Rock Is Dead

Rock Is Dead Session (Sunset Sound Recorders)
Los Angeles, California - February 25th 1969.

After The Doors returned from their European concert, they began to record "The Soft Parade", their fourth studio album during October, 1968. They wanted something different from their previous albums, so Robby came up with the idea to produce an album featuring not only the four Doors members but also an additional two bass players, as well as a brass and string arrangement. Paul Rothchild, Doors Producer, had agreed to Robbie’s idea to do an album that would take the group in a totally new musical direction during the recording of "The Soft Parade". "The Soft Parade" has been seen by some as being The Doors’ "Sergeant Pepper".
Jim had later said in an interview with John Tobler at The Isle Of Wight Music Festival, that the sessions and the recording process for "The Soft Parade" had gone out of control and took too long. The Doors had spent nine months in the studio only to produce an album that Jim never really liked, as he once said to John Tobler at The Isle Of Wight Music Festival:

"An album should be like a book of stories strung together, with some kind of unified feeling and style about it, and that’s what ‘The Soft Parade’ lacks,"

By February 25, 1969 The Doors had spent a lot of their time in the studio trying to work out new songs, and had come up with a handful of songs written by Robbie and two new songs written by Jim, "Shaman’s Blues" and "Wild Child". The Doors then started to jam together and ended up playing a selection of music including blues, rock’n’roll, Latin, surf, pop, jazz and Jim’s rap for most of the recording. During an interview with Jerry Hopkins, Jim described how the jam session came about:

"We needed another song for this album. We were racking our brains ... We were in the studio and so we started throwing out all these old songs. Blues trips. Rock Classics. Finally we just started playing and we played for about an hour, and we went through the whole history of rock music-starting with blues, going through rock’n’roll, surf music, Latin, the whole thing. I call it ‘Rock Is Dead.’ "

In an interview between Ray Manzarek and Paul Laurence of Audio in December 1983, Ray had said:

" ‘Rock Is Dead’ doesn’t really exist in a form worth putting out. When we recorded it, it was just a bunch of drunks fooling around and jamming in the studio and then we started to get into something. Unfortunately, the tape ran out halfway through and by the time they got it back on five minutes had elapsed and we were right in the middle of doing surf music. We went into the control room and said ‘Gee, that was really great, hope you guys got that down on tape.’ And they said, ‘Well, we got all of it down, except we missed some of the last "Rock Is Dead."’ And I said that, ‘That was the only thing that was any good’. And we missed it. It was parodies on various styles of music and I don’t even remember what was left out."

Fortunately this was not the case, as the complete sixty seven minute recording had eventually surfaced. Apparently after Jim’s death, Paul Rothchild had gone back into the studio and chopped up the session into little pieces and put it together and later offered this to the remaining Doors members. The three guys had rejected it and was also later rejected when Paul had offered it to be released on "American Prayer". None the less, the complete session somehow "leaked" out of the studio and made it’s way amongst tape traders -a treasured recording for any Doors collector !
A Dionysian Experience.