In other words, is the music in The Doors songs worse because they didn’t use a bass? Would those tracks be better musically if they had a bass, or is the organ a suitable replacement? If the organ is a suitable replacement, why don’t (hardly) any other bands go bassless?
According to Bruce McCullough of the Kids in the Hall…it makes them BETTER
“When you’re free-flyin with the Doors, man, what do you need a safety net for?”
Not really. First of all, they used a bassist on all their studio albums (except for their first, where Manzerek is credited with playing bass), so the issue didn’t come up when they were composing. It became a matter of reproducing the bass line onstage.
Other groups don’t try it because it’s hard to find an organ player who can handle doing the bass line while doing everything else. It’s easier to find a bassist, not to mention that many groups don’t have an organ player.
I’ll be the first blasphemist and say that I think the organ carried too much in most of their music.
Of course, its my opinion only, but organ music is like butter on a sandwich. It can make a good sandwich great (I love to hear a hot leslied B3 hitting some power chords), but too much of it is just butterbread.
Manzarek himself states in his book that Strange Days was the first time the Doors used an outside bassist (Doug Lubahn), but Greg Shaw’s book The Doors on the Road mentions Larry Knechtel as playing on the first album. Some tracks on the album use Manzarek’s keyboard bass, others use bass guitar, which could be either Manzarek or Knechtel.
Maybe I’ve just read too many fishing magazines. When I saw “bass hamper” in the title, I pictured a double-size wicker creel. A regular creel isn’t big enough for legal size bass in most places.
Word.
I’ll be even more blasphemous and say that the Doors were a band with a very limited repertoire of tricks. It’s basically Morrison glowering pretentiously and that organ churning behind him in every song.
Not that some of those songs didn’t kick ass, but one ‘greatest hits’ disc is more than enough to cover the entire range of the band (and still have room left over for some repetitive songs.)
Others have already noted that keyboards are indeed not a suitable replacement, but I would also add that as far as presentation of a band (what the audience sees), it’s much cooler to have people up front who you can actually see, and not in the back hidden by their instrument, i.e., keyboards on a stand that occlude the player from at least the waist on down and probably more.
Um, and if you can’t parse that long and convoluded sentence I just wrote, how about this: It’s just a lot flashier to have a bass guitar player in the front line of a band performing on stage.
I love the sound of a Hammond, but I don’t think it provides the power a rock band needs. And I say that not as a rookie bass player, but as a guy who would play the B3 if he could.
I also agree with The New and Improved Superman’s assessment of The Doors.
Um…that’s what us keyboardists do. Playing bass and treble parts is kinda part and parcel of the whole instrument. That’s one reason why a lot of keyboard players tend to make good bassists–they’re already quite familiar with the role of the bass in music.
And Ray Manazarek’s keyboard bass lines are extremely easy.
Hey, but what about the keytar! 
I would also say the physics of the instrument make the electric bass a more suitable backend to the rhythm section than the organ. You can get a wider range of sounds out of an electric bass. You can pick notes, you can finger notes, you can slap notes, you can slide notes, you can vary your attack and amplitude (volume), etc…
With an organ, keys are not pressure sensitive, so you can’t control volume except through the pedal. However, the sound will remain the same. When you pluck a string, the harder you pluck it, you don’t just get a louder volume, but you get more of the higher harmonics, and a brighter sound. You have much finer control over tone and volume with an electric bass.
Put it this way, I don’t think having one could have saved them musically. New Improved Superman nailed it - a very limited top 40 band whose schtick runs thin very quickly.
mm
I tend to be on the same side as The New and Improved Superman but I’ll say this – I never listened to a Doors song and found myself thinking “Damn, if only it had a bass.”
They HAD to do without a bass player. Lemmy kept trying to join the band, and the only thing they could think of to keep him away was to say, “Oh, no, Lemmy – we don’t NEED a bass player!”
q: Did the lack of a bass hamper The Doors muscially?
a: I think the lack of being good musicians was more to blame.
They lacked a bass player (later addressed on LA Woman with a session player named Jerry Scheff), but Ray Manzarek had a keyboard bass. He played the bass keyboard with his left hand and the organ with his right hand. So they didn’t lack for bottom end. That said, I prefer the sound of bass guitar.
Executive Slacks did the Goth Rock without a bass player thing in 80s Philadelphia. Early Man is just a guitar player and a drummer doing metal. Black Keys is the same setup, I believe, doing rootsy blues-based music. “No bass guitar” doesn’t necessarily mean “no bottom end,” and neither does it predict what kind of music you’ll be hearing.
Yeah, and there’s a few rock bands with traditional guitar-drums instrumentation I could think of without a bass. Sleater-Kinney, The White Stripes, The Black Keys, and The Jon Spenser Blues Explosion, all immediately come to mind.
Actually, that was Robbie Krieger.
Yup, they were basically a bar band who really only benefited from a pretty frontman with a good line {for the time - it’s dated pretty embarrassingly} in tripped out poetic shaman angst theatre - which, unfortunately, hasn’t aged very well. They’d be pushing to get ten good songs, and 7 minutes of “Riders On The Storm” is still about four minutes too many.
Zappa had a song on his “You Are What You Is” album called “I Don’t Wanna Get Drafted” that is an obvious Doors rip-off/parody. The funny thing is, it’s impossible to figure out which song they’re riffing on because it could be any one of about six different ones, they all sound so much alike.