Idolator
After a break consisting of listening to some of the 252 '80s Christian-rock songs posted on YouTube by someone named "Amber", it's back to hangin' with Jim and the boys.
I assumed for some reason that Morrison Hotel would be my downfall, but it hasn't been that bad. I almost found myself enjoying "Land Ho!" during the upbeat sections.
However, it's LA Woman's half-assed interpretation of the blues that's killing me slowly.
Compare and contrast:
LA Woman is the Doors album I remember most from my child of a baby boomer upbringing, and that certainly is making isn't making the seven-plus minutes of "Riders on the Storm" any easier or "WASP (Texas Radio & the Big Beat)" which I found trouble finding interesting in any manner whatsoever. I do have a bit of appreciation for the Doors now in the sense that every bar band full of Vietnam vets works this same style in a pale imitation of the original. It might not be fun for me to listen to now, but credit the Doors for doing it first, I suppose.
At very least, I made it through the ull band with Morrison records with some appreciation for the whole aesthetic. The experience rates below listening to the Rod Stewart catalog (the Mercury discs are solid, I tell you) but slightly above working my way through stacks of Pitchfork-baiting indie rock promos, which can be the most tiring experience of all some days. The Doors: white guys trying to play the blues, get some chicks and sound like LA in 1969. Not the worst idea of all time, for certain.
At very least, I'll always have a soft spot for "Five To One":
Still, An American Prayer's spot in my iTunes media library is meeting the delete button the minute "The Ghost Song" finishes.
Previously:
My Day Of Hanging With The Lizard King, Part One
Comments
You now have roughly the same level of appreciation for The Doors that I have for The Beatles, after taking roughly the same amount of abuse.
Ugh. L.A. Woman - bad place to start. Their catalog kind of loses me after Strange Days - I really dug their weird carny-gone-wrong sound and that weird spaced-out vibe they had. But L.A. Woman, like L.A. itself is pure suck.
@Empire: I still can't stand the fucking Beatles. I appreciate their place in music history, but I can't listen to their fucking songs without thinking of all the products they've been used to sell me over the years.
Dammit, nobody's forcing you to talk about the Doors.
You masochist! Stop this madness!
@Chris N.: Ah, leave him alone. I thought his rant last week was excessive, but I'm enjoying this whole reappraisal thing.
In fact, we should do this more often. (Get a Beatles burnout to start with Please Please Me and move on from there?)
@Chris N.: No one forced you to click through or comment, but yet, it still happened. Strange.
Oh, fine.
@Clevertrousers: Have they really been selling you stuff since nobody actually uses their own recorded output in ads, movies, etc.? Sure, there are bad cover versions out there, but that could happen to anybody.
Doors > having a friend in college who wouldn't allow people to talk in his car when the Doors were on the radio.
@Big Gray.: Yeah. I can only think of one example of actual Beatles music being used in an ad (the Nike "Revolution" ad), and it was almost historic in and of itself.
I would say that I love the Beatles, but I know that my love is pretty much restricted to Revolver -> Abbey Road, so I probably should just shut my mouth and return to my rockist cave.
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