Stoned Immaculate: the Music of the Doors
(Elektra)
Grade: E
The baby boomers really sucked. Worse, they're not done sucking yet.
The most staggeringly narcissistic generation in American history to date, the boomers have an endless fascination with themselves that continues even now, as the entire bald, ponytailed generation reaches its twilight years. Desperate to recapture their relevance, boomers have wrought such evils as the Woodstock sequels, Santana's "Smooth" and several presidential candidates. Even more heartbreaking, boomers' kids have believed the hype spewed by their self-absorbed parents, giving rise to the current retro-obsession that has largely crippled cultural creativity.
The Doors are, predictably, a favorite boomer band - facile mysticism, hippiefied drug use and premature death being three of the boomers' favorite pursuits. Many of today's mope-rock stoners have latched onto the Doors' recorded legacy with all the enthusiasm their then-stoner parents did in the late 60s.
This latter-day Doors popularity coincides with the remaining original Doors needing some work, so some charitable soul had the idea to put together a tribute album featuring contemporary artists doing Doors covers with some assistance from the old boys.
The biggest aesthetic problem with a tribute album for this band is that the Doors were essentially a really good one-album band that somehow managed to keep Jim Morrison alive and writing far past the death of his creativity. Though there were isolated bright spots on later albums, Morrison's increased focus on drinking and writing bad poetry sank any hopes the group may have had at recapturing its initial inventiveness. Thus, there is a dearth of tightly written songs worth covering, and even fewer songs that are not so inextricably tied to the Doors' identity as to be basically uncoverable.
But the biggest real problem for Stoned Immaculate is basic irrelevance. Fierce Smash Mouth completists may crave the group's cover of "Peace Frog," but the mentally competent can skip this one.
- Ian Caruth
