Williams: On interpreting "The End," I considered for the first time the other day, that the lines "This is the end my only friend," and particularly the lines, "It hurts to set you free but you'll never bother me …" at that point, when I heard that, it occured to me that the song was about a murder, and not just a guy leaving a girl. I didn't decide that, but the possibility opened that the whole thing was the murderer's mind and ah, the...

The Doors' popularity is currently at its highest level since Jim Morrison's demise in July, 1971…. Unfortunately, the fascination with Morrison's self-destruction seems to have overtaken any real passion about the group's music…. It is the music, however, that made the Doors fascinating, not Morrison's leather clothes or petulant eroticism. The Doors were a pioneering West Coast outfit who succeeded in a variety of musical areas, including jazz, blues, pop a...

What Jim Morrison wanted more than anything—more than fame, more than wealth, more than the women's wet submission that fame brought with it—was to be taken seriously as a poet. But he was too immature. Too unfinished to sense how little he knew about the job of turning a vision into meaningful words and rhythms. The Doors' most ambitious work was often their worst. Trying to make of rock & roll something it could never, should never, be, Morrison seemed a pompous fool rather...

The Doors are spectral. Maybe more than anybody. What counts is the impression for which no significant referent detail can or should be found. The music ends and there is no detail which you can refer to actually justify your impression. But you have that impression. And it's not even ambiguous. "The little girls they understand." Understand? Most importantly, there is a statement being made. But how? Take the words of a Doors song. Lots of people think the songs make them "swim...

An American Prayer [is] the best recitative sluice of American literature on LP since Call Me Burroughs, and hell, even Burroughs never had the sheer nerve to lead with "All join now and lament the death of my cock." In a way Jim was really the end of the Masculine Mystique as celebrated through American culture up to and through rock 'n' roll, because unlike clowns of John Kay ilk, Jim was always in on the joke, in fact ballooned it to full erectile expanse before bending to gul...

With Morrison …, each Doors concert or album became more than just music—it was theatre; theatre of the macabre, theatre of cruelty; theatre of the absurd all rolled into one. And always living theatre…. Properly performed (it's not done particularly well on "Absolutely Live") "The Celebration Of The Lizard" lulls an audience with a grotesque recitation before Morrison screams at ear-piercing level "Wake up!" then alternates the two sides...

The Doors … were among those who created the rock underground, and turned the deaf, overconfident recording industry around. Without hit singles, these groups sold thousands of albums on the basis of the quality of their music and the power of word-of-mouth. With their first album, the Doors brought many innovations to rock. Essentially, it was the first successful synthesis of jazz and rock….

The Doors presented as complete a statement as the Doors themselves were capable of, each track unveiling another facet of Morrison's polygonic personality. If "Back Door Man" established his erotic credentials, "Soul Kitchen" enhanced them…. The album's tour de force, "The End," had begun innocently as the Doors' show farewell, stretched by Morrison into a molten fresco of travel-weary images and faces. "C'mon, baby, take a...

Alternate suggested titles for The Soft Parade would be The Worst of the Doors, Kick Out the Doors, or best, The Soft Touch. The Soft Parade is worse than infuriating, it's sad. It's sad because one of the most potentially moving forces in rock has allowed itself to degenerate. A trite word, but true.

["L.A. Woman"] stands as [The Doors'] nadir, a spunkless, sterile effort that sounds as if it's been put out just so's everyone won't forget the name, and of course, the name is Jim Morrison. The Doors have always had two things going for them: an ability to throw some catchy riffs together in a brief context …; and Jim Morrison, who was built up as America's answer to Mick Jagger. Morrison, as Mick Farren pointed out in this paper last week, has alway...

Run, do not walk—nay, teleport yourself—to the nearest record store and take this record home with you, 'cause the Doors can still do it and we all ought to be glad and I hope it shuts up the bad-rappers for good and all. The Soft Parade: none of it is bad; most of it is very superior music and some of it is absolutely glorious. (p. 40)

Jim Morrison's life was filled with the events of which legends are made. No mere rock singer, he was both godlike and pompous, sensual and piggish, never existing on a middle ground. Seven years have passed since his death, and time is notorious for making what once seemed shattering, merely quaint. An album of accompanied Morrison recitations, some feared, would sound so dated it could tarnish the Doors legacy. But An American Prayer … remains decisive, possessing the ability to operate outs...

There isn't one serious cut on [L.A. Woman]…. [Morrison is] taking no chances about being taken seriously or with universal import. In fact he's not even writing his own snake lyrics anymore. Instead there's John Lee Hooker's "Crawling King Snake," a whopper of a readymade and proof positive that he and his boys are still listening to the roots….

[The Doors'] music was a melodic hard rock which did not detract from Morrison's lyrics. Morrison, when he was good, was very good, using broad, emotional and exotic images to create poetry that urged "breaking free" of traditional restraint, always a hot topic but particularly so in hippie circles in 1967. Morrison managed to take "breaking free"—the perennial plea of the hip—and turn it into an ambiguous semi-nightmare. In his songs, the characters w...

["The End"] was the first major statement of the Doors' perennial themes: dread, violence, guilt without possibility of redemption, the miscarriages of love, and, most of all, death. Nevertheless, the last time I heard "The End," it sounded funny. Even by Strange Days, the second Doors album, it was becoming apparent that the group was limited, and that Morrison's "Lizard King" vision was usually morbid in the most obvious possible way, and thus cheap....

Morrison Hotel opens with a powerful blast of raw funk called "Roadhouse Blues."… This angry hard rock is that at which the Doors have always excelled, and given us so seldom, and this track is one of their very best ever, with brooding lyrics that ring chillingly true: "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future's uncertain and the end is always near." From there on out, though, the road runs mainly downhill. It's really a shame, too, becaus...

Poetry or not, Morrison's lyrics always worked best via surprise attack; [on An American Prayer] his earnest readings … are sympathetically backed by the impeccable Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore, reunited for this holy purpose. Although he tends to sound like Ken Nordine without a sense of humor, Morrison wades through his imagination beguilingly; not as effective for employing tired poetic devices ("cool jeweled moon") or embarrassing imagery ("Lament for my cock"...

[Thirteen is] a total, A-1 rock 'n' roll album, worthy of a place of honor in anybody's collection…. One heretofore somewhat clouded point brought out by the release of this set in an era when the Hit has given way to the gnawingly personal statement, is that the Doors at their best laid down tracks that were absolutely clear, architecturally impeccable, with no part missing and no dross left in. Ah, weren't those the days, when songs like "Hello, I Love You"...

[Is] "American Prayer" valid today? Can new music by the Doors tacked onto a monologue recorded more than eight years ago do justice to Morrison? Even if it were artistically successful, why release a rock-based disc with literary ambitions at a time when literacy itself seems to be dying, when young rock fans often can't (and often aren't required to) read, let alone deal with the complexities of poetry? The truth is that "American Prayer" sounds more than a bit ol...

Absolutely Live is one of the absolutely finest live rock and roll albums ever made, and no mistake…. Absolutely Live is good…. [Enough] new songs are fitted in to make the double-record set less of a Doors anthology than an actual, carefully programmed concert caught on record, complete with rock-ya-sock-ya curtain-raiser (Who Do You Love), medley (three standbys and Love Hides—one of the most beautiful lyrics the Doors ever had), theatrics (When The Music's Over), production nu...

Sociologists are beginning to think that the sexual revolution of recent years has a wider significance than merely who sleeps with whom. Certainly, in Morrison's completely unambiguous lyrics, it seems to be part of a wider scene where all the comfortable assumptions are challenged. "We want the world and we want it now," he yells, and audiences have been known to join in the chorus. But the atmosphere is something else again from the "We Shall Overcome" cosiness that the...

There are a few fine [songs on Absolutely Live]: "Who Do You Love," "Build Me A Woman," and Willie Dixon's "Close To You," but they account for about 15 minutes in an 80-minute set. We are then left with the rancid/poetic "Celebration of the Lizard" …, a mediocre new song, "Universal Mind," which sounds like a single that would not have made it, plus the old war horses "Five To One," "Music's Over...

To see the Doors as a radical political influence seems to me misguided. According to Morrison, "The Unknown Soldier" is a love song. "The violence is just a metaphor," he's quoted as saying. "It's about sexual intercourse. The firing squad is just a metaphor for what's going on." Soldiers in Vietnam turn on and listen to the Doors records—what kind of politics is that? Are the Doors any more subversive than the Vietnam war?… With ...

The 40-minute film [Feast of Friends] prudently edited from a much longer and less successful version, represents nearly a year of covering the Doors in concert and on vacation and accurately captures the unique Doors personality. The in-performance footage stands out. Many filmed dramas and documentaries about rock have shown the clutching hands and ecstatic faces that confront the musician or singer, but no film before Feast has captured in so exciting a manner what actually takes place during a near-riot...

[Highway] is Morrison. Morrison hitchhiking. Morrison speeding through the desert. Morrison drinking beer. Morrison pissing. Only near the end did he reveal he had killed a man and stolen his car. The picture's beauty lay in its honesty. Morrison, the star, was totally free of everything—but himself. For those who missed the point, the film ends with a short "love is where it's at" rap by four persons bathing in a mountain stream.