The Doors - Rock Is Dead (1969)

As promised in my last Doors post, here is an album made up from the legendary 'Rock Is Dead' sessions. The story of the recording is fascinating, so here is an excerpt taken from Stephen Davis's book 'Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend'.
On Tuesday, February 25, 1969, the Doors were recording at Sunset Sound. Jim laid down two stentorian versions of 'When I Was Back in Seminary School', his scary southern gospel radio riff, plus a blues titled 'Build Me a Woman' - also known as 'The Devil Is a Woman', lifted from Robert Johnson's 'Me And The Devil'. A new bootleg record of the unreleased Robert Johnson recordings had just appeared, and Jim immediately reworked 'Love in Vain'' which the Rolling Stones would soon appropriate. He also cut a sing song fragment called 'Whiskey, Mystics, and Men', with accompaniment by the band. That evening the Doors and their entourage went out to supper together at a local Mexican joint, the Blue Boar, where they stuffed themselves in a private dining room and drank beer and tequila for a couple of hours. Well lubed, they returned to the studio, and started jamming. Jim sang Elvis's 'Love Me Tender' and, as the band played free form R & B, started improvising about the death of rock and roll. He kepr repeating 'Rock is dead', and 'Listen, listen, I don't wanna hear no more talk about revolution'. as if trying to damn the rock movement as something that was definitely over. 'I'm not talking about no revolution'. Jim sang. 'I'm not talking about no demonstration. I'm talking about...the death of rock and roll....The death is rock, is the death of me....And rock is dead,...We're dead! All right! Yeah....Rock is dead!'. The "Rock Is Dead" jam - forty-five minutes of primal bar-band R & B - was Jim Morrison's disgusted, explicit farewell to the rock movement that had launched him into immortality. It summed up the depressive, changing climate of the youth movement of 1969, when the Haight-Asbury had become a slum of panhandlers, burnouts and runaways. Led Zeppelin was hammering its way to the top. Ken Kesey had denounced LSD. The Nixon presidency escalated the war in Vietnam and started persecuting its critics. The Doors had lost the avant-garde, and were now hated by the same writers who had fawned on them the year before. Jim Morrison's original audience - college students and bohemians who responded to the long silences and mannered gestures of rock theater - had been replaced by dopey high school kids, pressed together like goats, giggling at 'The End' and catcalling to Jim, "Hey, you wanna @#$%& me?" It was all too much. For Jim, rock was truly dead. Jim later explained: 'We needed another song for this album. We were wrecking our brains trying to think - what song? We started throwing up these old songs in the studio. Blues trips. Rock classics. Finally we just started playing, and went through the whole history of rock music - blues, rock and roll, Latin jazz, surf music, the whole thing. I called it 'Rock Is Dead.' I doubt if anyone will ever hear it.' The 'Rock Is Dead' session remained officially unreleased for almost thirty years, but was notoriously bootlegged and became familiar to fans of the Doors. 
Eventually a heavily-edited 16-minute version appeared on the 1997 'The Doors Box Set', but this often only included snippets of full songs that were recorded, so by adding the full versions of those tracks from the various bootlegs, I've come up with a surprisingly listenable album. Obviously it's nowhere near their best work, but it's also not as bad as some critics have made out (mainly because I've excised the worst excesses and self-indulgent nonsense from the session, and just left the more or less completed songs). If you listen to this solely as a historical archive recording, and don't expect too much from it, you might actually enjoy it.

Track listing

01 Love Me Tender / Save The Whole World
02 Rock Is Dead
03 Boogie All Night Long
04 Naked Woman Jam
05 Me And The Devil (a.k.a. Build Me A Woman)
06 Queen Of The Magazines
07 Rock And Roll Woman
08 Pipeline
09 Whiskey, Mystics And Men (with 'Petition' intro)