Apparently we've been listening to the wrong album for decades. At least that's what engineer Bruce Botnick says in the liner notes of the expanded 40th-anniversary release of the Doors's self-titled debut. Aside from the fact that the original LP and all subsequent CD reissues were reproduced at a slower rate (and therefore at a barely discernable flat pitch), two songs now include their original lyrics. The new "Break On Through (To The Other Side)" finds Jim Morrison singing "She gets high" several times in a row, as was originally intended; being that the song was the band's first single, Elektra Records censored it to meet radio airplay standards. But there's a fine line between preserving what was intended and maintaining what, simply, was. Arguably, the "real" version is the one people have been listening to for the past 40 years. Anyway you slice, restore, or remix it (as it has been by Botnick himself), The Doors is still one of the best debuts in rock history.
Though it wasn't a hit upon its initial release, "Break On Through" was the perfect debut single for The Doors. The mid-'60s was a transitional time in American society and pop culture in general, and the song was the threshold through which The Doors—and the country—passed and never looked back. When Morrison sings, "Learn to forget" on "Soul Kitchen," a classic Doors love song that's actually about a restaurant in California, it could be the motto of an entire generation. It's a sentiment that's echoed on the next two tracks, "The Crystal Ship" and "Twentieth Century Fox," in which Morrison ends an ostensible downer of a relationship ("Deliver me from reasons why/You'd rather cry/I'd rather fly") and enters another with a girl who "never hesitates" and "won't waste time." Morrison was too wrapped up in drugs and girls to explicitly address the source of this need to seize the moment and, had The Doors disappeared after one album, that attitude may have seemed utterly juvenile, but there's an undercurrent of turmoil racing beneath the surface of the transient pleasures promoted throughout The Doors that would be more explicitly addressed on subsequent albums.
Though it wasn't a hit upon its initial release, "Break On Through" was the perfect debut single for The Doors. The mid-'60s was a transitional time in American society and pop culture in general, and the song was the threshold through which The Doors—and the country—passed and never looked back. When Morrison sings, "Learn to forget" on "Soul Kitchen," a classic Doors love song that's actually about a restaurant in California, it could be the motto of an entire generation. It's a sentiment that's echoed on the next two tracks, "The Crystal Ship" and "Twentieth Century Fox," in which Morrison ends an ostensible downer of a relationship ("Deliver me from reasons why/You'd rather cry/I'd rather fly") and enters another with a girl who "never hesitates" and "won't waste time." Morrison was too wrapped up in drugs and girls to explicitly address the source of this need to seize the moment and, had The Doors disappeared after one album, that attitude may have seemed utterly juvenile, but there's an undercurrent of turmoil racing beneath the surface of the transient pleasures promoted throughout The Doors that would be more explicitly addressed on subsequent albums.
