LAST LISTENED TO foolishly it was this week
CHANCE OF WAKING TO IT higher than it should be
RATING
Funnily enough, just the other day i was wondering who would be the first artist to appear on A Song For The Day twice for different songs. Today is that day and that artist is The Doors. Or are The Doors. Whatever. Sadly, this morning's song leaves a lot to be desired and, whilst it's not pure pish, it's certainly not pure genius either. In fact, it's not pure anything. It's much too much of a cross-breed bastard to be that.
To begin with, you need to know that The Soft Parade album is the worst ever recorded by The Doors. There are many things wrong with it, too many, in fact, to go into here. However, the problems in the title track are a good example of the problems of the whole.
For starters, there is the start of the song. It's really crap. Pretentious Jim "American Poet" Morrison twaddle at it's worst. That's followed up by two minutes of The Doors Musical Improv School as they take a bash at a number of very ill-advised music styles. At best this portion is embarrassing. At worst there is Morrison with more stupid lyrics. It's really quite hard to take and it's advisable to skip forward to 3:04, the point just after Morrison's ludicrous exclamation of "The monk bought lunch!" and the end of the nonsense. From here on it's Doors-by-numbers, fairly enjoyable, but nothing special in itself. Only Manzerak's organ is notable for being better then average.
The Soft Parade represents the end of the path The Doors had found themselves straying down: the nadir in their career, unless you want to be picky and note that as the death of Morrison (and we'll not even mention their most recent incarnation with The Cult's Ian Arsebury). This path had carried them down a vaguely hippy-ish, vaguely mystical path. It's easy to put all the blame for this on Morrison as it's his lyrics that seem to be the most guilty of leading them down this path. But that would be unfair. Well, a little unfair. All four of them got them to this point and clearly their inspiration was all but exhausted by the trip. In The Soft Parade, none of the extra instruments or money thrown at them helped alleviate this problem. It took a stripped, back-to-basics sound and less Morrison nonsense to solve that, which is where their next LP came in…
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