DOORS 1st ALBUM INSANELY RARE MONO TEST PRESSING PAUL ROTHCHILDS UNCENSORED COPY

$

2,050

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·       THE DOORS - THE SELF-TITLED FIRST ALBUM (“THE DOORS”)- ORIGINAL 1967 ELEKTRA MONO LP EKL-4007

·       ORIGINAL U.S. PRESSING

*** INSANELY RARE ORIGINAL 1966 AMERICAN MONO TEST PRESSING APPROVED BY PAUL ROTHCHILD!!! (THE ALBUM WAS RECORDED IN THE FALL OF 1966, BUT RELEASED IN JANUARY 1967)***

·       MONSTROUSLY RARE ORIGINAL MONO PRESSING, MANY TIMES RARER THAN STEREO

·       UNIQUE MONO MIX WITH RARE UNCENSORED LYRICS ON "THE END"

·       PLEASE NOTE: there appears to be a controversy as to what is censored or uncensored on this album. Namely, there are two segments on this album which are partially or completely uncensored (both, of course, on "The End"). The first one is the one where Jim Morrison announces his libidinal intentions to his mother. This section was NEVER completely "uncensored". Even the loudest mono pressing has this section partially obscured by Morrison's primal scream. Still, on the mono pressing, after a few listens, the Morrison's F-bomb can be clearly discerned (on the stereo copy, you can't hear this no matter how hard you try). The second section is unequivocally, unambiguously and totally uncensored and consists of series of loud "f**k" yelps during the climax of the song, at the closing minute or minute and a half before the song's ending. Neither segment was available or audible on the stereo version of the album until the 2007 40th Anniversary CD remasters

·       THICK, HEAVY VINYL PRESSING

·       MONO version of this album has NEVER been available on legitimate Compact Disc or in any other digital format.

·       PLAIN, WHITE, GENERIC "SMALL" TEST PRESSING LABEL , WITH ONLY THE GROUP'S NAME , SIDE DESIGNATION (A/B), PRESSING PLANT NAME (COLUMBIA'S PRESSING PLANT IN PITMAN, NEW JERSEY) AND PAUL ROTHCHILD'S APPROVAL STAMP. NO OTHER DETAILS ON THE LABELS.

·       MATRIX STAMP IN TRAIL-OFF VINYL (DEAD WAX) OF THE RECORD ARE CONSISTENT WITH ELEKTRA'S VERY FIRST MONO PRESSING OF THE ALBUM (THERE ARE NO LATER MONO TEST PRESSINGS) :EKL-4007A (COL) ON SIDE 1 AND EKL-4007B (COL) ON SIDE 2.

·       A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TAPE SOURCE FOR THIS PRESSING: FROM WHAT WE UNDERSTAND, THE DOORS' FIRST ALBUM IS THE ONLY DOORS ALBUM FOR WHICH ORIGINAL MASTER TAPES HAVE BEEN LOST OR STOLEN AND ARE NO LONGER IN EXISTENCE OR AVAILABLE. THIS IS AS CLOSE AS YOU CAN POSSIBLY GET TO BEING WITH THE DOORS IN STUDIO AS THEY WERE RECORDING THIS IMMORTAL SESSION

·       COPYRIGHT NOTICE: THIS TITLE IS BEING OFFERED FOR SALE AS IT IS DEEMED TO BE (OR HAVE BEEN) PUBLICLY AND COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE. IF YOU ARE THE OWNER OF THE COPYRIGHT AND HAVE QUESTIONS, COMMENTS OR DOUBTS, PLEASE CONTACT US DIRECTLY THROUGH EBAY.

(?PLEASE SEE THE IMAGE OF THE COVER, LABEL OR BOTH, SHOWN BELOW)

(Note: this is a REAL image of the ACTUAL item you are bidding on. This is NOT a "recycled" image from our previous auction. What you see is what you'll get. GUARANTEED!)

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We doubt that in four decades of collecting records we have held in our hands a more musically and historically important artifact.: A truly UNFATHOMABLY rare and possibly even one-of-a-kind TEST PRESSING of the Doors's first album, approval-stamped by none other than the legendary ?Paul A. Rothchild, the legendary producer of all Doors albums (except for L.A. Woman) and one of the most influential and important figures in all of Rock'n'Roll;  a recording which is literally and figuratively the GROUND ZERO of the West Coast Psychedelic movement, the very core of the Summer of Love and definitely its FINEST MOMENT (the album was released only a few months prior to the legendary Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967, and its influence on other musicians and the world at large was truly MONUMENTAL in every conceivable sense). And while the Doors were never a typical West Coast psychedelic band, such as guitar-crunchers like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company, freaky acid-droppers such as Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane or sunshine popmasters like Mamas and Papas, they were not only at the core of the Psychedelic movement, they were its proverbial heart and soul. Although Jim Morrison's poetic vision did not share the optimistic view of the human nature or the love-peace-and-harmony aesthetics that informed the hippie movement (he was more into breaking on thru to the Nietzschean dark side and transcending the positive reality through the Dionysian rituals) it can be said that,  if anything survived the Summer of Love fully and perfectly intact and did not become brutally dated and stale over the next 45 years, it is PRECISELY the Doors, and SPECIFICALLY THIS, their first, finest, groundbreaking moment: the moment they broke on through to THIS side. For better or worse, the Jim Morrison's manichean, good-and-evil (mostly the latter) vision of human psyche has become a dominant paradigm of the Western Civilization's cosmology and truly its integral and constituent part.

Nothing epitomizes better this "who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men" philosophy than 'End of the Night' (titled, undoubtedly, after Francois Mauriac's 1935 Nobel-winning novel, in which characters act as if completely devoid of free will and predestined to act the way they did), and one of Jim Morrison's finest songs (yes, our personal favorite, too). In it, Morrison laments the facts that some of us were simply born evil for no rhyme or reason fathomable to human mind. Actually, he does not lament: he simply STATES so: he observes without getting emotionally involved.

"Realms of bliss, realms of light

Some are born to sweet delight

Some are born to sweet delight

Some are born to the endless night

End of the night, end of the night"

(Jim Morrison: End of the Night)

A word on the mixes used for this album. From what we have been able to determine (we played the entire disc back-to-back three times) this test pressing mirrors the officially released MONO version of the album (available between early 1967 and mid-1968), which INCLUDES "offensive" and uncensored lyrics on the closing track, "The End" (please see above for more details) . We could not detect much difference in mixes between this test pressing (apparently, judging by the Rothchild's approval stamp, this was his final say before the album went into production, so there is no reason to believe that it contains anything much different from what you hear on the commercial mono release) . However, we believe there are at least two minor differences, both on 'Light my fire':  the three loud bass drum breaks that follow Robbie Krieger's lengthy guitar solo are significantly (and frankly, unnaturally) louder than on the released version of the album . We believe these three drum breaks (which we would be willing to bet are by Hal Blaine, not John Densmore, but have no way of proving) were "shorn off" or "flattened" (equalized) during the final mix of the album. There is also another difference: on the same Robbie Krieger's solo (on 'Light my Fire'), somewhere near the end of it, the master tape was clearly poorly and clumsily spliced, which resulted in a brief gap between the two segments of the tape (apparently taken from two different takes of the solo which were then merged), causing an unseemly split-second gap in Krieger's solo (although this gap is faintly audible even on the released version, it is much more prominent on this test pressing; this was apparently corrected during the final mix). At first we thought that the record skipped, but - no - it did not. It is definitely a tape-splicing error.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS TEST PRESSING APPARENTLY NEVER HAD A CUSTOM COVER; THE ALBUM WILL BE SHIPPED IN A PLAIN, GENERIC [WHITE] CARDBOARD COVER. TEST PRESSINGS ARE RARELY – IF EVER – FOUND IN CUSTOM (STOCK) COVERS.

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A tremendous debut album, and indeed one of the best first-time outings in rock history, introducing the band's fusion of rock, blues, classical, jazz, and poetry with a knock-out punch. The lean, spidery guitar and organ riffs interweave with a hypnotic menace, providing a seductive backdrop for Jim Morrison's captivating vocals and probing prose. "Light My Fire" was the cut that topped the charts and established the group as stars, but most of the rest of the album is just as impressive, including some of their best songs: the propulsive "Break on Through" (their first single), the beguiling Oriental mystery of "The Crystal Ship," the mysterious "End of the Night," "Take It as It Comes" (one of several tunes besides "Light My Fire" that also had hit potential), and the stomping rock of "Soul Kitchen" and "Twentieth Century Fox." The 11-minute Oedipal drama "The End" was the group at its most daring and, some would contend, overambitious. It was nonetheless a haunting cap to an album whose nonstop melodicism and dynamic tension would never be equaled by the group again, let alone bettered.

(EXCERPT FROM AN ONLINE REVIEW BY RICHIE UNTERBERGER, ALL MUSIC GUIDE /ALLMUSIC.COM/)

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What else can be said of this 1960s masterpiece that hasn’t been said over the past 45 years since it was recorded? Not much, we believe. By now, this album should be known to every man, woman and child on earth. This version of the album, with its direct, raw, punchy mono mix, amazing clarity of sound and robust rhythm section will rip your speakers to shreds, and leave you begging for more. You will not only hear all of those "Summer of Love" songs like you’ve never heard them before; you will also hear (on "The End") the things, like Jim Morrison’s Oedipal ranting and raving - that you DO NOT NECESSARY WANT TO HEAR!!! This is the version of the album to bury all subsequent versions - gold discs, stereos, or MOBILE FIDELITY (MFSL) versions. Out of print since 1968 or so, there is absolutely no chance on earth that any of the major audiophile labels will treat us to a mono CD reissue of this album any time soon.

For its extraordinary contribution to the contemporary music, superb production, craftsmanship, fine musicianship, revolutionary significance and influence it exerted on numerous generations of musicians, songwriters and general public, or for some other inherent quality, this album was voted one of top-200 albums of all time in one of the largest poll of critics, music reviewers, show business professionals and producers ever organized: the poll, which was conducted by Paul Gambaccini, the legendary BBC Radio A&R man, surveyed more than 50 top music professionals (including Roy Carr, Jonathan Cott, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe, Chet Flippo, Ben Fong-Torres, Charlie Gillett, Greil Marcus, Murray the K., Lenny Kaye, Bruce Morrow (a/k/a "Cousin Brucie"), Tim Rice , Lisa Robinson, Robert Shelton, Ed Ward, Joel Whitburn, Pete Wingfield, etc.). For more details, see: "Critics Choice: Top-200 albums" , Omnibus Press, Library of Congress Catalog No.7855565 (or ? click here for the complete album listing)

For additional historical or discography information on this album, including track listing ?click here

TO SEE IF WE HAVE OTHER LISTED ITEMS BY THIS GROUP OR ARTIST ? click here

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·                               CONDITION:

·                               RECORD

(IMPORTANT NOTE: unless otherwise noted, ALL records are graded visually, and NOT play-graded!; we grade records under the strong, diffuse room light or discrete sunlight)

(a)          WE GRADE THE VINYL AS STRONG VERY GOOD+(+) . CAUTION: The vinyl is NOT MINT or NEAR MINT, but is nevertheless in a very nice and clean condition. There are some surface marks and abrasions, mostly light and superficial, although some may be longer than 1.1/4 inches (1 inch = 2.5 centimeters)

(b)          The record is pressed on a beautiful, thick, inflexible vinyl, which was usually used for the first or very early pressings. Usually, the sound on such thick vinyl pressings is full-bodied, vivid, and even dramatic. Do not expect to obtain such a majestic analog sound from a digital recording!

(c)           Mono pressing of this title is much rarer, and by far more preferable to its stereo counterpart. We think that the mix is more natural, humane, "organic" and that the mixes are somewhat different than on the stereo version. We estimate that stereo copies of this album outnumber mono pressings by a ratio of at least 30:1.

(d)          Of course, this is a full-bodied ANALOG recording, and not an inferior, digital recording!!!

(e)             Important disclosure: VISUALLY, THE RECORD is STRONG VERY GOOD+ (VG+). HOWEVER, WE CAUTION THAT a bad groove causes the record to skip (briefly) on 'Back Door Man'. The buyer can probably correct this by using a different stylus, adjusting the proper tone arm calibration, tracking force or pressure.

·       COVER : This reference pressing comes without any custom jacket, and will be shipped in a plain, generic, white cardboard cover.

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