Peace Hotel

The Doors fifth studio album, Morrison Hotel, will be reissued in October for its 50th anniversary. The album was recorded in late 1969/early 1970 and released in February 1970. It’s newly remastered for this release by Bruce Botnick. The goodies are all on the bonus CD with more than an hour of unreleased recordings taken from the sessions for Morrison Hotel. Botnick says: “There are many takes, different arrangements, false starts, and insightful studio conversations between the band – who were in the studio – and producer Paul Rothchild – who was in the control room. It’s like being a fly on the wall.” The outtakes include rough versions of Morrison Hotel tracks ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘Blue Sunday’ as well as The Doors rarity ‘I Will Never Be Untrue.’ The bonus CD also features the band jamming on cover versions of the Motown classic ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ and B.B. King’s’ ‘Rock Me’.

The Doors returned to crunching, straightforward hard rock on Morrison Hotel, an album that, despite yielding no major hit singles, returned them to critical favor with hip listeners. An increasingly bluesy flavor began to color the songwriting and arrangements, especially on the party'n'booze anthem "Roadhouse Blues."…

As the years pass since John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their 1969, weeklong "Bed-In for Peace" at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, the event’s reputation has taken on an increasingly clownish aspect in memoirs and biographies written about life with the Beatles. But John & Yoko: Give Peace a Song, a documentary drawing from hundreds of hours of film footage shot in the celebrity couple’s small bedroom, proves the time was well spent in exhaustive, public exchanges between Lennon and some of the most influential people of the day. Talking with and sometimes debating the likes of Timothy Leary, Tommy Smothers (fresh from the controversial cancellation of his outspoken comedy show on CBS), Dick Gregory, and assorted revolutionaries, Lennon stayed on-message about the practicality of non-violent solutions to the era’s most serious problems. It might be easy today for some of their then-contemporaries to look back and dismiss Lennon and Ono as self-aggrandizing and politically naïve publicity hounds. But the depth, rigor, and consistency of Lennon’s thinking about peace, both as a personal choice and collective tool for social change, was quite striking as evidenced in this movie. Everything leads to the momentous, chaotic, and fun recording of "Give Peace a Chance," which–as the film demonstrates—instantly became an anti-war anthem for millions. Special features include a terrific, complete television interview with Lennon on the CBC.

–Tom Keogh