morrisions lyrics were awful. "mojo risin", "ride the snake", "like a dog without a bone", how did peple actually take his stuff seriously. he was an exciting frontman and personality but poet he was not.

have you read any lyrics from that era?

Mr. Mojo Risin is an angram of Jim Morrison.


eat your dinner
eat your pork and beans
I eat more chicken than any man ever seen yeah
I'm a backdoor man!
the men don't know but the little girls
understand


if that is not prime rock n roll I don;t know what is.

What's incredible is how different L.A. Woman sounds from anything else they did. It's still the Doors, you can tell that--but it's like a whole new band got channeled into their bodies at the same time. It's an amazing album.

how stupid do you think i am? everyone knows what mojo risin is. making an angram out of your name is not creative at all, just ultra pretentious, like mr mogo risin was. and yes ive read lyrics from that era. leanord cohen, lou reed, bobby dylan, even jimi hendrix (who is often way overlooked for his lyrics due to his groundbreaking guitar olaying) are all wayyyy better songwriters than jim.

Uuuhh....aren't those lyrics originally Howlin Wolf's?

Willie Dixon's to be precise.

"Crystal Shit.....yeah, they do a Doors show."


John Densmore 4 lyfe!!

Tough call, because the group went through 4 phases over 8 studio albums. The first two are the artsy, proto-New Wave albums, the next two are the jazz albums, after that come the blues/funkish/rootsy rock albums, and then the two post-Morrison albums. Rolling Stone magazine has traditionally gone with Morrison Hotel, but I'm not going to trust their opinion, considering the way they treated The Doors like shit when they were around--considering the way they treated anything outside of Frisco and London like shit, come to think of it.

I think 'My Eyes Have Seen You' off Strange Days is one of my top contenders in the should-have-been-a-hit category. Sadly, they never even released it as a single. Ditto for The Velvet Underground & Nico's 'Femme Fatale'--that would have stood a chance as an A-side.

As for the question of Morrison's poetic abilities, beat legend Michael McClure has called him "the best poet of his [i.e., Morrison's] generation," so I don't think any derisive comments from a cranky (yet lovable) eccentric rock journalist like Lester Bangs means anything to the literary world. I have all three of Morrison's full-length volumes, are they're like far-out, maaaannn. Morrison was a great surrealist.

Um, so?

The mistake is judge his or anyone's rock lyrics as poetry. They're never going to be poetry. They're going to rock lyrics, good or bad, great or mediocre. But thinking about them as poetry is not the way to go.

Whatever.

Morrison Hotel.

I have no opinion on Morrison being a good poet or not but you're wrong, for instance Ian Curtis lyrics have a strong poetic quality and I see nothing wrong with it at all.

Poetic quality is different from poetry. I seriously doubt even the very best rock lyric is any match for the very best or even not very best contemporary poetry.

If there's poetry in rock lyrics, it's in how well they fit the song. In that sense, the Ramones are probably every bit as poetic as Joy Division.

Ok, you have a point.