The one band Paul Simon called the best in America
As the 1960s unfolded, England was quickly becoming one of the biggest locations for great rock and roll outfits. The genre may have started in the American South when people like Little Richard and Chuck Berry took the blues and modernised it with a stronger beat, but was there really any competition when comparing someone like The Byrds to The Beatles back in the day? There were still legends like Jimi Hendrix and Brian Wilson coming out of America, but when Paul Simon was first putting tunes together, he felt that some of the best music was coming out of Los Angeles.
Sgt Pepper’s may have earned the distinction for kickstarting the Summer of Love, but Simon was already among the finest players in the New York folk scene. Bob Dylan had started to go electric, and it looked like Simon and Garfunkel would be one of the next great folk-rock acts after ‘The Sound of Silence’ came out, but there was always a light in the darkness whenever talking about rock and roll.
After all, The Beatles even had The Rolling Stones to compete with on the charts, and while the garage rock of The Velvet Underground and The Stooges may have never landed on the hit parade, it was easy to see what made them stand out back in the day. They were the dark side of Flower Power, and while California was the epicentre of the Love generation, The Doors stuck out like a sore thumb.
From their debut album onwards, Jim Morrison was convinced that he was put on this Earth to talk about the darker side of life, and everything from ‘The Crystal Ship’ to ‘Light My Fire’ cast a dark shadow on the 1960s rock and roll scene. They had their fair share of happy songs, but once someone tasted Morrison’s poetic ramblings on ‘The End’, they were a changed person when the song finished.
The debut is enough to capture the minds of countless listeners, but Strange Days was them taking everything they did on the first record and honing it down even more. They had been inspired to use the sounds of synthesisers on the title track, but outside of a few filler tracks, the singles hit much harder like ‘People Are Strange’ and ‘Love Me Two Times’ and the oddities on the album stick out much better as well, like the interlude ‘Horse Latitudes’ or ‘The End’s little brother, ‘When the Music’s Over’.
Simon didn’t have the kind of stage presence to pull off what Morrison did, but when the folk icon heard their second album for the first time, guitarist Robbie Krieger remembered getting high praise right out of the gate, saying, “We took our time making it and really liked how it came out. The record company did too. Jac Holzman played it for Paul Simon. And Paul Simon, after listening to the record, said: ‘The Doors are the best band in the United States.’ Strange Days was really the four of us working together on the same path.”
There might not have been an accurate way to describe what The Doors were doing, but that’s because they were as interested in seeing where their music could go as the rest of the world. The Soft Parade was when the orchestral elements came in, and even when they followed the trend of being a bluesy rock and roll outfit, LA Woman is still one of the finest albums of the early 1970s.
You’d hardly tell that Simon was influenced by The Doors’ music by listening to him, but wearing those kinds of musical heroes on his sleeve was never going to happen. Simon is a man of many talents, but outside of being an absolutely stellar songwriter, he knew better than to give us a taste of him in leather pants strutting his way across the stage.
