The Doors -- "The Crystal Ship" (1967)

The crystal ship is being filled
A thousand girls, a thousand thrills
A million ways to spend your time

The Doors' debut album (The Doors) was released the first week of 1967 – that's 42 years ago. If I were to really think about that, my whole day would be ruined.

One reason I always liked the Doors was because Jim Morrison had a relatively low voice, and so did I. When I was singing along with the radio, I couldn't reach the high notes in a lot of my favorite songs – but that was never a problem with a Doors song because Morrison and I had similar vocal ranges. (Speaking of my singing along with the radio . . . I remember one long drive when my father suddenly turned the car radio off. When I protested, he said "We can either listen to the radio, or listen to you.  But not both.")

Jim Morrison

"Light My Fire" wasn't the first song released as a single from The Doors – "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" was.  I assume that was because "Light My Fire" was over seven minutes long.

Six months after the album was released, a more radio-friendly 2:52 version of "Light My Fire" was created, and became one of the most unforgettable hit singles of the AM radio era. It is #7 on VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of All Time"and was one of the few rock songs included in NPR's ranking of the 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century (which included, among other things, "West Side Story" and "Rhapsody in Blue"). When you come across The Godfather Part II on television, you have to watch it, and when you hear "Light My Fire" on the radio, you have to listen to it.  

"Light My Fire" was #1 on the Billboard "Hot 100" for three weeks. Jose Feliciano's cover version reached #3 only a year later, and an astonishing variety of others have covered the song since then – including Patricia Barber, Nancy Sinatra, Shirley Bassey, Stevie Wonder, Al Green, B. J. Thomas, Type O Negative, and Massive Attack. (Massive Attack's version samples the "Light My Fire" covers by Jackie Wilson and Young-Holt Unlimited.)

(I need a pair of leather pants just
like those Jim Morrison wore)

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The B-side of "Light My Fire" was another song from The Doors – "The Crystal Ship." 

 I didn't own the album until many years later, and I'm not sure when I first heard "The Crystal Ship." I must have heard the entire album played by friends during college, but I don't remember hearing "The Crystal Ship" until the early 1980's, when I was living in San Francisco and it was played regularly on a local classic rock station.  

It's a classic Jim Morrison song – which can be good news and bad news. Morrison, who considered himself first and foremost a poet, was influenced by William Blake, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Joseph Campbell, and the "Beat Generation" writers. (The name "The Doors" came from a line in the Blake poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.") 

Morrison took himself just a tad too seriously, and he wrote a lot of crap. But his lyrics are like no one else's, and the Doors' best songs are unique and really get under your skin. If you're in the right mood – nostalgic, or longing for something that you can't quite get a grip on – a song like "The Crystal Ship" is just what the doctor ordered.

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Some people interpret "The Crystal Ship" as a drug-trip song – of course, that's the default interpretation for any 60's or 70's song that you can't make sense of. (What is a "crystal ship" anyway? I have no clue, but it sounds awfully fragile.) 

The other explanation you'll find is that the song is Morrison's good-bye to a former girlfriend. (I suppose it's a bummer when a rock star dumps you, but having him write a song or two about you before the breakup is pretty cool.)

I don't really care what the song means. It's a gorgeous two and a half minutes of dreamy, loopy music and dreamy, loopy words. The studio recording is perfectly arranged and executed – especially the way Morrison's voice crescendos into the last stanza, peaking on the word "crystal."

Click here to listen to "The Crystal Ship."

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Click here for a video that combines a pretty good live performance of the song with some very interesting photos of Morrison and the other Doors.

System of a Down -- "Lost in Hollywood" (2005)

They take you, and make you

They look at you in disgusting ways

You should have never trusted Hollywood

Life can be pretty random. 

If you don't think so, just look at your husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend. (That's assuming you have one, of course).  How did you meet him/her?  

The odds are that the meeting was such a fluke, seemingly mere happenstance – perhaps the result of the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil – that a slight alteration in any one of about a million events would have caused enough of a divergence in your paths that you would never have encountered one another. 

Of course, some would say that fact that there were incredible odds against that particular outcome actually taking place is the best proof that it was not the result of chance, but destiny.

That explains how I became aware of today's featured song.

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Like much of the music I have on my computer, I got System of a Down's Mesmerize CD through my local public library. 

I don't recall ever hearing the band's music on the radio or seeing anything about them on TV.  I can only assume that I searched for and requested Mesmerize because I came across the name of the band or the CD on some music review site – maybe on a "Top 100 CDs of 2005" list or something like that.

After downloading the CD, I don't recall ever listening any of the songs on it until last Saturday, when we were buried by the Mother of All Snowstorms.  Somehow five songs from Mesmerize had ended up on my iPod shuffle, and came up while I was shoveling the driveway.  (Four of them were great, and the fifth wasn't bad.)

This is the final song on the CD, and it's about an archetypal "young man from the provinces" who goes to the big city to seek his fame and fortune. 

 Unfortunately, we know what happens to all those strays who end up in Los Angeles: they end up working as waiters in vegetarian restaurants, playing in bands that never get any real gigs, and checking out each other's hairstyles.

I'm a sucker for songs about Los Angeles. Forget the traffic and the tacky, temporary-looking buildings, and the generally ugly, dried-out landscape – it's the center of the popular culture world, and popular culture is so much more important than serious culture.  (Sorry, New York City!)

Click here to listen to "Lost in Hollywood."  It's a stick of dynamite from beginning to end.

Click here to see System of a Down performing the song live in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.

And click on the link below to buy "Lost in Hollywood" from Amazon:

Spirit -- "Prelude/Nothin' to Hide" (1970)

We got nothin' to hide

Married to the same bride

She eats away from inside

This song is the first track on Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, Spirit's fourth (and last) album with its original lineup – a truly great record.  

You'd best believe it wasn't easy picking just one song from that album to feature today.  I originally was going to feature "Morning Will Come," but it has fairly uninteresting lyrics, and this blog's format does require that each entry begin with two or three lines from the featured songs.  

But even though I decided to feature a different song, here's a link to "Morning Will Come" – a little bonus for my fans.

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I used to listen to "Morning Will Come" every morning before going to my summer job.  I was in college when Dr. Sardonicus was released, living at home and unloading rail cars at a grocery warehouse for $5 an hour.  My shift started at 7 AM, and I was usually a little banged up when my mother woke me up to get ready for work in the mornings because I spent my evenings at Nina's Green Parrot, Buck's Recreation Parlor, and other establishments of that ilk in Galena, Kansas, drinking 3.2% beer and playing spades.  So I needed some musical inspiration to get myself going in the mornings.

Galena is a very sad little mining town just over the Missouri-Kansas line.  I grew up in Joplin, Missouri, only about 10 miles from Galena via old Route 66 ("It goes from St. Louie/Joplin, Missouri/Oklahoma City/Looks oh so pretty"). Missouri had relatively normal liquor laws – bars could serve liquor by the drink. Kansas did not have liquor by the drink, but allowed 18-year-olds to drink 3.2% beer, legally classified as non-intoxicating.  (Ha!) 

So on weekend nights, there was a steady stream of Kansas adults going eastward to Joplin's tonier nightclubs to sip martinis and manhattans, while Missouri teenagers were heading the other way to drink 35-cent quarts of Falstaff, Schlitz, and Coors – which had a particular cachet in those days because it was not sold east of Kansas.

Fortunately, the Kansas beer joints closed at midnight, so I did get 6 or so hours of sleep each night.  But I was a growing boy, and that didn't really get the job done.  Hence the need for some musical stimulation to help clear out the cobwebs each weekday morning.

There to help me out was "Morning Will Come," which I would play on my family's Magnavox console stereo.

Magnavox console stereo (circa 1970)

Our Magnavox had legs that were long enough that I could lie on the floor on my back and slide my head underneath it, much in the manner of a mechanic sliding under a car to change the oil. I  did that so I could block out the rest of the world and really focus on the music – plus stereo sound was fairly new, and positioning myself in this fashion allowed me to maximize the separation between the channels -- one channel for the left ear, the other for the right.

A couple of times through "Morning Will Come" and I was ready to do battle with the 50-foot rail cars from General Mills, Scott Paper, Ralson-Purina, Del Monte, Clorox, etc., that I unloaded every day at the warehouse.

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I remember two of those freight cars with particular displeasure.  One time, a Clorox car had been banged around a little too much en route.  Because the car wasn't fully loaded, some of the cases of one-gallon bleach bottles had tipped over and crashed to the floor, and there were a few dozen gallons of undiluted bleach sloshing around when I opened the car's doors.  My black high-top tennis shoes and the bottom six inches or so of my Levi's were bleached almost entirely white by the time I finished cleaning up the mess.  (Today, that much exposure to concentrated chlorine fumes would have been more than enough to attract dozens of sleazy personal-injury lawyers smelling major contingency fees as well as chlorine.)

Even worse was the Ralston-Purina car that had been bumped around sufficiently to break open a number of cans of cat and dog food.  The car then sat on various Midwestern railroad sidings in the hot August sun for a few days, plenty of time for a few gazillion maggots to hatch and grow before we opened the car to unload it.  You should have seen the look on my face when I picked up an undamaged case and exposed those little creepy-crawlies feasting on some cans of Alpo-brand "Prime Cuts in Gravy" dog food.  Quelle surprise!  

But I digress . . . . (By the way, if digressions aren't your cup of tea, you are on the wrong blog.)

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Spirit is somewhat forgotten today, but they were a remarkably talented collection of musicians with a unique style (or mixture of styles).  

If you had to choose one adjective to characterize their music, you might pick "psychedelic" – but their music has elements of pop, jazz, art rock, and quite a few other genres. 

Spirit was not a great commercial success. The band's most successful single – the irresistible "I've Got a Line on You" – peaked at #25.  The group's biggest mistake was probably turning down an invitation to appear at Woodstock in order to tour in support of their third album.  Spirit would have appeared just before Jimi Hendrix.

The band's most recognizable member was drummer Ed Cassidy – a sort of Mr. Clean look-alike who had a shaved head (very unusual in an era where long hair was de rigeur) and always dressed in black.

Spirit drummer Ed Cassidy

Cassidy was 37 when Dr. Sardonicus was released.  He had started working as a musician before World War II, and played with a long list of jazz greats in the 1950's –  including Cannonball Adderely, Art Pepper, Lee Konitz, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

(Kirk was notorious for playing two or even three saxophones at the same time.  Click here to see him do that.)

Cassidy was the stepfather of Spirit guitarist and singer Randy California. (He was given that name in 1966 by Jimi Hendrix to distinguish him from another Randy in Hendrix's 1966-era band – "Jimmy James and the Blue Flames"  who was called "Randy Texas." Randy California met Hendrix when he was living in Queens.) California was not quite 17 when Spirit's first album was released. He wrote "I Got a Line on You" and a number of Spirit's other signature songs.

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Jay Ferguson (songwriter/vocalist) and Mark Andes (bass) left the band after Dr. Sardonicus and founded Jo Jo Gunne, which was moderately successful. Ferguson later released several solo albums. His "Thunder Island" is a wonderfully innocent, appealing little song that doesn't make a lot of sense, but who's counting?  Click here to listen to it.

After Ferguson and Andes left, California pursued a solo career, joined by stepfather Ed Cassidy and former Hendrix bassist Noel Redding (who called himself "Clit McTorius" when the group performed live).  His first album, Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, was an odd conglomeration of original songs and covers that critic Robert Christgau said was characterized by "sheer dense weirdness."

After Dr. Sardonicus, the band's original lineup never recorded together again, but there have been a number of subsequent Spirit albums – Cassidy was part of all of them, and California contributed to most of them. 

California drowned in 1997 while helping his twelve-year-old escape from a rip current while both were swimming off the coast of Molokai, Hawaii.

Click here to listen to "Prelude – Nothin' to Hide."

Click on the link below to order the song from Amazon:

Dandy Warhols -- "Bohemian Like You" (2000)

I really love your hairdo, yeah
I'm glad you like mine, too,
See we're looking pretty cool


Eight or nine years ago, while I was walking through the music department at Borders after getting my hair cut, I heard the then-new Dandy Warhols' CD (Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia) playing on the in-store sound system.

The first song from that CD was great. The second song was great. So I  immediately bought the CD:

If you knew me well, you'd know how out of character this is for me. I rarely respond immediately to new music – I have to hear it several times before it starts to grow on me. Plus I'm kind of cheap. (I don't buy books, I go to the public library. And I don't buy many CDs – I borrow them from my friends and my kids, or I go to the public library.)

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David Allan Coe, an "outlaw" country-western singer who claims he spent time on death row for killing a fellow prison inmate who demanded oral sex from him, had a big hit in 1974 with his recording of the Steve Goodman song, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name." 

Coe said that Goodman told him he was sending him the perfect country and western song to record. But after reading the lyrics, Coe told Goodman that a song that failed to mention the singer's mother, trains, trucks, prison, and getting drunk could not purport to be the perfect country and western song. 

So Goodman wrote this new verse for the song:

I was drunk the day my momma got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station
In my pickup truck,
She got runned over by a damned old train

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If you were writing the perfect Los Angeles (henceforth, "L.A.") song, what are the analogous key elements that you would just have to mention? 

It's been a few years since I've been to L.A., but I used to travel there frequently, and so I feel qualified to offer my list:

1. An obsession with physical appearance.

2. Cars. (Anyone who grew up listening to the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean and reading Hot Rod magazine knows that cars are a crucial part of L.A. culture.)

3. Wannabe actors/musicians who wait tables (preferably at a restaurant featuring vegan food, or food from an obscure third-world country) while waiting for their big break.

4. Romantic/sexual relationships where money or career advancement is the primary motivation for at least one of the parties.

By that definition, "Bohemian Like You" is pretty much the perfect L.A. song.

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The lines quoted at the beginning of this post cover the physical appearance element. 

By the way, remember I said I had just gotten a haircut when I heard this CD for the first time? I'm such a creature of habit that I've gone to the same woman for haircuts for about 25 years – if she's booked up when I call, I'll wait a week or two. Before that, I went to her ex-husband for 10 years or so until he went into a different line of work. (They used to have a shop in a small town about 30 miles from where I live – and I would drive there in rush-hour traffic rather than take a chance with someone different.) 

The Dandy Warhols in 2003

And speaking of being a creature of habit, have I told you that I've made myself the same dinner almost every Monday and Tuesday night since 1992?

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Here are the lines about cars:

You got a great car
What's wrong with it today?
I used to have one, too

Here's the part about working in a restaurant until you get a movie role or your band makes it big:

So what do you do?
Oh yeah, I wait tables, too
No, I haven't heard your band
Because you guys are pretty new

And last but certainly not least, here are the lines about the mercenary relationship:

Who's that guy just hanging at your pad
He's lookin' kinda of bummed
Oh, you broke up that's too bad
I guess it's fair if he always pays the rent
And he doesn't get bent
About sleeping on the couch when I'm there

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Raise your hand if you think you know the gender of the singer and the person he is talking to, boys and girls. Who thinks we have two guys? Who thinks it's two girls? And who votes for one of each? (Don't cheat and watch the music video before you answer.)

It beats the hell out of me. The talk about cars would make you lean toward two guys. That would make it likely that the sexual relationships in the song were gay, but gays (at least according to popular stereotypes) are not into cars like straight L.A. guys would be.

The talk about hairdos would ordinarily make you think we had two chicks here, but this is L.A. we're talking about–- so it could still be two guys, or one of each gender. 

The Dandy Warhols in 2018

The fact that the two characters work at a restaurant and are in a band doesn't help us figure out their respective genders at all.

What about the guy just hanging at the pad? How does he fit in?

I'm guessing that the singer is a male and the person he is discussing hairdos with is a female – and there's no threesome involving the guy who has to sleep on the couch when the singer (presumably younger and better-looking than the guy on the couch, who is probably only allowed any privileges whatsoever because he pays the rent) spends the night.

But if you think the song is about two guys or two girls, I can't say you're wrong. Anything is possible. (The music video agrees with me.)

Forget it, Jake.  It's L.A. – anything's possible.

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By the way, the song never mentions Los Angeles (or Hollywood or Beverly Hills or even the beach). The Dandy Warhols are from Portland, Oregon, so maybe the song's about Portland.

Naaaaaah. It's about L.A. One hundred per cent chance it's about L.A.

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A final note. If you don't understand the references to "Bohemian" and "urban Bohemia," you can read all about it here. It's a French thing. ("Boho" is short for "Bohemian.")

Click here to watch the official "Bohemian Like You" music video.

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: