WAITING FOR THE SUN

After delivering two revolutionary and head-turning albums in the space of a single year and finishing a spectacularly controversial tour the Doors faced their first real challenge: Write and record new songs that would rival the gems they had honed in their earlier years and amazed the general public with. Only a handful of bands could rise to that challenge and the Doors gave it an admirable try but, in the end, created what most fans considered a step down from their previous two. I suspect the opening song (with a riff obviously derived from "Sunshine of Your Love" and "Inna-Gadda-da-Vida") came about as the result of some fat record exec who uttered the cliché "I don't hear a single" upon listening to the tapes coming out of the Electra studios, forcing the foursome to quickly put together "Hello, I love you." It is banal both lyrically and musically and should never have seen the light of day. But they were still young and toeing the company line (even though Jim confessed "I tell you lies, I tell you wicked lies" in the song "We Could Be So Good Together.") The next few songs are strictly about love in its various forms and that's not what we fans were wanting or expecting from them at all. They aren't bad songs, they were just too "nice." Morrison boldly declares "I am the Lizard King, I can do anything" but we were still skeptical at this point. Not until the jarring "Unknown Soldier" were we treated to the brutality and horror of the war-pervaded sixties that we craved and needed from these guys. The satirical carnival-like atmosphere of the ending is truly a great thing to behold and rang frighteningly true for all of us of draft age. Not until the next to the last song are we once again confronted by Mr. Morrison's eerie forecasts when he sings (in "Yes, The River Knows") "I'm going, but I need a little time. I promised I would drown myself in mysticated wine." And that's a promise we didn't want him to keep. The album ends with a bang, though. "Five to One" is the group at its most forceful. To all warnings from his legions of followers to take it easy Jim shouts "No one here gets out alive!" and that he is ready and willing to trade in his hours for a handful of dimes. We didn't know what he was talking about at the time but he was walking down a one-way street toward Dylan's desolation row and no one could stop him. The overindulgences Jim couldn't resist were just beginning to take its toll and this album's overall mediocrity was, unfortunately, only the tip of the iceberg.