The Range Dwellers

Typically, rock bio programs for radio are little more than aural versions of Teen Beat, rarely delving beyond the surface appeal of a given artist. Los Angeles-based DJ Jim Ladd's aptly titled Inner View was the first nationally syndicated music and interview program to raise the intelligence bar several notches. Ladd's No One Here Gets Out Alive – originally broadcast on North American radio stations during the late summer of 1979 – is an audio biography of the Doors as told by those who lived it…

Live at the Hollywood Bowl was one of a brace of official live Doors recordings that began circulating around in the 1980s, and had the distinction of being captured on film as well…

While this double disc (later combined with Alive, She Cried and Live at the Hollywood Bowl for CD release under the title In Concert) is valuable in that it contains material the Doors didn't release on their studio albums, it's also tilted toward some of their more boorish aspects. Recorded at concerts in 1969 and 1970, this was an era in which Jim Morrison was becoming increasingly dissolute and increasingly disinterested in the whole rock machine. During much of this set, he seems not to be taking himself or the songs too seriously, tossing flippant asides to the audience that seem to treat the whole exercise as a charade.