Review Summary: Having been brought out too hastily, Waiting for the Sun finds it place among The Doors' weaker moments.
Jim Morrison’s poem, Celebration of the Lizard, is to take up one whole side of The Doors’ third album. But producer Paul Rothchild chooses not to include it. Jim’s behaviour is becoming unpredictable, and Rothchild is under pressure to bring another record out while the band is hot. He fills out the side with unused songs from their first album. Despite the raw intensity of songs like Five to One and Unknown Soldier, critics dismiss the record. The fans judge the album differently. Both the album and Morrison’s Hello, I Love You hit #1.
The critical dismissal of
Waiting for the Sun at the time it came out is partly justified. It is, in fact, one of The Doors’ weaker albums, only surpassing its follow-up
The Soft Parade. Nevertheless, some genuine Doors classics are still to be found within.
Not to Touch the Earth, the only part of the originally to be included
Celebration of the Lizard that eventually made it onto the record, counts among the band’s best, containing a playful, yet oddly disturbing instrumentation.
The Unknown Soldier, a protest against the Vietnam War, and more specifically the way it was shown through the media at the time, and
Five to One are also highlights, both displaying some of Morrison’s most primal vocals.
Unfortunately,
Waiting for the Sun has a little too many flaws. The hit
Hello, I Love You remains a staple of The Doors’ material to this day, and is certainly catchy, but also shallow.
My Wild Love, where Morrison is just muttering for three minutes, is boring and pointless, but the biggest problem is how far some of the song stray from the characteristic sound of the band. Particularly
Love Street,
Summer’s Almost Gone and
Wintertime Love sound, oddly enough, closer to 50’s lounge music than the band's signature sound, and if it weren’t so that Morrison’s vocals are quite characteristic, it would be impossible to tell whether they were Doors songs. A suspicious matter, and though it is up to debate whether their record company had influence on this, it certainly mars the overall quality of the record.
Waiting for the Sun was the beginning of The Doors’ eventual demise, which would not only be felt on subsequent records, which could never match their first two, but also in Jim Morrison’s increasingly self-destructive behaviour, leading to an inability to properly function as a live band. That all said, this is still a record that any more-than-casual Doors fan will want to own. Despite the fact that the bad slightly outweighs the good, it still has enough flashes of achievement to make it worth the while for the collector.
Doors Classics:
Not to Touch the Earth
The Unknown Soldier
Five to One
