Classic Albums: The Doors

For every Doors fan, this is a thrill to have the first Doors album featured on a Classic Albums dvd. I have been a Doors fan since 1967 and have enjoyed their very unique style of music for 41 years. This dvd features 7 of their 11 debut album songs, 1.Break On Through (To The Other Side), 2.The Crystal Ship, 3.Back Door Man, 4. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar), 5.Light My Fire, 6.End Of The Night and 7.The End. It does not feature the following 4 songs: Soul Kitchen, Twentieth Century Fox, I Looked At You and Take It As It Comes. I wish they had covered all 11 songs, as it is fascinating listening to the surviving Doors Ray Manzarek (organ, piano and bass), Robby Krieger (guitar) and John Densmore (drums) telling how these songs began and how they evolved into one of the greatest albums of all time. Jim Morrison's poetry was almost always the beginning of their great songs, but there were many other influences that Ray, Robby and John brought into their unique sound from jazz, blues, latin, flamenco and bossa nova music. They even brought in some James Brown music! There is much bonus material that really makes this worth owning as well. Ray tells of learning to play a Marxaphone on Alabama Song that gives the song it's carnival sound. Robby tells about his slide guitar, which gave The Doors such a unique mystical sound. John tells many of his trade secrets on the drums, such as he uses size 7A drum sticks, which are very thin and break easily, but give him maximum speed. There are also great stories about Jim Morrison from 1967 told by The Doors. Bruce Botnick, the sound recording engineer for The Doors, plays many tracks from this fantastic album by themselves, so you can hear just single tracks of Jim Morrison's voice or just single tracks of the instruments. Jim Morrison can be heard singing with no accompaniment to show that his voice alone was unbelievably incredible! Ray was such a talent on the keyboard, that he was the bass player! They never needed a bass guitar player with the fantastic sounds Ray could make on his keyboard. They tell how Moonlight Drive never made it to this first album, because the sound was not quite right. Moonlight Drive did make it on the second album, Strange Days, when it was slowed down quite a bit and a harpsichord sound was added to it. There are also commentaries from manager Bill Siddons, Jac Holzman who signed The Doors to Elektra Records, friend and poet Michael McClure, LA DJ Jim Ladd, other musicians, a film student and a music writer. This dvd brought back many memories from 1967, when the shortened version of Light My Fire stayed at #1 on the record charts for that summer. The magic and genius of The Doors from 1967 is still there and it comes through on this dvd. I only hope that Classic Albums will feature more of The Doors truly fantastic albums like Strange Days and Waiting For The Sun, because listening to the origins of The Doors unbelievably fantastic songs is just like listening to The Doors songs for the first time in 1967!

The documentary is part of an ongoing series that airs on VH-1 and would have been vastly superior with more instrumental demonstrations & less chatter from those outside the band.

The enthusiasm of Ray Manzarek & engineer Bruce Botnick and technical explanations from Robby Krieger - with John Densmore adding a holistic dimension to the music - becomes muddled with too many people who have too little to add to the exploration of The Doors self-titled debut album.

It becomes a stretch to have friends of the group, Henry Rollins and Perry Farrell in a number of interview segments. That Farrell would share the album with his children hardly places the material in a historical context.

The bonus features place the spotlight back on the band members and the decisions that went into producing the album, with additional explanations through demonstrations. But the editing to the original documentary strays too much from letting the classic music do the talking.