The last great song The Doors ever wrote: “It’s the final classic”
Even though all of their albums with Jim Morrison were released in the space of half a decade, you have to wonder where The Doors would have ended up going if he’d been alive to continue the project.
Of course, there’s every chance that the project wouldn’t have lasted regardless of whether Morrison was there at the helm, but his passing certainly sped up the collapse of the band, with the remaining members only able to muster up two underwhelming records after his death in 1971 before deciding to call it quits.
Over the course of six records, the style of the band weaved its way through a myriad of genres, going from noirish psychedelic rock to baroque pop, and then all the way back to straight-up blues, all of which makes for a fascinating yet hard-to-follow trajectory. There aren’t too many bands who have managed to successfully cover as many bases as this in such a short window of time, and the fact that they were able to do this is a mark of their supremacy as a unit.
However, while many people see the run of albums that came immediately after their first two offerings, The Doors and Strange Days, to have provided diminishing returns, the record that would wind up being their final release with the original four-piece unit certainly made amends for that.
LA Woman had some of the band’s freakiest acid-induced explorations on it, mixed with a smattering of the blues they’d become so proficient at over the years, and after the slightly lukewarm reception that their previous three records had received, it seemed as though this album had got them back on course to cement their place as titans of the rock world.
Perhaps the most ambitious track on the record is ‘Riders on the Storm’, the closing seven-minute epic that veers from moody spaghetti western to morbid psychedelic freakout with astonishing levels of ease and cohesion.
The band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, would later claim that it was the last hurrah for the band before Morrison’s tragic death at the age of 27, and that it still stands up as being one of the best things they ever did as a group. “It’s the final classic, man,” he proclaimed. “Interestingly, Robby [Krieger} and Jim came in and were working on ‘Riders on the Storm’. They started to play it and it sounded like an old cowpoke riding out one dark and misty day. It was like ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’.”
He went on to explain that this initial incarnation of the song was nowhere near what he envisaged the band doing, and that several changes had to be made for it to reach its finished state. “Doors don’t do that,” he argued. “Let’s make this hip. We’re going to go out on the desert. ‘There’s a killer on the road’. This has got to be dark, strange and moody. Let me see what I can do here. It was like ‘Light My Fire’. It just came to me. I got it. It became this dark, moody Sunset Strip 1948 jazz joint.”
It’s plain to see what he means by it having served as a parallel to their first hit, ‘Light My Fire’, with its extended jam sections and haunting tone, but it also signifies the evolution of the band from their earliest days to where they ended up. Frankly, it couldn’t have been more appropriate that two songs that so brilliantly sum up The Doors would bookend their career in spectacular fashion.
