Gimme one tribute band, hold the cheeseThe Unknown Soldiers
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Photo copyright Lorne Vogt
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Jim Morrison died in July 1971. The opportunity to see The Doors
perform with the original lineup will never occur again. Concert footage of The Doors does exist, but the audio is far from stellar, and only goes so far in
fulfilling the desire to witness The Doors live in concert.
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Peter Bowman is 32 years old. He is a young man, but Jim Morrison never got that old.
The other members of the Unknown Soldiers range in age from 25 to 35 years,
which is a fair representation of The Doors during the last half of the time
they were together as a band.
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PB: No one can deny that this is timeless music, and that there's still a
place for this music. What we are providing for the people is the ability
to hear this - live - and to experience it live.
Tribute bands when done right, with a certain amount of
quality, can offer the listener a remarkable illusion of the past.
Your audiences are a mix of old people and young people. Why does the music of the Doors reach across generations?PB: Why does the Doors music reach across generations? I think the key element is that sort of initiation of introspective ideas... reading... poetry... flip on some Doors late at night with a candle kind of thing. Seeing the mirror reflection of the darker self... Joeseph Campbell, images of heroes, Carl Jung's ideas of symbolism. The Doors were really powerful about conveying those images. That is why it is so timeless and powerful today. Well educated, well read, every move that they did, they did with some sort of idea of what may happen. Controlled chaos. Jim wrote some big essay on crowds in university... mass hypnotism and mass hysteria of crowds... I think he actually had the ability to create that kind of control, much like politicians. |
Photo copyright Lorne Vogt
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You're doing the whole Jimbo thing, Pete, but what about the rest of the band?
PB: We want to be more like a good rock'n'roll band covering The Doors - yet
we know the importance of the Jim Morrison icon image, that people are
expecting that when they come out, to see this image - to see a guy in leather
pants screaming at the top of his lungs. |
Besides singing and playing as closely to The Doors as possible, what's the big challenge for The Unknown Soldiers?PB: Our challenge is to ensure that every show has the same vigour and intensity, but not in a contrived fashion. You have to let the energy out. The audience - they want to go to the mind-blowing show, not the one where they're going to go home disappointed. The ten percent of shows that were out of this world were enough to create an iconic image that survives to this day. |
So your goal is... ?PB: Our goal is to be the bar that you have to achieve in order to be in a tribute band. If people want to come out to the shows and are expecting to get their money's worth, you have to be at that bar, and nothing less will do. We want to raise the bar really high so it becomes an art form unto itself. |
It seems like nostalgia has really regained popularity. Any thoughts on that?
PB: Offering nostalgia regresses people back to the first time they heard
a Doors album, or what was happening in their lives. Usually, they were
a youth. Teenage angst, or experience, so they re-visit that - and all
the times in between. Zeppelin, Beatles, Doors - someone can still be
introduced to it, initiated into the music that was created decades ago...
and that music has an impact because it's so timeless - and it's so
powerful that it's just as potent as the day it was created. |
Photo copyright Lorne Vogt
Click photo to enlarge
How do The Unknown Soldiers feel about merchandising? Besides concerts, what do you sell?PB: Any time we do The Doors thing, it's The Doors. People have come up and said, "Hey, do you guys got any CDs for sale?" and we say, "Yup, it's in the record store, under 'Doors' - go buy the Doors, man." We're not about to sell DVDs of ourselves or CDs or 8x10 glossies of ourselves. |
Pete, what do you think about sounding like Jim Morrison? When you sing, you really do, you know.PB: It's funny - you know, before, I did some original projects, and everyone would say, "Hey, you kinda sound like Jim Morrison - what's goin' on there?" It's the voice I was born with... it's just the deep voice I inherited from my father. |
So how does one go about learning to sing and play like The Doors?PB: There's no book for the keyboard player. Same thing with the Jim Morrison, too, because he has all these different nuances that really are required to make a very believable performance of him... it makes it exciting each time I listen to The Doors because I hear a new nuance, and then I add it to my toolbox of Morrison-like nuances. |
Photo copyright Lorne Vogt
Click photo to enlarge
Do you think your experiences performing as The Unknown Soldiers are anything like the experiences of The Doors all those years ago?PB: One of the first shows ever... we played in Whistler at the Boot Pub, and that was a fairly mellow show, but then we played a show down in skid row in Vancouver, at a place that was called (at the time) Mike's Tavern... and we had a hundred people inside the place just having the time of their lives, and so it reminded us what it might have been like for The Doors in their early days, down at The Fog, The London Fog. There's lots of different parallels and I think when you're in a tribute act, if you're perceptive enough, you can see alot of these sort of synchronicites occur, and recognize them for what it is... that history is cyclical, and history kind of repeats itself. |
For you, how important is feedback from the audience?
PB: The audience participation is important... at Central City [Brewing Company
in Surrey BC]... the first show there, we had a bunch of kids that actually
sat at the front. At the last, there were some kids outside - but yet, they
were willing to sit outside and watch this. So that kind of reassures us
about the music, and there is enough for everybody to really enjoy it.
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What are the highlights from your performances so far?PB: ...recently played a show at the Vancouver Harvest Cup... you know, High Times magazine and the whole Cannabis Cup culture. We're sort of the Lionel Richie of the Olympics - opening up the Cannabis Cup - in an abandoned old bank with huge vaulted ceilings. We thought for sure it was going to be a totally enthusiastic crowd, up on their feet freaking out all night, but it was actually - everybody was completely stoned out of their mind, very subdued... between songs, you would get one or two polite claps and that would be about it. The guys in the band were like, "What's goin' on here? How come these people aren't going crazy?" and I think that's what an early Doors show probably would have been like... and then, when they became a little more popular, a little more mainstream, it got into the crowd that there was a little more alcohol and testosterone, and then that rebellious image of Jim came out, I think. |
Clearly, The Unknown Soldiers as a band, is still evolving. What can your audiences expect next?
PB: We have a couple of things on the backburner - what we would like to do is
take one of the songs from [the two Doors albums made after Jim's death]
Other Voices and from Full Circle and apply the Jim Morrison voice onto it,
and re-introduce it to the world as a Doors tune, covered by
The Unknown Soldiers. I totally examined both albums, and there's only
three songs we could do this to. The rest - I don't suspect so. That's a little
something down the road, and I think that that would be something that would
be fun for Doors fans to hear, to see that. |
Photo copyright Lorne Vogt
Click photo to enlarge
Hey Pete, any last wishes?
PB: I would love to see a Doors cover band. One of them [the singer of another
Doors cover band] certainly looks like Jim. It's pretty trippy...
I would love to feel what it would be like in the audience.
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