The list of bands that could never hope to have their story told accurately is a short one, but there’s no doubt that The Doors is at the top of it. The characters are just too larger-than-life; Oliver Stone based his movie on drummer John Densmore’s account and it wound up being the same fantastic work of fiction that Densmore’s “tell-all”, Riders On The Storm, was; everything keyboardist Ray Manzarek has written about the band has been hopelessly romantic, theatrical and flaky, and the novel by Danny Sugarman was generally worthless too – we’re not talking about a wealth of reliable sources here. Theoretically, the most grounded member’s account (that of guitarist Robbie Kreiger)would be a valuable asset in that regard but, he’s not really talking.
So why rehash the same stories and songs with the same notoriously unreliable cast?
The Classic Albums account starts with the same old song and dance – with a couple of music industry people and producers discussing something they couldn’t possibly know anything about, Henry Rollins and Perry Farrell chiming in with a little hero worship and Manzarek expanding upon the “magic” of it all – before the brass tacks get busted out and we finally get some stories we haven’t heard before. For example, The Doors weren’t any kind of overnight success; they pulled out of a deal with Sony early on and they got turned down a lot in the early going on the grounds that they were basically too un-hip. The revelations continue as its explained that singer Jim Morrison was a big fan of the classic crooners and the guitar riff in “Break On Through” was actually lifted by Robbie Kreiger from a Paul Butterfield Band song.
This is not the same Doors story we’ve been fed for decades, it’s different; it’s better because it’s more honest.
As the surviving members of The Doors along with producer Bruce Botnick lay out the nuts and bolts of making all the songs on their first album (that, yes, had a bass player on each song), the magic – not so mystical, but magic just the same – of the band in their early days comes into focus. They were good – there’s no debating that – but they worked hard and practiced relentlessly before they walked into the studio; it wasn’t a matter of divine intervention or a magical finger that reached out and touched the group’s members.
From there, the DVD dives back into the stories that everyone knows; having to cut down “Light my Fire” for radio, the Ed Sullivan debacle and on into Morrison’s own personal troubles. Not shocking to fans, those personal troubles are shown to be the inspiration for a lot of Doors songs and ultimately led to his destruction. Were these things on the band members’ minds when they were making their first record? Probably not, but they manifest in this documentary as sure as Densmore’s narcissism (comparing both himself and Morrison to Picasso) does in the later-running of the program. “The End” is, of course, the end of the line for the run-time. Classic Albums ends on the perfect note as the DVD goes through the development and creation of the song as we know it. As with the album it exposes, this installment of Classic Albums is a charmed moment because it gets through all of the obvious personal obstacles to the heart of a personally convoluted record.
The most insightful (from a previously unrealized standpoint) and funny moments ended up apparently first on the cutting room floor and then in the extras appended to this DVD. Included is a sequence wherein its discovered that there were a few songs not used for The Doors’ self-titled debut including two different versions of “Moonlight Drive” (they eventually appeared on box sets and compilations and a completely different version appeared on Strange Days a year later) that fans will absolutely eat up here. There are some incomprehensible moments too, like a flamenco lesson from Kreiger using “Spanish Caravan” (which didn’t appear on the first Doors album) as a text and Jac Holzman (president of Electra Records) doing a very Charlton Heston-inspired reading of “Break On Through” as well as Manzarek rambling about Morrison’s rabble-rousing that are all indeed a little reaching for purpose in this context (presumably why they were cut) but they’ll captivate Doors fans because they’re moments that fans can’t recite by rote. Those are the things that make this edition of Classic Albums special and, in addition to making it of interest to long-time supporters of The Doors, it’s accessible enough to win new ones as well.
