The Doors Alive, She Cried (1983) [west Germany, 1st Target CD Press, Elektra 9 60269 2]

For the first 17 years of their history, the only official live Doors album was Absolutely Live, which had its virtues – especially as it captured elements of their harder, more ambitious repertoire – but also left more casual fans rather cold, owing to the absence of any of their biggest hits…

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 knockout 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…

Rumours is the kind of album that transcends its origins and reputation, entering the realm of legend – it's an album that simply exists outside of criticism and outside of its time, even if it thoroughly captures its era. Prior to this LP, Fleetwood Mac were moderately successful, but here they turned into a full-fledged phenomenon, with Rumours becoming the biggest-selling pop album to date. While its chart success was historic, much of the legend surrounding the record is born from the group's internal turmoil. Unlike most bands, Fleetwood Mac in the mid-'70s were professionally and romantically intertwined, with no less than two couples in the band, but as their professional career took off, the personal side unraveled.

Nobody really expected the Berlin Wall to come down in 1989, and so suddenly. Roger Waters especially, because he had once made a promise never to perform The Wall again after the 1980 tour until the bricks fell in Berlin. But they did, and Waters had no intention to renege on his promise. The Wall became a star-studded megaconcert to benefit the Memorial Fund for Disaster Relief, with larger bricks, bigger inflatable puppets, and a larger audience than any of the original Pink Floyd shows. There was always a contradiction in performing such a personal work in a stadium setting, but here it becomes especially acute when opening up the vocal tasks to a variety of artists.

In Concert is the successor CD set to the individual releases of Absolutely Live (which remains in print as a single CD), Alive, She Cried, and Live at the Hollywood Bowl – as none of them presented more than a single angle or two of the group's sound and each confined itself to only a portion of the group's repertoire, the three-in-one release makes perfect sense and is a decent bargain…

The Doors were an American rock band formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and John Densmore on drums. The band got its name, at Morrison's suggestion from the title of Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, which itself was a reference to a quote made by William Blake, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." They were unique and among the most controversial and influential rock acts of the 1960s, mostly because of Morrison's lyrics and charismatic but unpredictable stage persona…