FOUR PILLARS OF A ROCK BAND:

 

  1. SONGS: The best shows fade into memory, but the records are here for the long haul. Chuck Berry is “Maybelline.” The Beatles are “She Loves You.” Amy Winehouse is “Rehab.” To this day, Foreigner tours, even though its guitarist is the sole remaining member of the band (and sometimes they play without him). This is because Foreigner is “I Wanna Know What Love Is?” At its most elemental, a band is its songs, and the songs are the band. I say, “Welcome to the Terrordome.” You say, “Public Enemy.”
  2. PLAYERS: It may be obvious but the band sounds the way it sounds because the players in it want their music to sound that way. No two players have the same sensibilities. What sounds good to one, may sound like garbage to another. This isn’t only about chops (though the more chops a band’s players have, the larger the band’s sonic pallet will be). Musically, it’s about feel, note selection, tone, phrasing, etc. But more broadly it’s about personality and preferences. If your guitarist hates waltzes, you’re probably not going to play anything in ¾. If your singer loves to belt, you may end up writing more torch songs. When John Cale was kicked out of The Velvet Underground, they, for the most part, stopped being an avant-garde band. When Maureen Tucker left to have a baby and was replaced by a more straight-forward rock drummer, they essentially became a bar band. When Lou Reed left, they became an abomination.
  3. GEAR: This is self explanatory. If you have an organ in your band, you may play gospel songs. If you tune your guitars to FACGCE, you’ll probably play midwestern emo. If you don’t own a distortion pedal, you probably can’t play doom metal. The least liked Rush albums are the mid-80s albums when Geddy Lee got too into synthesizers. Consequently, they’re considered the least Rush-like albums. It’s also important to remember that technological innovation often works hand in hand with artistic invention. Heavy metal was birthed after Marshall created the first 100 Watt tube amps. After Boss popularized a chorus pedal which allowed electric guitars to sound clean and yet fill the mix, new wave was born. More than most creators care to admit (but less than gear manufactures promise), gear choices drive creativity.
  4. AESTHETICS: Call this one overall aesthetics. A band’s album art, costumes*, stage presence, relationship with the media, website, social media presence, the type of venues a band plays, the type of bands they play with, etc. A band makes thousands of decisions that have nothing to do with music that nonetheless define what type of music they create. If you wear corpse paint, you probably play death metal. If you play rock music in churches, you probably play CCM. If your website is www.magapatriotsmusic.com, you probably won’t get airplay on public radio. Although many players insist that they’re “only about the music,” they don’t realize they’re unwittingly determining their image (they probably play math rock). Doesn’t it seem statistically impossible that our most talented musicians are also our prettiest? Image is important. 

 

*Occasionally the costumes override #2 and #3. Only diehards care who’s behind the GWAR mask or which kitty cat is drumming for KISS. (An addendum: if your band spells its name in all caps, the aesthetics of your band might be more important than the actual members.)

 

So, for this week’s album, we have a band that figured out all this shit out on their debut (which they never bested). THE DOORS’ THE DOORS has ridden quite the critical rollercoaster over the years. Critics initially loved it, Gen X-ers hated it as emblematic of boomers’ hippie hypocrisy, and now I think it’s seen as an important album, a dark counterpoint to the Summer of Love, and a progenitor to the goth rock of the 1980s. The band also nails all four pillars:

 

  1. “Break on Through (to the Other Side)”, “Light My Fire”, “The End”, these will never not be Doors songs. They’re so durable the band kept playing them for decades after their iconic lead singer Jim Morrison OD’d in a bathtub. 
  2. Did you know The Doors made albums after their iconic lead singer died? Those albums suck dick. Your players matter. 
  3. The Doors have a unique sound among 1967’s California rock bands. Instead of a bass player (though one recorded on their albums), they had a classically trained keyboard player in Ray Manzarek. Did every song need a keyboard on it? Probably not, but that was the equipment they had, so that’s what they played.
  4. Morrison was a sexy, acid-munching poetry nerd with a spooky baritone, and he played the part of shamanistic, hippie fuck god to the hilt, going so far as to get arrested for exposing himself onstage. But the whole band knew what they were doing. The Doors named themselves after Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-fueled The Doors of Perception. This was a band that wanted to mess with your parents. Elektra records sold a shitload of Doors LPs banking on that image.