Experience 'The Doors Experience'

It’s not often that you go to a hardrock gig with your parents, but when you do, you can only hope that it’s going to be a cool gig!

My parents, especially my dad, like hardrock music from the sixties and seventies. My mother is more of a disco-fan, but my dad likes his classics: The Doors, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd, Zombies; that sort of music.

My dad likes to go to a concert every once in awhile and he was surfing the net a few months back when he found an upcoming gig by The Doors Experience. A Doors coverband, could be tacky, but I was curious. Also, I thought it’d be cool to go to a gig with my parents.

Yesterday was the day of the gig and I had to hurry after work to meet my parents, because it was quite a drive to the venue of the concert (for Dutch standards). We had agreed that I’d take the train to Geldermalsen, my parents would wait for me there. Because we had luck and no traffic jams we arrived much too early at Uden, where the concert would take place. I dined in the car with sandwiches made by my mom and dessert came in form of a nice cold beer. De Pul (that’s what the venue was called) was impressive. Uden, a seemingly random dull place in a southern province of the country, can be very proud to have such a nice venue for concerts. It looked quite new, was nicely decorated, with lots of cozy places to sit and drink your beer and have a nice chat. The bar was sort of seperate (but not closed off) from the room where the concerts are given. We had plenty of time so we drank two beers and admired the building. For me it was also a nice opportunity to calm down after a busy day of work.

The concert was supposed to start at 20:15, but we had to wait another 30 minutes before the band decided to get off their lazy asses and started playing. The crowd was diverse: old and young, yups and farmers; so I was curious as to how the atmosphere would develop into the evening. It all depended on the band: how good would they be?

The Austrian ‘Doors’ entered the stage and they weren’t look-a-likes except for the singer (obviously). He had the same hair-do as Jim Morrison and even his attire was similar: the black leather pants and the cuffed white shirt.

They kicked off the concert with ‘Gloria’ and I knew all was well. The voice of the singer sounded very close to Jim Morrinson’s, and the rest of the band was also very convincing. They had to ‘warm up’ for a little while, especially the ‘organ’ player (who actually played a keyboard of course). That guy was pretty weird in general. He took the concept of multitasking to a whole new level. Whilst playing his keyboard with one hand he did various other things, like setting some incense sticks on fire, putting a tambourin on his head, doing his hair, unbottling a bottle of water, drinking water and bottling it again, lean back, dance….This did mean he made some mistakes once in awhile, but those were kept to a suprising minimum. The guys on guitar and drums were very good. They managed to imitate The Doors so well that I could not really hear any differences with the original songs, and believe me, I’ve been listening to some songs of The Doors endlessly. In the end, if I’d have to give some critisism it would be the singer who could improve the experience. He has the most difficult task of course, but sometimes I wish he sung not so loud as he did. Some songs, like The Crystal Ship for example, must be sung in a softer manner. This Austrian Jim Morrison however, only knew how to sing very loud. This ruined my favorite song of The Doors a little.

In other occasions he was very impressive. They played The End to near perfection and their version of Riders On the Storm was also very neat. They played two sets, totalling for a good 2,5 hours of playtime! After the break the crowd was definately more responsive, I guess because they had a couple of more beers (= they were drunk fucks). Almost 30 songs were played in total, including the ones I wanted to hear: Backdoor Man, Waiting For the Sun, Touch Me and Light My Fire.

All in all, it was a very good gig. I wouldn’t know if they are as good as the real band was, since I wasn’t even close to being born at the time. Heck, my parents were just in their teens and hadn’t even met each other! I liked hearing the songs of the Doors played live, and this band came near to perfection in imitating the sound.

I could only wonder if I’d want to do the same as them. They’re good musicians, how is it that they are satisfied with copying a sound and songs all the time??? I would want to write my own music.

Speaking of which, I’m going to get a new iMac real soon and I plan to fiddle around with Garageband a lot more. I’ve got some good ideas for new songs, in the vein of Current93. I only have to buy a good mic and connect my piano to my computer and I’ll get somewhere.

This has grown to quite a long post so I’ll leave it for now.
Next post is going to be about my new clarinet which I just got!