Tuesday, December 24, 2013

The Doors - Celebration of the Lizard


The Doors – Celebration of the Lizard

(soniclovenoize reconstruction)


Side A:
1.  Five To One
2.  Love Street
3.  We Could Be So Good Together
4.  Yes, The River Knows
5.  My Wild Love
6.  The Unknown Soldier

Side B:
7.  Spanish Caravan
8.  Wintertime Love
9.  Celebration of the Lizard


Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  This was a much-requested reconstruction that was surprisingly easy to do, so I thought I’d revisit and bastardize my favorite Doors album as present to my blog followers!  This is a reconstruction of the unreleased Doors album Celebration of the Lizard, which was restructured into 1968’s Waiting For The Sun.  The bulk of my reconstruction uses a superior needledrop vinyl rip of the album for the best possible fidelity, and the title track is reconstructed from three different sources to make a complete and dynamic performance piece as it would have sounded like in 1968, superior to the officially released “work in progress” track. 

Upon entering the recording studio in 1968 to make their third album, The Doors hit a creative wall for several reasons.  First and foremost, they had simply run out of material, having blown through their backlog of quality songs with their first two albums in the previous year.  Paraphrasing Robbie Krieger, the ‘Third Album Syndrome’ had affected The Doors, who were thrown into the position of needing a new album to promote with no songs immediately on hand, forced to compose new material in the studio.  A solution was to base their third album around a lengthy poetry piece of Jim Morrison’s, entitled “Celebration of the Lizard”.  Originally claimed to occupy an entire side of the LP, “Celebration of the Lizard” would have included seven sections, some of which were experiments in noise to accompany Morrison’s abstract poetics.  Unfortunately, the piece was too abstract for producer Paul Rothchild, who felt the band absolutely needed a hit single, and the band themselves allegedly could not properly record the song to their liking in the studio.

Rothchild presumably convinced the band to abandon “Celebration of the Lizard” midway through the recording sessions for the album, which signaled a change in Jim Morrison himself to a state of drunken ambivalence.  After his epic poetic masterpiece was killed in favor of a hit single, he simply stopped caring about the album and turned instead to alcohol and his own circle of followers who vied Morrison’s time away from the actual members of The Doors.  The only thing salvaged from the formerly-title track was its fifth section, “Not To Touch The Earth”, which became its own track on the album, which was retitled to Waiting For The Sun.   The legend has it that the void left by “Celebration of the Lizard” was filled with two songs chosen by the 10-year-old son of Elektra Records head Jac Holzman.  Unused filler from The Doors’ original 1965 demo, “Hello, I Love You” and “Summer’s Almost Gone” were rearranged specifically to be a hit single and it’s b-side.  It worked; the album Celebration of the Lizard transformed into Waiting For The Sun, the band’s highest charting album.  But it was not the album that Jim Morrison had originally wanted it to be.  Can it now?

The first step in recreating Celebration of the Lizard is to know what would or would not have been on the album.  Obviously, “Celebration of the Lizard” would have been the title track, allegedly taking up the entire second side.  Although a studio run-through of the track reached 17 minutes in length and media outlets at the time claiming some recordings incredulously amounted to 36 minutes, almost all of the performed live versions of the entire track ran between 13-15 minutes.  I propose that “Celebration of the Lizard” would have not exceeded 14 minutes in length, and would have been teamed with another song or two on side B, which is how it is presented here.  Also, we know that “The Unknown Soldier” and it’s b-side “We Could Be So Good Together” would have been on Celebration of the Lizard, since it was a single release from early in the sessions; while some speculate the b-side might not have been included on the album, that is not a precedent set by the previous two albums, where not a song was wasted!  Studio documentation also shows that “Spanish Caravan” and “Wintertime Love” were all recorded before “Celebration of the Lizard” was scrapped, and were probably good contenders for the album.  News articles at the time also place a cover of “Gloria” as a contender for the album, although we must exclude this because we simply don’t have a 1968 studio recording of “Gloria” to use on our reconstruction (not to mention the band simply stopped performing the song altogether the previous year).  There is also speculation that Morrison’s spoken poetry might have acted as segues between the actual musical tracks on the album; we must also set this notion aside, since we simply do not have any spoken word recordings from the CotL/WftS Sessions to use in this reconstruction (although this is certainly plausible for the following album, 1969's The Soft Parade; maybe the poetry rumors were assigned to the wrong album?).   Aside from these six songs, that’s all we know for sure.  In contrast, we are certain of what would not be on the album: “Hello, I Love You” and “Summer’s Almost Gone”, which were the title track’s replacement.

Because of a) the limitations of source material and b) the unsurety of how the album would have sounded like aside from six songs, we are left with a great leeway to reconstruct our Celebration of the Lizard.  Here, I am essentially beginning with all of the Waiting For The Sun album, dropping the two 1965 demo-originated tracks and adding a rebuilt title track with “Not To Touch The Earth” reinstated.  That leaves us with a nine-song 37-minute album, enough to compete with the rest of The Doors’ works.  I am also going to exclude the actual song “Waiting For The Sun”, as no 1968 recording is available that lacks the 1970 Morrison Hotel-era overdubs.  It is of note that I am using the pbthal vinyl rip of the album, which is the best version of Waiting For The Sun I’ve heard by far. 

Side A of my Celebration of the Lizard reconstruction begins with the ruckus of “Five To One”, taking the place of The Door’s usual ruckus-opener tracks.  Morrison’s introductory lyrics to the track make the song the only real contender for album opener.  It is gently crossfaded into “Love Street”.  While we can’t be certain it would have actually appeared on Celebration of the Lizard, it is needed to release the tension from the previous track.  Following is “We Could Be So Good Together” and then the brilliantly-composed ballad “Yes, The River Knows”.  Again, while we are unsure if the later song had actually been a contender for the album, its inclusion here gives Celebration of the Lizard a pretty large dynamic and stylistic breath, a quality I appreciated the most about Waiting For The Sun.  The stylistic breath widens again with the tribal “My Wild Love” (which thematically certainly fits Celebration of the Lizard) and the side closes much like its officially-released counterpart, with “The Unknown Soldier”.  Side B similarly opens with the amazingly mysterious “Spanish Caravan”, followed by the baroque-rocker “Wintertime Love”.  The album concludes with the title track. 

Clearly, The Doors were not able to capture “Celebration of the Lizard” in the studio as they had intended it; this is demonstrated by the only known studio version, an extremely lazy and lackluster rehearsal, appropriately subtitled “An experiment/work in progress”.  This seems curious, as the entire piece was performed a number of times live to sheer perfection.  Why not use direct soundboard recordings of actual live performances if they could only perform it correctly live?  Contemporaries such as The Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention had mixed studio with live recordings on albums proper and would continue to do so throughout the 1970s.  This is the approach we will take on my reconstruction of the title song: we must find other, stronger performances of the seven individual sections of “Celebration of the Lizard”, while staying within the timeframe of the CotL/WftS sessions, and assemble them into the best track possible.  Although Rothchild has claimed the track had no cohesion, it seemed the obvious choice to push the envelope in that very direction and record each segment separately, piecing the song together.  Admittedly, that was probably not The Doors’ ethos, even though Rothchild allegedly forced them to perform hundreds of takes of “The Unknown Soldier” in search for the perfect take for a hit single.  Here, we have the luxury to undertake what Rothchild could not—or would not—do. 

My own edit of “Celebration of the Lizard” begins with ‘Lions in the Street’, taken from the studio rehearsal version.  It is edited into a live version of ‘Wake Up!’ taken from The Doors 1968 Hollywood Bowl performance.  Since The Doors refined “Celebration of the Lizard” over time, we wish to exclude any anachronistic later-era live recordings of the song.  Thus a performance from 1968—the same week as the release of Waiting For The Sun itself—is close enough to the album’s sessions to let us know how the refined pieces would have sounded like in 1968, as opposed to 1970.  This crossfades into more Hollywood Bowl recordings of ‘A Little Game’ and ‘Hill Dwellers’; the slight audience noise is excusable since the overall fidelity of the recordings are a great match to the studio recordings.   Following is the album version of ‘Not To Touch The Earth’, segueing into the studio rehearsal versions of ‘Names of The Kingdom’ and ‘The Palace of Exile’.  The result is an album hopefully more in-tune with Jim Morrison’s intentions before Rothchild’s desire for a hit single destroyed it.  And at the centerpiece, a strong, nearly-fourteen minute title track that is a sum of the more passionate performances of its seven pieces, constructed into a cohesive whole.  So are you ready?  The ceremony is about to begin…  
 


Sources used:
The Doors – Waiting For The Sun (2007 40th Anniversary CD remaster)
The Doors – Waiting For The Sun (1998 Steve Hoffman vinyl remaster, pbthal rip)
The Doors – Live at The Bowl ’68 (2012 remix/remaster, HD wav download)



flac --> wav --> editing in SONAR, Audacity & Goldwave --> flac encoding via TLH lv8
*md5, artwork and tracknotes included

42 comments:

  1. The Celebration Begins!
    Right On brother...what a wonderful Xmas gift,
    thank you so much!!
    I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Waiting For The Sun...
    and now we can experience it like ole Jimmer wanted us to...
    Love you Lizard King!
    ...please believe me, the river told me... ...SO fuckin GOOD
    and Wintertime Love is one of my favorite songs,
    takes me back to golden memories
    of friends and days long gone...
    when I got the Doors Live back in the day,
    I would jam out The Celebration Of The Lizard damn nearly daily,
    man I couldn't get enough
    Really looking forward to celebrating the holidays with the Lizard King in SLN style!
    and sourced from pbthal!! YES!!!
    A very Merry Christmas to you and yours my friend,
    you are one-one-Wonderful!
    Happy Holidays on a Jubilee Morning :)


    ps. your lil wizard avatar is super bitchin! Much 8-bit love!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, so sweet! Thank you so much! WftS is my favorite Doors album anyway, so this attempt to tap into its original intent is quite appreciated.

    ReplyDelete
  3. cliche' ridden response

    but in this case it's sooo true

    Dude, You Rock

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey, love what you're doing. Seems like you have a real vocation here. Just wondering, I downloaded the mp3 version and the timings seem messed up - long silences after most of the tracks. Is it just me getting this? Don't think it's some Jim Morrison pretentious arty thing...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How long are the silences you are talking about?

      Delete
    2. Hey, thanks for getting back. Sorry I've been so slow in answering - busy week at work.

      I've just checked and my CD burned from the mp3 version is 39:57 long. There are silences of approx 20-23 seconds after every track. The silence at the end of title track might be deliberate but the others seem wrong. Perhaps I just need to d/load the flac files?

      Delete
    3. Hmmm, curious. I dl'd the link to test, and Explorer tells me the lengths of the mp3s are as you say, with an extra 20 seconds. But when played in foobar, the mp3s play back at the correct length. I can't explain it!

      I would recommend playing all the songs in a media player before burning the mp3s, so your software "knows" the correct length of the mp3. If that doesn't work, then let me know and I'll re-encode the mp3s from wav and re-upload. You could also try the flacs.

      What's interesting is that the link has had 120 downloads so far, and you are the first to observe this problem. Anyone else having this problem?

      Delete
    4. I checked the tunes on iTunes on my computer and they play just fine, no long silences

      Delete
  5. Have you ever heard of Pink Floyd's The Man And The Journey? (I believe that's what it's called.) Not sure if it was ever intended to be an album but it is a very interesting live set. It would be pretty far out to hear a studio version.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Here 'tis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_And_The_Journey

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yep, I actually already created a studio The Man and The Journey a few months ago. I'll upload it here... sometime!

      Delete
  7. Awesome! I created a playlist last night but obviously it's not down to the science on any level, just used the associated album tracks and added cuts where necessary (according to wiki's descriptions of the songs.) Also there was a tentative title of The Massed Gadgets of Auximenes - which is far superior, so I used that name.

    PS - I had never thought about doing playlists like this until I saw your site... now I've entered a new world of compulsiveness.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Also I realized the copy I have of Zaireeka (stereo) is actually your work, but it's not uploaded here. So the question arises, how many more unsung mixes are you stashing out? ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ha! Yeah that's me! There are a handful of other projects I've done that I wouldn't upload here because they aren't an "album that never was", such as: The Flaming Lips stereo "Superior 5-in-1" Zaireeka; the "Concise" version of Oasis's Be Here Now (which meticulously edited the vinyl version down from 70 minutes to 60 minutes); a few compilations of some Smashing Pumpkins material (all-live Adore, all-live Machina 1 and 2, a demaster of the Pisces Iscariot bonus disc, etc), a recut of Wilco's Kicking Television into an all-live A Ghost Is Born; a cleaned-up version of Olivia Tremor Control's Cubist Castle Demos; a two-CD version of a "remastered" Dylan & The Dead that isn't terrible.

      Might be more, I can't really remember.

      Delete
  9. I don't know about anyone else but I would love to see a series of albums covering what Pink Floyd would be like if Roger Waters never left.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. on that idea...if Water's never left, I made this with that in mind. It's lossy though, I am working on a flac version..
      http://www.demonoid.ph/files/details/3036830/001007071659/

      if the link doesn't work just google "pink floyd - what could have been"

      Delete
  10. Not to discredit any of the other bands, but I would love to hear the Olivia Tremor Control's mix and definitely the Dylan & The Dead mix. I'm not nearly as much into newer bands (i.e. 80's and onward) but I do love a handful of certain artists from the eras, including Olivia Tremor Control. Mainly bands that sound like they're from the 60's. haha Speaking of all this, do you have another site you upload your not-albums-that-never-were mixes to?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Very knowledgeable information, thanks for sharing.

    windowmaintenanceservices

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hey! I'm discovering your blog and your works.. and I think it won't leave my browser for the following weeks to read / hear everything. You're just a effin' magician, please keep up that excellent work!

    ReplyDelete
  13. whew, just found your site and want to thank you for all the work, research put into these projects

    ReplyDelete
  14. Than you for this informative post. Doors are prime requirement for any house, so get the best doors from Alles4bau in Germany for your house.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Good show dude, very nice. There was some talk over on the Doors Freedom Man Forum about putting in a request for a post-1971 Doors album with Morrison had he survived, with tracks from Other Voices, Full Circle, American Prayer, Golden Scarab, Jim Morrison's poetry, etc. Not sure if this request ever found its way to you or not. You think that is something you could pull off?

    Great blog by the way, working my way through your back catalogue as we speak. Keep up the good work bro! Cheers!

    ReplyDelete
  16. I seriously disagree that "Hello, I Love You" and "Summer's Almost Gone" were filler, but I love the version of "Celebration" you came up with. Here's what my version would have been like:

    Side A:
    Hello, I Love You
    Love Street
    Wintertime Love
    We Could Be So Good Together
    Yes, The River Knows
    Spanish Caravan
    My Wild Love
    The Unknown Soldier

    Side B:
    Summer's Almost Gone
    Celebration Of The Lizard (your version)
    Five To One

    My version of WFTS/COTL starts off happy then goes darker and crazier, culminating with The Doors marching downs the hills into town with "Five To One".

    ReplyDelete
  17. Heey;ThanxaLOT! :-D
    I was (as every other evening) standing by my stowe, coocking my dinner, when suddenly Jim's Live-monolouge on Astrology ("An American Prayer") popped up from the annuals of my sub-c; and all in the middle of coocking what i think's called Cod (White fish) in American; i couldn't remember on what album cover "The Celebration Of The Lizard" is printed in the gatefold. I'm almost positive that it's "Waiting For The Sun", and it is. But when googling it (I don't got the Vinyl for the time being.
    And The 40th Aniversary-CD don't come with an authentic Cover re-print.
    Those 40th aniv. CDs with the sloped corners are actually bit of a flop, as i see & hear'em. They don't sound....right, dig?) i stumbled into your Blog. And "All Good To Those Who Search"...or Wait, or whatever one do to find out.
    And i jost DIG that Zippyshare! SO quick, man. So smooth! :-D

    ReplyDelete
  18. Thank you for helping people get the information they need. Great stuff as usual. Keep up the great work!!!
    www.pinellaswindowsanddoors.com

    ReplyDelete
  19. While I'm not willing to agree that the abandonment of Celebration of the Lizard drove Morrison to drink, I do agree that it drove a wedge between him and the band and Paul Rothchild. Jim was proud of this piece as well he should have been and in another place in time I believe that it surely would have been held in the high regard that it deserves.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Do you think you will ever upload any of those maybe on to a secondary blog. I'd really like to hear all of your personal edits. You really have a gift for getting all these albums so right.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really enjoy be here now but hearing your edit would be great.

      Delete
  21. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  22. By all accounts, Waiting For The Sun evolved from—or rather, ‘trickled down from’—two abandoned projects: American Nights and The Celebration Of The Lizard. One project appears to have focussed on jazzier, softer and more poppish material,while the other revolved around harder-edged and more experimental stuff. There is some indication that The Celebration Of The Lizard was originally intended to take not just an entire side, but an entire album. We’re talking Thick As A Brick or A Passion Play four or five years before Tull made such records a reality. I’m rather dubious of stories about Jac Holzman’s prepubescent son picking old demos to re-record; and cover tunes (e.g, ‘Gloria’, ‘Mack the Knife’) appear to have been confined to concert performances by the end of ’67. ‘Waiting for the Sun’ would definitely have been included on the harder project – being left off at the last moment to make room for the ‘Not to Touch the Earth’ segment of ‘Celebration’ according to most stories, the album cover and title having been already settled on. All of this considered, this is what a Waiting For The Sun 2-LP deluxe edition should look and sound like in 2018:

    Record One: American Nights

    A1. We Could Be So Good Together
    A2. Love Street
    A3. Indian Summer (1966 outtake)
    A4. Summer’s Almost Gone
    A5. Wintertime Love

    B1. Spanish Caravan
    B2. My Wild Love
    B3.Yes, The River Knows
    B4. Adagio by Albinoni

    Record Two: The Celebration of The Lizard

    A1. Hello I Love You
    A2. Waiting for the Sun
    A3. The Unknown Soldier
    A4. Five to One

    B1. The Celebration of The Lizard

    Short poems (a la ‘Horse Latitudes’ on Strange Days) may or may not have been intended to be recited without musical accompaniment between some or all of the numbers on at least one of these projects—stories vary. No poems are known to have been recorded during these sessions, although short pieces like ‘All Hail The American Night’, ‘The Dark Los Angeles Evening’ and fragments of ‘Far Arden’ definitely fit with the story. The jazzier project (Record One) was an obvious precursor to The Soft Parade album, and there is some indication that ‘Blue Sunday’ (Morrison Hotel) may have also been considered or intended for inclusion.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Dig what you did to put together Celebration of the Lizard. Fantastic!

    I started out trying to build a different album around CotL keep the "Waiting for the Sun" album separate. So I pulled Summertime and Woman is a Devil from the Matrix tapes to build an A side that's more jazzier/bluesy and showcasing Ray Manzarek, and then your edit of CotL and the Adagio from the WftS sessions for B side. That seemed a bit too short, so I tossed in Go Insane to pad out side A and the song Waiting for the Sun to change the pace and add some depth to side B.


    Side A

    Summertime
    Go Insane
    Woman is a Devil/Rock Me Baby

    Side B

    Waiting for the Sun
    Celebration of the Lizard
    Adagio

    Brings it to about 41 minutes, somewhat eclectic, but I think it flows.

    I made my own cover too with a different photo from the WftS shoot.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Hello,
    Could you please make this one available for download on mega?
    Hope to hear from you soon.
    Thanks very much,

    ReplyDelete
  25. The more I listen to CotL the better it gets. The transition to the live tracks works too. After the "is everybody in" it just expands and all I can think of is some sort of pagan tent revival.

    ReplyDelete
  26. empty3
    https://mega.nz/file/2x4GAQAY#WK-UsVnoL8wK78aUYZkUddt_fkgrKKTpVr5TeLK30v8

    listless flak
    https://mega.nz/file/y0Ig1LbQ#2zmEDvdZWDKRSmBBsLrwsAtZVAqGBpK3pMJ9_LTWsOE

    ReplyDelete
  27. Alternate cover here:

    https://imgur.com/wIWY6kd

    (Go on, have a look.)

    ReplyDelete
  28. 7pMDFIaA#Mc1nnCaClxSKpiB4JvRYzLgr1avdVwx5jqLhG3c1CUU

    q0ExzSYZ#2R95AufMk2UmiQqBTDr24R_1hZGoI7SQrCvkca4m1Ks

    ReplyDelete
  29. This one is a stayer - any chance of a reup - love the Doors but discovered this blg way too late

    ReplyDelete
  30. Hey; is the link for this still available?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. add "https://mega.nz/file/" to the links that soniclovenoize posted on Novmber 13, 2021

      Delete