A Trip Down Nostalgia Lane

NB: The subject matter of this post was in no way approved by my co-blogger. I would like to make it absolutely clear that she DOES NOT like the Doors, and no assumptions are to be made about her feelings relative to the content of this post :)


(click on the strip for a larger image)

My love of the Doors in general and Jim Morrison in particular have become well known to my friends, particularly those who have watched the Doors perform on Ed Sullivan with me. Thus, one of said friends e-mailed me the above comic strip. Naturally, the strip is only funny if you agree that the idea of a 25-year-old hamster is as ridiculous as the idea of Jim Morrison living to be 66. Anyway, receiving this comic strip has inspired me to actually finish and post a blog entry I began over winter vacation.

Because I am a true music nerd, I was ecstatic to receive a record player for Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, records, also known as vinyl, LPs, 45s, etc. are those shiny black disks that you’ve probably seen in your parents’ attic or, depending on your age, have in your own attic.

Not really having much in the way of my own vinyl collection (a.k.a. I only owned one album), I naturally needed to borrow music from my parents for testing out on my latest toy. This meant not only exploring the records my parents had out, but dragging out boxes (and I mean drag; those suckers are heavy!) from storage and the garage.

The first things I played were selections from their classical collection, because that’s mostly what they’ve kept out over the years. And really, short of hearing it live, there’s nothing like listening to good classical music on LP. And it wasn’t just about the music. I got to hear my mother talk about how an ex-boyfriend of hers who played trombone introduced her to Janáček’s Symphonieta because of its excellent use of brass. I also got to see how much she loves listening to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, which led to a discussion about Tchaikovsky’s amazing ability to tell stories with music. Of course, all of this led to the excavation of the other boxes.

In one of these boxes was my father’s collection of classic pop and rock. I wouldn’t have expected to see him with more records by Elton John and Chicago than The Beatles. And "Black Dog" and "Stairway to Heaven" are even more glorious on vinyl. But the group I have become sincerely attached to since then is the Doors. (And it’s not because of Morrison’s leather pants. Honest.)

I’d never thought myself to be particularly familiar with the music of The Doors, but there isn’t much classic rock that I don’t enjoy at least a little. Well, while my family chilled at home on Christmas, we watched a DVD of classic performances from the Ed Sullivan Show, which included The Doors performing “Light My Fire.” It was one of those songs I’d always heard, but never knew (or thought about) who sang it. And it kind of got stuck in my head. So, when I found that my dad had an album with that on it, I listened to it. And it is much longer than the version they performed for Ed, and has some fantastic instrumental solos.

Well, it’s more difficult to listen to single tracks on LPs, and I always like discovering new good music, so after listening to the first side (which conveniently opened with the 7 minute long “Light My Fire”) quite a few times, I finally flipped over the record, not expecting to hear anything I knew. But as soon as the first song, “Touch Me,” started, I knew what it was. It was one of those songs I’d always heard on classic rock radio that my dad listened to when I was younger. I always knew it as the Stronger Than Dirt song because whenever it came on the radio, my dad would crank the volume up so that we could hear what Morrison was singing at the end.

As I listened to it, I wished that I’d actually listened to more classic rock regularly when I was younger. I couldn’t help but think about listening to the Backstreet Boys during some of my formative years of adolescent growth and hormones. One could say that the Backstreet Boys were better. None of them were known for being alcoholics or hardcore drug-users (so far as I know, anyway). But none of them were Jim Morrison, either (or John Lennon, or Mick Jagger, or Gary Puckett, for that matter). I can’t help but think if I was a hormonal teenager in the late ‘60s lying on the floor of my bedroom listening to Jim Morrison sing "Touch Me" or "Wishful Sinful," I probably would have melted straight through the floor. Let’s face it, they don’t make music like they used to. And can any group today make hordes of pre-teen girls scream and faint quite like The Beatles (and, apparently, the Rolling Stones) could? No way.

This is not to say that modern music has nothing going for it. That would be a lie. I have my fair share of good music that has come out in the time I have been alive. But I think that my generation, the Starbucks, iPod, instant gratification generation, has come to expect different things from our music. I’m not sure quite what they expect, but I think that the revolutionary sounds of groups like The Beatles and The Doors are no longer new. But because of things they did, there’s very little new that modern groups are doing. Weezer has the Red Album, the Blue Album, and the Green Album. The Beatles had the White Album. Except it actually had a title. The Beatles. But I understand why no one calls it that; we can’t speak in italics, after all. We’d end up sounding like a bad Abbot and Costello sketch (-I listened to The Beatles this afternoon. –Awesome! Which album? -The Beatles. –You said that, but which album? Who’s on first?).

My generation isn’t going to be shocked and possibly scandalized by listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (though "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" still sounds trippy), and no one is going to think twice about hip swiveling on TV (in the Ed Sullivan performance we watched, Elvis was filmed from the waist up, but the screams from the audience gave some indication of what we weren’t seeing). They may have been completely trashed all the time or have been having lots of sex with women they weren’t married to, but, come on, after Tom Cruise couch-jumped and Lindsay Lohan went into rehab for the ump-teenth time, who really cares? I’m sure some of the greats of early rock had onstage antics to match Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl (Jim Morrison and the Miami Incident, anyone? He was arrested! Multiple times!), but then as now, those things seldom stop people from following artists that they like.

And I had all of these deep and obviously profound thoughts because of getting a record player for Christmas. Betcha can’t get all of that from a new Blu-ray player. So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go listen to Jim Morrison and melt.