As travesties go, it could have been worse. At times during the concert by
the reconstituted Doors at Roseland on Thursday night, the band briefly reawakened
its indelible late-1960's sound, with Robby Krieger's jabbing blues guitar
lines, Ray Manzarek's spookhouse-calliope organ and Ian Astbury's careful
mimicry of Jim Morrison's voice. Then the illusion faded, and the new Doors
became a passable Doors tribute band holding an invaluable trademark.
A Doors resurrection could never be easy.
Morrison's dark charisma and unstoppable chutzpah held together the band's
improbable amalgam of earthy blues, high-flown poetry, modal jazz, sardonic
cabaret and Top 40 rock. Without Morrison, who died in 1971, the Doors would
have been a pretty good psychedelic jam band. The Doors were also a band of
their era, when Morrison's mingling of love and death, ecstasy and destruction
was a revelation to audiences.
So Mr. Astbury, from the Cult, has an impossible job. The visions in songs
like "Moonlight Drive" are not his own extemporaneous poetry
compressed into song, and he won't be mistaken for Dionysus. Even in his
leather jacket and leather pants, he was too mundane to capture either of
Morrison's extremes: Baudelaire or the bawdy leer.
That left him with posturing and defensiveness. He tried vulgar ranting like
the latter-day Morrison, making crude suggestions about the Dixie Chicks.
Between encores, he speechified: "I mean no pretense. I know where I'm
standing, believe you me."
The new Doors have revised the music as a nostalgia trip, adding videos of
light-show blobs or 1960's riots. The original Doors were a four-man band
onstage, with Mr. Manzarek playing bass lines on organ pedals. The band now
includes a bass player, Angelo Barbera, and Ty Dennis on drums replaces John
Densmore, who did not join the reunion. He lacks Mr. Densmore's jazz
background, and lost the swing in songs like "Light My Fire." But
"Light My Fire" had a worse problem: a pointless interpolation of the
Wailers' "Get Up, Stand Up."
Mr. Manzarek has apparently taken over the Doors, adding unnecessary
background vocals and redoing "The Crystal Ship" in a quasi-classical
arrangement that would embarrass a lounge band. He announced that the Doors
were working on a new album with lyrics by Jim Carroll, Michael McClure, John
Doe, Henry Rollins and Mr. Astbury; a new song, "Cops Talk," sounded
like a self-parody. Yet the old songs had their moments: "L.A. Woman"
as a surging jam that seemed to presage the Allman Brothers; the band's meshing
with Mr. Krieger's flamenco guitar to start "Spanish Caravan"; guitar
and organ sharing "the scream of the butterfly" in "When the
Music's Over." They were vivid flashbacks, doomed by reality.
"You won't see something like this again," Mr. Astbury declared
near the end of the concert. That wasn't true. The Doors continue touring this
summer, including appearances at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., on
Aug. 23 and Jones Beach Theater on Aug. 24.