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Two weeks ago The Wayback Machine landed us at the Music Hall at Fair Park on December 11, 1970 — site of The Doors’ almost-farewell gig, one night before ” it finished in the voodoo juju” of a warehouse in New Orleans, as Ray Manzarek put it. At the time one Friend of Unfair Park, apparently without Google access, wondered: Surely, the band’s ’68 swing through downtown Dallas — two days before the release of Waiting for the Sun — is out there, somewhere.
Yes, yes it is. Here, then, The Doors at Memorial Auditorium on July 9, 1968 (scroll down) — pieces of which occasionally appear on “unofficial” live anthologies, mostly “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)” and “Hello, I Love You.” If the ’70 gig was The Doors on their way out, the ’68 show was The Doors on their way up — Waiting for the Sun, after all, would prove the band’s sole No. 1 record. And, despite the back-pocket production quality, it’s a powerful best-of including most of the key tracks off the ’67 debut, among them: “Break On Through (To The Other Side),” “Soul Kitchen” and a blazing, for lack of a better word, “Light My Fire,” which I didn’t think I ever needed to hear again. Then I listened to this.
