adhere to
a proper setlist; practically sacrilege for a Doors performance. The hits and
the esoteric reside together as ‘Spanish
Caravan’ provides the perfect counterpoint to their bouncy cover of Brecht’s
‘Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)’. Morrison’s
schizophrenic vocal prowess is given room to manoeuvre, between a feral howl
and lilting, understated croon. Roman candles and firecrackers really make you jump during ‘Light my Fire’, as if you are there,
among the 18, 000-strong crowd, checking to see if your shoes are still intact.
Like all good rollercoasters, everything comes crashing down
in ‘The End’ – as with the studio
version, it moves uneasily from its front section through near-silence beneath
the Morrison narrative. The tension becomes almost unbearable, before reaching
the top of the rollercoaster, crashing towards a thrilling coda.
Yes, at least a third of this release already exists, and
yes, they were never going to please everyone – ditties ‘A Little Game’ and ‘Horse
Latitudes’ could have been dispensed with in favour of superior studio tracks
– but as a sonic document of a truly unique band with the world in its grasp,
this is a triumph. Let them alter your perception.
