FREE SPIRIT
“ON THE DOORS’ FIRST RECORD, I MIGHT HAVE OVERDONE IT ON THE ECHO!”
The Doors were many things. They played rock. They played jazz. They played blues, too. And the LA group’s charismatic singer Jim Morrison, inheriting the Beat Generation’s countercultural posture, wrote poetic lyrics oscillating between the psychonautic free-lovin’ spirit of the 60s and a foreshadowing of the darkness that would consume that decade’s end. There was light and shade in The Doors’ sound. There were psychedelic pop hooks, proto-funk rhythms, morbid visions, sex and death.
As a guitar player, Robby Krieger pushed the envelope. He developed a hybrid jazz-blues style, was red-hot with a slide, and had flamenco chops gleaned from lessons with the late theatre actor Frank Chin. This flamenco hot sauce often found itself spicing up The Doors’ compositions because... Well, why not? There was an element of chance to The Doors’ writing and no rules, a dynamic that felt entirely in keeping with an era riven with chaos, when everything was up for grabs.
The escalating war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Manson Family Murders; The Doors’ discography came together as America’s social fabric came apart. Of course the 60s cataclysmic denouement
