I fell for The Doors when I was 16. I'm probably not alone in this. It's that age. I bought all six of their studio albums within a six month period. Then, a few years later I convinced myself I should grow out of them. Then a few years later still I grew back into them and I'm not budging now. Here Luke Haines, (yes him again, he's taking over the blog), explains in The Quietus why The Doors are worth defending.
'I love The Doors. I will defend The Doors to any fucker. They're massively derided, but I won't have a word of it. I find it very difficult to believe that people really think Morrison couldn't write lyrics. So what if he was some kind of arsehole oaf character? That's the point of being a rock star! It's very difficult to imagine a rock band that had the authorities down on them, but they did, properly, to the point of long prison sentences for not really doing anything. So I think that a lot of the arsehole behaviour can be excused for the pressure cooker of those times. If you read enough about them you'll see they were quite derided in their time as well, for the so-called poetic pretensions. I never thought there was anything wrong with having poetic pretensions. Why the hell not? What's he meant to do? 'What I really want to do is be a bus driver, I'm not going to go for the whole leather trousers and shamen thing.' Morrison was obviously fairly touched in some way. There's been nobody like him since. He's really suffered from the three-pronged attack of Ray Manzarek, Danny Sugerman and Oliver Stone. I don't think they ever helped his cause. The great thing that he says about Morrison Hotel is that it's when they became the band he really wanted them to be. He describes them as "an existential bar band", which is fucking brilliant. I think if you hold that in your head, it totally makes sense, and every lyric makes sense. At the end of the album he sings about being 'an old blues man', which is what he wanted to be, he got fat deliberately, and grew the beard and got out of condition. He had a sense of humour about himself, he thought he was a bit of an idiot and The Doors were fairly idiotic. Sorry to say the fucking obvious and be totally idiotic, the worst thing he did was die. He timed his death very badly, and it's never worked out very well from him. I say whether you like or dislike The Doors separates the wheat from the chaff.'
'Ghosts crowd the child's fragile eggshell mind' Perhaps this is the kind of thing he's talking about.
Such mixed feelings about The Doors. I fell in love with them at a certain age (15?) after I bought the first album because the NME cited them as an influence on Joy Division, and was obsessed for a few years (to the point that I bought the big double live album, but not quite so far as to get into American Prayer - that tells you where I fall on the obsession spectrum). Morrison Hotel became my favourite Doors album, but The Soft Parade was my default for a long time. But I couldn't imagine going back to them now for some reason. It seems that they were perfect for me at a certain age, and once the spell was broken, it was impossible to go back to the time before that had happened.
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