BLACK LABEL SOCIETY

ZAKK WYLDE - The Sabbath Disciple, Acoustic Cowboy, Les Paul Warrior, Proprietor & Brewmaster

Black Label Society is hand crafted in single batches with uncompromising attention to detail. Following the master recipe, they use only classic ingredients: Hand selected beats, full-bodied guitar riffs, savory bass, and quenching melodies. No other brew matches this rich, robust, complex sound

SDMF

Strength, Determination, Merciless, Forever

BLACK LABEL SOCIETY
Bylaws and Code of Honor:
* God, Family, Beer *
* Suicide is not an Option *
* Complaint Dept. Closed *
* Live Life Stronger than Death *
* Thou Shalt not Spilleth Thy Beer *
* Refuse to Lose / Born to Booze *
* Respect is to be Shown to All Society Dwellers Worldwide *
* Colors Must be Worn at All Black Label Society Shows and Events *
* FEAR NO BEER *
* - Bleed Black Label Society - *

DOOM CREW INC.

Complaint Department

Closed

There’s The Door

MOTHERFUCKER

Still Born Suicide Messiah In This River Fire It Up Concrete Jungle A.n.d.r.o.t.a.z Live In Paris

People Are Strange Unknown Soldier Crystal Ship Love Me Two Times Severed Garden Under Waterfall Moonlight Drive Strange Days The End

The Lords: Notes on Vision (1969)

Yoga powers.
To make oneself invisible or small.
To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.
To change the course of nature.
To place oneself anywhere in space or time.
To summon the dead.
To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images, of events on other worlds,
in one's deepest inner mind, or in the minds of others.

(Windows work two ways, mirrors one way.)
You never walk through mirrors or swim through windows.

The world becomes an apparently infinite,
yet possibly finite, card game.
Image combinations,
permutations,
comprise the world game.

Cinema has evolved in two paths. One is spectacle. Like the phantasmagoria, its goal is the creation of a total substitute sensory world. The other is peep show, which claims for its realm both the erotic and the untampered observance of real life, and imitates the keyhole or voyeur's window without need of color, noise, grandeur.

The subject says "I see first lots of things which dance — then everything becomes gradually connected".

Few would defend a small view of Alchemy as "Mother of Chemistry", and confuse its true goal with those external metal arts. Alchemy is an erotic science, involved in buried aspects of reality, aimed at purifying and transforming all being and matter. Not to suggest that material operations are ever abandoned. The adept holds to both the mystical and physical work.

They can picture love affairs of chemicals and stars, a romance of stones, or the fertility of fire. Stange, fertile correspondences the alchemists sensed in unlikely orders of being. Between men and planets, plants and gestures, words and weather.

Cinema returns us to anima, religion of matter, which gives each thing its special divinity and sees gods in all things and beings. Cinema, heir of alchemy, last of an erotic science.

The Lords. Events take place beyond our knowledge or control. Our lives are lived for us. We can only try to enslave others. But gradually, special perceptions are being developed. The idea of the "Lords" is beginning to form in some minds. We should enlist them into bands of perceivers to tour the labyrinth during their mysterious nocturnal appearances. The Lords have secret entrances and they know disguises. But they give themselves away in minor ways. Too much glint of light in the eye. A wrong gesture. Too long and curious a glance.

                             Jim Morrison

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 The New Creatures (1969)

I can't believe this is happening
I can't believe all these people
are sniffing each other
& backing away
teeth grinning
hair raised, growling, here in
the slaughtered wind

Do you dare
deny my
potency
my kindness
or forgiveness?

                                    Morrison

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“Memories of moonlight mystery …Romantic melody and the everlasting ghostly soulscape” –AcousticWizard

 

Penetrate popular culture to see that the legacy of the band is pure anomaly inside the ever predictable façade that is Rock In Roll. A timeless enigma that exists beyond the limit’s of comprehension .The world has yet to relive the collaboration of Jim Morrison, Ray Manzerak, Robby Krieger, & John Densmore. The poetic paradox is blisteringly severe, infectiously pure, enchantingly visceral, erotically true.

Intoxicatingly controversial, unpredictable ...The Edge Of Reason ...Into Realization

"Ladies And Gentlemen ..from Los Angelos California ...The Doors"

 

A chance meeting between acquaintances and UCLA film school students Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek on Venice beach in July 1965 led to the founding of The Doors, one of the premier acts of the late 1960s, in 1965 in Los Angeles, California. Morrison told Manzarek he had been writing songs and, at Manzarek's encouragement, sang "Moonlight Drive." Impressed by the quality of Morrison's lyric, Manzarek immediately suggested they form a band.

Vox-Organ-Player Ray Manzarek was already in the band called Rick And The Ravens with his brother Rick Manzarek while Robby Krieger and John Densmore were playing with The Psychedelic Rangers and knew Manzarek from shared meditation instruction. In August Densmore joined the group and, along with members of the Ravens and an unidentified female bass player, recorded a six-song demo on September 2. This was widely bootlegged and appeared in full on the 1997 Doors box set.

That month the group recruited talented guitarist Robby Krieger and the final lineup—Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore—was complete. The band took their name from the title of a book by Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, which was in turn borrowed from a line of poetry by the 18th century artist and poet William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite."

The Doors were unusual among rock groups because they did not use a bass guitar in concert. Instead, Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand on the newly invented Fender Rhodes bass keyboard, an offshoot of the well-known Fender Rhodes electric piano, and keyboards with his right hand. However, the group used bass players such as Jerry Scheff, Doug Lubahn, Harvey Brooks, Kerry Magness, Lonnie Mack, and Ray Neapolitan on their albums.

Many of The Doors' originals were composed communally with Morrison usually contributing the lyrics and some melody and the others hammering out the beat and flow of the song. While Morrison and Manzarek were walking on the beach in California, they passed a black woman, and Morrison wrote the lyrics to "Hello, I Love You" in a single night, referring to her as the "dusky jewel." Some criticized the song for its resemblance to The Kinks' 1965 hit "All Day and All of the Night," and The Kinks' lead singer, Ray Davies, sued The Doors.

By 1966 the group was playing The London Fog club and soon graduated to the prestigious Whisky a Go Go. On August 10 they were spotted by Elektra Records president Jac Holzman on the insistence of Love singer Arthur Lee, whose group was on Elektra. After Holzman and producer Paul A. Rothchild saw two sets of the band playing at Whisky A Go Go, the first uneven but the second mesmerizing, they signed the band to the Elektra Records label on August 18—the start of a long and successful partnership with Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick.

"You Know The Day Destroys The Night... Night Divides The Day"

 

The Doors' self-titled debut LP, released in January 1967, caused a major sensation in music circles. It featured most of the major songs from their set, including the 11-minute musical drama, "The End." The band—at peak form and bristling with energy and ambition—recorded the album in only a few days in late August and early September 1966, almost entirely live in the studio with most songs captured in a single take. Morrison and Manzarek also directed an innovative promotional film for their first single, "Break on Through," a significant advance in the development of the music video genre.

Their second single, "Light My Fire," established the group along with The Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead as a top new American band of 1967. It was released in April but did not hit the top (with the long middle solo cut out) until July.

In May 1967, the group made their "National" debut by recording a dazzling version of "The End" for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) at their Yorkville Studios in Toronto (Yorkville was Canada's version of Haight-Ashbury). It remained unreleased until the release of The Doors Soundstage Performances DVD in the early 2000s.

The Doors quickly earned a reputation as a challenging, rebellious, and entertaining live act. With his saturnine good looks, magnetic stage presence, and skin-tight leather trousers, Morrison quickly became a major pop sex symbol, although he soon became frustrated with the strictures of stardom. Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) network censors demanded that Morrison change the lyrics to Light My Fire, by altering the line, "Girl, we couldn't get much higher" (because of the possible reference to drugs) before the band performed the song live on September 17, 1967, on the Ed Sullivan Show. However, Morrison sang the original line instead, and on live television with no delay, CBS was powerless to stop it. A furious Ed Sullivan refused to shake the band members' hands, and they were never invited back. According to one account, Morrison was told he'd never appear on the program again; he replied, "Baby, we've already been on the Ed Sullivan Show"—at the time, an appearance was a hallmark of success. Morrison later insisted that nervousness caused him to forget to change the line. They also performed a new single, "People Are Strange," which they repeated for DJ Murray The K's TV show on September 22.

Morrison further cemented his status as a rebel on December 10 when he was arrested in New Haven, Connecticut, for badmouthing the police to the audience. Morrison said he had been maced by an overzealous police officer after he was caught backstage with a girl.

An American Prayer

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind.

Me and my mother and father, and a grandmother and a grandfather. were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just — I don't know what happened — but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.
So the car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. I musta' been about four — like a child is like a flower, his head is just floating in the breeze, man. The reaction I get now thinking about it, looking back — is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead Indians... maybe one or two of 'em... were just running around freaking out, and just leaped into my soul. And they're still there.

Do you know the warm progress under the stars?
Do you know we exist?
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet
& are you alive?

Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests

O great creator of being
grant us one more hour to
perform our art
& perfect our lives

The moths & atheists are doubly divine
& dying
We live, we die
& death not ends it

I touched her thigh
& death smiled

We have assembled inside this ancient
& insane theatre
To propagate our lust for life
& flee the swarming wisdom
of the streets

resident mockery
give us an hour for magic

I'm sick of dour faces
Staring at me from the T.V.
Tower.
I want roses in
my garden bower; dig?

Death makes angels of us all
& gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws

I will not go
Prefer a
feast of Friends
To the Giant family

The program for this evening
is not new. You have seen
This entertainment thru & thru.
You've seen your birth, your
life & death; you might recall
all of the rest — (did you
have a good world when you
died?) — enough to base
a movie on?

They're making a joke of our universe

Let's swim to the moon, uh huh
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evenin'
that the City sleeps to hide

"Five To One Baby ...One In Five ..No One Here Gets Out ALive"

 

1967

The second Doors LP, Strange Days, was more subdued and less spontaneous than their debut, but the album was notable for its evocative lyrics and atmosphere. Closing track "When The Music's Over" was, like "The End," lengthy and dramatic and helped establish Morrison's reputation as the wild shaman of rock.

1968

Tense recording sessions for the group's third album took place in April as a result of Morrison's increasing dependence on alcohol. Approaching the height of their popularity The Doors played a series of outdoor shows that led to frenzied scenes between fans and police, particularly at Chicago Coliseum on May 10.

The band began to branch out from their initial form in their third LP, Waiting for the Sun, (1968), because they had exhausted their original repertoire and began writing new material. It became their first #1 LP and the single "Hello, I Love You" was their second and last US #1 single.

Although Morrison received the most attention, including getting a far larger image on album covers, he was adamant that all the band members should get recognition. Before one concert when the announcer introduced the group as "Jim Morrison and The Doors," Morrison refused to appear unless he announced the group again as "The Doors." While he never felt close to his real life family, he was extremely protective of his band members. Reportedly, he once told Ray Manzarek that he never felt comfortable in a social setting unless Ray or another band member was with him. Many people have concluded that he viewed The Doors as his surrogate family. He repeatedly turned down every solo album opportunity he was offered, and after his death the remaining band members refused to replace him.

In the last two years of his life Morrison curtailed his prodigious intake of psychedelic drugs and began drinking heavily, which soon affected his stage and studio performances. Apparently trying to escape the image of "The Lizard King" that had come to dominate him, Morrison put on weight and grew a thick beard, forcing Elektra to use photos taken earlier in his career for the cover of the Absolutely Live LP, released in 1970. The album features performances recorded on The Doors' 1970 American tour and at the 1969 Aquarius Theatre gig and includes a full-length live performance of "The Celebration of the Lizard."

Their fourth album, The Soft Parade (1969), released in July, further distanced the group from the underground, containing extremely pop-oriented arrangements complete with "Vegas-style" horn sections (their single, "Touch Me," featured saxophonist Curtis Amy). Morrison's excessive drinking made him increasingly difficult and unreliable in the studio, and the recording sessions dragged on for weeks when they had previously only taken days. Studio costs piled up, and the group came close to disintegrating.

In its defense, The Soft Parade was a successful experiment in "quasi-prog-pop" despite Morrison's erratic behavior and numerous technical challenges. The more commercially-oriented songs such as "Touch Me" and "Tell All The People" are memorable; tracks such as "Wild Child" and "Shaman's Blues" are as stripped down and imaginative as ever, with excellent guitar and lyrics.

"Mojo Rising ...gotta keep on a rising"

 

The group staged a strong return to form with their 1970 LP Morrison Hotel.Morrison Hotel had a buoyancy and optimism that the band had never had before with a host of celebratory songs and a couple of lovely ballads. It hit US #4.

The group continued to perform at arenas throughout the summer. Although Morrison faced trial in Miami in August, the group managed to make it to Isle of Wight Festival on August 29. At the festival, the band performed alongside other legendary artists such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis and Sly & The Family Stone. Two songs from the show were featured in the 1995 documentary Message To Love .

During the Doors' last public performance, at the "Warehouse" in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 12, 1970, Morrison apparently had a mental breakdown on stage, slamming the microphone numerous times into the stage floor. Nevertheless, the group looked set to regain its crown as a premier act with the superb L.A. Woman in 1971. The Doors conceived it as a "back to basics" album that would explore their blues and R&B roots, although during rehearsals the group had a serious falling-out with Rothchild. Denouncing the new repertoire as "cocktail music," he quit and handed the production reins to Botnick. The result was widely considered a classic, featuring some of the strongest material and performances since their 1967 debut. Some dissenters, however, consider nearly half the album to be lackluster blues material that detracts severely from the album's overall quality. However the song "Changeling" has been stated the most underrated song The Doors ever released. The atmospheric single "Riders On The Storm" became a mainstay of rock radio programming for decades.

In 1971, following the recording of L.A. Woman, Morrison decided to take some time off and moved to Paris with girlfriend, Pamela Courson, in March. He had visited the previous summer and, for a time, seemed contented to write and explore the city. But by June he was again drinking heavily and fell from a second story window in May. On June 16 the last known recording of Morrison was made when he befriended two street musicians at a bar and invited them to a recording studio. The results were later released in 1994 on a bootleg CD titled The Lost Paris Tapes.

Morrison died under mysterious circumstances on 3 July 1971; his body was found in the bathtub of his apartment. It was concluded that he died of a heart attack, although it was later revealed that no autopsy had been performed before Morrison's body was buried at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery on July 7.

Rumors persisted for many years that Morrison had faked his death to escape the spotlight or had died at a Paris nightclub and that his body had been surreptitiously taken to his apartment. However, in his book Wonderland Avenue, Morrison's former associate Danny Sugerman states that during his last meeting with Courson -- which took place shortly before her own death from a heroin overdose -- she confessed that she had introduced Morrison to the drug and because he had a fear of needles, she had injected him with the dose that killed him.

http://www.thedoors.com/home

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doors

 

"Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free."

"The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you."

"Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That's all it was: curiosity."

"Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you."

"If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel."

“You're all a bunch of fuckin' slaves!" 

JIM MORRISON

 

"Road all night into the dawn

The Sun only see's me ...when I'm gone

Road all day into the night

They only love me when I'm right

 

Dance with the dragon inside the dream

The memory is fading ...and this must seem

The dying inside of a truthful whole

Let it roll baby roll.... " --AcousticWizard

The electric bass guitar  is an electrically-amplified fingered (or plucked) string instrument. The bass is similar in appearance to an electric guitar, but with a larger body, a longer neck and scale length, and, usually, four strings tuned an octave lower in pitch, in the bass range.

Since the 1950s, the electric bass has largely replaced the double bass in popular music. The bass is typically used to provide the low-pitched bassline(s) and bass runs in popular music and jazz. The electric bass is also used as a soloing instrument in jazz, fusion, Latin, and funk styles.

Paul Tutmarc developed a guitar-style electric bass instrument that was fretted and designed to be held and played horizontally. Audiovox's sales catalogue of 1935–6 (also featuring a solid body six-string electric guitar) listed what is probably the world’s first fretted, solid body electric bass that is designed to be played horizontally — the Model #736 Electric Double Bass. The change to a "guitar" form made the instrument easier to hold and transport; the addition of guitar-style frets enabled bassists to play in tune more easily (which also made the new electric bass easier to learn).

A self-taught electrical engineer named Leo Fender developed the first mass-produced electric bass in the 1950s. His Fender Precision Bass, introduced in 1951, became a widely copied industry standard. The Precision Bass (or "P-bass") evolved from a simple, uncontoured 'slab' body design similar to that of a Telecaster with a single piece, four-pole pickup to a contoured body design with beveled edges for comfort and a single "split coil pickup" (staggered humbucker).

First introduced in 1960, The Jazz Bass was known as the Deluxe Bass and was meant to accompany the Jazzmaster guitar.The Jazz Bass (often referred to as a "J-bass") featured two single-coil pickups, one close to the bridge and one in the Precision bass' position, each with separate volume and tone controls. The Jazz Bass' neck was narrower at the nut than the Precision bass (1 1/2" vs 1 3/4"). Another visual difference that set the Jazz Bass apart from the Precision is its "offset-waist" body. Pickup positions on other manufacturers' basses are often referred to as "P" or "J" position pickups, in reference to Precision and Jazz basses. Fender also began production of the Mustang Bass; a 30" scale length instrument used by bassists such as Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads ("P" and "J" basses have a scale length of 34").

Following Fender's lead, Gibson released the violin-shaped EB-1 Bass in 1953, followed by the more conventional-looking EB-0 Bass in 1959. As with Fender's designs, Gibson relied heavily upon an existing guitar design for this bass; the EB-0 was very similar to a Gibson SG in appearance (although the earliest examples have a slab-sided body shape closer to that of the double-cutaway Les Paul Special). Whereas Fender basses had pickups mounted in positions in between the base of the neck and the top of the bridge, many of Gibson's early basses featured one humbucking pickup mounted directly against the neck pocket. The EB-3, introduced in 1961, also had a "mini-humbucker" at the bridge position. Gibson basses also tended to be smaller, sleeker instruments; Gibson did not produce a 34" scale bass until 1963 with the release of the Thunderbird, which was also the first Gibson bass to utilize dual-humbucking pickups in a more traditional position, about halfway between the neck and bridge.

With the explosion of the popularity of rock music in the 1960's and seeing the success that Fender and Gibson were having with their products, Rickenbacker, Danelectro, ESP Guitars, and many others started to produce their own version of the electric bass. The 1970's also saw the founding of Music Man Instruments, owned by Leo Fender. Music Man produced the StingRay, the first widely produced bass with active (powered) electronics. Specific models became identified with particular styles of music, such as the Rickenbacker 4000 series, which became identified with progressive rock bassists.

In 1971 Alembic established the template for what would subsequently be known as "boutique" or "high end" electric basses. These expensive, custom-tailored instruments featured unique designs, premium wood bodies chosen and hand-finished by master craftspeople, onboard electronics for preamplification and equalization, and innovative construction techniques such as multi-laminate neck-through-body construction and graphite necks. Alembic and another "boutique" bass manufacturers,Tobias, and Ken Smith, produced 4 string and 5-string basses with a low "B" string in the mid-1970s. Ken Smith also developed and marketed the first wide-spacing six-string electric bass.

As the electric bass matured, new designs continued to push the envelope. Ned Steinberger introduced a headless bass in 1979 and continued his innovations in the 1980s, using graphite and other new materials and (in 1984) introducing the Trans-Trem tremolo bar. In 1987, the Guild Guitar Corporation launched the fretless Ashbory bass, which used silicone rubber strings and a piezoelectric pickup to achieve a "double bass" sound with an extremely short 18" scale length.

The standard design electric bass has four strings, tuned E, A, D and G (with the fundamental frequency of the E string set at 41.2 Hz, making the tuning of all four strings the same as that of the double bass). This tuning is also the same as the standard tuning on the lower four strings on a 6-string guitar, only an octave lower. The materials used in the strings gives bass players a range of tonal options. String types include all-metal strings (roundwound or flatwound), metal strings with different coverings, such as tapewound and plastic-coatings, and non-metal strings made of nylon.

Early basses used flatwound strings with a smooth surface, which had a smooth, damped sound reminiscent of a double-bass. In the 1960s and 1970s, roundwound bass strings similar to guitar strings became popular. Roundwounds have a brighter timbre with greater sustain than flatwounds. Flatwounds are still used by bassists who want a more vintage, smooth, or damped sound.

A number of other tuning options and bass types has been used to extend the range of the instrument. The most common are:

Four strings with alternate tunings to obtain an extended lower range. Tunings such as "BEAD" (this requires a low "B" string in addition to the other three "standard" strings), "D-A-D-G" (a "standard" set of strings, with only the lowest string detuned), and D-G-C-F or C-G-C-F (a "standard" set of strings, all of which are detuned) give bassists an extended lower range.

Five strings (usually B-E-A-D-G, but sometimes E-A-D-G-C). The 5-string bass with a low "B" provides added lower range, as compared with the 4-string bass. As well, it gives a player easier access to low notes when playing in the higher positions. Five-string basses are common in certain sub-genres of heavy metal where music often uses an extended lower range.

Six strings (B-E-A-D-G-C). The 6-string bass (B-E-A-D-G-C) is essentially a 4-string bass with both an additional low "B" string and high "C" string. While much less common than 4- or 5-string basses, they are still used in Latin, jazz, and several other genres. A few players have tuned the high C down to a B (giving B-E-A-D-G-B) matching the E-A-D-G-B string found on the lower end of a guitar.

The electric bass is the standard bass instrument in many musical genres, including modern Country, post-1970s-style Jazz, many variants of Rock and Roll, Heavy metal, Punk, Reggae, soul and funk. Even though the double bass is still the standard bass instrument in orchestral settings, some late-20th-century composers have used the electric bass in an orchestral setting. Modern bass playing draws on guitar and double bass for inspiration as well as an increasing vernacular of its own.

The bass may have differing roles within different types of music and the bassist may prefer different degrees of prominence in the music. Early uses of the electric bass saw bassists doubling the double bass part or replacing the upright bass entirely with their new, more portable and easily amplified instrument. By the end of the 1960s, the electric bass had replaced the upright bass in many forms of popular music.

The switch to electric bass moved bassists more into the foreground in a band setting, in several senses:

From an aural perspective, electric bass tone can often "cut through" a live mix better. As well, electric basses can be amplified to very high levels without the problem of feedback "howls" that can plague upright bass players trying to amplify their instruments.

The smaller size of the electric bass allows rapid, complex lines to be played more easily, enabling some musicians to develop a solo role for the instrument.

The switch to the electric bass allowed bassists much more freedom of movement on stage. The double bass sits on an endpin, and stands vertically, and players typically play in a single location for the duration of a song. However, the electric bass is smaller, and is held up with a strap, which allows the electric bassist to move about on the stage while playing, and get closer to other musicians or the audience.

 

Jason Newsted Victor Wooten Flea Gene Simmons Billy Sheehan Cliff Burton Geezer Butler/NIB