Album #4
Thursday, March 27th, 2008The Doors - LA Woman
Sometimes, friends, the universe lines up all of its necessary components and you are listening to the perfect record at the exact perfect moment doing the exact perfect thing. Thus begins the story of album #4 on my list of my Top 15 favorite records of all time, LA Woman.
June 2004. There we were, my cousin Len and I cruising in my already laboring 2001 Corolla, down Route 40 through New Mexico on our way across the country to San Diego. We had just stopped at a ghost town’s gas station to fill up our tank, gas was about 1.40 back then. At that point we had been driving for about 28-30 hours straight, the reasons why are important to me and my family but not to this story, when whatever disc we were listening to finally ended and we had to find something else to listen to. I dont know if the sun sets slower out west than it does in the North East but it seemed like it started setting the minute 12:00 turned to 12:01. The speed limit out there is 75. I think we were probably doing 85 or 90 the whole way. We encountered a minimum of cars, maybe there were more but we didnt notice. We were in what they call “The Zone” and I must have known instinctively that the record that would make this particular moment of our trip one of the most memorable would be if LA Woman was blaring out of our windows and mixing with the New Mexican sunset.
I am planning a longer more involved post about the Doors but now is not the time to start Thinking about the Doors. I will just say that i enjoy some Doors music, specifically the first album and the last album, LA Woman. The quality of everything in between falls somewhere between terrible and ridiculous, but they make up for it with the two great records.
Back to the story…LA Woman is the album the Doors were created to make. It is greazy, its loose, its funky, Jim Morrison at this point is just a drunk with a white bluesman’s growl throwing his inane ‘poetry’ around like a monkey and its feces. But Oh man, when you are flying down the highway through the desert, two thousand miles away from home, trying to make sense of an atlas but in reality not really caring as long as you are going west, there is nothing like that moment when the band kicks in with The Changeling.
To me, three years removed from that moment, every song on the record blurs together into a mass of dirty blues and boogie rock but like i always say, if the songs aren’t tremendous then it doesnt matter when or where or with whom you are listening to it. It wouldnt hit the same way. If The Changeling wasnt followed by Lover Her Madly, If the record didnt end with Riders on Storm and revlove around the title track like our solar system around the sun my recollection of that moment as total perfection and joy, which was needed greatly after only three days before feeling nothing but sadness, loss and anger, would have been either greatly diminished or would cease to exist at all. At that moment i knew that i was doing something that i was going to treasure forever.
Len and I always called driving cross country the one stupid thing we always talked about doing but never did that we actually did do and it didnt hit me that i was doing it until those first snare drum hits of The Changeling.
Hours later, while cruising through Albuquerque, I put on Raw Power by the Stooges and then Superunknown by Soundgarden. At that point we had been up and driving for 36 hours, were driving on super unkown highways, in total darkness, hallucinating and most certainly high from all the red bulls we drank while stopped for gas and food. i think it was one in the morning. Those were scary times. Im not sure how we managed to survive. we stopped for the night at a hotel and when we woke up we found the hotel was literally in the middle of the desert. We had no idea what the landscape looked like because it was so dark and our minds and bodies were so wrecked by the time we finally stopped.
We listened to the Meat Puppets that day.
