Customer Reviews

Poet Rock Musicians of the Desert

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Cpt. beef heart and jim morrison are wild children of the desert,who express their feelings jim with a dramatic foreboding undertone always flirting with death,while the captain at first sounds like kiddo the clown but as you listen you realize your hearing the picasso of words painting wild pastels of dischord octaves,both sounding like sincere searing souls wandering and echoing across the desert land scape.an ingenious combination...Stefan

This CD is 2 discs. Disc 1 is Captain Beefheart, Disc 2 is Jim Morrison.
As for Disc 1, I could live without it. I have never been a Beefheart fan. Sorry.
If you're a Beefheart fan, I apologize. To me, he's just kind of annoying. His brand of 'psychedelia for psychdelia's sake' ramblings get boring real quick. At least Morrison had stories to tell, that weren't just bizarro hippie gibberish.
I really don't see how Beefheart can be equated with Morrison, enough to justify the existence of this 'Rock Poets of the Desert'-themed set, except for the fact that they were contemporaries and artists with vaguely similar interests. But the connection is tenuous at best, in my opinion.
I bought this for Disc 2 - the Morrison side.
It's a good behind-the-scenes recording of Jim reading his poetry in the studio - several of these tracks would later be edited by the surviving Doors and become the 'An American Prayer' album.
It's interesting to hear the unexpurgated words, unedited, and without the background music and sound effects. Jim actually describes the sound effects that he wants to be added later as asides to the engineer in the booth, between poems, with the tape still rolling the entire time. It's a true Jim Morrison spoken word performance - real, raw, and uncensored.
Listen back-to-back with 'An American Prayer' and hear the differences.
The company that produced this CD has released several other rare Morrison recordings - brief interviews, soundbites, etc - and some of this material has appeared elsewhere, in varying degrees of quality, but this is one of the better, cleaner, more complete versions.