Sorry not to have posted anything myself from the Swappers Vaults for a while but here's a treat and though severely edited, as much if it is now officially available, there is enough here to enjoy for the most cursory of glances and those with maybe hardly more than a passing interested in Jimbo and The Boys....and as Big O says
"We’re celebrating The Doors 40th at BigO. As long as there are fans, there will be sharing."
Over on Big O (of course!) who say............
Only four out of the 17 tracks on this R.O.I.O. can be offered.4 out of 17, you say, why bother? 'Cos there is the 17+ minute 'Celebration of The Lizard' for one....give it a punt....................
Morrison Hotel Outtakes came into our possession before the Doors released their 1997 4CD boxset of rarities. It has since been less of an outstanding bootleg with many of its tracks now officially released in 1997 and then in 2007 when the Doors released all their albums in 40th Anniversary editions together with the Perception box.
Surprisingly, there are still a number of gems to be had. Here are the really raw versions of The Spy (demo) and the studio recording of the 17-minute long Celebration Of The Lizard. There was probably only one take and this raw 17-minute version is probably what transpired before the studio guys took over. When compared to the official release, both songs appear to have been heavily remixed and polished for release. No edits, just a lot of repositioning of the sound to make them modern rock.
THE FINAL DOOR
The DOORS - Morrison Hotel Outtakes 1969
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| Mr Mojo Risin' |
SOME MORE DOORS
So feelin' short changed anyone? Nope, thought not but still Big O decided to post another bootleg with limited track listing so here's another two pieces and one consists of An American Poet the sessions that An American Prayer were based on.......worth checkin' out for Jim fans but maybe no-one else (who else is there? ED)The Doors - Orange County Suite
Big O says......1969 sessions plus a live performance from January 1970 in New York. Very good to excellent soundboard stereo. Released in 1988.A review here of the original boot release..........
When Jim Morrison hired a studio to read his poems, there were no Doors in sight. No bass guitar or piano or lead guitar or drums to highlight his words or create an atmosphere. Just Jim and his words, sometimes in a monotone, at other times adding a thrill here and a melody there. Finally, Jim’s An American Poet reached a larger audience during the first wave of CD bootlegs out of Europe. This was the way it was recorded in March 1969 before it was released 10 years later in 1978 as An American Prayer with input by the Doors. This is the original version as recorded by Morrison.
You can read why Doors producer Paul Rothchild called the release version “the rape of Jim Morrison” here.
The other great discovery on this bootleg is the lengthy 21-minute Rock Is Dead edited down from an hour-long session on Feb 25, 1969 during the sessions for The Soft Parade. This version with Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a slow classical movement for strings and piano, tagged at the end was finally released in the 1997 4CD The Doors Box Set, so you can buy a copy.
When this bootleg was released back in 1988, it was a great revelation. It was probably Rothchild who edited the hour long session to 21 minutes and added the classical movement, generally associated with war and destruction, to enhance the gloomy atmosphere.
Taken from our archive copy of the silver-disc bootleg.
With the exception of the last track, the rest are studio takes of a session or sessions that the Doors never completed and, worse still, want to have little to do with. When Elektra were looking for new Doors material, they did compile An American Prayer which took a lot of Jim Morrison poetry readings with new Doors music added. It made Morrison’s poetry more accessible.
On Orange County Suite, just three of the poems are featured minus any music. It is clear that Morrison took his poetry seriously and surely would not have wanted it commercialised with background music. The most fascinating discovery though is the 21-minute rock opera, Rock Is Dead. There has been no mention of this incredible track in any of the various Doors’ books. It is a blues song with Morrison rambling on about how rock is dead if the blues is dead.
This was recorded shortly after his Miami bust where he was arrested for indecent exposure. His mind in turmoil, all Morrison saw was the corrupting element of pop music taking away the power of the blues. What sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March gets to fill the closing minutes of the song. Because of the length of the song, and some audible cuts, it’s quite possible that some bootlegger’s initiative was used to put this song together.
Whatever the case, Morrison’s performance is captivating. Rock Is Dead, like The End, is a powerful display of how the blues could have been had the shaman survived. Unfortunately, like Morrison’s life, Rock Is Dead came to a deadend conclusion. - Michael Cheah
And still more DOORS.......................
THE DOORS
Palace Of Exile [Colosseum C-013, 1CD]
Live at the 3rd Isle Of Wight Festival at Afton Farm, Freshwater. Commencing at 12.05 am on Sunday, August 31, 1970.
If anything is worthy of The Doors’ 40th anniversary, surely this concert, held 41 years ago today on the English Isle of Wight, should have been a contender. Yet it remains cruelly unreleased except for two tracks.The Doors - Isle of Wight Aug 1970
The reason is because the band themselves were disappointed with the performance. The Doors flew into London on a Friday and performed early Sunday morning on a darkened stage because Jim Morrison forbade additional lighting to film their segment for the documentary. He sure didn’t need another spotlight.
As soon as the show ended, Morrison was on the first jet headed for the U.S. and his court appearance for the Miami “flashing incident”, the previous year. From John Densmore’s account in Riders On The Storm, the band’s performance was underwhelming, blaming all on Morrison’s lethargy. Densmore says Jim’s body language and his singing made it clear other things were on the singer’s mind.
Here’s another worthy addition to The Ever Popular Tortured-Artist Effect except this was for real. A jail sentence awaited Morrison should he be found guilty of exposing himself on stage in Miami. You can consider it this way, here was Morrison switching between self-pity and expressing his anger at authority. Here’s an artist who did not follow convention but was unsure if he wanted to pay the price of his protest. It’s all here in this concert which closes with “The End”.
Swappers Castle Keep has most of this stuff on vinyl anyway but for those who haven't got this stuff it is worth a punt.............if only for a delve into the mind of the 'poet' and his impending demise...personally I was staggered at An American Prayer for only Robbie Ray and John could do the meter justice I guess......anyhoo.....and now the Isle of Wight concert ...........enjoy!
NEARER TO THE END
THE DOORS - Jimbo's Blues
"Live at The Civic Auditorium, Bakersfield, California, August 21, 1970. Excellent - stage recording in stereo.
The first indication that a fine recording of The Doors live at Bakersfield emerged in 2000 with the limited release of the CD, The Bright Midnight Sampler: 14 Songs, 8 Concerts. Tucked away as the second to final track was this medley: Love Me Two Times/ Baby Please Don’t Go/ St James Infirmary. It was identified as a “stage recording”.
We’re not sure who first mentioned this but it is believed that “Vince Treanor, The Doors’ tour manager, recorded the show for the band on a Sony reel-to-reel using two microphones placed on the stage. While not a multitrack high fidelity recording, it is clean, quiet, and clear, allowing the unbridled energy of the performances to shine through”.
On the net, fan bumina added, “The Doors never used a soundboard while Jim was with them. They tuned on stage and adjusted levels. Vince (Treanor) would use a reel-to-reel recorder and just raw fed some well-placed microphones. To my knowledge, all the Bright Midnight releases are from this kind of source which is really evident in the Boston shows released a couple of years back. Jim’s mic goes out during Alabama Song and you still hear him faintly over the music… pretty impressive stuff.”
This concert comes a week before the Doors’ performance at the Isle Of Wight. Whoever did the cover art and titled this “Jimbo’s Blues” must be referencing the Miami incident as Jim’s mugshots are on display on the cover art. That sense of despondency is clear in the ragged singing. The recording industry was rewarding hard rock and heavy metal for bringing in large crowds but The Doors’ revolution was not to be encouraged."
and the beat goes on..........
ROCK IS NOT DEAD
The Doors - Rock is Dead Sessions 1969THE DOORS
The Rock Is Dead Sessions [no label, 2CD, Artwork by Sgt Weatherman]
Big O says............Sessions at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, CA, Feb 25, 1969. Ex- SBD stereo. This is possibly a copy of Bruce Botnick’s tape. It is a 2nd gen. chrome cassette.
“OK, finally got this up for everyone…
“Took a while because I have several ‘master’ versions. Version ‘1′ comes from a tape copy from Sandy Gibson who produced The Doors radio show in the late ’80s. Presumably from the band who were involved.
“Source ‘2′, which is not included here is a known 2nd gen. from Greg Shaw.
“It runs exactly the same as version one, but the sound was not as good, at least to my ears… so I left it out of this torrent.
“Source ‘3′ comes from another private source direct from a Bruce Botnick cassette. Also 2nd gen., Source ‘3′ is the best sounding and comes from a direct source on metal tape BUT, it’s the chopped up 37 min version… at least worthy for the long passages and the upgraded sound on ‘Whiskey, Mystics and Men’. Enjoy… more to follow! PEACE!” - Maggie7
Maggie7 shared her copy of this Doors session in March 2007. For the longest time, since the early ’80s, a 21-minute edited version with Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor tagged at the end has circulated. That version, presumably mixed by Doors’ producer Paul Rothchild, was finally released in 1997 on The Doors Box Set.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the full sessions for Feb 25 surfaced on European bootlegs like Missing Links, Missing Tapes and Mystic Man. Possibly judged to be too raw, management opted for Rothchild’s edit which captured the essence of the sessions, Jim’s rant at the co-option of rock as art into rock as commerce. Rothchild’s inclusion of the Adagio gave the proceedings an eerie, solemn tone.
The following is one of many accounts of the session on Feb 25, 1969.
An excerpt taken from Stephen Davis’s book on Jim Morrison, p.312-313:
On Tuesday, February 25, 1969, the Doors were recording at Sunset Sound. Jim laid down two stentorian versions of “When I Was Back in Seminary School,” his scary southern gospel radio riff, plus a blues titled “Build Me a Woman” - also known as “The Devil Is a Woman,” lifted from Robert Johnson’s “Me And The Devil.” A new bootleg record of the unreleased Robert Johnson recordings had just appeared, and Jim immediately reworked “Love in Vain,” which the Rolling Stones would soon appropriate. He also cut a sing-song fragment called “Whiskey, Mystics, and Men,” with accompaniment by the band.
That evening the Doors and their entourage went out to supper together at a local Mexican joint, the Blue Boar, where they stuffed themselves in a private dining room and drank beer and tequila for a couple of hours. Well lubed, they returned to the studio, and started jamming. Jim sang Elvis’s “Love Me Tender” and, as the band played free form R&B, started improvising about the death of rock and roll. He kept repeating “Rock is dead,” and “Listen, listen, I don’t wanna hear no more talk about revolution,” as if trying to damn the rock movement as something that was definitely over. “I’m not talking about no revolution,” Jim sang. “I’m not talking about no demonstration. I’m talking about… the death of rock and roll… The death of rock, is the death of me… And rock is dead… We’re dead! All right! Yeah… Rock is dead!”
This was then interspersed with a memory riff. The singer was now a child, overhearing his mother complain about him to his father. “Mama didn’t like the way I did my thing. Papa says, ‘You gotta hit him, baby.’ …And I’m feeling real bad, real bad, real bad.”
The “Rock Is Dead” jam - 45 minutes of primal bar-band R&B - was Jim Morrison’s disgusted, explicit farewell to the rock movement that had launched him into immortality. It summed up the depressive, changing climate of the youth movement of 1969, when the Haight-Asbury had become a slum of panhandlers, burnouts and runaways. Led Zeppelin was hammering its way to the top. Ken Kesey had denounced LSD. The Nixon presidency escalated the war in Vietnam and started persecuting its critics.
The Doors had lost the avant-garde, and were now hated by the same writers who had fawned on them the year before. Jim Morrison’s original audience - college students and bohemians who responded to the long silences and mannered gestures of rock theater - had been replaced by dopey high school kids, pressed together like goats, giggling at “The End” and cat-calling to Jim, “Hey, you wanna fuck me?” It was all too much. For Jim, rock was truly dead.
Jim later explained: “We needed another song for this album. We were wrecking our brains trying to think - what song? We started throwing up these old songs in the studio. Blues trips. Rock classics. Finally we just started playing, and went through the whole history of rock music - blues, rock and roll, Latin jazz, surf music, the whole thing. I called it ‘Rock Is Dead.’ I doubt if anyone will ever hear it.”
Listen to it now.
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