Appacolypse Now +the Doors

Ideally, one would avoid compilations of the Doors' work, except perhaps for the hit singles and moments when one wanted very light listening. This was a band that took itself very seriously, almost to the point of self-parody at times, and their music ought to be discovered in the setting and context in which it was intended, but assuming that one needs a Doors anthology, this 19-track collection is the place to start. It started life during the quadrophonic era as a single LP of the same title, with programming intended to combine the concepts behind two earlier compilations, 13 and Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine, under one cover. In 1985, the two-LP version, the fourth compilation of the group's work, and the most comprehensive, was released, providing a good overview to the most obvious different sides of the group's output, and in 1991 this was remastered for CD with improved sound and an extra track…

The Doors were a few months away from stardom in March 1967 when they played five sparsely attended shows at a small club in San Francisco called The Matrix. These uninhibited performances would have been fleeting if not for Peter Abram, who co-owned the pizza parlor-turned-nightclub with Jefferson Airplane founder Marty Balin. An avid recordist, Abram taped concerts at The Matrix regularly and his recordings of The Doors, made between March 7-11, 1967, spawned one of the band’s most storied bootlegs. At long last, all known Matrix recordings, sourced entirely from Abram’s original master recordings, will be released on September 8.