Bright Midnight: Live In America (Limited Edition)

The Doors | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (February 19, 2002)
• Original Release Date: 1969
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Rhino / Wea
• ASIN: B00005Y1Y3
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #85,212 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Light My Fire

2. Been Down So Long

3. Back Door Man

4. Love Hides

5. Five To One

6. Touch Me

7. The Crystal Ship

8. Break On Through (To The Other Side)

9. Bellowing

10. Roadhouse Blues

11. Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)

12. Love Me Two Times/Baby Please Don't Go

13. St. James Infirmary

14. The End

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Decades after Jim Morrison's death effectively ended the Doors' career as an active band, the surviving members' legal efforts to wrest control of their legacy from others yielded some pleasant surprises. Found during the effort were a dozen or so professionally recorded concerts from late in the band's career--recordings they began to self-distribute online through their own Bright Midnight label. This 13-track from-the-vaults anthology effectively culls together a new Doors live album that chronicles some edgy moments from 1969 and '70. With singer-provocateur Jim Morrison ever the focus, the band has bravely eschewed sonic revisionism in favor of a largely unvarnished historical snapshot. Kicking off with an 11-minute-plus take of their signature "Light My Fire," the band quickly shows that its jam-ethos was more about emotionally charged musical consciousness expansion than about showcasing their licks to a perfect groove. Morrison leads the charge throughout, whether playfully crooning during a 1969 Hollywood Aquarius Theater take of "Touch Me," carousing through "Been Down So Long" and "Roadhouse Blues" in bluesy/boozy 1969 shows in Detroit and Boston, respectively, or playing the role of mad shaman poet to the max in a rare, 16-plus-minute live invocation of "The End." --Jerry McCulley

Product Description

'Bright Midnight - Live In America' is a limited edition release features 14 live performances recorded at various cities between 1969-1970. Includes one of three live versions ever recorded of 'The End', with Jim's improvisation of some free-form poetry. Bright Midnight/Rhino Records.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as it gets, July 5, 2002

By 

Jinkyu - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bright Midnight: Live In America (Limited Edition) (Audio CD)

Live in America is a must for hard-core Doors people, and also highly recommended for everyone. It contains a nice selection, many of the group's greatest songs, and the sound quality is fabulous. What the mixers can achieve in these 21st Century CDs of 20th Century Foxy concerts (OK, concert snippets) is remarkable. If you turn up the sound a bit, it is as if you are sitting next to a speaker on stage, with volume and balance personally calibrated to you, a magically funneled sound.

Check out "The Crystal Ship" and Ray Manzarek's trademark lovely organ solo, which radiates ooh so beautifully. "Touch Me" is also superb, as Robbie Krieger's guitar flows through so neatly in stereo, in place of the absent brass and strings! "Been Down So Long" is excellent, slick worksmanship to that cool heavy blues, with harmonica here too. The good sonics make the always-electrifying "Break on Through" even better, and "Roadhouse Blues" cooks. "The End" fills the long cut slot. The only negative is some muffled sound in an extended "Love Me Two Times," too great a song to let it bother me. Overall, Jim Morrison's poise and delivery are good and professional to boot, even as he allows himself some spoken-jive spontaneity, in contrast to his alcohol-infused theater in "Absolutely Live."

Though the Bright Midnight story is just beginning, by now at least one other version of each song on this CD has appeared on that label or Elektra. It will be interesting to see how the many Doors tunes with no previous commercial live version roll out with the passage of time, for the group performed virtually everything at least once in concert, including "L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm." For now, we have this gem of a CD, opening with none other than "Light My Fire," highlighted by Ray's dynamic keyboard tension preceding the bridge between the two instrumentals.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars pretty great, October 24, 2006

By 

silly narwhal "sillynarwhal" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Bright Midnight: Live in America (Audio CD)

No, Jim is generally not as "hungry" or as vocally flexible range-wise here as in the first couple years of the Doors' existence, perhaps (check out the Soundstage DVD for sheer perfection). But to dismiss these performances as drunken poetry recitals is just plain false--but then, similar criticisms were launched even in 1968 by those who had a set notion of what goods the Lizard King should be expected to deliver. Not only is the sound quality superb, but to these ears there's plenty of energy and magic. I mean, how much more inspired of a performance of "Been Down So Long" could you want from Jim? Or how much more beautifully sung a "Crystal Ship?" "The End" also--though the beginning lines are less than ideal with the band & Jim getting out of synch, some serious mojo is stirred up in the middle, with Jim in a deep poetic space. No, you don't get "the killer awoke before dawn;" why should Jim have to always visit that particular room (fans were singing along to those lines by 1968, for crying out loud) when he had so many others to choose from. The beauty is that, like the Grateful Dead exploring Dark Star, Jim is free to wander wherever he wants each time out so that each is unique & special, for both audience, and just as importantly, for him & the band.
"Touch Me" is a big treat, with Robbie jamming instead of a saxophone--nice to hear this with just the band filling all the space. Really like the "St. James Infirmary" back into "Love Me Two Times," too.
Perhaps this isn't the hottest Doors ever played, but it's pretty damned great--I know I'd have counted myself lucky to have attended one of these shows. And I'm very happy to have this document as consolation.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Saint Jim, the Lizard King, returns from the great beyond, March 9, 2002

By 

rash67 (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bright Midnight: Live In America (Limited Edition) (Audio CD)

For another Jim, that famous American philosopher Cheech Marin said, "Let's dig Jim up and get him to lay down a few more tracks." Well they didn't do that, but they did the next best thing.

When I first saw this I couldn't believe my eyes. How good could it be, a live tape that's been in the vaults for more than 30 years? There had to be something wrong. I stood at a listening post and listen to the whole thing before I bought it. And guess what, except for someone clowning with the mixer in "Love Me Two Times", it's all good! I expected off key, bad tape something. It's as good as the Doors live concerts, heck it is a live concert! Through some electronic wizardry, the engineers cobbled together 14 songs from 10 concerts and make it sound like one concert.

In retrospect, the Doors had a strong Jazz Fusion aspect. In "Light my Fire" Robbie Krieger quotes John Coletrane's version of "My Favorite Things". The Blues in "Been Down so Long" is really gutsy, if not too "R" rated for the 60's. Lot's of blues here. In "RoadHouse Blues" Jim sounds as if he's had a drink or two, it's raw, but real, but he still sings on key.

The eerie part is to hear Jim rap about eternal recurrence and re-watching your life over and over after death. Jim says "You'd better have some good incidents happening" to watch forever or words to that effect. Wherever you are Jim, I hope it's good for you.

This is the first of a proposed release of Doors live concerts 30 years in the vaults.

Well worth your money. On my tough grading system, 5 points for performance, 4 for recording quality. Very close to five stars.