Artist	Song
The Doors [L. A. Woman]	Love Her Madly (3:20)
The Doors [Essential Rarities]	Break On Through [live] (4:44)
The Doors [The Doors]	Alabama Song (3:20)
The Doors [Essential Rarities]	Orange County Suite (5:49)
The Doors [Waiting For The Sun]	Wintertime Love (1:54)
The Doors [The Soft Parade]	Touch Me (3:12)
The Doors [Strange Days]	Moonlight Drive (3:04)
The Doors [Waiting For The Sun]	Spanish Caravan (2:59)
The Doors [L. A. Woman]	The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat) (4:15)
The Doors [Absolutely Live]	Build Me A Woman [live] (3:33)
The Doors [Waiting For The Sun]	Love Street (2:52)
The Doors [Waiting For The Sun]	Yes, The River Knows (2:37)
The Doors [Strange Days]	People Are Strange (2:12)
The Doors [Absolutely Live]	Universal Mind [live] (4:37)
The Doors [Morrison Hotel]	Queen Of The Highway (2:47)
The Doors [Waiting For The Sun]	The Unknown Soldier (3:25)
The Doors [The Soft Parade]	Runnin' Blue (2:27)
The Doors [L. A. Woman]	Riders On The Storm (7:15)
The Doors [Essential Rarities]	The Soft Parade [live] (10:09)
The Doors [The Doors]	Soul Kitchen (3:35)

Comment:

So i'm sitting in a cafT on Thayer Street in Providence, Rhode Island, meeting with a few friends from Brown U. for a weekly impromptu poetry workshop we've set up. maybe it's the tie-dyed shirt i bought on Saint Mark's Place that draws the man, but the fact of the matter is that when he comes in to try to sell his Doors box set, i'm the first one he turns to. he's clearing out his house, or something; the story isn't really important. he's selling 7 CDs for three bucks a pop: all six original studio albums plus something called Essential Rarities. the only Doors album i have is Absolutely Live; i tend to think of the Doors as a relic of the time i was just first getting into rock music. but there's no way i can turn the man down for $21, and so of course i say yes, and my ownership of Doors CDs goes from 1 to 8 in an instant. let me tell you: buying the entire studio repertoire a band released in its lifetime simultaneously is far from the best way to really understand their career. i end up listening mostly to Essential Rarities, simply because of its variety. a year or so later, i finally get the obvious idea in my head of putting all the songs that stick out onto one CD and clear the board. this, then, dear readers, is my Best Of The Doors, and i have almost no regrets about it. okay, maybe some of the loudest, most extreme moments from Absolutely Live should've been on here too... but i've always thought of Absolutely Live as having its own existence apart from the Doors canon, and the two songs i've included from it are just good songs there's no reason for the Doors to never have released in the studio, "Universal Mind" especially, which always puts me in a wonderful trance. Yes, my Best Of The Doors leaves off "Light My Fire", "L. A. Woman", "The End", "Five To One", "Peace Frog", "When The Music's Over", "Strange Days"... and by Jove, it's better for it! Here are some of the conclusions i've drawn from being inundated with the Doors' entire output once upon a distant moon: The eternally-maligned Waiting For The Sun, here represented by no less than five tracks, is actually the best studio album the Doors ever released, with not a single bad song, long pointless rambling, or challenge to look into Jim Morrison's eye and say an unconscious prayer to the god Priapus. Conversely, their worst album was Morrison Hotel: lauded perhaps as a back-to-roots move, but the Doors were never about roots, really; it was just their medium of expression from beginning to end, and the album's only really fascinating song to me is "Queen Of The Highway", which Essential Rarities probably does better. Essential Rarities itself is a better listening experience than any of the actual studio albums, and reminds this listener at least of the Beatles' White Album in its unity-through-diversity approach; it makes me think that the Doors would have been an even greater band if they had been bigger showoffs than they already were. Robbie Krieger was really just as talented a songwriter as Jim Morrison, and more dependable; Jim Morrison never seemed to understand the catchiness inherent to good pop songs the way Krieger did, and "Runnin' Blue" is maybe the catchiest Doors song ever. finally: i really don't get what the Doors were thinking not ending their first album with "Soul Kitchen", probably the best song on the album, and one of the strongest album-ending statements i've heard anywhere. "The End", the song, pales by comparison, both as a closer and simply as a song. they really should have just used it to close Side 1 and had done with it. Here, then, are The Doors as i present them: a great 60's original, who maybe didn't ever realize just how original they were.

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