The Doors - L.A. Woman

Mon 7th Nov, 2005 in Music Reviews

Only twenty four American soldiers died in the week ending October 1970, the lowest casualty count since 1965. It was the fifth week in a row that the number had been less than a half century; that’s less than fifty young Americans butchered on infamously dubious grounds, drafted into a jungle by Nixon, a man who later took his place in history as the definitive leper of western politics. The lower-than-usual body count was, in its way, a good sign; maybe things were cooling off. Not a bad way to kick off the first November of the 1970s.

Indeed, you could even call the death count a minor victory, if you were willing to base your opinions on the kind of perverted relativism that continues to prop up United States military campaigns abroad (insurgents running wild, thousands of civilians dead, American soldiers burned in public… but we took down Saddam’s statue!).

November also saw a military coup in Syria, a cyclone in Pakistan that killed half a million people and the deaths of an entire college football team in a plane crash in West Virginia. It was probably a pretty typical month in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a time that looks – now, years later - to be the pivotal half decade of recent history. Things seemed to happen then, whether it be movements based on freedom, love and a shared desire to take drugs and root each other, or groups of bikers riding highways and beating heads, or warmongers fighting secret battles, or student protesters being shot for no good reason.

(Of course, you could quite rightly put all this down to an era being constructed from cultural fragments; all those nostalgic films and right-on songs and the musings of a generation that – by so many accounts – seemed to find it, whatever it is, and if only briefly. Things happen today – hundreds of thousands die in a tsunami, Iraqis get killed daily, a bus explodes on a London street. The world isn’t any less weird or interesting or tragic in 2005, but the present isn’t part of a narrative until it becomes the past, and everything seems better when it’s in story form, doesn’t it?).

Things weren’t just happening politically, of course. Those right-on songs were being written, for one thing. Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan. A young Springsteen was still playing on the rides down at the boardwalks of New Jersey – a place later abandoned hastily, the carnivals of Asbury Park left standing like some modern day Pompeii – but he was taking notes. The groundwork of popular music was being set, one note, one line at a time.

In 1970, Hendrix was living, the Beatles had only recently split, Hunter S. Thompson hadn’t started Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas yet, instead spending his time haggling with his publishers. The first Stones live album (Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!) was rush released in an attempt to stifle the thriving bootleg trade, Santana was actually relevant, Cat Stevens inspired thousands of guitar-toting folkies with Tea For The Tillerman. Van Morrison released the beautiful Moondance, Bowie released the overrated Hunky Dory, and Miles Davis released A Tribute To Jack Johnson (the boxer, kids, not the surf nerd) and Bitches Brew, his best since Kind Of Blue.

And The Doors released Morrison Hotel, a bluesy return to form after the much-maligned Soft Parade, an album that had delivered a hit (Touch Me) amidst a misguided cacophony of strings and trumpet fanfares. Morrison Hotel was the kind of album the punters claimed to want, but it didn’t have a hit on it, so they slagged it off - or worse, ignored it. It showed off an angry, manic Jim Morrison, still beardless but well into developing the alcoholism that would eventually do him in, and the paunch that signified a man distancing himself from the lizard king pop idol he once was. He spoke of madness on the streets and innocence lost, two justifiably well-mined literary subjects du jour.  ‘There’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my ankles,’ he screamed on Peace Frog, ‘there’s blood in the streets, it’s up to my knees.’

Who knows how much of the global turmoil of November 1970 was on Morrison’s mind when he turned up to the Los Angeles studio where The Doors came together to record L.A. Woman - their last album recorded with their frontman. Morrison had booze to drink, charges of public drunkenness and indency to fight, and a band that was splitting at the seems; he’d have to have been a bit distracted. The band had even fallen out with Paul Rothchild during rehearsals – the producer who’d discovered them and recorded their previous work proclaimed their rawer, bluesier sound ‘cocktail music.’

As a result, long-time engineer Bruce Botnick shared production duties with the band. The Rothchild style – 50 takes per track, clean production – was out, replaced by a lazy charm and a dirty, drunken willingness to take chances. The band wanted the sound of old blues 78s, a record perfect for a cheap vinyl player in a shitty bar downtown. The results require little introduction; Riders Of The Storm has long since become culturally ubiquitous, played in supermarkets and propping up mediocre classic rock playlists; the title track is an unofficial anthem of Los Angeles, an urgent drive down busy highways, past lazy cops and bored strippers.

This is an album marked by odd proclamations and serious weirdness. The world informed everything Morrison did, even he didn’t notice it (and critics of his lyrics – sorry, poetry – will happily point out how absent-minded, non-specific and irrelevant his words may often seem to be). Morrison tries to bring order to the madness, emphasising the inner modes of existence he was creating for himself amidst the genuine chaos: ‘I’m the changeling,’ he says on album opener, ‘see me change.’  ‘Been down so goddamned long,’ he says, ‘that it looks like up to me.’ This was Morrison’s world, where the rules didn’t matter, self-mythologising was to be encouraged, and the auto-didact reigned supreme. This is an album of bizarre introspection, the band – Manzarek, Densmore, Krieger -forming blues and jazz patterns into a prism, forcing light straight into Morrison. Even a song about a woman leaving – Love Her Madly – becomes about you. All your love. Don’t you love her madly? And Morrison isn’t talking about you, in case you were wondering, he’s talking about Morrison.

This isn’t an album about a woman from LA, and it’s certainly not about Vietnam or war-and-peace (the band, after all, were surprisingly apolitical, Morrison ranting in generalities and often spurting the same venom on the left-wing peaceniks as that he splashed on the right-wing warpigs). It’s about Morrison finding himself amongst it all: the dead soldiers and the fat cops and the bottles of brandy and Jack Daniels. ‘C’mon! Give your love to me’ he says, but it doesn’t sound like it’d make much difference either way.

Cars hiss by Morrison’s window. Mr. Mojo Rising – that’s an anagram of Jim Morrison in case you missed it – took a trip down to L’America. Jim is the Crawling King Snake in a room of death. Let Morrison tell you about Texas radio and the big beat. Only when the album ends – on Riders Of The Storm, in which basic jazz forms are obscured by Manzarek’s divine, airy piano and the rain clouds that hang over the track – does Morrison venture outside himself. ‘Into this house we’re born ,’ he says, and all of a sudden you’re a part of his private world, ‘into this world we’re thrown.’ And then you’re gone, and the album is over.

L.A. Woman is a product of the madness, social disarray and anger of the early 1970s, when the love generation were dead and buried, the mass grave marked by the high water line Hunter S. Thompson says you can only see with the right kind of eyes. Morrison was never a part of that generation. He was never a part of any generation. But L.A. Woman was his attempt to find himself in music and words. In the end, he never heard the finished album, instead finding himself dead in a bathtub in Paris, his heart too weak to go on. But in death, he may have found his generation, and he may have found his era, where cyclones don’t kill half a million people and planes don’t fall from the sky, and cops won’t mace him in bathrooms for no good reason. He rests now in Père-Lachaise, along with Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Proust and Balzac. And L.A. Woman survives, a stunning testament to the poet laureate of drunks and his Bacchus-and-Brecht band.