‘Till The Stars Fall From The Sky . . .’

by whiteray

I’ve always been ambivalent about the Doors. There are times when I think the group might come close to meriting the hosannas that have been sent its way over the past fifty-plus years, and there are times when I revert to my long-term judgment that Jim Morrison and his pals made up the most over-rated band in the history of rock. 

When I sit down to slice those contradictory views apart to see what I can find inside them, I find that it’s the Doors’ singles that I appreciate, for the most part. And it’s the group’s album work that I find wanting. 

As to the singles, back in the summer of 1967, no one – not even a dedicated follower of trumpet music and soundtracks like me – could escape “Light My Fire.” And I didn’t necessarily want to. What I heard was a record with a great introduction and a generally interesting sound. Even though I wasn’t much of a Top 40 listener then – that interest would sprout two years later – my friends were, and their listening choices were all around me. And what my friends and the rest of the nation heard was something compelling: “Light My Fire” spent fourteen weeks in the Top 40 and three weeks at No. 1. 

Three more Doors’ singles came and went without my noticing during the school year of 1967-68; the next summer, I worked at the state trap shoot just outside of St. Cloud for four days, spending ten hours a day in a low brick structure sunken mostly into the ground, placing clay targets on a whirring and scary machine with only a radio for company. With a shrug, I tuned the radio to Top 40. 

And during those four days, the Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” got lots of airplay. I thought it was pretty good. And beyond a brief exposure to a couple tracks from Morrison Hotel, “Light My Fire” and “Hello, I Love You” were the only bits of the Doors’ canon I knew until my freshman year of college started in the autumn of 1971. That was the autumn of The Soft Parade. 

During the summer, I attended an overnight orientation program aimed at helping new students find their ways around St. Cloud State’s campus. I didn’t need an orientation to learn the campus’ geography: Because my dad worked and taught there, I’d been wandering around the campus for most of my life. But I saw the overnight orientation as a way to meet friends, and in fact, I met the guys who would provide most of my social life for my freshman year. When school started, one of them – Dave – ended up paired with a roommate we’d not met, a guy named Mark. 

I never did figure out which one of the two started it, but by the end of the first month of classes, the two guys were in the habit of dropping the Doors’ 1969 album, The Soft Parade, onto the turntable at least twice a day. As I – and other guys and a few gals – hung around a lot, the sounds of that album became a large part of the soundtrack of that first quarter of college. And I found a lot of it to be silly, especially the portion of “The Soft Parade” during which Jim Morrison declaims, “When I was back there in seminary school, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer . . . You CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer!” The song that follows is fine, but the introduction is ludicrous. 

My initial reactions to “The Soft Parade” were mirrored over the years as I eventually gathered and listened to the Doors’ other albums: As an album band, the Doors had been hugely overrated, most on the basis of Morrison’s lengthier pieces filled with mediocre poetry and over-wrought delivery. (I know there may be those out there who will want to shred me for that: Well, shred away. But it won’t change my mind or make Morrison’s long works any better.) 

But the more I listened over those years, the more I liked the Doors as a singles band: “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange,” “Love Me Two Times,” “The Unknown Soldier,” “Hello, I Love You,” “Love Her Madly” and the long but effective “Riders On The Storm” were all good radio listening. And I found that I liked the album Morrison Hotel much better than any other album the group ever put out: Filled with concise songs, from “Roadhouse Blues,” the kick-ass opener, through the ethereal “Blue Sunday” and “Indian Summer” to the grunting and rocking closer, “Maggie McGill,” it was a very good – maybe even great – album. 

For good or ill, though, when I hear the Doors mentioned, one of the first things that come to mind is The Soft Parade and the sight of my pal Dave posing and lip-synching his way through the album tracks “Wild Child” or “The Soft Parade.” It’s a tolerable memory, though, because there was one track of redemption on the album: “Touch Me.” 

Thus, in one of those odd convergences of memory and merit, my favorite Doors song is “Touch Me,” which was liked enough elsewhere to rise as high as No. 3 on the Billboard chart. The writer and editor in me still cringes at the grammatical sin in the chorus, where Morrison sings, “I’m gonna love you till the stars fall from the sky for you and I.” (It should be “for you and me.”) 

But never mind. Here’s “Touch Me” as it sounded on The Soft Parade.