the lyrics to "LA Woman" are great!
what's not to like?
"I see your hair is burning"
He's driving around, and one of the hills here has got a brush fire. That actually happens. I've driven on a freeway past an area of wilderness right near downtown - the bits with the skyscrapers and spaghetti junction style freeway intersections - and there's been helicopters dropping water on a blaze that the steady stream of traffic is going right past. it's part of the everyday strangeness of LA - the fact that a metropolis was built in this unsuitable desert location. Fires, mudslides, droughts, etc
most of his lyrics are pretty direct, easily comprehensible even when waxing mystical - "learn to forget" , "write in secret alphabets", etc etc
a rock vernacular translation of basic attitudes out of Romanticism, Beats etc
re. rock lyrics as poetry thing - it's a fairly basic idea that most rock lyrics are meant to signify in the context of vocal delivery and the music - you put them on the printed page, they don't look as impressive as when sounded and when in the whirl and drive of the music. you can do that to almost any rock group - from the Stones, Lennon, Led Zep to well nearly of them really - Costello, Morrissey for sure. When you take it away from the voice it was written for, put it on the paper page, it's depleted significantly.
(Rap is the ultimate example of that, it almost always looks dead laid on the page (or online) without the stresses and intonation and barely describable nuances of inflection, the words are inseparable from the flow and the vocal personality)
i'm not a poetry buff - love a few things like Gerard Manley Hopkins to distraction, Emily Dickinson if i have a critic to hold my hand and patiently guide me through a poem, the obvious middlebrow classics, etc - so rock lyrics's shortfall c.f state of art versification is not really an issue for me. I'm sure it's doggerel in comparison. But it's an irrelevant standard by which to judge. I don't know why people publish books of 'collected lyrics', who on earth would actually sit there reading them?
That said I am SUCH a Doors fan that I even love the posthumous poetry LP An American Prayer that was done 40 years ago as it happens - Morrison's pomes + slick, funk-Muzak backings from Manzarek / Krieger / Densmore
not my favorite rock group but definitely in the Top 10