7. The Doors - Roadhouse Blues

Baw ba-now ba-now ba-na-na-na, baw ba-now, ba now, ba na-na-na….

That Robbie Krieger riff belted out of the 80s ghetto blaster in our 6th form common room and thus commenced my realisation, ignited at that moment and swift to come to fruition, that most of the best rock music ever recorded came out between 1967 and 1971.  In that time, The Doors released six albums of incomparable brilliance.  These days, rock bands struggle to push out two mediocre albums in that amount of time.  This is not just the stereotypical middle-aged moan.  Things WERE so much better in the old days and even more so between '67 and '71.

Although I'd already discovered Dylan, that was a bit of an aberration.  That didn't spur me on to explore other music from the 60s and 70s.  It was an anomaly.  But Roadhouse Blues proved to be the gateway riff to a religious-like conversion to the cult of classic rock that was so zealous in its fundamentalism that I cast aside Madness, to some extent U2 (but NOT Kate Bush because I still loved her) and anything else not produced in that magical 5 year period.  Music could only be judged in terms of how far away it was from 1967-71.

My mate Chris Watt may well have been struck by this riff in the same way and at the same time as me, because from that moment onwards, we became partners in a voyage of discovery, like characters in a Jules Verne novel, only equals, whereby one of us would discover a band or artist from this time and make a compilation tape for the other.

From The Doors we discovered the following and I'm sure you'll struggle to deny me my beatification of this era in musical history:

• Led Zeppelin (their first 4 albums came out in these years)
• Jimi Hendrix (all of his work)
• Cream (the same)
• Pink Floyd (undeniably, their best stuff was later than 71 but they did knock out some intriguing psychedelic stuff before nailing it with Meddle in 71)
• Simon and Garfunkel (their 2 best albums out of 5)
• (Peter Green's) Fleetwood Mac (all albums)
• The Rolling Stones (3 of their best 4 albums, the 4th being in '72)
• David Bowie (pre-Ziggy Stardust, but Hunky Dory and The Man Who Sold the World fit the period)
• The Beatles (Sgt Pepper's, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Let it Be and Abbey Road)
• Jethro Tull (first 4 albums, 3 of which are their 3 best) though at this stage I only had their Greatest Hits

Most of this music got an airing (sometimes as a means of introducing each other to it) in the kitchen of The Beefeater restaurant on a Saturday night, where I worked from the ages of 16-18 with Chris and my old mate from primary school days (and mentioned in previous posts) John.  Again, that old 80s piece of tech, the ghetto blaster, accompanied me on my way to work, along with a pocket full of tapes, and we'd set it up over the sink and just by the hatch to the bar, through which Tony the Animal surreptitiously passed us pints of lager to accompany the deserts we also helped ourselves to for free, from the ice-cream and hot fudge machines in the kitchen.

Tony the Animal loved this sort of music as well and I went with him to see Floyd at Wembley in 1987.  His nickname, by the way, was an attribution we devised based on his tendency to be a little too frank in discussing what he did with his girlfriend Vicky, one of the waitresses.

The waitresses in general, who came in and out of the kitchen through swing doors, holding dirty plates smelling of French mustard and steak fat, found our taste in music intolerable.  The managers were less scathing, but insisted we turned it down when it could be heard in the bar through our lager hatch.

I can't say I have ever enjoyed a job so much.  As shit as it is to wash up plates for 5-6 hours on a Saturday night, the perks mentioned above and the company of John and Chris to share music with (and jokes that had us laughing constantly and on one occasion had Chris lying on the floor crippled with mirth) made this the best job I ever had.  And a big part of that was also that Roadhouse Blues riff that still reminds me that all the bands and all the music that it led me to get into remain very much my favourites just as much today.