Hey, groovy cats, we’re still in Keeping it Short Week, each post 250 words or your money back:
Everyone has bands they love, but what about the ones you kind of love and don’t love? The Doors and Jim Morrison hold a very singular place in my tastes.
I’ve owned their albums and CDs multiple times and then gone through a phase of being so over the Doors that they went… well, out the door. I felt sometimes like being a Doors fan over the age of 21 was embarrassing. The anguished “Mother/Father” oedipal stuff in “The End” is a prime example of how the Doors could swing from ominous to awful in the space of a few lines.
Morrison was, by all reports, a fairly reprehensible human being in a lot of ways, and his sexist stoned messiah complex wears thin fast. How we feel about an artist as a person can affect how you view their work, and that’s not cancel culture, it’s just being a human.
And yet, I still find myself humming along to the Doors. They were pompous, overwrought, exciting and ridiculous all at the same time. A broody epic like “Riders on the Storm” still gets me, while trippy psych-rock like “Light My Fire” and “People Are Strange” are both timeless and time capsules of what we think the ‘60s meant.
Maybe I overthink The Doors, and in the end they were just a solid rock band with a tendency towards bad poetry. But for a band I sometimes hate, I sure end up going back to them an awful lot.
Nik Dirga 