Very good to end here...

L.A.W.

The final album with Jim Morrison in the lineup is by far their most blues-oriented, and the singer's poetic ardor is undiminished, though his voice sounds increasingly worn and craggy on some numbers. Actually, some of the straight blues items sound kind of turgid, but that's more than made up for by several cuts that rate among their finest and most disturbing work. The seven-minute title track was a car-cruising classic that celebrated both the glamour and seediness of Los Angeles; the other long cut, the brooding, jazzy "Riders on the Storm," was the group at its most melodic and ominous. It and the far bouncier "Love Her Madly" were hit singles, and "The Changeling" and "L'America" count as some of their better little-heeded album tracks. An uneven but worthy finale from the original quartet.

The Lizard was on the limbo

M.H.

The Doors returned to crunching, straightforward hard rock on an album that, despite yielding no major hit singles, returned them to critical favor with hip listeners. An increasingly bluesy flavor began to color the songwriting and arrangements, especially on the party and booze anthem "Roadhouse Blues." Airy mysticism was still present on "Waiting for the Sun," "Queen of the Highway," and "Indian Summer"; "Ship of Fools" and "Land Ho!" struck effective balances between the hard rock arrangements and the narrative reach of the lyrics. "Peace Frog" was the most political and controversial track, documenting the domestic unrest of late-'60s America before unexpectedly segueing into the restful ballad "Blue Sunday." "The Spy," by contrast, was a slow blues that pointed to the direction that would fully blossom on L.A. Woman.

The best live album of all times... just listen

While this double disc (later combined with Alive, She Cried and Live at the Hollywood Bowl for CD release under the title In Concert) is valuable in that it contains material the Doors didn't release on their studio albums, it's also tilted toward some of their more boorish aspects. Recorded at concerts in 1969 and 1970, this was an era in which Jim Morrison was becoming increasingly dissolute and increasingly disinterested in the whole rock machine. During much of this set, he seems not to be taking himself or the songs too seriously, tossing flippant asides to the audience that seem to treat the whole exercise as a charade. As for the music, the haunting "Universal Mind" and the basic blues-rocker "Build Me a Woman" are originals that are not found on their proper albums; "Close to You" is a dull Muddy Waters cover sung by Ray Manzarek; "Who Do You Love" is a fair cover of the Bo Diddley standard; and the controversial "The Celebration of the Lizard" is a drawn-out opus that is as much poetry recitation as music. There are also extended versions of "Soul Kitchen," "Break On Through," and "When the Music's Over" that flag considerably in comparison to the sleeker studio versions. A.L.