The Doors - Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 9-20-1968

Although I've been doing this blog for over two years, there are some major artists I like that I haven't touched or have only barely touched yet (with the Beatles being a prime example). One important band I've avoided so far is the Doors. I plan on posting stray tracks albums and some other things from them at a different time, but for now here's a great concert they did.

Some musical artists have officially released almost no archival live material, and others have released tons. The Doors fall into the latter camp. There are about 20 officially released live albums, most of them full concerts. There's even a official compilation called "Boot Yer Butt" that scrapes the bottom of the barrel with selections from rough sounding audience bootlegs. So you'd think that all the best live material has been released already. But you'd be wrong. Strangely, some of the very best sounding live recordings haven't been touched.

This is the prime example. (Though there's at least one other I know of, a PBS show from 1969 that I'll probably post at a different time.) The Doors played two concerts in Stockholm on the same day in 1968. Complete versions of both shows have been bootlegged, in pristine soundboard quality. I believe this is because the shows were recorded for a Swedish radio show.  (I've posted some other concerts from this same show, by the likes of Traffic, the Move, Wilson Pickett, and the Hollies.) In terms of sound quality, these Stockholm shows are better than many of the officially released live Doors albums. The band's performance is very good as well. I have no idea why those other shows have been released and these have not. 

The early and late shows featured many of the same songs. I generally don't like posting the same songs on one album. So I've combined the two shows. I'm including the entire late show, plus the few songs from the early show that are different. There are four songs from the early show: "Love Street," "A Little Game," "The Hill Dwellers," and "The Unknown Soldier." (The second and third songs are sections of the larger opus "The Celebration of the Lizard.") Both shows started with "Five to One." So I put the "Five to One" from the late show first, then the four songs from the early show, then the rest of the late show. The result sounds like one continuous concert that last an hour and 23 minutes.

I made a few other edits. The concert starts with an MC introducing the Doors. After he yelled the Doors' name, there was total silence on the recording. I'm sure it wasn't that way in real life! The problem is that the early show recording is such a pristine soundboard that there's almost no audience noise whatsoever. So I grabbed some cheering from the late show and added that in as a cheer in response to the MC introduction. (I would have preferred to use the MC introduction from the late show with the crowd noise, but that didn't get bootlegged, it seems.) I also added in cheering at the ends of the early show songs when appropriate, again using cheering from late show songs. It would have sounded really weird to have those songs end with total silence.

There's almost no between song banter. I suspect that lead singer Jim Morrison did talk some, because he usually did, but that also didn't get bootlegged for whatever reason. (Perhaps the radio show only wanted to play the songs on the radio and not the banter.) One exception is right before the last song, "The End." In that case, there was too much talking, in my opinion. Morrison asked for some adjustments to the lighting, and there was a minute of back and forth about lighting issues. I found that boring, so I cut it way down. 

After my editing, what you get is the ideal version of this music, with every song played but no duplicates. Of course, if you want the full versions of both the early and late shows, one can easily find that on the Internet. In my opinion, this may well be the best Doors concert recording from 1968, if you take into account both performance and sound quality. (The vast majority of the official live albums are from 1969 and 1970.) That makes it even more baffling to me that this concert hasn't been officially released. Thank our lucky stars for bootlegs. :)

01 talk (Doors)
02 Five to One (Doors)
03 Love Street (Doors)
04 A Little Game (Doors)
05 The Hill Dwellers (Doors)
06 The Unknown Soldier (Doors)
07 Mack the Knife - Alabama Song [Whisky Bar] (Doors)
08 Back Door Man (Doors)
09 You're Lost Little Girl (Doors)
10 Love Me Two Times (Doors)
11 When the Music's Over (Doors)
12 Wild Child (Doors)
13 Money [That's What I Want] (Doors)
14 Wake Up (Doors)
15 Light My Fire (Doors)
16 talk (Doors)
17 The End (Doors)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15111338/TDoor_1968_KonserthustStockholmSweden__9-20-1968_atse.zip.html

I couldn't find any photos from this exact concert for the album cover. However, I did find one from the band playing in Copenhagen, Denmark, just two days earlier, so I used that one. The photo has an unusual perspective of looking down at the band from above. So when it came to adding some text, I tried to make it look as if the text was physically there in the room by matching the same perspective.