Parke Puterbaugh

The show belongs to Nelson, who has fashioned from these blues a sagebrush poet's autumnal meditation on faded love and the wages of the sporting life. The result is emotionally rich, musically savory and languidly blue from end to end.

There are no treatises on ecology or foreign policy, no oblique strategies or hidden agendas. There doesn't have to be; all of that is implicit in the atmosphere of entropy, of things falling apart, that's evoked and detailed candidly, with glimmering beauty and unsurpassable sadness, on Out of Time.

The Works is a royal feast of hard rock without that awful metallic aftertaste; as such, it might turn out to be the Led Zeppelin II of the Eighties.

An Innocent Man is an affectionate, spirited paean to an undefiled past that's truly forever.

There’s a little Van Halen in everybody, these guys are fond of saying, but there’s too little on Diver Down.

Third is guitarist-singer Chilton’s untidy masterpiece. It is beautiful and disturbing, pristine and unkempt — and vehemently original.

Though great albums followed, The Doors stands as the L.A. foursome’s most successful marriage of rock poetics with classically tempered hard rock — a stoned, immaculate classic.