Music Review: These Doors put on a fine show

http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/20030624doors0624fnp5.asp

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

By Scott Mervis, Post-Gazette Weekend Editor

Short of coming out drunk and dropping his pants, Ian Astbury couldn't have been more like Jim Morrison.

It's as if the singer for The Cult has been practicing his whole life to stand between Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger and belt out these songs. In The Doors 21st Century, Astbury is starring as the younger, sexier Morrison, and he brings more danger and swagger to the role than anyone could have expected.

Astbury not only looks like Morrison, with just a slight deepening of his voice he sounds like him, too. And that was clear Sunday at the Post-Gazette Pavilion from the first notes of a monstrous "Roadhouse Blues." The sight (not to mention sound) of Krieger hovering over Manzarek's keyboard to trade blues licks was no less stunning.

If Astbury sounded like old Jim on "Roadhouse" and "Break on Through," he seemed to be channeling him on "When the Music's Over," which was the deepest the band dipped into the Doors' dark psyche. You had to be there to believe how Astbury navigated the long, poetic section and then nailed the dramatic "unnn-tilll the end."

Oddly, Astbury sounded more like Morrison than Manzarek sounded like Manzarek. Although the co-founder's playing was great, his keyboard didn't always reproduce that warm tone it has on the recorded versions. Worse yet, it tended to bury Krieger. On "L.A. Woman," Manzarek played over that great guitar riff, and on the encore of "Light My Fire," right when the show could have torched the place, right when the Doors hit their absolute peak, when the organ slides into that guitar solo ... no guitar solo. Just Astbury going back into the verse. Did they forget? Did they run out of time? What happened to the #$@$&# guitar solo?!

OK, considering everything that came before it, it was almost forgivable. Still, most sane people are going to wonder what's the point of The Doors 21st Century, and that had to nag even the most excited crowd members as they were raising their beers. But as Manzarek suggested, this music is too good not to be played. And Sunday night showed there's really no one better to play it.