L.A. Woman (40th Anniversary) - The Doors Album Review

The Doors

Image: link

Album Review

Within four months of the release of L.A. Woman the Lizard King was dead, left lying in that comparatively unremarkable plot of ground in Père Lachaise Cemetery. For all we know he may even still be there, or if those conspiracy theorists are to be believed he could well have wound up working in a gas station somewhere in Oregon. Forty years on, whether dead or alive, Jim Morrison would surely look back on The Doors' final album knowing damn well that it is still their most wholly satisfying work, a recording that transcends time and place, life and death. It tells the story of the blues, in Morrison's own view, the original blues. Listened to in retrospect it is quite possibly his story.

If their eponymous debut album from just over four years earlier had captured the spirit of the times with its mescaline infused majesty, The Doors' sixth studio album most definitely hammered nails into the final coffin of that crumbling hippie dream. Captured perfectly across its ten songs as a valediction to Los Angeles, and perhaps to life as it once was, it is unveiled as a love letter to that city of angels. Tales of desperation from the city's darker underbelly are played out in its sleazy motels and midnight alleys, all paralleling Morrison's own descent into increasingly unpredictable mood and behaviour as he is about to turn his back on the rock star's life for that of a poet's in Paris. "The Changeling" foretells his departure. "Yeah, I'm leaving town", he growls in that wonderful baritone, still a glorious, inspirational sound yet by now ravaged by alcohol and ennui. He has had enough. "Love Her Madly", prompted by an argument between Robbie Krieger and his wife and still a truly classic pop song offers some temporary relief before "Been Down So Long" resumes a mood of desultory helplessness and hopelessness. And so the beat goes on, and on. Cars, quite literally hiss by Morrison's window with their sonic boom. Boom, they go. And with that the first side of the original vinyl album arrives at the title track and at a point where The Doors manage to distil the very essence of rock music into less than eight minutes. Visceral, lean and reckless, it sears relentlessly across an aural highway either side of the "Mr Mojo Risin'" anagrammatic bridge with enough petrol in its tank to last for four hundred years never mind forty.

The creeping stealth of "L'America", propelled by Densmore's tattoo beat and at the time inexplicably rejected by Anotonio for his film Zabriskie Point, finds Morrison in much purer voice testament perhaps to the song having been recorded months before the rest of the album and when he was in ruder health. Any hope though is extinguished by the time of "Hyacinth House", its words appearing to affirm the rejection of flowers and beads, and perhaps of life itself. "And I'll say it again, I need a brand new friend, the end", Morrison intones, in part reprising the dénouement of The Doors debut album's monumental closer "The End". The beauty of the song's melody and the referencing of Fryderyk Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat major, Op. 53 during Ray Manzarek's keyboard solo merely add to its poignancy. By including John Lee Hooker's "Crawling King Snake" and revisiting a number regularly included in their early sets on LA's Sunset Strip, the band seem to come full circle as if signalling a natural conclusion to their being. The ensuing "The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)" also nods to the past, Morrison's lyrics dating from three years earlier as he speaks their words over a hypnotic beat before the album finally reaches its natural end with the eternal "Riders On The Storm". Recorded in The Doors' workshop, the band's workspace on the corner of La Cienega Blvd. and Santa Monica Blvd, Morrison's isolation booth was the studio bathroom. Emerging from there after completing this imperious epic of a song, he was to have said "I can't do any better than that". And somehow you just know that to be true. It was to be his ever last vocal.

In saying goodbye to Los Angeles, the city where it had all begun, The Doors returned to their roots for one last time, a time by which they were at the absolute zenith of their powers. The second disc of this 40th Anniversary release affirms this. Forget the addition of two previously unreleased, yet quite easily dispensable songs and leave them for the completists. Instead concentrate on the alternate takes of seven songs from the original album. They follow almost exactly the same arrangements and form as the originals but shorn of their final veneer present themselves with an altogether more natural hue. They capture a band as one, tight, tense, empathic and driven, no more so than on the title song which, if anything, is even better than the album version as Krieger's guitar dances in and around Morrison's world weary croon to a quite astonishing and mesmerising effect. Whether Morrison had lived or died you doubt they would have ever scaled these heights again.

Simon Godley