Every Great Song Ever

The Doors: “Waiting For The Sun” (Morrison Hotel, 1970)

Let’s talk about The Doors.

I like the Doors. They have music I love and music I think is terrible. In high school, I loved them—they are exactly the kind of band you like in high school. The craziness, the seriousness, the implied gravity of the post-Beatnik poetry spouted by the doomed frontman… all of that feels right when you’re in your teens. The actual substance of that poetry hardly matters at all—the important thing is that he means it.

Hearing the Doors today makes me think of high school and what I was like as a music fan back then. This is the central reason I’ve decided to excavate the cassettes I taped off the radio—to see if I can figure out how I developed as a listener and where certain changes might have taken place.

The Doors bring me back to two specific people. One is my friend Matt, who was my best friend from some time around third grade until we became slowly estranged toward the end of high school (long story—I hope to see him again some day). I have one particularly vivid memory of the two of us, listening to an LP of Strange Days and kind of freaking out over “Horse Latitudes.”

We had gone over to his house directly from a meeting of our high school’s literary magazine, at which we both read some of own poetry. His was better than mine—Matt had a really direct line to something pretty deep inside himself that came out in his writing, whereas I was always more of a stylist. He had the feeling first; I had the idea first. Anyway, if I recall correctly, these LPs had been his uncle’s (I think some were his parents’, too—there was a Carpenters LP that didn’t fit the uncle’s profile), and Matt had gone through a few of them. Strange Days was the one he chose to play for me.

I don’t think I responded much to what Morrison was saying—the poetry of “Horse Latitudes” is pretty impenetrable (what on Earth is “mute nostril agony” anyway?), but the crazily woozy soundscape that shifts around behind him while he yells was definitely my kind of thing.

The other place The Doors take me back to is the passenger seat of my friend Barbra’s Volkswagen. Barbra lived down the street from me (a little over a mile away—“down the street” has a different meaning out in the sticks), and she was two years ahead of me. I liked her a lot, not in the sense of a crush or anything, but more in the sense that I respected her and enjoyed talking to her. She was intelligent and enthusiastic and seemed to completely lack the sullen streak of a lot of the people I hung out with regularly.

There was a community service group that ran out of our school—it may have been related to the National Honor Society? Barbra was, for a year, in charge of getting people together to work at a soup kitchen in Rockville, and I was one of the regular volunteers. None of us knew much about cooking, but it was easy enough to make a few gallons of donated Annie’s Shells And Cheddar and we handled it okay. The kitchen was run by an immigrant with visa problems that were coming to a head right around the time I graduated. I hope things worked out for him.

Anyway, Barbra had three favorite bands: Led Zeppelin, the Doors and Pink Floyd. I wasn’t old enough to drive, so I caught rides to the soup kitchen with her. I remember that the radio stayed on after she turned the car off—you had to turn it off independently. But these three bands were what we listened to. We connected over Pink Floyd on the school bus before she got her license, but my feelings toward the other two bands were much more ambivalent.

I liked a lot of music by both of them but didn’t think of myself as a fan. I remember one time, when the car had been turned off but the radio hadn’t, “Touch Me” was playing, and we somehow got to talking about what we liked and didn’t like about the Doors. For me, Jim Morrison was the only thing that ever gave me problems. It wasn’t the content of his lyrics, though—it was his showmanship, for lack of a better term. I didn’t particularly like the little “yeahs” and “uhns” he threw in. But for Barbra, those were some of the best parts of the music.

I’ll not speculate on our reasons for these preferences (well, mine was simple—Pink Floyd were my point of comparison for everything, and their instrumental breaks tended to be free of vocal dynamite, so I think it turned me off because it wasn’t what I was used to), but I thought it was interesting that we saw the same thing so differently. I think it was also the first time that I ever worried I might have offended someone by disliking something they held dear.

I came around on the Doors and the showmanship issue over the next year or so. I got a bunch of their albums, and outside of The Soft Parade generally liked them. I gravitated toward their weirder tendencies—Waiting For The Sun was my favorite LP of theirs.

Weird thing about Waiting For The Sun: though it was recorded around the same time as that LP, the title track didn’t come out until two years later, when it appeared on Morrison Hotel, the band’s bluesy retreat from the experimentation of The Soft Parade. I think “Waiting For The Sun,” the song, is the Doors at their best and most distinctive—it’s because of songs like this that they get a new chance with each succeeding generation.

I have no idea what kind of keyboard Ray Manzarek is playing on this song, but that weird, distorted tone is something I’ve never heard on another record. I think Robby Kreiger’s guitar playing in 1967 and 1968 was some of the most interesting going in the rock world, and this is an example of that. His psychedelic bottleneck playing has its own kind of personality to counter the outsize persona of Jim Morrison, who here sings more like a part of the band and less like a guy trying to break out of the band.

Last night, I asked for some of your opinions of The Doors. I’ll be sharing some of those and talking about them over the course of the day as I have time.