STONED IMMACULATE: The Music of the Doors

Various Artists
(Elektra)

RATING: four

I never knew a world without the Doors. Which shouldn’t be so strange, considering I was born three years after the death of lead singer Jim Morrison. But Morrison lived the rock star stereotype so well and so completely that I don’t know if the very concept would have been the same had we not had him to draw from.

The wide and continuing influence of the Doors is paid tribute to in Stoned Immaculate, an impressive collection of Doors songs covered by modern artists working in different genres. The names are impressive, if not for their stature, then surely for their variety. Sure, you’d expect to see the Stone Temple Pilots on board, maybe even Creed and Aerosmith. But Smash Mouth, the Cult, Perry Farrell, John Lee Hooker, Days of the New? And how about the late Beat generation William S. Burroughs?

The strange collective, all claiming to have been influenced by the Doors in one way or the other, were pooled together by producer Ralph Sall, choosing those whom he thought “might best interpret the material in an interesting way.” Working with the remaining Doors members—Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger—the bands were given some of the band’s best-known songs and challenged to reinterpret them as they fit.

Still, the album opens with two Scotts bent on being Morrison’s sonic doppelgangers: STP’s Scott Weiland and Creed’s Scott Stapp sound almost eerily like Jim. STP’s “Break On Through” is remade with a few modern touches, but largely remains very faithful to the original. Creed, on the other hand, don’t even attempt any reinterpretation of “Riders on the Storm.” Creed don’t nearly have enough personality to flavor the track, a problem that Aerosmith doesn’t have—there’s little that they do to change “Love Me Two Times,” but Steven Tyler’s distinct vocal style is enough to take over the track and make it their own. Their version may not stray too far from the original, but it’s full and satisfying.
Similarly, goth rockers The Cult resurface for “Wild Child,” while lead singer Ian Astbury does one more take, for “Touch Me,” both of which are rewardingly rich, not in reinterpretation, perhaps, but in sheer personality and presence.

But tribute doesn’t always entail imitation, and the other artists on the album bring in their own influences into the other tracks. Smash Mouth takes out all the darkness from “Peace Frog,” injecting it instead with lively riffs. “While Morrison was growling about blood spilling in the streets, Smash Mouth make it sound like it’s a good thing.

Alternative rock icon Perry Farrell teams up with punk rocker and performance artist Exene to further weirdify “Children of the Night.” The Morrison poem, which the Doors later overlaid with instrumentals, is read by the arty duo as a spoken-word piece that is both haunting and oddly…well, catchy. Morrison (who always fancied himself a poet, not a rock star) would’ve been proud.

For all the big names on the album, however, the biggest are those that Morrison himself would’ve considered his peers—or his mentors, even. The late, great Beat generation poet William S. Burroughs—one of Morrison’s avowed influences—reads “Is Everybody In?” in tribute, pronouncing the poem “in the tradition…of Rimbaud and Saint Jean-Perse particularly. It’s very pure poetry. Very pure poetry.”

Then there’s blues greats Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker, whose influences on the Doors are clear when they take on “Love Her Madly” and “Roadhouse Blues,” respectively. Done in their own style, the songs reveal their influences, sounding more pure than they ever did. The participation of these icons are more than enough reason to sit up and take notice of this album, though Doors fans will simply love the fact that Morrison’s ghost makes a number of appearances: talking to an audience on “Roadhouse Rap,” singing to Hooker’s guitars on “Roadhouse Blues,” and being accompanied by his surviving bandmates on the previously unreleased “Under Waterfall” and “The Cosmic Movie.”

This 17-track monster ends with Days of the New attempting to carry “The End,” perhaps the Doors’ most important song ever. The album cannot end any other way but with this 13-minute epic, and Days of the New have big, big shoes to fill. Unfortunately, they can’t live up to the track, which is at once so impressive and so intimate to Morrison. When Travis Meeks goes into the pivotal Oedipal poem at the heart of the song, he sounds unconvinced; beside Morrison’s unnerving original, it is indeed a pale substitute. Even with the remaining Doors helping out, “The End” is anticlimactic, making Morrison’s absence just all that more palpable.

That, however, and a few more stumbles don’t diminish the appeal of this album. Bold, imaginative, and hell, just a lot of fun to listen to, Stoned Immaculate is the best tribute album to come out in a long while. —Kristine Fonacier

ANGELS & CIGARETTES

Eliza Carthy
(Warner)

RATING: three and a half

This is probably the worst album sleeve design I’ve seen in a long time. The cover features the blue-haired Eliza Carthy staring blankly into space, sitting on a dirty marble staircase overgrown with vines, her toes uninvitingly curled and legs turned inward. Behind her, the city skyline looks fake. I can remember only one other CD with design this bad, and that was Red Rice, Eliza Carthy’s previous 2-CD special. I’d spotted its ad in a music magazine years ago, and it was ugly enough to make me stop turning the pages, stopping for a full ten minutes just to marvel at how singularly, extraordinarily, gut-wrenchingly bad the whole thing was.

So Eliza Carthy has a talent for bad CD design. Fortunately, her music is good enough to forgive the cover and even the gruesome fashion shots inside—which really is no mean feat; these pictures are really, really, really bad. You wouldn’t believe.

Thankfully, the tracks on Angels & Cigarettes are nothing like its album cover would suggest. As Carthy’s debut outside her native UK, Angels & Cigarettes introduces her as a likeably eccentric folk singer with a gift for weaving modern influences into her lush music. Armed with a violin and a sharp pen, Carthy plays like a loonier Sarah McLachlan with a Yorkshire accent.

Synthesizers, strong beats, and the generous use of strings give the songs a lush musical bed to lie on, giving the folksy core of her songs a modern veneer. Carthy’s lyrics are also very versatile, graceful in its narrative one moment, before lobbing in a few spiky lines for surprise the next. “Train Song,” for example, is a love song with unusually rich imagery that can tell stories in the space of a verse: “But I think that stitches will mend him/ And his feet choose a path that they know/ Looking from his bedroom window and falling in love.” Lest you think that she’s all New Age-y sugar, though, Carthy right around and mocks the genre on “Company of Men,” with its dramatic orchestra and melodramatic harp faking right, before abruptly goes left with the mock-sweetly sung, “I’ve given blow jobs on couches/ To men who didn’t want me anymore…/ My evenings have passed me by/ ( a confusion of lies and loose flies).”

The 10-song collection is surprisingly broad in texture and mood, as Carthy draws on a whole range of experience—musical as well as biographical—for her songs. Gentle love songs sit side by side with caustic observations on life, and through them all Carthy displays a deft songwriting hand. The album is also remarkably well-produced for somebody who isn’t being pushed by her record label all that much. It makes you wonder how much better she could get if the label pumped in more money.

It should tell you something that Red Rice was nominated for a Mercury Prize in 1998, despite the stunningly bad cover art and Carthy’s young age (she was 24 then). It would be a shame if this talented songwriter’s career is sunk by bad marketing and ugly album covers, because Angels & Cigarettes, which marks only the beginning of her international career, is already a mature work that surpasses those of many other artists working in the mainstream. So while her art director should be shot, Eliza Carthy deserves a legitimate shot at mainstream stardom.—Kristine Fonacier

THE COLOR OF SILENCE

Tiffany
(Backroom/ Zomba/ Jive/ Universal)

RATING: three and a half

There are a number of things that I used to do that I’m deeply ashamed of now—and the entirety of the 80s falls into that category. Yes, I’m deeply sorry that I dressed up in Punky Brewster fashion, that I dissolved the ozone layer with Aqua Net hair spray, that I swore up and down that A-Ha were going to be my favorite band forever.

But let me tell you something else: I listened to Tiffany, and I refuse to be ashamed of that. I remember lying in bed, plugged into my Walkman, and listening as the joyful strains of “I Think We’re Alone Now” filled my ears and lifted my soul. As a love song, it has the depth and artistic value of a crayon drawing, but, hey, I was in early elementary school.

The red-haired freckle-faced precursor to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera has long since faded away, but as fate would have it, she’s not the E! True Hollywood Story fodder that we thought she’d be. Living a happy, married, suburban existence, Tiffany (still without a last name) has since made a couple of albums after her stint at center stage, none of them making much of an impression, and the last one released only for Asian markets.

All this would make a bland “Where Are They Now?” installment, save for the release of The Color of Silence, an album that presents a rejuvenated, updated Tiffany for 2001.
If you’re expecting drippy, teenyboppy stuff, you’re in for a huge surprise. With tracks like “Piss U Off” and “I Will Not Breakdown” (sic) The Color of Silence is spiritually closer to Jagged Little Pill than Oops…I Did it Again. Who’d ever have thought that the mall-tour queen was secretly listening to Melissa Etheridge during her time off?

The album’s first track, “Open my Eyes,” opens gracefully, primly and properly, just as you’d expect from a former teen princess—but it dissolves into a pop-rock beat that surprises and captivates. If you used to listen to Tiffany, believe me, you won’t see this coming. Tiffany’s voice has matured, though it has lost the interesting teenage rasp that distinguished her from her peers (think Debbie Gibson). But what she lost in vocal edge, she’s more than made up for in song quality. Take for example “I’m Not Sleeping,” which offers up a whiff of menace and guest vocals by rapper Krayzie Bone, which is a far more interesting song than Tiffany’s ever done—and, really, more than we all thought she was capable of.

Not that the album is without its faults. There are 16 songs on the Color of Silence (13 regular tracks, plus three bonuses), not all of them sweet. The album is front-loaded, with most of the highlights placed out front, and the latter half full of throwaway cuts that sound more like pop doodles than real songs. Ghosts of the old Tiffany resurface starting from about track five, which is around the same place where the album begins to slowly disintegrate. With the exception of the quirky “Cinnamon” and, to a lesser degree, the hard-edged “Butterfly,” the rest of the tracks are forgettable.

It’s certainly not shaping up to be a commercial hit: the album has been out in the US since last year, and has made no splash. Still, Color of Silence is an impressive comeback for Tiffany—it’s so refreshing to hear an old dog show up with a few new tricks, no?—Kristine Fonacier