Classic Album Reviews

Storm Doors of Perception

Listening again to LA Woman

Of course I was aware of The Doors in 1967. Who of that time wouldn’t have been since “Light My Fire” spread everywhere? Even in Birmingham, Alabama, where they burned Beatles’ records, a song about igniting sexual craving couldn’t be denied. The Doors played Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium, and given that I was barely eleven, I can only imagine how they took the stage, playing, I think, on the same bill as Paul Revere and the Raiders, because rock is rock, and audiences loved to hear different pitches of Big Beat.

I’m gonna skip over the rest of their active years for a minute so that I can say that it was only in the early 1980s that I truly fell in love with The Doors. I acquired every LP I could, most of which were easily found in used or budget bins in whichever record store hailed me from the University of Tennessee’s infamous strip.

I would have had a hard time naming a favorite Doors’ song then. I kind of favored “Love Street,” off their 1968 Waiting For the Sun LP. But then, Soft Parade gave me “Runnin’ Blue,” a minor hit from ’69, and go on and name the others for yourself: “Touch Me,” “Indian Summer,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “Peace Frog/Blue Sunday.”

Whatever grad school gathering I found myself in the middle of, along with The Clash, The B-52s, Elvis Costello, and Bowie (always Bowie), someone would put a Doors record on the turntable, and what with the pot and the beer and the strange days attempts to see if literature could be turned into love, we all wafted away on Jim Morrison’s voice, and the tighter rhythms of Krieger, Manzarek, and Densmore.

How can I explain those nights except to say that when you remember yourself at 23 or 24, living out a dream of imagination and mind expansion, when a voice starts chanting about the music being over, well, maybe I was the one to turn out the lights.

On the hill of Ft. Sanders, where all the cool kids lived, you really didn’t need those indoor beams because in the beyond there were enough glowing crystal ships to mark the unknown you just had to walk into as you figured a path home or to someone you didn’t exactly know but wanted to’s apartment, likely in an old Victorian house chopped into slum lord firetraps.

I’m saying that The Doors in 1980–1 were as much my life soundtrack as anyone else who entered my rock and roll portal.

So, stepping through it back to 1971, I come to my absolute favorite Doors’ LP and song: LA Woman and “Riders on the Storm.”

I want to pause here and have you realize that The Doors had quite a number of Top 40 hits, and two of these came from this LP: “Storm,” of course, but also “Love Her Madly.” And I don’t want to denigrate anything else on the radio in 1971 because there was magic in the air, but honestly, how could any song compete with Morrison taking us down a love street that he, at least, understood clearly, despite the fact of impending or current madness?

I’m not a musical historian, but even I understood back then that The Doors used a carnival, Kurt Weill-influenced score for hurtling strange organ and piano tunes at us.

I also knew then that almost every Doors LP included an anthem — something long and unsettling, whether it’s “The End” or “When The Music’s Over.” On LA Woman, it’s the title song, which beats “Riders” by a mere 35 seconds in length, but is equal in power, though of a different kind.

Listen:

If the album contained just this one song, it would still be an album worthy of owning. Its opening menace transforms into a screaming lament. Is it better experienced on acid? I’ll get back to you on that.

Because though I love the others, “Hyacinth House” and “The WASP (Texas radio and the Big Beat),” I have to get to “Riders on the Storm” before the music’s really over on my own turntable.

When this song hit in the summer of ’71, my grandmother had died, and my church youth group kept taking trips to old waterfalls, chair-lift overlooks, and tube-drifting on the riverbanks near Eastaboga.

In the cars to these sites, “Riders on the Storm” seemed to play perpetually. Yes, I was only fifteen, but it didn’t take an adult or someone with more experience to get this song, its restless images, and its desire to move on, or at least to see what could be out there on the horizon:

Jim Morrison died four days before my grandmother did, and so listening to his voice, during this summer storm time seemed even more chilling. And even then, I kept thinking,

“nothing more, nothing more.”

It’s a shitty feeling when you understand that what you love is gone. For our beloved artists, we will never have more, never know what else.

For our family, lights turn out, and we eventually move into the bedroom where we used to watch a grandmother paint. Her shadow stays, even when lying in her old bed and listening to the AM radio on the nightstand — the same nightstand where my turntable now rests — I hear the opening bars, that piano calling.

The storm outside, or within that box, forever brewing.

🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸

Morrison chanted The West Is The Best on “The End.” I think you are, and so are The Riff and Kevin Alexander.

Any thoughts Steven Hale, JP Timko, Alex Markham, Sarah Paris, Paul Combs, Chris Zappa, Anthony Overs, Robert Gowty, If Ever You’re Listening, Nicole Brown, David Acaster, Jessica Lee McMillan, or Jeffrey Harvey?

From the album vault: