Mr Mojo by Dylan Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

disappeared, and Elektra started a death hoax. ‘It’s a good idea,’ said Harris, ‘but there’s just one problem. No one knows who you are yet.’
    The Doors
remains one of the most extraordinary debut albums in rock history, as influential now as it was when it was released. This was no confused rock and roll arrangement – it was a statement of intent. Released in January 1967, the group’s first LP established a powerful and theatrical rock-blues style, and was a blueprint for their whole career.
    The album was produced, as were all subsequent records apart from
LA Woman
, by Paul Rothchild, a thirty-year-old fan of the band who had just finished an eight-month jail sentence for smuggling marijuana. Assigned to the group by Elektra – Jac Holzman had the producer flown in from New York – Rothchild immediately clicked with them, becoming almost a fifth member. He understood what they were trying to do, and had a sympathetic ear. He got them to recordin Sunset Sound, a studio renowned for its ‘live’ feel, something which made the band sound all the more assertive. Most of the LP was recorded quickly as the band had played the songs so many times, and rehearsals weren’t necessary. Recorded live, nearly everything was cut in a couple of takes. A bass player was drafted in to beef up Manzarek’s tinny Fender keyboard bass on a few songs, but the resulting record was practically an exact copy of the Doors’ stage sound.
    The sound of this first Doors record was remarkable for a variety of reasons: not only for the great tunes or for the sophistication of the lyrics, but for the crystal-clear definition – it sounded
clean
. Because this was his first time in a proper recording studio, Morrison was mostly well behaved, and his enthusiasm for the project manifested itself in his extraordinary performances. He knew this was his chance of immortality; he was, to quote one journalist, ‘conscious of the Kleig lights monitoring his every move’. Recording was occasionally postponed when he came in too drunk to sing (or when he didn’t turn up at all), but mostly it went according to plan.
    And what a plan it was. A blueprint for a dark new tomorrow,
The Doors
was full of haunting little trailers of the future, compelling tales of transcendence, sexuality, death and, in Morrison’s own words, ‘celebrations of existence’. These topics were hardly standard pop fare, and in a world dominated by the Monkees, theBox Tops and the Turtles, the Doors stuck out like a sore thumb, all swollen and bleeding. These sensuous, acid-induced songs were quite unlike anything that had been heard before – modern life as synthesised by an egotistical ‘shaman’ in leather trousers. Morrison’s songs were clipped little poems which he turned into rock and roll vignettes – urgent, obsessive songs of freedom and spiritual death – what he called ‘a journey into truth’.
    Most of Morrison’s early songs share a similar refrain: forget your past and create your future: ‘break on through’, ‘learn to forget’, travel to the ‘end of the night’.
    But if Morrison’s lyrics were full of rich imagery and cryptic trivia, the songs themselves were carefully constructed pop packages. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore created a whirlwind of a backdrop, a gorgeous, malevolent swirl of sounds which evoked the dread side of flower power: sly, hypnotic blues – electric white man’s blues. ‘Break On Through’, ‘The Crystal Ship’, ‘End of the Night’ and the rest are figments of Morrison’s imagination, sung in his rugged, flat baritone, and bathed in Manzarek’s surreal, phantom fairground organ, that distinctive Baroque hurdy-gurdy sound which characterised all their best records. Among Morrison’s life-or-death snapshots were a couple of dazzling cover versions: Kurt