So why is The Doors on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
Shortly after seeing The Doors movie in early 1991, I devoured a biography of Jim Morrison and the band called No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Danny Sugerman and Jerry Hopkins.
More recently, in The Uncool, Cameron Crowe recalls his youthful friendship with Sugerman, a passage that reminded me of the profound influence No One Here still has on me.
The book’s three sections map out Morrison’s wildly creative, turbulent, and tragically short life: The Bow is Drawn, The Arrow Flies, and The Arrow Falls.
Goodfellas is far and away my favorite movie of all time, and at some point it hit me that I was tracking Henry Hill and his corner of the New York mafia as an epic and ultimately tragic “rise and fall” story just as No One Here had mapped out for Morrison.
And just to show off my Doors Nerd Cred, I’d go on to read the memoirs of John Densmore, Robbie Krieger, and Ray Manzarek (and throw in a novel in which he imagines Jim lives!). If I had to choose one, I’d go with Krieger’s – Set the Night on Fire feels the most revealing and least self-serving of the bunch.
I’ve mentioned in a few other pieces that I became aware of Jack Kerouac and the beats in high school and that influence in part eventually pushed a relatively shy kid to get the hell out of Long Island and travel widely (I just had to see what was on the other side of that groaning continent, dig?).
It ties to my adolescent fascination with Jim Morrison. There was something about both Kerouac and Morrison that attracted me – the creativity, the poetry of language, the intellect… but also the self-destructively “romantic” aspect.
Taking a step back, there are so many ways in which The Doors affected me as a teenager, but I’d say most of all I bought into the myth – as one can only do in life at a certain age – of a person in Morrison and a band in The Doors that I wanted to become: mysterious, brilliant, daring, poetic, cool (read: dangerous) before I had actually figured out who I was as a person.
Being unshackled from society’s rules, even while knowing that the end (my friend) was coming, maybe. That too ties to my (ongoing) obsession with Goodfellas. Through Henry’s young eyes (The Arrow Flies), being a part of the mob seems freaking great, better than almost anything, growing up in 1950s Brownsville, Brooklyn.
That was the myth that teenage me constructed. The Doors – the album – is the purest distillation of everything I’ve just described.
The sound of the album, masterminded by Paul Rothchild, is pure beguiling mystery, seduction, an invitation to something deeper.
Rock and blues, pop and swagger, love and menace.
And then there’s this: decades after discovering The Doors, the opening section of “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” will start playing in my head fully unannounced from time to time.
I’ll be going about my day, reading an e-mail or whatever, and John Densmore’s sly and nimble drums and Ray Manzarek’s hypnotic blues-jazz keyboard vamp will interrupt a perfectly good reply to Ken from marketing.
You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run, tried to hide
Break on through to the other side
That it’s the lead track on The Doors feels like destiny, and if it’s not a mission statement for Morrison and the band, nothing is. It’s one of those songs that, while great on its own, is so much more: Jim Morrison may have been a drunken asshole much of the time, but he wasn’t a performative drunken asshole. He is one of those modern mythic figures who wanted to live, burned to live, burned to create – and ultimately burned through his life at the age of 27.
These days, I can still never get enough of the bluesy and rollicking live version of “Break On Through #2” on In Concert (#51 of best 1,000 albums ever), though with critical note that it must always be preceded by “Dead Cats, Dead Rats.”
Okay, well here’s a hellaciously embarrassing story starring moi. If I wasn’t the King of the Friend Zone in high school, I was certainly a Crown Prince. I’d develop mad crushes that were rarely divulged and certainly never reciprocated. But part of my fantasy – if ever one of these objects of my desire to return my plea of undying affection – was to ever so romantically… leave an answering machine message that included the opening of “The Crystal Ship”:
Before you slip into unconsciousness
I’d like to have another kiss
Another flashing chance at bliss
Another kiss, another kiss
Perhaps the fates benevolently intervened here, and to mangle an analogy while borrowing from R.E.M., that was one letter never sent.
Anyway, I still find “The Crystal Ship” to be a delicate, mysterious gem that has a classically arranged feel to it.
What about the “Light My Fire” of it all, you ask? The first 10 seconds are iconic, showing off the wild alchemy that Manzarek and Densmore had, the blues and rock and baroque vibes fermenting in a carnivalesque stew that remains intoxicating close to 60 years after the song was first dreamed up by Robbie Krieger, a secret weapon of a songwriter if there ever was one.
It’s everything that embodies The Doors – the dark and the light, the surreal and the terrestrial, the attraction to pushing those earthly bounds, approaching the fire, approaching death itself, and making it across (breaking through) to the other side.
If any of that resonates with you, you owe it to yourself to check out the live version from In Concert that has a rendition of the fun, very Morrison “Graveyard Poem” inserted into the instrumental section near the end.
“Soul Kitchen” is the version of the band that I feel closest to these days, smooth and soulful and groovy, bursting with life. It also has some of the best and most evocative lyrics – this one from Morrison – that The Doors ever produced:
Let me sleep all night
In your soul kitchen
Warm my mind near your gentle stove
Turn me out, wander baby
Stumblin’ in the neon groves
Well your fingers weave quick minuets
Speak in secret alphabets
I light another cigarette
Learn to forget
I adore the slow, drugged-out “End of the Night” – it’s always felt like a rainy night song, a bummer of a trip but worth the ride.
“I Looked at You” and “Take It as It Comes” are largely overlooked these days, but shouldn’t be, as both show off the band’s dynamite ability to produce Billboard-topper-worthy pop/rock songs that absolutely sizzle and snap.
I had to save “The End,” of course, for the end of the piece. This is psychedelia that’s anti-hippie, anti-flower power. It’s a trip in the truest sense of the word, a hedonistic journey of the senses, a peyote-fueled sojourn into the sand dunes, Native American spirits descending, snakes and lizards, kings and ancient galleries, Oedipus wrecks.
This is the best part of the trip, quoting Morrison from “The Soft Parade.”
The kind I really like.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be Jim Morrison on a subconscious level. These days, I want to break through in a way that’s meaningful to me.
Like this seven-miles-long snake of a project. I have The Doors to thank for that.
#4 of the best 1,000 albums ever.
Some stats & info about The Doors
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Hard Rock, Blues Rock, Psychedelic Rock, SoCal Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – #86
- All Music’s rating – 5 out of 5 stars
- When was The Doors released? 1967
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #4 out of 1,000
The Doors on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from The Doors that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
Break on through to the other side.
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.