The Doors are good. They’re a good band, I’m sorry. Break On Through, Light My Fire, Touch Me, L.A. Woman, People Are Strange, Alabama Song, The End, Riders on the Storm, Love Me Two Times, Hello I Love You, Roadhouse Blues—guess what, that’s a good band! That’s more bangers in four years than Eric Clapton has across all of his projects in a decades-long career combined (for the record: Layla, Bell Bottom Blues, White Room, Tales of Brave Ulysses, Crossroads, Sunshine of Your Love, I Feel Free, Badge, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Cocaine, and most of those were written by people not Eric Clapton), and I’m not even digging particularly deep. It’s not a Creedence Clearwater Revival’s contemporaneous California run of absolutely miraculous hitmaking, but it’s up there. The insistence that the Doors are a gigantic joke, a dorm-room poster posing as a band, a faux-poetic wet fart—it’s childish, tbh. It’s jejune. It’s “except rap and country,” it’s “Ringo was a bad drummer,” it’s a YouTube comment complaining that today’s music just can’t compare. It’s so, so freeing to leave it behind and fucking bellow YOU KNOW THAT IT WOULD BE UNTRUE! in that final verse as you sing along in the car or just shred BREAK ON THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE! at karaoke or whatever. Godfathers of goth along with the Velvet Underground as well. If the Doors were good enough for David Bowie, who loved them, they’re good enough for you too. We have Kiss and Bon Jovi and the Eagles (excepting the song Hotel California and the solo stuff) to kick around. Leave Mr. Mojo Risin’ alone!
I say all that to say this: The Jeff Healey Band really kill it on “Roadhouse Blues.” It’s the most natural fit possible for the movie (duh), for Healey’s more high-energy Stevie Ray Vaughn thing, and for a solo so hot you can all but smell smoke rising from the guitar he holds on his lap. It also loses the scat-singing portion of the song, which is probably one of the reasons you hate the Doors if you hate the Doors. They do it well enough that you could actually conceive of a full nightclub dancing to “Roadhouse Blues” by the Jeff Healey Band, and I mean dancing their asses off, or their gaucho hats, whichever comes first, which they do. LET IT ROLL, BABY, ROLL! LET IT ROLL….ALL NIGHT LONG!
Tags: jeff healey, jim morrison, road house, roadhouse blues, the doors, the double deuce, the jeff healey band