The issue of authorial intent has always been a thorny one in the arts, and never more so than in this age of digital revisionism. Who can say, for instance, that putting giant lizard-riding Stormtroopers on the streets of Mos Eisley was really part of young George Lucas’ “vision” during the filming of Star Wars in 1977? Lucas can, that’s who, and if his insertion of these and many other CG-enhanced details into the film twenty years after the fact hasn’t necessarily made the world a worse place to live in (not even the most rabid of Star Wars freaks would try to make that claim), then I think it certainly goes without saying that it hasn’t made the world a better place, either. Which brings us, however indirectly, to the Doors, who forty years after the release of their debut album have elected to meddle with a different kind of giant lizard altogether (the Lizard King, geddit?). And this isn’t just some plain old garden-variety remaster job, either: on the new reissue of 1967’s seminal The Doors (previously released as part of Rhino’s Perception box set late last year), the surviving band members with the help of original engineer Bruce Botnick have given the album an all-out facelift, replacing scrapped overdubs from the original multitrack studio recordings, increasing the overall pitch by about a half-step (a correction of apparent mastering issues which caused the first umpteen or so pressings of the album to run slow), and even reinserting a few (gasp) dirty words.
Some of you, I’m sure, are wondering what the big deal is; new and improved is new and improved. But for the purists among us, this kind of move sends up warning flags. It makes us ask just how acceptable it is to fundamentally alter a classic album in the name of hearing it “as it was originally intended.” Because frankly, in another 40 years or so, when Botnick and the Doors (…Of the 21st Century or otherwise) are no longer of this earth, nobody’s really gonna care about their “intentions” while they were in the studio. They’re gonna care about the music that came out of the studio, the music we’ve been listening to and liking just fine since 1967. And frankly, in those cases when the music has been noticeably changed, to the ears of this layperson the changes have been for the worse, not for the better.
Let’s go with the obvious example: on opening track “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” we have traditionally heard Jim Morrison squawk something to the effect of, “She gets…! She gets…! She gets…! Haaaauuggghhhhhhhh!” Now only a choirboy who’s been living under a rock since the 1950s would fail to realize precisely what “she gets.” She gets high, and though the offending word itself is never actually spoken, we’re as painfully aware of that fact today as we were in the summer of ‘67. So why, in the spring of 2007, do we now have a version of the song where Morrison audibly sings “she gets high,” adding nothing to our enjoyment of the song and actually taking away from the performance’s rhythmic propulsion and sense of on-the-edge danger? This may seem like splitting hairs, and maybe it is, but when the lyrics are just “she gets…”, that little ellipsis speaks louder than any big, bad word. It puts us on edge, makes us wonder whether he’s really gonna say it, the way Roger Daltrey’s stuttering of the “F” sound on “My Generation” still does even after we’ve heard it a million times and know that all he’s gonna say is “fade away.” Not only that, but by leaving the whole word a blank slate, not even giving us the benefit of a first syllable to go by, “Break On Through” used to invite our imaginations to run wild. She could have gotten anything. She gets fucked. She gets screwed. She gets…well, I dunno, but you get the idea.
The point is that by allowing themselves finally to cross the imaginary line they once dubbed the “fuck barrier,” the Doors have somehow managed to neuter one of the most potent moments on what is arguably still their greatest album. And while it’s hardly a reason not to run out and buy The Doors if you haven’t already, even in this altered edition, then it’s certainly worth noting as an example of final results trumping “original intent.”
Accidental bowlderization aside, however, there are admittedly few moments when the “new” Doors album assaults the ears in an altogether unpleasing manner. “Light My Fire” is still the organ-fuelled marathon we know and love. “Back Door Man” is still one of the greatest white-boy blues cuts of the 1960s, hands down. And “The End” is still a hamfisted but oddly terrifying closer, a song whose epic length (11 minutes, 41 seconds on this disc), overt portentousness (who today has the nads to close an album with the words “this is the end, beautiful friend” – a debut album, at that?), and infamous Oedipal climax is still as likely to trigger your gag reflex as give you goosebumps, often both at the same time. If you’ve never heard this record, or you haven’t heard it in years, or you stopped listening to it because you decided it wasn’t “cool” enough, you owe it to yourself to check it out again. It really is that good.
In fact, if there’s anything to recommend this repackaged version of The Doors, it’s the fact that these days, pretty much any reason to hear this much-loved and maligned band with fresh ears is a good one. It’s easy after four decades of blacklight posters, Oliver Stone biopics and ill-advised reunion tours with that dude from the Cult to let the shadow of the Doors mystique obscure the quite excellent music at its center; nor is this helped at all by the band members themselves, who tend to come off as either pompous, self-important assholes or stuck-in-the-’60s dinosaurs, with the insufferable Ray Manzarek representing the worst of both worlds. Then there’s the specter of Morrison himself, who was never one for letting the music stand on his own terms. The guy was no mere mortal, he was a “shaman.” The “Lizard King.” “Bozo Dionysus,” as Lester Bangs dubbed him, and not (as many of my generation have smugly and erroneously assumed) out of malice. But with the exception of a few theatrical flourishes – the aforementioned “The End, ” bits of “End of the Night” and “Break On Through” – here he’s just Jim, a passable crooner and over/under-rated poet (depending on whom you ask) who works a lot better when he’s wailing and guiding his crack bar band through unabashed garage rockers which may or may not spill way over their expected runtimes.
The Doors at its best isn’t the work of the capital-”D,” “Riders on the Storm,” “no one here gets out alive,” dead-Indians-on-the-freeway Doors, the ones your stoner friends used to worship in junior high and who you abandoned sometime between mid-high school and your freshman year in college; it’s the work of a rock and roll band, and a damned good one at that. That, precisely, is the beauty of these early years in the band’s history, before they lost the plot and started to mistake forced profundity and ponderous arrangements for musical “progressiveness.” And it’s just that raw and untamed side of the Doors which tends to get lost in the shuffle, and which another listen to their debut will, if you let it, help you rediscover. Music listeners of the world, you’ve just been re-introduced to a little band out of L.A. called the Doors. Enjoy them…whether it’s in the way they “originally intended” or not.
- Zach Hoskins
The Doors Official Site
Buy The Doors (Remastered)
