Who Are The Doors?
Oh come on now!! Jim, Robby, Ray & John. Arguably the greatest quartet in rock music.
Absolutely Live – The Review
Released in 1970, Absolutely Live captures The Doors at the point where their concerts had become less like rock shows and more like theatrical knife fights. The studio records could be beautiful, strange things—polished darkness, psychedelic poetry, carefully arranged explosions. But onstage, the songs could stretch, stumble, howl and mutate. Jim Morrison wasn’t simply singing them. He was testing how far they could be pushed before they broke.
And sometimes they nearly broke.
“Who Do You Love” is one of the monsters. The band takes the old blues number and turns it into a long, dirty procession, with Robby Krieger’s guitar grinding away while Ray Manzarek’s keyboards give the whole thing the feeling of some sinister carnival passing through town after midnight. John Densmore keeps it moving with a drummer’s patience, never losing the pulse even when Morrison seems determined to wander off into the wilderness.
Then there’s “When the Music’s Over.” This is where Absolutely Live stops being merely a live album and becomes an event.
The song was already huge in the studio, but live it becomes something much less civilized. Manzarek’s keyboards hang in the air, Krieger prowls around the edges, Densmore drives the machinery forward, and Morrison turns the microphone into a confession booth, a theatre prop and occasionally a weapon. The famous refrain—”When the music’s over / turn out the lights”—sounds less like a lyric than an instruction from a man who has discovered that the party is ending and doesn’t particularly care whether anybody is ready.
“Love Me Two Times” and “Light My Fire” show another side of the record. They’re familiar songs, but the live setting gives them room to breathe. “Light My Fire,” especially, becomes less a pop hit than a piece of musical architecture. The band stretches it out, allowing Manzarek and Krieger to occupy the spaces between the original notes. The song becomes a road with no obvious exit.
But the real treasure is “The Celebration of the Lizard.” It’s excessive. It’s theatrical. It’s completely unreasonable.
The piece is part rock song, part spoken-word performance, part fever dream. Morrison sounds like a man who has spent too long alone with mythology and decided to invite the audience into the basement of his brain. There are images, declarations, repetitions and strange little corridors leading nowhere. You don’t listen to it because it is tidy. You listen because it isn’t.
That was one of The Doors’ great gifts: they understood that rock music could be dangerous without necessarily being loud. Sometimes danger was simply the possibility that the song might go somewhere nobody had planned.
Before it, plenty of live albums had been documents of performances. After it, the live album increasingly became a place where a band could demonstrate that its songs were not finished objects. They could be stretched, rearranged, expanded and occasionally allowed to become something else entirely.
The album sits in the lineage of the great live records that followed—records where the audience isn’t merely listening to a reproduction of the studio album but witnessing the band prove that it can survive outside the laboratory.
Four men on a stage. A room full of people. A handful of songs. And the uneasy suspicion that something might go wrong.
The Vinyl Review
Costing a paltry £8 this is simply an essential live album to own. It is a little rough around the edges but plays very nicely indeed. To be honest i cannot actually recall where I purchased it. I think it may have been at a record fair in London a few years back.
Donnie’s Rating: 10/10
