Waiting for the Sun

Recording

The recording of Waiting for the Sun was, by all accounts, troubled. For one, the band had plundered Morrison's original songbook, a collection of lyrics and ideas, for their first two albums. Consequently, after months of touring, interviews, and television appearances, they had little new material. To compensate, the band struggled mightily to record a longer piece called "The Celebration of the Lizard," a collection of song fragments stitched together by Morrison's often surreal poetry. Frustrated by their lack of progress, the band and producer Paul A. Rothchild abandoned the recording. The group would revisit it later in its full-length form on their 1970 album Absolutely Live. Rothchild's growing perfectionism was also becoming an issue for the band; each song on the album required at least twenty takes and "The Unknown Soldier", recorded in two parts, took 130 takes.

Composition

Waiting for the Sun includes the band's second chart topper, "Hello, I Love You." One of the last remaining songs from Morrison's 1965 batch of tunes, it had been demoed by the group for Aura Records in 1965 before Krieger had been a member, as had "Summer's Almost Gone." In the liner notes to the Doors Box Set, Robby Krieger denied the allegations that the song's musical structure was stolen from Ray Davies, where a riff similar to it is featured in The Kinks' "All Day and All of the Night". Instead, he said the song's vibe was taken from Cream's song "Sunshine of Your Love". According to the Doors biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, courts in the UK determined in favor of Davies and any royalties for the song are paid to him.

Waiting for the Sun contains two songs with militant themes: "Five to One" and "The Unknown Soldier". In his 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Jerry Hopkins speculates the song seems to be a parody of all the naive revolutionary rhetoric heard on the streets spouted by the "hippie/flower child" hordes he saw in growing numbers panhandling outside concert halls, an interpretation strongly supported by the final verse's lines "Your ballroom days are over, baby" and "Trade in your flowers for a handful of dimes." The former line ("Your ballroom days are over baby/Night is drawing near/Shadows of the evening/crawl across the years") may have been lifted by Morrison from the 19th-century hymnal and bedtime rhyme "Now the Day is Over" ("Now the day is over/Night is drawing nigh/Shadows of the evening/Steal across the sky"). "The Unknown Soldier" is less obtuse but no less compelling and is a good example of the group's cinematic approach to their music. In the beginning, as well as after the middle of the song, the mysterious sounds of the organ is heard, depicting the mystery of the "Unknown Soldier". In the middle of the song, the Doors produce the sounds of what appears to be a marching cadence. It begins with military drums, plus the sound of the Sergeant counting off in 4s, (HUP, HUP, HUP 2 3 4), until he says "COMPANY! HALT! PRESENT! ARMS!" being followed by the sounds of loading rifles, and a long military drum roll, a pause, and then the rifle shots; in live performances Krieger would point his guitar towards Morrison like a rifle, drummer John Densmore would emulate a gunshot by producing a loud rimshot by hitting the edge of the snare drum, and breaking the drum sticks, Manzarek would raise his hand and drop it as if to release the signal, and Morrison would fall screaming to the ground. After this middle section, the verses return, with Morrison, first singing in a sadder tone, to "Make a grave for the Unknown Soldier", with the mysterious organ being heard. The song ends with Morrison's ecstatic celebration of a war being over, with sounds of crowds cheering and bells tolling. Ironically, as pointed out in the 2010 film When You're Strange, at the height of Morrison's success, his father, an Admiral, was commanding a division of aircraft carriers off the coast of Vietnam. The song was Morrison's reaction to the Vietnam War and the way that conflict was portrayed in American media at the time, with lines such as "Breakfast where the news is read/ Television children fed/ Unborn living, living dead/ Bullets strike the helmet's head" reflecting how news of the war was being presented in the living rooms of ordinary people. The band also shot a film for the song, which was released as a single and became the group's fourth consecutive Top 40 hit.

The centerpiece of this album was supposed to be the lengthy theatrical piece "Celebration of the Lizard", but in the end only the "Not to Touch the Earth" section was used. (In a 1969 interview with Jerry Hopkins for Rolling Stone, Morrison said of the epic, "It was pieced together on different occasions out of already existing elements rather than having any generative core from which it grew. I still think there's hope for it.") At the conclusion of "Not to Touch the Earth," Morrison utters his iconic personal maxim, "I am the Lizard King/I can do anything." The opening lines of the song, "Not to touch the earth/not to see the sun" were taken from the table of contents of The Golden Bough. Krieger's skills with the flamenco guitar can be found on "Spanish Caravan", with Granainas intro and a reworking of the melody from the classical piece Asturias (Leyenda) composed by Isaac Albéniz. The optimistic "We Could Be So Good Together" had been recorded during the sessions for Strange Days, even appearing on an early track listing for the album. A review in Slant Magazine described the song as "categorically pre-fame Morrison," pointing out that the line "The time you wait subtracts from joy" is the kind of hippie idealism the singer had long given up on. "Wintertime Love" (the closest the band ever came to a Christmas song) and the mournful "Summer's Almost Gone" address seasonal themes, while the gentle "Yes, the River Knows" was written by Robby Krieger. In the liner notes to the 1997 Doors retrospective Box Set, Manzarek praises the latter: "The piano and guitar interplay is absolutely beautiful. I don't think Robby and I ever played so sensitively together. It was the closest we ever came to be being Bill Evans and Jim Hall." In the same essay, Mazarek calls "Summer's Almost Gone" "a cool Latino-Bolero kind of thing with a Bach-like bridge. It's about the ephemeral nature of life. A season of joy and light and laughter is coming to an end." While recording "My Wild Love," the band eventually gave up on the music and turned it into work song by getting everyone in the studio to clap their hands, stamp their feet, and chant in unison. Morrison wrote "Love Street" for his girlfriend Pamela Courson, and like all of his other songs about or dedicated to her, there was a hesitancy or biting refusal at the end ("I guess I like it fine, so far"). The title track "Waiting for the Sun" was left off this album, but would be included on the 1970 album Morrison Hotel.

Release

Waiting for the Sun was released on July 3, 1968. The album has sold over 9 million copies. The US monophonic pressing, though only a fold down of the stereo mix to mono, is one of the rarest pop/rock LPs and has been sought after by collectors for years. A studio run-through of "Celebration of the Lizard" (subtitled "An Experiment/Work in Progress") and two early takes of "Not to Touch the Earth" were included as bonus tracks on the 40th anniversary expanded edition release of this album.

Critical reception

Waiting for the Sun has been generally well received by critics, though most cited it as a step down in quality from the band's earlier albums. Jim Miller of Rolling Stone wrote, "After a year and a half of Jim Morrison's posturing, one might logically hope for some sort of musical growth, and if the new record isn't really terrible, it isn't particularly exciting either." In his retrospective review, Richie Unterberger of AllMusic wrote, "The Doors' 1967 albums had raised expectations so high that their third effort was greeted as a major disappointment. With a few exceptions, the material was much mellower, and while this yielded some fine melodic ballad rock […] there was no denying that the songwriting was not as impressive as it had been on the first two records." In his review of the 2007 reissue, Sal Cinquemani of Slant wrote "Despite the fact that Morrison was becoming a self-destructing mess, Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore were never more lucid – perhaps to compensate. This was a band at its most dexterous, creative, and musically diverse ..."

Track listing

All tracks written by The Doors (Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore), except as stated.

Personnel