Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now
This commentary was written in 2008, shortly after playing an amazingly magical Gold Label pressing in a shootout.
My favorite of the first three Doors album, Waiting for the Sun is imbued with more mystery and lyricism than previous efforts. The album shows them maturing as a band, smoking large amounts of pot and preparing for the wild ride of their next opus, the ambitious, controversial The Soft Parade.
Actually, as I listen to this album, it reminds me more and more of that one. Now that it sounds as good as The Soft Parade, I find I’ve gained a new respect for Waiting.
More to Come
I started playing these albums in high school on my 8-track tape player. My older stepbrother had the records and I probably played those too.
When I seriously got into audio sometime in the ’70s, I tried every kind of record I could get my hands on — Brits, Germans, Japanese, originals, reissues — but no matter what I did, I couldn’t find good sounding pressings of their albums. Everything I played sounded terrible and I just assumed the band, like so many other ’60s artists, had been poorly recorded.
Then in the early 80s, the MoFi pressing of the first album came out. It sounded amazing to me at the time.
Ten or so years later the DCC pressing on Heavy Vinyl came along and showed me how wrong I — and it — were.
Now we’ve come full circle — back to the right originals. (The operative word there is “right”; some early stampers are terrible. We know, we’ve played them.)
With better cleaning technologies and much better playback equipment, the tables have turned.
