News Why do people criticise The Doors so much?
As the 1960s began, most rock stars were looking to promote the concept of peace and love. The Vietnam War was still raging half a world away, so everyone was turning to music to assure themselves that everything was going to be fine. If the hippies were the cosmic optimistic side of the times, The Doors brought everyone back to Earth and pried open the audience’s third eye.
Then again, there are just as many people who would rather throw a stereo system in a blender than have to listen to The Doors at all. Since everyone was talking about the importance of expanding one’s mind in the 1960s, hearing Jim Morrison drone on about the state of the world either felt like a hit of bad acid or the kind of music that plays outside of a particularly drab three-ring circus.
It wasn’t just the casual fans who were disgruntled, either. For one, resident weirdo Frank Zappa hated what The Doors stood for, saying that most of their music was guilty of being “distasteful and stretching the boundaries of what it actually was”. While there’s certainly merit to that, considering that one track ended up in a car commercial, that was never how Morrison saw his music.
Morrison sought to open up different avenues for his music to thrive throughout every record they made. After all, the group’s name was taken from a literary reference from Aldous Huxley, where everyone would see things as infinite if they cleansed their doors of perception.
Even if Morrison was exercising poetic license in his music, it didn’t excuse him from criticism by fellow rock poet Lou Reed, who accused him of stealing the look he had pioneered with The Velvet Underground. No one has exclusive rights to leather pants as their image, and whenever Morrison stepped up to the microphone, his version of poetry is vastly different from anything Reed was doing at the time.
Being interested in all forms of literature, Morrison was the kind of bizarro world answer to someone like Bob Dylan. Whereas Dylan helped expose the world for what it was and encouraged everyone to change it for the better, Morrison was wondering whether some parts of it were beyond saving. Just looking at the lyrics to ‘The End’, the line “lost in a Roman wilderness of pain/and all the children are insane” is probably one of the more biting social critiques anyone has ever made on the flower generation.
If there’s one criticism often levelled at The Doors, it’s the music itself. Compared to other singers, Morrison was far from the greatest, often singing a basic melody to push the song along. In any other group, this might not have worked, but his bandmates’ powerful performances behind him turned it into their greatest strength.
After all, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore started out by listening to jazz and blues. From that experience, they crafted some of the most beautifully dark melodies of the 1960s. This included the haunting raindrop sounds from the electric keyboard on ‘Riders on the Storm’ and the gritty piano groove laid down on ‘Love Me Two Times’.
And while Robbie Krieger never played with a pick during his time with the group, his fingerstyle approach actually predicted what Lindsey Buckingham would be doing years later in Fleetwood Mac. Every guitarist is more grounded with a pick, but that sense of abandon that Krieger put into songs like ‘LA Woman’ and ‘People Are Strange’ are probably the most tasteful solos of the entire 1960s.
More than anything, The Doors offered a bit of a retort to everything that the 1960s was supposed to be, and that is a lot more interesting than just a standard hippy rock and roll act. It was common for everyone to stick flowers in their hair and try to make the most of every day they had, but The Doors presented an alternative to the mainstream, and that mindset is still baked into the DNA of any artist looking to break the tradition and see where the muse took them.