Ray Manzarek, R.I.P.
By A couple of notes on the late keyboardist. First, it should be noted that he produced Los Angeles and Wild Gift, two of the best American albums of the 80s (as well as the two quite good followups.) Exene and John remember.
On the Doors…they’re become sort of like an overhyped New York roleplayer, so overrated by the media a lot of people stop giving him credit for their modest but real virtues. Christgau has the right basic idea:
Shaman, poet, lizard king–believe that guff and you’ll miss a great pop band. Ass man, schlockmeister, cosmic slimeball–that’s where Jim Morrison’s originality lies, and he’s never been better represented. Right beneath the back-door macho resides a weak-willed whine as El Lay as Jackson Browne’s, and the struggle between the two would have landed him in Vegas if he hadn’t achieved oblivion in Paris first. Compelling in part because he’s revolting, Jimbo reminds us that some assholes actually do live with demons. His three sidemen rocked almost as good as the Stones. Without him they were nothing.
Appropriately for a Doors defense, this overreaches: they were way too uneven to be great, and let’s leave the Stones out of it, please. (To begin with, Watts/Wyman v. Densmore/Manzarek’s left hand — not a flattering comparison for the latter. And it took Jagger more than a decade in the biz to achieve the level of self-parody Morrison was born with.) But it is true that at their best they were capable of nearly perfect singles — “L.A. Woman,” “People Are Strange,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Peace Frog,” “Break on Through,” inter alia…these are first-rate pop songs. No need to let Morrison’s relatively high pretension-to-achievement ratio or the fact that teenagers are were [thanks for the obvious correction, PP] prone to thinking of them as a Great Band unduly bother you.