CoronaVinyl Day 52 (California): Morrison Hotel by The Doors

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is California, and while I have many albums by bands from California, I went with one by my favorite of the bunch, The Doors.  Jim Morrison was, in my mind, the first true archetypal rock star -- a tortured genius who dabbled in every excess and did outrageous things just to get a reaction.  Thankfully, his bandmates were the yin to his yang, and they brought their various influences together to make some of the most interesting and influential music of the '60s and early '70s, before Morrison faked his death in 1971 to become a member of the 27 Club and live his life out on a secluded island, joined six years later by Elvis and 25 years later by Tupac.

1970's Morrison Hotel was the band's fifth studio album.  Their previous album, The Soft Parade, was a departure for the band, with horns and strings and such, and a much more over-produced, polished feel than people came to expect from The Doors.

With Morrison Hotel, they returned to their blues-rock roots and put out what many consider their best album.  The sides of the album have two different titles, with Side 1 being labeled Hard Rock Cafe and Side 2 being labeled Morrison Hotel.  The cover features the band at an LA hotel named Morrison Hotel.  They didn't have permission to take pictures, so they had to quickly run into the hotel and hit their marks for the cover photo while the front desk clerk was away from the desk.  On the back is a photo of an LA dive bar called Hard Rock Cafe, and the photo inspired the founders of the now-famous international bar and restaurant chain of the same name.

Musically, the album is fantastic.  Side 1 -- the Hard Rock Cafe side -- is comprised of mainly harder rocking songs, starting with the opener, the ballsy and iconic "Roadhouse Blues," which features blues guitarist Lonnie Mack on bass (The Doors didn't normally have a bassist) and Lovin' Spoonful frontman John Sebastian -- using the pseudonym G. Puglese -- on harmonica.  Side Two -- the Morrison Hotel side -- features a couple slower and bluesier songs, along with a couple rockers.

The album peaked at #4 on the Billboard album charts and hit #12 on the UK album charts, making it the band's highest-charting album in the UK.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Peace Frog"
While "Roadhouse Blues" is an awesome song, "Peace Frog" might be my favorite Doors song.  This song has a great, catchy riff that draws you in, a bass line that makes you nod your head, and lyrics about civil unrest in the late '60s -- blood in the streets of Chicago and New Haven -- while the rest of the band yells "she came" in the background.  The ethereal bridge -- in which Morrison says "Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding / Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind" -- was inspired by an alleged event that occurred when Morrison was a young child.  He and his family were driving through the desert at dawn -- because that's just what families did in the late '40s -- and came upon the scene of an accident, in which a truck full of Native Americans had crashed, and, as he put it, "there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death."

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Land Ho!"
"Land Ho!" is the first track on Side 2, and it's a pleasant rock song about pirates, I assume, climaxing at about the 2:17 mark when Morrison shouts out "land ho!"