The Doors
L.A. Woman

THE REVIEW

You gotta see me chaaaaaaaaanngge!!!!!!1

The last breath.... when I listen to the rising climax of the opening track of the last true studio album by The Doors, I get chills, the last cry of a prophet who left us too soon, the last breath of the shaman of pain, the last tremor...

Yes, because here Jim vomits the words as one vomits under the influence of a drunkenness, he vomits them violently, he vomits them with disdain, exhales them and consumes them upon himself, the body devastated by excess and the voice corroded by alcohol send out the hallucinatory final message before leaving forever...

Already that voice... dry and destroyed, justification that many often use to criticize this album, I, personally, can’t imagine an "L.A Woman" sung differently and I don’t think it would even make sense to do so because that way one risks losing sight of the essence of Morrison's last musical discourse...

Remember the highway, "take the highway to the end of the night", "Ride the king's away", already featured in other Doors songs, well, that highway is now actually a lost little road that could be Texan or it could be in Nevada, a road worthy of the beat novel "On the road" by Kerouac, this road, if traveled, leads to the reddest and most heartfelt twilight that exists, leads to the happy sunset of a man, before that of an artist... yes, because Jim was in pieces, after the Miami events, the group’s censorships, the press’s criticisms he needed, once again, a "new true friend" as he admits in "the hyacinth house", a magnificent, moving piece, of disarming sincerity and unprecedented simplicity to seal another sad masterpiece of the "end".

In the album there are then a good dose of rock-blues tracks, a hard, decadent and cursed blues, from the opening track, to "Car hiss by my window", to "Love her madly", to "Been down so long", "I've been hidden too long, and now I want to break free, I want to break free from the conventions of a fake world, a cardboard world, a world that doesn’t "live life", but contemplates it, judges it"; a further taste of Morrison’s last "attempt at redemption" is the wonderful "ode to spring" of the title track, a very intense blues piece, a jumble of fresh and warm images at the same time, that leave you ecstatic, like when you are intoxicated by the scent of a flower to the point of nausea... "mr mojo risin", that is, I'm rising, Jim rises for the last time, to make everyone understand that he has made it, even now with a torn body and thick beard, even now that he is no longer the sex symbol he once was, he sees things with disarming clarity, a clarity that leaves you speechless for the passion with which it is communicated, and so the metaphor woman-Los Angeles, the city of angels that raised him and in which he cultivated success, has become, synthesizable in the dichotomy MOTEL-MONEY-DEATH-MANIA.

The gloomy "L'America" evokes apocalyptic scenarios, while the cover "Crawling king snake" by John Lee Hooker, perfectly suits the reptile, the lizard king, it is once again an ode to the forces of evil to awaken the perception clouded by habit, a dance made of hissing and rolling over themselves, like a wet cobra in the desolate land of a world that is about to disappear, a world that is setting.

After the "renunciation of God" of "The Wasp", comes the masterpiece par excellence of the album, it is "Riders on the storm" what to say, it's one of those timeless pieces, the wet-effect of the initial rain, a rain that, let’s remember, is a symbol of purification, Morrison's ghost-echo voice, which as if speaking from a better world, a world revealed in all its dictates, a world no longer virginal, but a bare world without any secrets, carves his verses in the stone of memory as if they were graffiti of blood, graffiti of an existence in every form and aesthetic, a vision dictated by the unconscious, a vision thanks to which Jim gives shape to the shapeless, a vision that is actually a continuous search... riders on the storm into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown... the world on you depends our life will never end...