Doors, "Waiting for the Sun" (1970)

(listen)

Wikipedia covers the main points regarding my initial confusion, on a disambiguation page: "Waiting for the Sun is a 1968 album by The Doors [pictured above].... 'Waiting for the Sun' [is] a song by The Doors from their 1970 album, Morrison Hotel." This oddness did not matter to my brother and his friends, who introduced me to Morrison Hotel, and especially "Waiting for the Sun," which they championed tirelessly. They recommended listening to it with headphones, an exciting new consumer electronic product at the time—and loud, needless to say. It was a bracing reintroduction to the Doors, following the pop hits. There's a context for it, I should mention—Jim Morrison & co. fighting for counterculture integrity after the disgrace of those hits, taking on the blues late, and incidentally in more trouble for alleged self-exposure antics on the part of Morrison in live performance in Miami. Talk about identity crisis. But the various shuttlings about between proto-gothy poets of doom, teen heartthrobs, and drunken white blues boys were surprisingly seamless, partly because they managed it by distending to embody the contradictions. And what a fine example we have here. Taking care of the teens is the easy part, with equal parts California sun worship and the skeevy Lizard King persona already well established. Then they proved surprisingly adept as a blues band, starting with Morrison Hotel particularly. The Doors as musical enterprise remain underestimated at one's peril. As for the poets of doom shtick, well, that's actually what makes this work. "Can't you feel it now that spring has come? / That it's time to live in the scattered sun." Key word here, I think, being "scattered," which torques it just enough in a certain direction that it amplifies the effect of the band coming in so hard, lending it an almost majestic quality. Especially if you are listening to it on headphones very loud.