Recycling

Jim Morrison is dead and buried and thriving in Paris. That is a fact, not the name of a new bit for the dinner theater circuit. Morrison — the rock singer who had his loins between his ears and pretentions of being a filmmaker (Pauline Kael admired him) and a poet (a sort of Gordon Lightfoot in leather pants) — has overcome the fickleness of the public spotlight; he has managed to become more popular more than 10 years after he died in a French bathtub than he was when he drunkenly prowled through LA Sales of albums by The Doors, the group Morrison headed, are high, better than ever. So it makes sense — and dollars — for Elektra to bring out Alive, She Cried, an album containing live (once-upon-a­time, that is) performances by The Doors. One of the numbers featured is the standard “Gloria,” the song that probably taught a lair number of teenagers the rudiments of spelling(“G-1-o-r­i-a — gonna shout it all night … “) but not diction and which is undoubtedly one of the most performed tunes by bands of the 1960’s that practiced in suburban two-car garages and played in junior high school gyms. The album is Dead, we think.

 

Coincident with the release of Alive, She Cried — though accidentally so, we suspect — Ray Manzarek, former keyboard player of The Doors, appeared with Carmina Burana (A&M Records), his arrangement of Carl Orffs cantata, which was first performed in 1937. Orff, as is well known by people who keep tabs on such things, based the cantiones profane, “Songs of Beuron, Profane Songs,” on 13th-century manuscripts. In a sense, the mere idea of a man who played a Farfisa organ in a rock band performing Orffs work is outrageous, but that’s only if the musicians who perform what is generally considered to be de­ generated noise are thought to have leaped fully undressed from the top of a Fender amp. Many of the so-called “rock’ musicians (an ill-defined epithet) had to practice, practice, practice the same things that those musicians of a similar age who now play in symphony orchestras had to endure. Manzarek is not the first keyboard player of his type who has selected a piece of music that is not based on feedback and heavily amplified bass drums; Keith Emerson, for example, has been doing it for years: witness his versions of works by Mussorgsky, Copland, and Bernstein. Actually, Manzarek’s choice is more fitting than it is odd. The lyrics (which are in Latin, a language which few hear sung in these post-Vatican II days) are full of desire, decadence, decay, and drinking; Jim Morrison wouldn’t have felt odd shouting them. (Fortunately, a more conventional choral approach is employed.)

Manzarek’s Carmina Burana was produced by Philip Glass and Kurt Munkacsi. Munkacsi has done a great deal of production work with Glass; he also worked with the other rock corpse that refuses to die, John Lennon. Glass is appropriate to the project While Carmina Burana includes a significant number of ostinatos, it is less repetitive than Glass’ work tends to be (e.g., “Etoile Polaire” on his North Star album [Virgin Records]). Not only has he mastered loops, he seems to have developed a sense of how the past can be melded into the present in a workable way. As such, the synthesizers and other instruments of this generation used in Carmina Burana become unobtrusive, for the most part. While not an unqualified success, Manzarek’s recording is a serious work. It will undoubtedly end up in the cutout racks at the youth-oriented music stores that will stock it. The Doors albums, in the same stores, of course, will become more dear. (SM)    cc