RECORD REVIEWS

The Soft Parade has long been the Doors’ most undervalued album. After the revolutionary impact of the band’s first two LPs, The Doors and Strange Days, and the commercial consolidation of the band’s popularity on the third, Waiting for the Sun, Soft Parade was perceived as a fall from grace. The charismatic Jim Morrison, famously dubbed “The Lizard King” by Crawdaddy! guru Paul Williams, had transitioned from perhaps the most sexually powerful rock’n’roll figure since Elvis Presley into a troubled frontman bent on self-destruction.

For all the transformational impact of the band’s records, their live shows were increasingly marred by Morrison’s nightly jousts with local police. At the first provocation from Morrison, a phalanx of police would come on stage and form a circle around him, shielding the crowd from the expected lewd behavior. Morrison often taunted the cops, and the shows would descend into chaos; police shut them down or enraged fans rioted, rushing the stage and breaking furniture. I witnessed this at a 1968 Singer Bowl show in New York, just a few months before work started on The Soft Parade.

Morrison’s antics had become a distraction, and he started to grow apart from the band, leaving guitarist Robby Krieger to handle much of the writing for The Soft Parade. The inclusion of strings and horns on some tracks—most notably the album’s first single, “Touch Me”—was viewed as apostasy by hardcore fans, who demanded rock authenticity from their band. Another factor in the album’s lukewarm reception is that three of the record’s best songs had already been released as singles before The Soft Parade came out. By the time of the album’s July 1969 release, it already seemed stale.

Fifty years later, none of that matters. The Soft Parade can now be viewed without prejudice. Rhino’s 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, with a wealth of previously unreleased material and remasters from Doors engineer Bruce Botnick, presents a strong work, as representative of the legend as anything the band recorded.

Morrison’s deterioration would of course continue, leading to his supernova flameout on the brilliant , his untimely death, and the massive success of . But even though he had ceded to Krieger and keyboardist Ray Manzarek much of the creative work on , Morrison was still a vital participant at these sessions. In fact, he sounds particularly strong, backed by an inventive and superbly integrated band; there’s no indication of waning vocal skills. His interaction with the horns on