The Doors - The Doors

The Doors’ debut album is the musical equivalent of The Catcher In The Rye. Every boy falls in love with it, but the appeal is short lived; you just can’t relate to Catcher at thirty or forty the same way you do when you’re a teenager.
At the same time, that first spin of The Doors, like that first read of Catcher, is a remarkable passage. The drama, the mystique, everything about it works perfectly during those years, and only the advance of cynicism with each passing year diminishes it. By the age of twenty-one, I viewed The Doors as a caricature of overblown importance, led by a drunken buffoon who’s success created a bubble big enough for him to not hear the laughter whenever it was suggested that he was a poet.
Make no mistake: Jim Morrison was not a poet. Instead, he was the perfect frontman for a Southern California who, collectively and without knowing it, started a few sub-genres in the process of recording their debut album.
They would never scale to the same heights and, to be honest, the resulting album is great enough that they wouldn’t need to. The Doors stands as one of the greatest debuts in rock music, and its importance is enough that every subsequent album they released stood comfortably in its wake. Some of those, to be completely honest, were bad enough (Waiting For The Sun and The Soft Parade) that they could have provide an end to their overall significance.
“Break On Through (To The Other Side)” starts off one of the best sequenced side one ever, with equal parts of hunger and mythmaking. The first hint at traditional blues begins with “Soul Kitchen,” but by the third song (“The Crystal Ship”), they’re finding shadows in reverb and exploring areas never ventured to in rock music.
“20th Century Fox” makes it clear that the band is perfectly able to mirror the commercial structure needed to make a pop song, while “Alabama Song” provides a complete left turn to the four songs that proceeded it.
The listeners is forced to sit through five, non-hit songs before letting the money shot of their number one single makes an appearance. And, it’s the full length version, surprising those who were brought up on the "Light My Fire" that didn’t feature the classical-tinged organ solo or Robby Krieger guitar part.
Side two is almost as good, started with the album’s second cover, “Back Door Man,” perhaps the whitest version of the Willie Dixon song ever recorded, but it may be the most convincing version too. The way Morrison’s voice cracks during the “You may eat your dinner/You may eat your pork and beans” part completely sells his credibility while the yelp after he screams “Imma back door man!” hints that these SoCal film school dropouts may have unknowingly just recorded a song that surpasses the original.
“I Looked At You” probably made a great set closer back in the club days, while “The End” makes an obvious case for obligatory encore song.
With equal parts Oedipus Rex and Sunset Strip jive, “The End” spans eleven minutes of drama so effectively that you believe all that shit about dead Indians scattered on dawn’s highway, bleeding.
At the very least, you believe that Jim fucked his Mom once.
But seriously: you don’t need another album other than The Doors’ first album, but boy, you do need it. It may go unread for years like that copy of Catcher In The Rye, but it needs to be there, like a beacon to anyone glancing through your “D” section, letting them know that, you too, went through that obligatory Doors phase.
And, unlike Jim Morrison, you survived it.