The Doors

Eleven tracks, and the test bites in the middle of each side. Break On Through must open: it states the record’s one wish, passage through a threshold, in under two and a half minutes over a bossa nova beat turned hard. Light My Fire must close side one and The End the record; each is where the short songs’ tension is let out into duration. The Crystal Ship and End of the Night are required as the two night-pieces, the quiet doors. The rest resist the test more than they first appear to. Twentieth Century Fox is a sharp, slight portrait, but it is the daylight world the record wants out of, and without it the doors would open from nowhere; Take It as It Comes restates the side’s urgency, and that urgency is what the long piece releases. I Looked at You, garage pop in the manner of the day, is the one track that could go with ease. The short songs are the room the doors are cut in, compelled by the passage rather than permitted beside it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated: the ordinary waking world is a room with a door in it, and the self wants through, into eros, intoxication and death, which the record treats as one country. Break On Through says it as a slogan; The Crystal Ship as a farewell, a lover told to “slip into unconsciousness”; End of the Night sets Blake’s “sweet delight” and Céline’s title over a slow, reverberant drift; The End says it as a rite. Sound discloses as much as words and is credited fully: the organ is fairground and church at once, and pleasure and dread are heard as one sound. That is more than a mood: that the wish for release and the wish for death are one wish is a meaning, and it has held beyond the record’s year. What keeps it short of the bar is the manner: the condition is enacted as posture, a young man’s romance of transgression, more often than it is articulated, and much of its truth is left to the trance.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation comes often and of two kinds. The dreadful kind is the record’s best: The End, from its tuned tremolo guitar and drone through the long, quiet spoken passage to the band’s rising frenzy and collapse, is real terror held over eleven minutes, and End of the Night is a smaller, colder height. The warm kind is Light My Fire: the baroque organ figure, then two long solos over a fixed vamp, organ then guitar, rising by accumulation and returning to the figure. The Crystal Ship has a fragile lyric height, the voice at its most tender over piano, and Break On Through lifts by drive. Twentieth Century Fox, I Looked at You and Take It as It Comes have energy and no height, and Back Door Man has menace more than elevation. Height on five or six of eleven tracks, but counted by time the record is high for most of its length, since the two long pieces that fill close to half of it are elevated throughout, and at The End very high.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Myth is evoked across the record and built in one place, toward which the whole is built. The End builds it: a figure, the “killer awoke before dawn”, walks through a house, visits sister and brother, and comes to the father’s and the mother’s rooms, and the Oedipal crime is enacted, not alluded to; around it are the snake, the ancient lake and the road West. The archetype bears load: the piece is a rite of passage out of the house into the wilderness, and the record ends on it. The sequence bears it too, a threshold at the end of each side, so that the figures evoked elsewhere, the threshold and the other side, the ship of death, the Dionysian fire of Light My Fire, Blake’s night, Brecht’s moon of Alabama, the blues trickster, are stations on the way to the rite. What holds it from the top is that the built myth is assembled more than fused, and the particular, a person with a face and a place, is mostly withheld.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The inheritance is the Los Angeles rock band of 1966, the Byrds and Love, with the Chicago blues the band covered and the garage organ combo. The turn is real: a quartet with no bass player, the bass line played on a keyboard; a drummer whose dynamics came from jazz; a guitarist drawing on flamenco, Indian modes and bottleneck; a cabaret song by Brecht and Weill dropped into a rock record; and a debut that ends in eleven minutes of improvised theatre of parricide and ritual. The stake was a first record by an unknown band, with a seven-minute track and a closing piece no radio could play. There was precedent: the Yardbirds and the Butterfield Blues Band had opened the long raga and blues form, and organ, blues and drone were common property. But the precedent opened a form; this record turned its meaning, away from virtuosity toward darkness, death and theatre, and staked a debut on the turn. The swerve is made from inherited means, and it was a wager.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The sequence is counted here, once. Each side is a set of short, closed songs, mostly under three minutes, ending in a long open piece where the form stops containing and starts to drift: the record knows the threshold by building one at the end of each side. Light My Fire is a pop song that opens into duration; The End is a song that dissolves into rite. Inside the long pieces the form is the instrument: the fixed vamp under the solos, the drone that lets the spoken passage happen at all. Break On Through’s single-figure drive and The Crystal Ship’s brevity suit what they say. The short songs between the doors are mostly ordinary rock and pop forms, interchangeable in order among themselves, but their closedness is part of what the record knows: the room has to be closed for the door to mean anything. The form bears load throughout, and most at the ends of the sides, which is what holds it from the top.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Evidence over fifty-nine years, of two kinds. The long pieces have been reused and heard anew: The End opened Apocalypse Now (1979) and was heard there as a new work about another war, and Light My Fire has been covered across idioms, José Feliciano’s slow version of 1968 the best known. The making has been kept open by the band’s own accounts, by a later remix that restored a word cut from Break On Through, and by the long argument over the singer’s poetry. Densmore’s and Krieger’s playing on The End repays close listening, and the organ lines of Light My Fire are studied. Much of what listeners find in The End is projection invited by its gestures, but the gestures invite it because they are open, and the opening has held across six decades of return without being exhausted. What holds the figure is that the shorter songs mostly give what they give at first: the well is deep at the doors.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The field is the rock album of 1966 and 1967. The intrinsic force is real: the record made a rock band an instrument of dark theatre, organ-led and bassless, with a singer who performs a persona of transgression as a rite, and it showed that a debut could end in long improvised drama. It took the blues and the cabaret song into the same night. That reorganised tone and the singer’s role more than musical language, whose means were common, but tone and role are what the field took from it, and the taking was large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and it carries the axis over the bar: Light My Fire, in an edited form, went to the top of the singles chart; the singer as shaman passed to Iggy Pop, to punk’s theatre and to the gothic rock of the late 1970s and 1980s; and the organ-led dark rock band became a type.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-nine years, and the figure is among the wider for that span. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been in print since 1967, and the word edited out of Break On Through on the first issue is a fault of that release, not a loss of the work. Presence is wide and continuous, with Light My Fire, Break On Through and The End in broadcast for six decades and The End carried to new audiences by film. That presence is popularity in part, and partly the singer’s legend, and the album is heard less whole than its songs; but the songs have carried the album, not replaced it. The fabric is of 1966, the organ and the four-track sound, and the singer’s persona dates more than the music, but little in the surface depends on a technology that has passed, and the record has long outlived the conditions that produced it.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Rothchild and Botnick’s recording is clean, close and live in feel, the band captured largely as a band, and its restraint lets four players sound like a larger thing. Densmore’s drumming is the most exact craft on it: the dynamics of The End, the bossa beat hardened on Break On Through, the brushes and space on End of the Night. Krieger’s tuned tremolo and slide and his modal solo on Light My Fire are distinctive and right. Manzarek’s organ carries the harmony and the bass, a structural solution that is also the sound, and there the making is load-bearing. The voice runs from croon to scream. The faults are small against this: the low end is thin, two short songs are routinely arranged, Back Door Man is more performance than construction, and the vocal is at times pushed past control.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law: the night as a place of passage, entered through pleasure and found to be death. The two most distant elements are Twentieth Century Fox, a quick satirical pop song about a fashionable girl, and The End, an eleven-minute rite, and they obey the same law from opposite sides: the Fox is the daylight world the record wants out of, sung from inside that world, the room before the door. Alabama Song, a Weimar cabaret number in search of the “next whisky bar”, obeys it surprisingly well, and its fairground lurch is the record’s sound; Back Door Man brings the blues trickster into the same night. The range, cabaret, blues, bossa-rock, ballad and drone, is wide and is credit. What holds it: the short songs of side two follow their borrowed genre as much as the law, which is a mood more than a physics, though a mood kept with unusual consistency across that range.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. Consciousness is held, the self at the threshold, wanting out. Eros is held in Light My Fire and The Crystal Ship, death in The End and End of the Night. The family enters once and with force, in the father’s and mother’s rooms of The End, as the thing to be destroyed. The sacred is held as rite and evoked as drug; society enters as the Fox and as Brecht’s whisky bar and its money, both glimpsed; the West is landscape, and the natural order a snake more than a world. One consciousness joins what is held, which integrates it and narrows it: the orders arrive song by song, but The End holds several at once, consciousness, eros, death, the family and the sacred in one rite, and that integration is achieved, not attempted. Labour, history and the state are absent, and that is what holds the figure lowest.

Score: 7.6 / 10