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The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California by vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and guitarist Robby Krieger. The Doors' music was a fusion of psychedelic rock, hard rock, blues-rock, and acid rock. They were considered a controversial band, due mostly to Morrison's cryptic lyrics and unpredictable stage persona. The remaining members of the band dissolved it in March 1973,[1] short of two years after Morrison's death on July 3rd 1971. Despite a career that barely totaled eight years, The Doors still enjoy a huge cult following as well as status in the mainstream music industry as being hugely influential and original. According to the RIAA, they have sold over 32 million albums in the US alone.
Origins and formation
The origins of The Doors lay in a chance meeting between acquaintances and fellow UCLA film school alumni Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach California in July 1965. Morrison told Manzarek he had been writing songs (Morrison said "I was taking notes at a fantastic rock-n-roll concert going on in my head") and, with Manzarek's encouragement, sang "Moonlight Drive". Impressed by Morrison's lyrics, Manzarek suggested they form a band.
Keyboardist Manzarek was in a band called Rick & the Ravens with his brother Rick Manzarek, while drummer John Densmore were playing with The Psychedelic Rangers, and knew Manzarek from yoga classes. In August, Densmore joined the group and, along with members of The Ravens and bass player Pat Sullivan (later credited using her married name Patricia Hansen in the 1997 box CD release), recorded a six-song demo in September 1965. This circulated widely as a bootleg recording and appeared in full on the 1997 Doors box set.
That month the group recruited guitarist Robby Krieger, and the final lineup — Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore — was complete. The band took their name from the title of a book by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954). That title was in turn taken from a line in a poem by the 18th-century artist and poet William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite".[3]
The Doors were unusual among rock groups because they did not use a bass guitar when playing live. Instead, Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand on the newly invented Fender Rhodes bass keyboard, an offshoot of the Fender Rhodes electric piano, playing other keyboards with his right hand. On their studio albums (with the notable exception of their eponymous first record), The Doors did, however, use bass players, such as Jerry Scheff, Doug Lubahn (who also played with Clear Light), Harvey Brooks, Kerry Magness, Lonnie Mack, Larry Knechtel, Leroy Vinnegar, and Ray Neapolitan.
Many of The Doors' original songs were group compositions, with Morrison or Krieger contributing the lyrics and an initial melody, and the others providing harmonic and rhythmic suggestions, or even entire sections of songs, such as Manzarek's organ introduction to "Light My Fire".
By 1966 the group was playing the London Fog club and soon graduated to the prestigious Whisky a Go Go, where they were the opening act for Van Morrison's group Them. On their last night together the two bands joined up for "In the Midnight Hour" and a twenty-minute jam session of Them's "Gloria".[4] On August 10, they were spotted by Elektra Records president Jac Holzman who was present at the recommendation of Love singer Arthur Lee, whose group was on Elektra. After Holzman and producer Paul A. Rothchild saw two sets of the band playing at the Whisky a Go Go, they signed them to the Elektra Records label on August 18—the start of a long and successful partnership with Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick.
The timing was fortunate, because on August 21 the club fired the band after a profanity-filled performance of "The End". In an incident that foreshadowed the controversy that later followed the group, an acid-tripping Morrison raucously recited his own version of the Greek drama Oedipus Rex, in which Oedipus kills his father and has sex with his mother
Concert here...
(Good color - Great sound quality)
Time: 1:02:16, Size: 126.58MB DL
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