The very best of the Doors review

I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.

-- Jim Morrison

Why write something that you probably never heard before? something you wouldn't even care to try to listen to? maybe this entry will let you try and like something thats so old and so amazing. You would be surprised you missed out the good stuff since many many years ago. Do come back for more stuff you missed out that you certainly couldn't find in Singapore radio. //assumption, most readers over here are singaporeans.

The Doors. a bit of background history: "one of the most influential and controversial rock bands of the 1960s," vocal, Jim Morrison, died from a drug overdose which ended the 8 year band. "In the mid-'80s[a decade after he died], Morrison was as big a star as he'd been in the mid-'60s, and Elektra has sold numerous quantities of the Doors' original albums plus reissues and releases of live material over the years". This is also one of the very few legendary bands around that doesn't consist of a bassist. The conventional bass parts are replaced by the deep vocals and keyboards. If I did not read the missing bass part, I wouldn't had realised that. They sounded so full.

When doing a 'greatest hits' , 'the very best" and/or "singles.." album review, its quite impossible to define the mood of the band at different stages of their career. The album is most probably just a gamut of all their most creative and best-selling. But apparantly, this album captures just about the best of everything they had done, leaving out the more 'hard songs' for the diehards.

My favourite The Doors song is of course "The End", which is also used in the commencing sequence of Apocalypse Now (1979). I admit I do not really understand most of the song but when Morrison sings "This is the end, my only friend", I know this is the song for me.

Followed by "Light my fire" (remember Will Young in World Idol?), that song had a very snake charmer solo right at the beginning of the song (which i practised for like 2 weeks yet I still can't get the rift going..). apparantly, this song is so heavily covered by many other artists [WILL YOUNG?!]. In the middle of the song, there is an extended two part solo which just totally expended every possibly-nice-snake-charmer-like guitar hooks.

"People are Strange", the shortest song in the whole album clocking at 2:12 with Morrison charming you off your socks. just listen to him chroon "When you’re strange, Faces come out of the rain, When you’re strange, No one remembers your name, When you’re strange". If you care about understanding the lyrics, you would realise this song's about hallucination, most possibly due to drugs.

"The Ghost song" sounds frighteningly modern, a sharp contrast to all the rest of the tracks in this album. This enchanced CD also includes a MTV of this song which looks really cool, albeit the poor video quality [its in .mov]. what do you think? this is a 1996 album. At that time, its still pentium 100Mhz. The song just goes on with relaxing keyboards and guitars phasing in and out, with Morrison's sexy [yes. sexy. yes. trust me] voice reciting his ever so poetic lyrics. I can't help it but this sounds so much like the background music while skydiving.

the rest of the songs are also mightily charming although the lengthy tracks are really long. So do trust uncle damon, go buy and listen. If you need a sample, do msn me and i'll send you a audio sample to tempt you to spend money on The Doors =]

--damon kohl: