The Doors [Limited Edition]

The Doors | Format: Vinyl

Product Details

• Vinyl (December 5, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Limited Edition
• Label: Dcc Compact Classics
• ASIN: B0000001D9
• In-Print Editions: Audio CD
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #161,272 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. Break on Through (To the Other Side)

2. Soul Kitchen

3. The Crystal Ship

4. Twentieth Century Fox

5. Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

6. Light My Fire

7. Back Door Man

8. I Looked at You

9. End of the Night

10. Take It as It Comes

11. The End

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gold DCC disc is about as good as we'll ever hear it., July 15, 1999

By 

James M. Shertzer (Winston-Salem, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Doors (Audio CD)

Unquestionably one of the four or five great American rock albums of the '60s, the Doors first album is a total stunner in this gold CD version. I have heard this music in almost all formats, from the first Elektra pressings through open reel to the audiophile Mobile Fidelity LP to the various CD incarnations. In the late 70s, I also attended a press preview of "Apocalypse Now" at a 70mm six-track stereo installation in New York City where Coppola had personally checked the sound just before the showing. "The End" sounds almost a good here at it did that night. I haven't been crazy about all Steve Hoffman's audiophile LP and CD remasterings at DCC, but this one is simply terrific. The sound has a presence and depth you don't hear on the aluminum version, and Morrison's vocals are just lacerating! Highly recommended, and the DCC version of "L.A. Woman," the other Doors album that really matters, is damn near as good!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Part of life in 1967, May 6, 2001

By 

Maria-Rosa de Hacia - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Doors (Audio CD)

It sure is a pleasure to reminisce, back to a day when we really thought that "all you need is love" and everything would be all right. Yes, the time between my 14th and 15th birthdays, when Sergeant Pepper was redefining what was musically possible and everyone else was reacting to it. "Light My Fire" indeed!

For Jim Morrison and the Doors, it was an unbelievably creative time, as evidenced by the songs on this, their first album. To say there is not a bad track here only begins to communicate the importance of the record. Some at the time called them America's Dionysian counterparts to the Rolling Stones, and that's a good place to start. Let's just say the Doors showed what could happen when "California Dreams" turned into nightmares, as "The End" so aptly describes.

The gem here remains "Light My Fire", every bit as incandescent as when I first heard it all those 34 years ago during the "Summer of Love." Of course, we're talking about what we then called the "FM Version" with its soaring keyboard and guitar break in the middle. The album snaps, crackles and pops with the bluesy "Break on Through", "Back Door Man", "Take It as It Comes", and such fine rock standards as "Alabama Song", "Twentieth Century Fox" and "Soul Kitchen". Another favorite of mine is the softer "Crystal Ship", and of course, "The End", which later gained new fame from its appearance in the film "Apocolypse Now" (a particularly poignant use of the song I might add).

Another reviewer called this one of the four or five best rock albums of the 1960's. (I'm inclined to agree with that, but completing that list is a difficult chore indeed!) Simply put, Morrison's later death in 1971 would rob the music world of perhaps many other great works to come. For the Doors, only L.A. Woman rivaled this one creatively.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Doors' debut album breaks on through to the other side, October 28, 2004

By 

Lawrance M. Bernabo (The Zenith City, Duluth, Minnesota) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Doors (Audio CD)

The Doors were probably more controversial than they were influential, but they were certainly one of the signature rock bands of the 1960s. The group was formed in Los Angeles in 1965 by a pair of U.C.L.A. film students, keyboard player Ray Manzarek and vocalist Jim Morrison, along with guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. Because the group did not have a bass player their music was dominated by Manzarek's distinctive electric organ work and Morrison's evocative vocals of his evocative lyrics. Signed a year later to Elektra Records with the goal of capturing on vinyl what the group did in live performance, their self-titled debut album featured the hit "Light My Fire" and because of their distinctive sound became one of the best albums of psychedelic music. In fact, "The Doors" was such a great album that it made everything that came afterwards pale in comparison and gave credence to the idea the group was on a destructive arc fueled by Morrison's personal problems and then went nova with "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Women" right before his death.

The music of the Doors was a peculiar blend of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and powerful lyrics. Nobody around played guitar like Krieger, while Manzarek's classical influences showed up in his organ riffs, Densmore brought some Latin influences, and Morrison's lyrics contained moments of searing emotional poetry. From the opening notes of "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" it is clear this group is different. For somebody who was consuming mass quantities of drugs and alcohol, Morrison's lyrics were the sort that students should be discussing in literature class: "I found an island in your arms/A country in your eyes," a love that becomes transmuted into "arms that chain" and "Eyes that lie." Then the song explodes into sound as the band announces its presence with authority. This is such a key song in the history of the Doors that there is reason it leads off most anthologies and collections of their best songs.

"Light My Fire," and I can remember finally getting to listen to the long version having only heard the single version with the impressive, intricate organ solo that still stands alone as the epitome of what can be done with that instrument in a rock song. Then Jose Feliciano proved how good it was in his totally stripped down acoustic version. "Take It As It Comes" is also pretty good, even if not quite in that same class. Still, it is the moodiness of "The Crystal Ship" and the "eleven-minute Oedipal drama" of "The End" that defined the Doors as one of the strangest and most ambitious rock groups around. It is impossible to think of another Sixties rock group that was as disturbing as the Doors, an idea codified in popular culture by Francis Ford Coppola's use of "The End" at the climax of "Apocalypse Now." Not only literature classes but future psychologists and psychiatrists could have a field day analyzing Morrison's lyrics as well.