Moving Music 2: "Wishful Sinful"

  

John Densmore, Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison of The Doors

    This is the second installment of my Moving Music series. You can read the first one I did on “Blue Sky” by the Allman Brothers Band. I explain in the first paragraph of that post how I want to write about these different songs that have affected me in very profound ways. The song I will feature in this post is “Wishful Sinful” by The Doors.

The Soft Parade-released in July 1969 which includes the song "Wishful Sinful"

    Unlike “Blue Sky”, which is a song that has been in my life practically since it came out in 1972, “Wishful Sinful”, although released in 1968 on The Doors album The Soft Parade, only came to my attention a few years ago. In actuality I probably had heard the song many years before, I just didn't remember it. In 1981 my friend Larry was on a Doors kick and he had most of their albums. I myself owned a copy of The Doors self-tilted debut album. This was around the same time that the Jim Morrison biography, No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman was published along with an appearance by Morrison on the cover of Rolling Stone that had the byline: “Jim Morrison: He’s hot, he’s sexy and he’s dead." Furthermore, The Doors song “The End” had been featured prominently in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now a few years before. The Doors and Morrison were very popular in 1981 even though Morrison had been dead for about 10 years by this time. I guess that depended on who you asked though. In the fall of 1981, in my freshman English class at South Shore High School in Brooklyn, there was a student who insisted that Morrison was still alive. I don’t remember how we got on the subject of The Doors lead singer but our teacher Mr Sunshine had mentioned he was dead. That’s when this other student who was sitting next to me insisted that he was not dead but very much alive. Mr. Sunshine said he was pretty sure he remembered when he died. She came right back again with a contradiction to his assertion. I could see that Mr Sunshine looked confused, like he was thinking to himself, “Is he still alive? Am I confusing him with some other 60’s rock star?” But I’m sure he eventually remembered Jim on the over of that Rolling Stone and said to himself this girl is wack and moved on. Why this 14 year old student, who was only 3 when Morrison actually did die, was convinced he was still alive is beyond me. I know people have been saying Morrison is still alive starting from right after he did die, all the way up to today. Perhaps he is still alive and on the 50th anniversary of his presumed death, which will be this July 3rd, he’ll come back into the spotlight. Maybe he’ll do a duet with Jimmy Fallon of "Reading Rainbow". But back to Larry’s room.

Published in 1980

   

The September 17th, 1981 issue

    We listened to all his Doors albums including the Infamous An American Prayer album released in 1978 that had the spoken word track "Lament". "Lament for my cock" was the opening line on that one. Holding The Soft Parade album in my hands and looking on the back of the album, I saw the list of personal and noticed that none of the Doors played the bass. That instrument had only been played by studio musicians. Larry confirmed the fact that The Doors did not have a dedicated bass player and I remember thinking that was weird.  I'm sure Larry played the whole album but I guess it just didn't stick with me. In fact, if I had picked up this album just a few years ago, the only songs I would have recognized on it would have been “Touch Me”, one of their biggest hits and a standard for the classic rock radio stations and “The Soft Parade” which was a medley of songs that I was only partially familiar with. So how did this totally obscure Doors song become worthy of making it to my Moving Music series?
    

This single peaked at #44 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1969

    I’m a photographer and I do a lot of photo editing so sometimes to keep me company I’ll open up iTunes and listen to an album or when I really want to live on the edge, I’ll hit shuffle. One particular evening I was bored with my music and went on YouTube to find something else to listen to. It was there that I came across The Soft Parade and the song “Wishful Sinful” written by Robby Krieger. The Soft Parade appears to be the critics least favorite Doors album and many fans seemed to agree. They didn’t like the inclusion of horns and strings on the album while others said Morrison phoned in his singing. I didn't know about these critiques until I read about them last year. Regardless, this album, along with L. A. Woman, are my two favorite Doors albums. In fact I’ve played them back to back numerous times over the past couple years and eventually, during these photo editing sessions, “Wishful Sinful” became one of my magic songs.
     I am usually concentrating more on photo editing when I have music on in the background. Eventually though, the music will slowly seep into my consciousness and that's how “Wishful Sinful”  became more than just a song to me. When I started listening to this song without any distractions, it took me to another place; a better place. “Wishful Sinful” is one of the songs the critics didn’t like because of the horns and strings and what they perceived as Morrison’s lackluster singing. I don’t agree but I can understand their sentiment. After all they’re critiquing this in 1969. If I was totally into rock and roll and The Doors at that time and then all of a sudden I heard these strings, I might not have liked it either. Who knows, maybe that’s why I didn’t connect with it back in ‘81. But my love of the song is not because of the strings or anything else that makes up the song, though of course there are certainly parts which do endure me to the song where upon I’ll keep out a keen ear(for example right after the bridge section at 1:41-1:50 is one my favorite parts). Like “Blue Sky”, it’s ultimately about the sum of its parts, how it makes me feel and where the song takes me. Robby has stated that he "tried to get in the subconscious mind" with the lyrics. Sometimes when I’m listening to it, I’ll see a couple walking on the beach with white sands and dunes with the occasional glare of the sun obstructing my vision. Other times I'll feel a sensation of moving forward. I'll feel a sense of hope, love and positivity. There are feelings of peace and contentment swirling inside me and I want to listen to the song again and again and go into that dreamworld. It's nice to have apiece of art make you feel this way.