The Doors
Morrison Hotel

*NOTE: The last track on side 2, "Maggie McGill," plays Mint Minus Minus to EX++.

*NOTE: Side 2 of this record was not noisy enough to rate our M-- to EX++ grade, but it's not quite up to our standards for Mint Minus Minus either.

Vintage covers for this album are hard to find in exceptionally clean shape. Most of the will have at least some amount of ringwear, seam wear and edge wear. We guarantee that the cover we supply with this Hot Stamper is at least VG

A great many pressings are neither rich nor present enough to get Jim Morrison's voice to sound the way it should. He's The Lizard King, not The Frog Prince for crying out loud. When he doesn't sound present, big, powerful, and borderline scary, what's the point?

Not to worry. On these sides he sounds just fine. Just listen to him screaming his head off on "Roadhouse Blues" and projecting the power of his rich baritone on "Blue Sunday." Nobody did it any better.

All the other elements are really working too -- real weight to the piano, amazing punch to the bottom end, lovely texture to the guitars and so on. The sound is clean and clear but not overly so; you still get all the Tubey Magic you need.

The sound of the organ on "Blue Sunday" is really something, check it out. Where has that sound gone?

What The Best Sides Of Morrison Hotel Have To Offer Is Not Hard To Hear

• The biggest, most immediate staging in the largest acoustic space
• The most Tubey Magic, without which you have almost nothing. CDs give you clean and clear. Only the best vintage vinyl pressings offer the kind of Tubey Magic that was on the tapes in 1970
• Tight, note-like, rich, full-bodied bass, with the correct amount of weight down low
• Natural tonality in the midrange -- with all the instruments having the correct timbre
• Transparency and resolution, critical to hearing into the three-dimensional space of the studio

No doubt there's more but we hope that should do for now. Playing the record is the only way to hear all of the qualities we discuss above, and playing the best pressings against a pile of other copies under rigorously controlled conditions is the only way to find a pressing that sounds as good as this one does.

To hear the best sound on side two, drop the needle on "The Spy" -- you won't believe how much ambience there is. The clarity is stunning as well, with amazing depth to the soundfield.

Check out the wonderfully dry drum sound on "Maggie McGill." Be forewarned -- you're gonna want to turn this one up loud.

Man, it is almost impossible to find Doors records that sound like this. It's hard to find clean Doors records at all these days, we find a small handful each year -- not nearly enough to do these shootouts as often as we would like.

Both sides here have the deep, rock-solid bottom end this music absolutely demands. You've got to hand it to Bruce Botnick -- he knows how to get real rock-'em, sock-'em bottom end onto a piece of magnetic tape.

What We're Listening For On Morrison Hotel

• Energy for starters. What could be more important than the life of the music?
• The Big Sound comes next -- wall to wall, lots of depth, huge space, three-dimensionality, all that sort of thing.
• Then transient information -- fast, clear, sharp attacks for the guitars and drums, not the smear and thickness common to most LPs.
• Tight, note-like bass with clear fingering -- which ties in with good transient information, as well as the issue of frequency extension further down.
• Next: transparency -- the quality that allows you to hear deep into the soundfield, showing you the space and air around all the players.
• Then: presence and immediacy. The vocals aren't "back there" somewhere, way behind the speakers. They're front and center where any recording engineer worth his salt -- Bruce Botnick in this case -- would have put them.
• Extend the top and bottom and voila, you have The Real Thing -- an honest to goodness Hot Stamper.

Vinyl Condition

Mint Minus Minus is about as quiet as any vintage pressing will play, and since only the right vintage pressings have any hope of sounding good on this album, that will most often be the playing condition of the copies we sell. (The copies that are even a bit noisier get listed on the site are seriously reduced prices or traded back in to the local record stores we shop at.)

Those of you looking for quiet vinyl will have to settle for the sound of later pressings and Heavy Vinyl reissues, purchased elsewhere of course as we have no interest in selling records that don't have the vintage analog magic that is a key part of the appeal of these wonderful recordings.

If you want to make the trade-off between bad sound and quiet surfaces with whatever Heavy Vinyl pressing might be available, well, that's certainly your prerogative, but we can't imagine losing what's good about this music -- the size, the energy, the presence, the clarity, the weight -- just to hear it with less background noise.

Speaking of heavy vinyl...

Heavy Vinyl

Just for fun, years ago we played the Elektra 180 gram reissue of Morrison Hotel. I have to admit that initially it was pretty good, but as time went on, the artificiality became more apparent -- and annoying.

Just listen to the vocals -- they're all wrong. Morrison has one of the richest and most distinctive voices in the history of rock. When the record I am playing doesn't sound like the guy I've been listening to for close to forty years, something ain't right.

And what ain't right -- not to put too fine a point on it -- is the sound of that record.

Side One

• Roadhouse Blues
• Waiting for the Sun
• You Make Me Real
• Peace Frog
• Blue Sunday
• Ship of Fools

Side Two

• Land Ho!
• The Spy
• Queen of the Highway
• Indian Summer
• Maggie McGill

AMG 4 1/2 Star Review

The Doors returned to crunching, straightforward hard rock on Morrison Hotel, an album that, despite yielding no major hit singles, returned them to critical favor with hip listeners. An increasingly bluesy flavor began to color the songwriting and arrangements, especially on the party 'n' booze anthem "Roadhouse Blues."

Review Excerpts

Morrison Hotel was, upon its release, seen by many as a comeback for the Doors following the critical failure of The Soft Parade and the Miami incident of 1969. Dave Marsh, the editor of Creem magazine, said of the album that it was: "the most horrifying rock and roll I have ever heard. When they're good, they're simply unbeatable. I know this is the best record I've listened to ... so far," while Rock Magazine called it "without any doubt their ballsiest (and best) album to date." Circus Magazine praised it as "possibly the best album yet from the Doors" and "Good hard, evil rock, and one of the best albums released this decade". ~ Wikipedia