Published in the MILWAUKEE (WIS) JOURNAL
By PIERRE-RENE NOTH
The Doors to acid rock opened at the Arena Friday night to a large crowd that helped the proper key: Youth.
The Doors, to the uninitiated, are no wooden set of guitar pickers and brassy vocalists. They are perhaps the leading popular exponents of acid rock—acid in terms of drug oriented, perhaps; acid in terms of social commentary, certainly.
Poetry With Melody
Jim Morrison, the white James Brown who leaps and sprawls across the stage, slink bops back and forth and makes love to microphone stands, is the leader.
In a society that does not pay poets well, he is a poet. He sings for a living. Not well, but that isn’t the idea. He writes his own lyrics and has a lot to say. Poetry these days comes with guitar, organ and drum accompaniment.
“We want the world and we want it NOW!” he tells his audience of stylish hippie clad teens, all of whom are trying to grow up fast and want that world.
Satanically Sinister
They plug in to Morrison and 1,300 watts of amplified sound blasts into their minds, a sound so loud it drives thought out, a sound so loud it pins the value judgments of the adult world to the far wall of the Arena and leaves them squirming helplessly.
From “Light My Fire” to “The End”—an Oedipus ballad of killing your father and loving your mother—the sinister lyrics socked their satanically sensual message to the crowd.
The Doors are big business with big music and big contrast between them and the group that opened the program, the Midwest Hydraulic Company, was acute. Both are instrumentally very able, the Hydraulics primarily because of an exceptional lead drummer. All the Doors—Ray Manzarek on organ., Robby Krieger on guitar, Jan Densmore on drums—are musically extremely able. But they have Morrison, who has little voice but lots of soul, even more ability in theatrics, and can write poetry the kids dig.
The Hydraulics also have no vocal talent, but they also lack a poet in residence.