The Doors Top 50 Countdown (#35-31) & This Week's Statistics

Hello everybody! This column usually appears a day later, but I thought it would be nice to change things a little and make them more interesting. So, let's get on with our Top 50 Countdown of the Doors' best songs.

At #35 is one of the Doors most romantic songs. Radio stations usually play this together with the jaunty track Peace Frog, which runs before it on the album. Blue Sunday is a stark contrast, with a dirge quality to the music but upbeat lyrics where Jim Morrison sings about finding his own true love. In fact, Morrison changes the tone of his voice to a crooning style when he segues to this from Peace Frog.

Blue Sunday appears on the album Morrison Hotel (1970). The Morrison Hotel was a real place. It was a beaten-down hotel in Los Angeles, and a picture of it was used on the album cover.

The Doors wrote this in 1965, when they were first starting out. For this album, they wanted to get back to their early sound, and felt recording this would be a good way to do it.

At #34 is a track from their second album, Strange Days (1967). Horse Latitudes is a poem set to music rather than a song, and it was the main inspiration for Patti Smith's wonderful Babelogue. Horse latitudes are ocean regions between 30° and 35° latitude which tend to contain calm waters and light winds. 18th Century sailors would throw horses overboard when they sailed into these "horse latitudes" in order to lighten the load and conserve food and water. Jim Morrison wrote the poem that became the lyrics when he was in high school and saw a paperback cover of horses being thrown off a boat.

The Doors' recording engineer, Bruce Botnick, took the white noise of a tape recorder and varied the speed by hand-winding it (resulting in a sound akin to wind) as the four band members played a variety of instruments in unusual ways. Further varispeed was then employed to create different timbres and effects. Some of the odd sound effects were created by dropping a coke bottle in a garbage can, beating coconut shells on a tile floor, and having people scream in a studio.

... and since I've mentioned it, here's Patti Smith's Babelogue, seguing into Rock 'n' Roll N*gger:

At #33 is yet another song from Strange Days (1967), which however had been demoed in 1965 at Trans World Pacific Studios before Krieger joined the group. Jim and Ray wrote it in Ray Manzarek's parents' garage in 1965. The song in question is My Eyes Have Seen You, and contains lyrics such as, "My eyes have seen you / Let them photograph your soul / Memorize your alleys / On an endless roll."

At #32 is a song from their debut album, The Doors (1967). Twentieth Century Fox is about a fashionable, but unfeeling woman. The title is a play on words - it's the name of a popular Hollywood movie studio, one of the Big Six, but Jim Morrison's lyrics refer to a girl - "fox" was a popular term for a pretty girl at the time. The movie studio is used to represent the woman in the song, who is glamorous, but artificial.

Producer Paul Rothchild had the band walk on wooden planks during the chorus to get the pounding effect. It was also one of the six songs by The Doors that used famous session player (and later a member of Bread) Larry Knechtel to overdub bass lines.

In Greil Marcus' book The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years, the author compares this song to a Lichtenstein painting - pop art, with an irony and a sardonic grin. He ruminates upon it as a ballad about how guys have it tough, having to conquer the world to win a gal's eye, where all a gal has to do is look good. It was also one of Robert Christgau's favorite tracks from this album.

Finally for today, at #31 is one of their most popular songs, The Unknown Soldier, from their third studio album, Waiting For The Sun (1968). The Doors developed it when they were on tour in 1967 - and it took over 130 takes to record this. Producer Paul Rothchild was being very particular. The band also shot a film for the song, which was released as a single and became the group's fourth consecutive Top 40 hit, even though many radio stations refused to play the song due to its controversial content.

It was no small irony that this bitter anti-war song was written by an admiral’s son. There’s a topsy-turvy feel to the music that repetitively rises and falls with military precision, as Morrison blithely sings about getting the day’s casualty news over breakfast. The most sinister aspect of the song is the set piece in the middle, where the nameless soldier meets his end not in the glory of battle, but before a firing squad. (In fact, the band would often act out this scenario when they played live, with Krieger “shooting” Morrison dead with his guitar). There’s a glimmer of hope at the end, when Morrison announces the “war is over.” It’s small comfort, though, if you’re already dead.

Here's a great live version:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics. Even though this was a six-day week, there has been a 150% increase of the number of visits. This is impressive - and quite pleasant. Of the "all-time top tenners", it was the United Kingdom and Italy that shouldered the increase, with everybody else more or less dropping, with the exception of Greece and Cyprus that remained stable. Which means that the increased visits were distributed among many other countries. To tell the truth, I like it this way. This blog flies the universal flag, it favors no race, religion, gender, country, or ideology. Or rather, it flies the flag of love, democracy, understanding and good manners... and more than anything, the rainbow flag. Here are this week's Top 10 countries:

1. the United States

2. the United Kingdom

3. Greece

4. Italy

5. France

6. Cyprus

7. Germany

8. Canada

9. Spain

10. Ukraine

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 44.7%

2. Greece = 8.4%

3. France = 7.6%

4. the United Kingdom = 7.0%

5. Russia = 5.0%

6. Germany = 4.3%

7. Cyprus = 1.12%

8. Italy = 1.06%

9. the United Arab Emirates = 0.73%

10. Belgium = 0.71%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!