The album The Doors were convinced their fans hated: “More disenchanted”
It was hard to really gauge what The Doors were when they first arrived on the scene in the late 1960s.
There had been plenty of bands preaching about Flower Power and creating an idyllic world, but Jim Morrison proved to everyone that life was as much about the darkness happening around them as the utopia they were trying to build. While that kind of dark energy was really enticing when they first started out, it’s not like every single album with The Doors name slapped onto it was going to be an absolute classic by any means.
Hell, there are still legions of fans who are convinced to this day that the band were all hype from the moment they started. Morrison didn’t have the same kind of musical training, and given the amount of controversy he got swept up in whenever he performed, it’s easy to understand why people thought they were focused more on the spectacle than anything else. When you listen to their records, though, they had a lot more to offer.
The fact that Morrison could rattle off some of their signature melodies without knowing a single chord is almost inconceivable, but there are still peaks and valleys to their albums. Waiting for the Sun does have a lot of their greatest moments in the studio, but when you look at a song like ‘Hello I Love You’, it makes sense why a few people thought they had started to sell out and pop in a more pop-oriented direction.
And if we’re talking bad albums with The Doors’ tag on it, it’s not like Other Voices and Full Circle don’t exist, either. The band didn’t have to completely collapse and fade into obscurity after Morrison passed away, but the idea of them continuing on with no frontman and having Ray Manzarek sing all the songs was a step too far. For guitarist Robbie Krieger, though, he knew things were going wrong on The Soft Parade.
The band were known as one of the darker offerings from California, so when they brought in the horns and string sections, Krieger was convinced the fans would hate it, saying, “I think the earlier fans were more disenchanted when we did The Soft Parade, the way we used the horns and strings. I think a lot of them didn’t like that. Instead of The Doors, it sounded like Jim Morrison with an orchestra. When Morrison Hotel came around with ‘Roadhouse Blues’, I think a lot of our old fans were back on board with us.”
If you come to The Doors to hear nothing but blues and heavy rock, you might be disappointed, but going in this direction was never off the table, either. Half of the band came from a jazz background, and even if tunes like ‘Tell All the People’ were a bit syrupy, they were balanced out by the strange detours like the title or letting Krieger take the mic halfway through the song ‘Runnin’ Blue’.
Even if a song like ‘Touch Me’ is one of the more blatant orchestral songs on the record, it’s still up there with the best Doors songs. Morrison actually manages to pull off a decent Sinatra voice throughout the tune, and when the band get to cut loose during the instrumental breaks, they lay into one of the meanest grooves they’ve ever thought of, especially when that sax solo comes in during the final moments of the tune.
Is this what most people were asking from The Doors circa 1969? Probably not, but the band weren’t the kind of group to stick with one sound for their entire career. They had a certain mystique around them half the time, and when they managed to find the right idea, their music was the kind of thing that no one realised they needed.
