DVD Review: The Doors - Live at the Bowl '68

DVD Review: The Doors - Live at the Bowl ‘68

Eagle Vision

All Access Review: A

The Doors - Live at the Bowl '68

Holding his guitar like a rifle, The Doors’ Robby Krieger takes aim at Jim Morrison. Always up for anything, the singer wanted to stage a mock execution during “The Unknown Soldier,” and Krieger went along with the gag, simulating the recoil action of a gun as Morrison fell like a sack of potatoes. Only six months had passed since Morrison’s notorious onstage arrest in New Haven, Connecticut, and he was, perhaps, beginning to feel as if he had a target on his back, put there by his friends in law enforcement. Confrontations between Morrison, The Doors and the police in the aftermath of that incident would continue, confirming his suspicions.

Unlike that surreal evening in December of 1967 when Morrison fought the law and didn’t win, he wouldn’t be hauled away in handcuffs when The Doors – feeling on top of the world – brought their psychedelic circus to the Hollywood Bowl on July 5, 1968, the concert where Morrison took that imaginary bullet from Krieger. Filmed at the behest of The Doors, it turned out to be a landmark performance for the band and the unpredictable Morrison, ever the fearless shaman and the enigmatic poet. Now, at a time when pettiness and fear seem to have the masses in their clutches and Morrison’s philosophy of liberation is but an echo from the distant past, the definitive document of that celebrated event arrives, a DVD account titled “Live at the Bowl ‘68” that cleans out the dust and the cobwebs and showcases the focused synergy and hallucinatory fervor The Doors could muster when properly motivated. Rising to the occasion, The Doors run through rousing, spirited versions of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar),” “Hello, I Love You,” “The Unknown Soldier” and “Back Door Man” with vim and vigor, their swirling mania and spirit of adventure driving them onward and upward.

And whenever Morrison gets the itch to veer off course and journey into the unknown, whether his fellow travelers are familiar with the imagined terrain or strangers in the strangest and wildest country one could possibly hope to explore, Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore are unafraid to follow. With their own loose, freewheeling and almost alien improvisation – oftentimes emitting harsh dissonance and throwing together shapeless sonic juxtapositions – negotiating safe passage through the borderless wilderness of “Horse Latitudes,” “A Little Game” and “The Hill Dwellers,” The Doors coalesce into the more recognizable cadre of gypsy artists commissioned to paint the rich, mysterious hues and golden frames of “Spanish Caravan.” It’s as if the know just what loose thread to pull and let everything unravel, before knitting the elements back together into stronger and more vivid weavings than those captured on in the studio.

Under The Doors’ hypnotic spell, the crowd jolts bolt upright when Morrison screams, “Wake Up!” And while Morrison lashes out with terrifying invective, that trio noisily devolves and breaks apart, embodying the decay and caged-animal frustration that drives Morrison’s delivery. Then, right on cue, The Doors launch into “Light My Fire” – which, along with “The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)” and the aforementioned “Spanish Caravan,” had been MIA previously from the film but are now part of it – with wild-eyed fury, building up to a powerful sonic orgasm of whirling organ, trampling drums and frenzied guitar. All of which leads them to the mysterious, apocalyptic visions of “The End.”

Restored to glorious effect, the audio and video of this event, one of the biggest and most transcendent events in the history of The Doors, couldn’t be more pristine. A vintage look is maintained, and the expressions on Morrison’s face, captured so artfully by the cameramen working this particular job, are priceless, although more close-ups on Krieger and Densmore, in particular, as they worked at their craft would have been appreciated. Even on that Spartan stage, so big and wide for three people intensely concentrating on their playing their parts and one snake charmer with a wry smile and a gift for making dream-like language submit to his will, The Doors – surrounded by an obscene amount of amps – seemed more gods than men. And the extra bonus features, including the mini-documentaries “Echoes from the Past” and “You had to be There,” are wonderfully informative nostalgia trips that tell the engrossing story of this occasion – as well as that of The Doors in general – in great detail, mining the memory banks of the remaining members of The Doors, the opening band The Chambers Brothers, and the Doors’ engineer Bruce Botnick in casual conversations that have the feel of barroom chats.

Unfortunately, we never do find out for sure if Morrison was on acid that night, as has been rumored over the years. Nevertheless, though somewhat compromised, the original footage is sublime, shot from angles that expertly capture the heightened tension and different moods of The Doors that June night in 1968, but never seeming intrusive or obnoxious. Quite lucid and even playful, Morrison was in rare form, and it’s apparent that the importance of this moment is not lost on him or the rest of them. And for those who worked on this new packaging, which includes fascinating liner notes culled from Botnick that read like a detailed tour diary entry from that special date in Doors lore, they recognize it as well.

-            Peter Lindblad

DVD Review: The Doors - Mr. Mojo Risin' - The Story of L.A. Woman

DVD Review: The Doors - Mr. Mojo Risin': The Story of L.A. Woman
Eagle Rock Entertainment
All Access Review: B+

In a very real sense, after Jim Morrison’s infamous Miami arrest on morals charges and public drunkenness, The Doors as a whole were subject to house arrest. The south Florida homecoming for Morrison at the Dinner Key Auditorium, packed with 14,000 people, was the first stop on The Doors’ 1969 tour, and it was a night nobody would ever forget. Perhaps it even signaled that the end was near.

Three sheets to the wind, and perhaps inspired by seeing the confrontational performance of the experimental theater group The Living Theatre the night before, the Lizard King was in no mood to sing. And so, during “Break on Through,” he began a confused rant that at once embraced the slavish adoration of the crowd – noting his Floridian roots – and then turned on them with blazing hostility, rebuking them as conformists and calling them “f**king idiots” and “slaves,” while expressing his love for a weirder and wilder locale, his adopted playground Los Angeles.

It’s all there on screen in the documentary “Mr. Mojo Risin’: The Story of L.A. Woman,” which follows the making of The Doors’ magnificent coda, the slice of gritty, sinister blues and dark, surreal jazz known as L.A. Woman that would turn out to be Morrison’s last studio recording. There’s Morrison threatening to expose his genitalia for all to see. There’s Morrison feigning oral sex on guitarist Robby Krieger. And then, of course, there are the clueless cops hauling away a bemused Morrison, who seems completely satisfied with the circus-like chaos and complete disorder he has so diabolically orchestrated. But, maybe, just maybe, there was more to Morrison’s actions than a simple desire to create all-out anarchy. By this time, Morrison’s notoriety had already become the stuff of legend – people had taken to calling them the “dirty Doors” as Manzarek relates in the film – and the alcohol was doing a lot of the talking, leading to arrests and tales, whether made up or true, of incredible hedonism. But, as Manzarek explains, Morrison had some questions for the Miami audience and everybody else who wanted a piece of The Doors, one of them being, “What do you want from us?” Morrison might have been asking the same question of himself.

As longtime music writer David Fricke argues, the implications of Morrison’s actions probably affected him the most. The threat of going to Rayford Penitentiary and losing his freedom, even if for only a matter of months, weighed heavily on a man who valued that above all else. In the short term, all the legal complications forced The Doors to cancel that ill-fated tour. Left with nothing better to do since they really couldn’t go anywhere to play – nervous venue owners didn’t want anything to do with such outrageous behavior and banned them from most of the halls in the U.S.  – The Doors responded by going back in the studio to record what would become L.A. Woman, and “Mr. Mojo Risin’” offers a competent, if somewhat pedestrian, creation story.

The sessions, as producer Paul Rothschild tells it in vintage interview footage, did not begin well. Morrison seemed disinterested, and the music, at least to Rothschild’s ears, was uninspiring. Even Manzarek admits the playing was sub-par, and Krieger relates that Rothschild even felt “Riders on the Storm” sounded like lame cocktail music. In a move that stunned The Doors, Rothschild parted ways with the band, leaving The Doors to their own devices and top-notch engineer Bruce Botnick. The story of Rothschild’s departure and how it resulted in the band taking control of its music is handled with the utmost care, as all sides are given equal time. In fact, there is great honesty and detail that emerge from interviews with all the living Doors, Botnick and a cast of seemingly thousands.

Musicologists will wet themselves over the attention paid to the recording process behind L.A. Woman and the studio magic – which returned for The Doors when they left the drab, lifeless Sunset Sound studio for the livelier environs of their rehearsal and office space on Santa Monica Boulevard, where their music was “seeped into the walls,” as drummer John Densmore so vividly recounts – that gave birth to some of the most memorable songs in the band’s catalog. One moment, Manzarek is telling how the soft, rain-like piano parts for “Riders on the Storm” developed and how Elvis’s bassist Jerry Scheff, who sat in and played on L.A. Woman, was dumbfounded as to how to recreate thosee bass parts on his instrument; the next, the disagreement over whether “Love Her Madly” should have been the first single is rehashed, with Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman recalling how it raised the hair on the back of his neck and Krieger saying he thought it was “too commercial.”

Packed to the gills with revelatory and enthusiastic interviews and vintage photography and video footage of both candid, behind-the-scenes moments and blood-pumping live segments, “Mr. Mojo Risin’” is nothing if not comprehensive. The story of every song on L.A. Woman, with the possible exception of “Cars Hiss by My Window,” gets its own time in the sun, and the filmmakers take great pains to examine the bones and the guts of tracks like the stomping, swampy blues of “Crawling King Snake” and the simmering heat and seedy noir of “L.A. Woman,” a song that captures the essence of the city, it’s literary underbelly and its women and pays tribute to them all in Morrison’s vivid poetry. With Botnick at the sound board and Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek at their instruments, the musical evolution of key moments in each track are intensely explored, as are Morrison’s lyrics, pregnant with metaphor and primal, dream-like imagery.

What crashes the party is … well, the lack of anything resembling a good time. On occasion, “Mr. Mojo Risin’” begins to drift off and become tedious and dry, an academic paper come to life in documentary film form. While smartly emphasizing the actual blood, sweat and tears behind L.A. Woman rather than the sensationalism that seems to dog other Doors’ biographies, the filmmakers treat the subject matter with little wit and a seriousness that colors it in grey rather than the rich, bold hues and apocalyptic psychedelic paints the Doors brushed onto the canvas of their music. Still, the documentary doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator. It is an intelligent and affecting history, especially as it relates to Morrison’s jetting off to Paris with girlfriend Pamela Courson after his vocals for L.A. Woman were done and the sense among friends and band mates that he wasn’t coming back.

One of the draws to this DVD is the appearance of a new Doors song, “She Smells So Nice,” included in the bonus features. A swinging, bluesy number that jumps off the dance floor of a southern backwoods juke joint, “She Smells So Nice” sweats heavily and steps lively as a cavalcade of Doors still pictures from days gone by passes through – that is before the song morphs into a slow-cooked, tantalizing stew of savory guitar notes, subtle brushed drums and neon electric keyboard lights. Even if the film isn’t quite as glorious or as transcendent as The Doors were, it does its job with workmanlike attention to detail and a tenacious desire to get the story right, to do it justice. And, in the end, isn’t that what we all want from a music documentary?

 - Peter Lindblad

Official Trailer from Eagle Rock:

DVD Review: The Doors "When You’re Strange"

DVD Review: The Doors "When You’re Strange" 
All Access Review:  A-

Inscribed on Jim Morrison’s Paris grave marker is a Latin phrase that, when translated to English, is said to mean “True to his Own Spirit.” Morrison’s estranged father, Admiral George C. Morrison, a man who admits to not really knowing his son the rock god all that well – something many in the Doors’ inner circle can relate to – claims to have chosen those words on the advice of a former language teacher. The by-the-book Navy man, so different from his wild-child offspring, got it right with this farewell tribute.

So does The Doors documentary “When You’re Strange,” now out on DVD through Eagle Vision. Where Oliver Stone’s feature bio-pic, “The Doors,” infamously played fast and loose with the facts, failed in epic fashion to capture the dark, mysterious essence of that most enigmatic and alluringly surreal of late-‘60s, early –‘70s counter-culture bands, this Tom DiCillo directed effort is unfailing in its quest for the truth. That is to say that it’s almost always on point whether reciting what really happened in The Doors’ brief, but incendiary, heydays in astonishingly rich and visually captivating detail or re-creating the swirling madness that swallowed up one cult hero and three serious musicians who, as guitarist Robby Krieger put it, made music that was more “symbolic than straight to the point.”

Of course, it helps to have a wealth of never-before-seen archival footage at your disposal. What’s your pleasure? Beguiling, and often riotous and unpredictable, live performances, some of it from landmark moments in Doors’ history, including the Miami incident and more of Morrison’s very public brushes with the law? What about candid vintage interviews with Morrison, Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore in which they try to explain the unexplainable, namely how their hypnotic music actually makes sense? There’s even film of The Doors at leisure and offstage rehearsals, of members’ lives before the band, plus Morrison’s prophetic movie of his own afterlife, a high-speed journey through a desert in a Mustang Cobra into the great unknown. Were that all there was to “When You’re Strange” it would be merely a funhouse of disparate images. What sets “When You’re Strange” apart is how artfully DiCillo and company pull it all together, with Doors’ songs like the funereal dirge “The End,” the ramshackle, carnival of sound that doubles as the film’s title, and other hits from the catalog gnashing their teeth above the surreal dreamscape of well-edited imagery.

And then there’s Johnny Depp’s deadpan narration, reminiscent of that of Martin Sheen in “Apocalypse Now.” Suitably dry and unobtrusive, Depp breathes gloom and tension into a script that, thankfully, offers a fairly in-depth and intelligent study of the musical chemistry of Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore before digging, with appropriate respect and very little sensationalism, into Morrison’s writings, his descent into alcoholism and its divisive effect on the band, and, ultimately, the cloudy circumstances surrounding his death in Paris. Add in intimate and revealing interviews with Morrison’s father, recorded prior to his death in 2008, and his sister, and what you get is a documentary that is dreamy, intoxicating and pure cinematic poetry.


-Peter Lindblad



Eagle Vision:  The Doors: When You’re Strange