06/23/03

Michael Sangiacomo
Plain Dealer Reporter
 

Jim Morrison is dead, so get over it.

Two of the three living members of the Doors - keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger - have decided to put the band back together and go on the road. Drummer John Densmore didn't want to play.

Saturday night, the Doors of the 21st Century played a 2½-hour set at the Scene Pavilion in Cleveland's Flats with former Cult lead singer Ian Astbury doing his best to make the audience believe it was 1969 again.

The concert would rise or fall on whether Astbury could pull it off. Overall, he did all right.

He does not have Morrison's deep, menacing voice, which frightened parents in the 1960s, and he doesn't have the moves. But at least he's his own man. If all anyone wanted was a Morrison clone, they could catch any of the Doors cover bands that litter the landscape from coast to coast.

If the newest incarnation of the Doors is to be more than a one-shot, do-it-for-the-money tour, the band will have to strike out on its own and slip out of the oldies mode.

That may happen eventually, but the Saturday show was mostly nostalgia. The band played only one new song, "Cop's Talk," with lyrics by Jim Carroll. Unfortunately, the "acoustics" at Scene Pavilion were so horrendous that the lyrics were unintelligible.

The same goes for the lyrics of the rest of the songs, which were largely lost in a sludge mix of distortion and echo. There was actually an ambient roar throughout the night.

Fortunately, with hard-rocking songs like "Break On Through," "When The Music's Over," "Wild Child" and "Backdoor Man," the lyrics didn't matter, since everyone knew them anyway.

The audience skewed older than most, but there were a lot of people there who were not yet born when Morrison died in 1971. It's nice to see the kids enjoying the same music as their parents.

The pulsing rock songs were the focus of much of the show. And that was also its weakness. Concentrating on the roadhouse rockers meant not performing the songs that gave the Doors some definition, like "My Wild Love," "Hello I Love You," "The Soft Parade" and "Touch Me."

High points of the evening came with "Five To One," the Doors' most blatant anti-establishment song, and "L.A. Woman," which featured a video with some shots of the old Lizard King himself. During "L.A. Woman," Astbury ran around the stage with Morrison-like abandon, and he seemed comfortable.

Of course, the band played the long version of its signature song, "Light My Fire," which lasted at least 45 minutes. Well, it wasn't quite that long. It just felt like it.

How was it for you? E-mail your concert comments to music@plaind.com.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

msangiacomo@plaind.com, 216-999-4890