Product Description

Track listing 1. Break On Through 2. Soul Kitchen 3. Crystal Ship 4. Twentieth Century Fox 5. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) 6. Light My Fire 7. Back Door Man 8. I Looked At You 9. End Of The Night 10. Take It As It Comes 11. End

Track Listing

1. Break On Through
2. Soul Kitchen
3. Crystal Ship
4. Twentieth Century Fox
5. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)
6. Light My Fire
7. Back Door Man
8. I Looked At You
9. End Of The Night
10. Take It As It Comes
11. End

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10640 in Music
• Released on: 1988-08-26
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
On their 1967 debut album, the Doors more than fulfilled the promise of their infamously challenging gigs around Los Angeles throughout the previous year. Whether belting out a standard like "Back Door Man" or talk-singing such originals as "The Crystal Ship" and "I Looked at You", leather-clad vocalist Jim Morrison exuded both sensuality and menace. The mixture, on the outsize album finale, "The End", helped rewrite the rules on rock song composition. None of this would have worked, though, were it not for the highly visual instrumental work of keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore, whose work on tracks such as "Take It As It Comes" and the lengthy hit "Light My Fire" virtually defined the rock- blues-jazz-classical amalgam that was acid-rock. --Billy Altman

CD Description
The first Doors album was an important development in the evolution of rock, representing the dark underbelly of the '60s counterculture, the Jekyll to the Beatles/Beach Boys' Hyde. The Doors were the antithesis of windblown Californian pop. Dark, brooding and alienated, every element of the quartet's metier was unveiled on their debut album. In Jim Morrison they posessed one of rock's authoritative voices, while the group's dense instrumental prowess reflected his lyrical mystery. Highly literate, they wedded Oedipian tragedy with counter-culture nihlism and, in "Light My Fire", expressed exotic images previously unheard in pop. Howlin' Wolf, Brecht and Weill are acknowledged as musical reference points, a conflict between the physical and cerebral that give THE DOORSits undiluted tension. Or you can just enjoy it as a brilliant album that sucks you in as it breathes out the '60's.

Customer Reviews

The Doors' debut album breaks on through to the other side
The Doors were probably more controversial than they were influential, but they were certainly one of the signature rock bands of the 1960s. The group was formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by a pair of U.C.L.A. film students, keyboard player Ray Manzarek and vocalist Jim Morrison, along with guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. Because the group did not have a bass player their music was dominated by Manzarek's distinctive electric organ work and Morrison's evocative vocals of his evocative lyrics. Signed a year later to Elektra Records with the goal of capturing on vinyl what the group did in live performance, their self-titled debut album featured the hit "Light My Fire" and because of their distinctive sound became one of the best albums of psychedelic music. In fact, "The Doors" was such a great album that it made everything that came afterwards pale in comparison and gave credence to the idea the group was on a destructive arc fueled by Morrison's personal problems and then went nova with "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Women" right before his death.

The music of the Doors was a peculiar blend of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and powerful lyrics. Nobody around played guitar like Krieger, while Manzarek's classical influences showed up in his organ riffs, Densmore brought some Latin influences, and Morrison's lyrics contained moments of searing emotional poetry. From the opening notes of "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" it is clear this group is different. For somebody who was consuming mass quantities of drugs and alcohol, Morrison's lyrics were the sort that students should be discussing in literature class: "I found an island in your arms/A country in your eyes," a love that becomes transmuted into "arms that chain" and "Eyes that lie." Then the song explodes into sound as the band announces its presence with authority. This is such a key song in the history of the Doors that there is reason it leads off most anthologies and collections of their best songs.

"Light My Fire," and I can remember finally getting to listen to the long version having only heard the single version with the impressive, intricate organ solo that still stands alone as the epitome of what can be done with that instrument in a rock song. Then Jose Feliciano proved how good it was in his totally stripped down acoustic version. "Take It As It Comes" is also pretty good, even if not quite in that same class. Still, it is the moodiness of "The Crystal Ship" and the "eleven-minute Oedipal drama" of "The End" that defined the Doors as one of the strangest and most ambitious rock groups around. It is impossible to think of another Sixties rock group that was as disturbing as the Doors, an idea codified in popular culture by Francis Ford Coppola's use of "The End" at the climax of "Apocalypse Now." Not only literature classes but future psychologists and psychiatrists could have a field day analyzing Morrison's lyrics as well.

The Doors Debut Masterpiece
The Doors debut record has to arguably be one of the greatest debut records of all time, up there with The Mothers of Invention's `Freak Out' (1966) The Velvet Underground's `Velvet Underground & Nico' (1967) Jimi Hendrix's `Are You Experienced?' (1967) The Clash's `The Clash' (1977) and Black Flag's `Damaged' (1981). The thing it lacks is the influential stature of some of the above albums but it had the chart success.

In 1967, the summer of love, it climbed to the no.1 spot on the billboard charts mostly aided by the success of the edited single of `Light My Fire'. While the rest of the album has many highlights like `Break On Through (To The Other Side)', `Crystal Ship' the focus of the attention is on `Light My Fire' and the Oedipal drama of `The End' that got them banned from the Whisky-A-Go-Go. `Light My Fire' with it's lengthy solo is an excellent example of modal playing which was based on the music of jazz giants John Coltrane and Miles Davis. The idea is to improvise over just one or two chords without falling into the pentatonic trap. Interestingly according to Krieger he used the same two chords Coltrane used on `My Favourite Things' (Am & Bm). Apart from the obvious reference to drug taking in the lyrics the structure of the song emphasises the swirling repetitive `high' of the solo before the final come down into the 3rd and 4th verses and outro.

`The Doors' is probably the only popular record that adequately captured the true atmosphere of 1967, the summer of love as well as its darker elements. Love's `Forever Changes' (1968) may be a better record but like the Velvet Underground's no one heard it. The problem with the record is that it was virtually impossible to follow up. All the albums released afterwards seem to somehow pale in comparison, with possibly `L.A. Women' being the only exception, however this is an outstanding debut that is nearly 40years old, yet still remarkably fresh sounding. It should be in all record collections.

The Making of A Legend
As The Doors first album this has to be in my opinion one of their best close to L.A.Woman (their last allbum).

After first buying their greatest hits in 2005, I decided to buy the albums to hear all the other songs they have done, as this is their first album I thought this was a good start. It was and after listening to the CD over and over again I relised that the greatest hits CD was missing so many good songs (eg. Soul Kitchen).

This album I beleive is so remarkable and has indeed made a legend out of the band.