Post by darkstar2 on Jul 19, 2008 14:46:20 GMT
Mojo Magazine
UK
September 2001 Issue
Death Cat Bounce
With L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison
emerged from a dark well of booze for The Doors' final
comeback. A rock god's last stand by Dave
DiMartino.
City of light or city at night? It is 1968, maybe '69,
and we are walking through the throngs of people
crowding the Sunset Strip. The sweet aroma of marijuana
fills the air, and the crowd is thickening somewhere
between Clarke and Hilldale. Traffic has slowed to a near
standstill, and, beautifully, nobody actually seems to care -
except maybe the cranky few in Cadillacs and
Continentals who chose this traffic route on their way home to
Beverly Hills and Bel Air.
Equally jammed is the
Whiskey A Go-Go, sweltering, smoke-filled and happening
indeed. At a table near the back a contest is going on.
Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, is tonight
just another spectator, matching Three Dog Night's
Jimmy Greenspoon drink for drink while the band - who
can remember their name? - play on obliviously. Not
quite obliviously, however. Because Jim Morrison, when
not drinking, is screaming very loudly at every
possible oppertunity. He is having a good time. So good a
time, in fact, that the Whiskey's manager strolls over
and tells the Lizard King that - regardless of who he
is - if he doesn't keep his mouth shut, he will be
asked to leave the premises.
Within minutes, more drinks arrive and James
Douglas Morrison is happily perched atop a table,
screaming louder than ever. Minutes later, the contest has
moved outside, where Morrison and Greenspoon, forcibly
ejected, now take brief respite. “I’m out on the kerb
sitting next to Morrison,” Greenspoon would later recall.
“I said, Now what? And Jim said – very calmly –
‘Well, now let’s go to the Galaxy.’”
“The mood
was weird, the mood was strange. Jim was struggling
mightily with the difficulties of success and stardom.”
The year is 1994, the speaker is late Doors producer
Paul Rothchild, who helmed all of The Doors’ recordings until their L.A. Woman finale.
“They always thought they might have a nice little career. The
group they patterned themselves on and aspired to be as
big as was Them. The fact of the matter is that Them
were never a big band – they were underground even at
the height of their very small success. Their other
heroes were Love. To them that was stardom. Of course
Arthur Lee never went on the road, and they never really
met Van Morrison until much later. So they really had
no grasp of what it was like to have this sudden
incredible celebrity. So Jim, with the publication of a lot
of the photographs – the famous photographs,
bare-chested and looking real good – wound up as a sex idol.
And Jim found that difficult. And the way he dealt
with the instant celebrity was to dull it with
alcohol.”
In late 1969, The Doors were up against it:
1) Singer Jim Morrison had just returned from Miami, where
he’d pleaded not guilty to four separate charges
resulting from the band’s riotous performance there in
March.
2) The Doors had effectively been banned from performing
in the States as a result of the Miami concert, with
30 planned dates cancelled by wary
promoters.
3) Though a commercial success, their previous album The
Soft Parade, was poorly received by critics who found
the horns and string-laden affair distinctly
un-Doors.
4) By all indications, Morrison’s creative wellspring
might be running dry, as the majority of The Soft
Parade’s material had been penned by guitarist Robby
Krieger.
5) Morrison had an alcohol problem.
Then again, the year was 1969 when an album a year, at the very least, was the norm.
When the majority of American concert
promoters have essentially told you you’re not wanted,
making a new album is the very least you can do. And so
it was that The Doors entered the studio and began
to record what would become Morrison Hotel.
“Because of Miami, there hadn’t been much songwriting,
especially from Jim,” recalls engineer Bruce Botnick, the
man at the board for each and every Doors album
through to L.A. Woman, which he co-produced. “He wasn’t
into it. And they didn’t woodshed together as much as
they had in the past, no time. [Morrison] was deluged
with legal problems. I can equate it with if you’ve
ever had a break up with a girl, or your wife or
something like that. There’s a lot of pain, and that’s
about all you can think about – that’s what the trial
was like. So it was very hard for him to write. Some
people get off on that and write love songs or whatever.
He didn’t, he didn’t have the……he just wasn’t into
it.”
Among the things Jim Morrison was into was drinking.
Heavily. According to keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who
founded The Doors with Morrison in August 1965, there
were two batches of drinking buddies: the earliest was
a pair named Frankie and Wes, whom the ever polite
Manzarek calls simply “cowboy trash”; the latter a trio
referred to as Morrison’s “faux Doors”, including pals
Babe Hill, Paul Ferrara and Frank Liscandro. “A couple
of them were from UCLA,” Manzarek now recalls. “And
actually…..you can’t blame them. They were running around with
Jim Morrison. A fucking rock star, man, and we know
him from UCLA! And he wanted to drink! Well, shit
man, we’ll drink with you! I don’t think anybody led
him into it – but they certainly didn’t say, ‘You
know, Jim, you really ought to stop drinking with us
and go back home and write some good poetry to record
with The Doors.’”
As one of Morrison’s very best friends, Manzarek could only tolerate the situation with great disdain.
“I couldn’t go along with
it,” he says, “I wasn’t going to go out to a bar and
drink all night. I always wanted to say, Jim, stop
doing this, but never did. He was dissipating his
artistic abilities in loose bar talk. After you’ve talked
for three or four hours, with a bunch of guys
laughing heartily at your jokes, there’s no reason for you
to go home and write. You’ve talked your creativity
away. That’s what drunks do. And for that, I had
nothing but disdain.
“But Jim wanted to sit around and drink – ad, by God, there wasn’t anything I could say.
He’d come in with songs, with lyrics, and they were always excellent – so if he chose to destroy
himself through drink….my God, that’s your choice, man.
Who knew he would die? This was an era of potheads
and acidheads. 27-year-old people weren’t alcoholics.
Alcoholics were bums on skid row.”
Familiars of the band point to the drawn-out
recording of the previous The Soft Parade as being
Morrison’s relative low-point in the studio – his “total
drunk phase”, as Manzarek calls it. Much of it had to
do with producer Rothchild, then in – as Manzarek
puts it – “his anal-retentive perfect recording
phase”.
Having recorded the first two albums at Sunset
Sound and Waiting For The Sun at TT&G Studios, the
fourth Doors album was put to tape at the brand new
Elektra Sound Recorders studio in LA. The plush studio
would later be proudly displayed on the inner sleeve of
the late ‘60s Elektra albums, with the charming
notation: “Artists who have recorded here include Judy
Garland, The Doors, Rhinoceros, and Delaney and Bonnie.”
Entering the premises in late November, the band would
take a total of nine months – a century, by past
standards – to finish the disc.
Typical procedure for making Doors albums
involved getting an appropriate sound from each instrument
– which often took hours – balancing the sound and
then, finally, when it all was satisfactory, Morrison
would be called in to sing. The Soft Parade’s
instrumental intricacies, which involved strings, horns and
even the odd fiddle (on Runnin’ Blue), meant that
Morrison had an enormous amount of time on his hands; that
time, by and large, was spent, you guessed it,
drinking.
Still, according to Manzarek, by the time the band came
into Sunset Sound to make Morrison Hotel, things had
actually been getting better. “Jim was over his great
drunk and knew he has to be in the recording studio. He
was there, on top of it and didn’t come in totally
intoxicated. He knew what he had to do.”
“Miami had happened,” said producer Paul
Rothchild in 1994, “and we knew we weren’t going to be able
to tour. We needed to try to expand The Doors’ fan
base with a more commercial album – The Soft Parade –knowing that after we did that album, we would do
something very roots, go all the way back to
Venice.”
Though the blues had been a part of The Doors’ music
since their four-sets-a-night at the Sunset Strip’s
London Fog club in 1966, the only recorded evidence to
date had been the memorable Back Door Man from the
band’s debut album. But the imprint of the blues never
left their live performances, and often served as
ground zero when the band jammed together in their
workshop. Opened in February 1968 and located near the
intersection of La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevards in West
Hollywood, the Doors Workshop would serve as a rehearsal
space and, eventually, the recording studio for L.A.
Woman. (Three decades later it’s long gone, its
structure proudly sitting – in true City Of Light fashion –
between a Koo Koo Roo chicken restaurant and an auto
stereo shop.)
“John [Densmore] didn’t like the blues thing,” recalls guitarist Robby Krieger today.
“Because whenever Jim would get drunk, he’d always want to do the blues. So it was like,
‘Oh God, here we go again’ – in which many nights in the studio were kind of
wasted, ‘Hey, let’s play Jimmy Reed for an hour.’ you
know? I could see his point. But I personally loved
playing Jimmy Reed for an hour, so I never had a problem.
But I know he was thinking – just doing blues to fuck
off is one thing…it’s not really making a record.
Although some great songs did come out of that
environment.”
One of those was Morrison Hotel’s towering opener
Roadhouse Blues, featuring harp playing by John Sebastian
(credited as G. Puglese) and which today Bruce Botnick
rightly calls “the quintessential bar band song. Go to
any bar in the United States and you’ll hear it.” It
set the mood for an album that seemed to roar out of
the stereo with a confidence reassuring to those who
felt that the band had lost their way. Those who cared
about songwriting credits noticed Jim Morrison’s name
on each of the tracks; each of Morrison Hotel’s
tracks once again bore his seal of poetic approval. The
remainder of the tracks rocked, hard, while softer tracks
like Indian Summer even envoked the melancholy majesty
of The End.
But the material hadn’t come entirely easy; nor was all of it new.
Indian Summer was one of the very first songs the band had attempted
in the studio when laying down the demo for Moonlight
Drive in 1965. “We recorded Indian Summer just to hear
the sound,” Manzarek remembers. “It was just a little
ditty. We never did it [live], we had The End. We
weren’t going to do a short little raga when we had 12-15
minute Oedipal love song to do.” Likewise, both Blue
Sunday and Waiting For The Sun had been sitting around.
They’d attempted the latter during the album sessions
bearing the same name, but “it hadn’t baked enough”, says
Manzarek.
More interesting was the construction of Peace Frog,
which typified the process by which the band would come
up with an appropriate music track. “Peace Frog was
a song that created itself in the studio,” says
Manzarek. “Jim had these lyrics ‘She came, she came, she
came, just about the break of day.’ Said Paul
Rothchild, “ We need more of that, man, that’s not
enough. Paul and Jim went through some of Jim’s notebooks
and found a poem called Abortion Stories, and said,
‘This one, right here. “Blood on the streets.” Great.
Fit that in there somehow.’ And Jim did, ‘Blood
stains on the palm trees and rooftops of
Venice.’
For once, everyone was happy with Rothchild’s
suggestions.
“He had a lot of suggestions and Jim took them
readily,” says Manzarek, “When Paul went through that
anal-retentive phase on The Soft Parade John Densmore said ‘We
can’t do this ever again, man.’ Paul kind of got the
point. ‘Oops, maybe I have gone too far. He definitely
lightened up for Morrison Hotel.”
The seeming return to form signalled by Morrison
Hotel should have meant that The Doors were back.
However, the same month that recording started on the
album Jim Morrison was back in legal trouble. On a
November 11 Continental Airlines flight from LA to Phoenix
to see The Rolling Stones, a drunken Morrison and
“faux Door” Tom Baker engaged in behaviour sufficiently
rude to get them arrested upon their airport arrival.
Newspaper accounts at the time reported the pair had “used
vulgar language…and threw glasses across the aircraft
while it was in flight”. Though Morrison would
eventually be acquitted (an airline employee had confused
Morrison with Baker), the charge of interfering with the
flight of an aircraft was still another crisis looming
over the singer’s head during the sessions. And the
Miami trial proceedings had yet to even
begin.
“People ask me about Morrison, ‘What was he like, man?’”
says Henry Diltz, the distinguished LA photographer
whose work adorns the covers of some of the biggest
albums in pop history, including Crosby, Stills And
Nash’s debut and The Eagles’ Desperado. “I always say he
really was a poet – he had a poet’s attitude. The word I
use is ‘bemused’. He always had a kind of bemused
little smile on his face when he would talk to people.
Especially the day we went and did the Morrison Hotel cover,
down in the flea-bitten area of LA.”
Diltz, not only a photographer but an member of
the Modern Folk Quartet, remembers Morrison well. “I
would see him around town. The Modern Folk Quartet
played at the Whiskey around the same time as they did –
so I saw him first as a fellow musician before I
ever became a photographer – and he was always very
friendly. I’d see him in stores around town, in shops with
his girlfriend, and he’d say, ‘Hey, man, how are you
doing?’ It was a ‘60s thing, outgoing, small talk. Never
standoffish or anything. But I would say he was a quiet guy – he was introspective. Definitely.”
Morrison’s on going legal skirmishes were spoken of so rarely that
Diltz can’t fully remember if the Morrison Hotel cover
shoot took place before or after the Miami concert
(it was in fact afterward). Instead, he recalls an intelligent man who simply enjoyed life.
“We went down to skid row to have a drink, “ Diltz says of the
shoot, which showcased the band behind the front window
of the last-legs, decrepit Morrison Hotel at 1246
South Hope Street in downtown LA. “And we ended up in
the old Hard Rock Café – which had been there since
the ‘30’s, so it didn’t mean rock n’ roll, obviously.
We were all in a Volkswagen van, saw that, and then
said in one voice – Oh man, we’ve got to stop in
there. We spent about an hour in there, having a couple
of beers and talking to all these old guys. Jim
loved to hear them talking about there lives. When we
were through, he said, ‘C’mon, let’s go into a couple
of other bars.’ We’d just sit at a table, buy some
guy a drink and just get him to talk. [Jim] didn’t
talk much himself. He’d sit there and just nod and
have that little smile on his face, like he was
drinking stuff in, observing life and people.”
And for all the talk of the image of the Lizard
King, it is interesting to note that the one-time
shirtless Morrison allowed photographer Diltz to shoot to
his heart’s content without offering direction. “It
never seemed to be a big deal to him. I just shot a rap
group who were very concerned about every stance and
how they looked; they really wanted to throw shapes
in a very certain way, very controlling. He wasn’t
at all. Very natural. We spent a day walking around
Venice Beach taking pictures, and he was right there –
into it but quiet. Very accessible.”
The last full year of Jim Morrison’s life was an odd mixture of
the very good and the very bad. Simon & Schuster
released his book, The Lords And The New Creatures,
bearing a photo of its author, the bearded “James Douglas
Morrison”; he and writer/author Patricia Kennealy were
joined together in some unofficial form of matrimony,
the holiness of which remains debatable, and both
Morrison Hotel and the Absolutely Live set garnered
respectable reviews. “I know this is a most horrifying rock
‘n’ roll,” said Creem’s Dave Marsh of the former,
“and I know The Doors have presented us with the best
record I’ve ever heard. So far.”
Additionally, on April 20 Morrison was acquitted of the Phoenix charges
stemming from the airline incident when the key witness –an airline stewardess –
reversed her testimony,
resulting in the case being thrown out of the court. At the
same time, shows such as Detroit’s Cobo Hall performance –
now documented on CD – proved The Doors were still a viable,
and powerful, rock ‘n’ roll band. On the other hand, the night before flying to Miami to finally
stand trial, Morrison was arrested in LA for public drunkenness after a resident found the singer
curled up and sleeping on his front doorstep. The next
day?
Miami.
Beginning on August 10, 1970 and extending
intermittently through a month, Jim Morrison’s Miami trial
ultimately resulted in a guilty verdict, rendered on
September 20. Though guilty only of two misdemeanour
offences – indecent exposure and public profanity – the
offences were enough for him to potentially face six
months in jail. As might be expected, his attorneys
immediately appealed the verdict. And what did Jim Morrison
do that month in Miami? Aside from stand
trial?
Not especially glamorous – but previously unreported
– are two encounters between Jim Morrison and Doors
fan Steve Rosenberg, a 16-year-old medical student
doing advanced placement research at Miami’s Cedars Of
Lebanon Hospital, today an obstetrician/gynaecologist in
private practise in LA. Taking his mother’s car to drive
to the hospital, Rosenberg also spent much of August
1970 attending Morrison’s trial.
“As the crowds died, I finally actually got to talk to him a little
bit,” says Rosenberg today. “I talked to him about some
poetry – Rimbaud – and what kind of music he was
listening to – Pink Floyd. At one point during a lunch
break he asked me what I was doing, and I told him I
was doing this medical research thing. He asked me if
there was a Burger King around there. And I said, Yeah,
I’m going back to the hospital, I can give you a
ride. Instead of just dropping him off, I joined him
for lunch. He had two Cheese Whoppers and a
malted.”
What did he look like?
“He was fat. Fat and bearded. Looked like he did on American Prayer and a little spacey.
Not, like, warm and friendly but cool,
never an asshole. I had to draw him out, and I think he
was more engaged because I had a brain. I was the
only one who was there every day of the trial so he
actually saw I had an interest in stuff. And he liked my
mother’s car . He thought
it was cool. I’m not making this up [but] I vaguely
remember him liking the air conditioning – ‘Cool air
conditioning, it really blows a lot of air.’ Then I dropped him
back off there.”
A second meeting took place, says Rosenberg,
“either at the Deauville or Carrillon” hotel, where he
shared a drink with Morrison and a bodyguard. Rosenberg
and the [bodyguard] when to the singer’s room. “He
came back up later with a couple of girls, the three
of us with these two girls. The girls are all ogling
Jim, he goes into the bedroom with them. I’m out in
the den area, it’s a suite, and one of the girls sort
of emerges pretty much undressed. There’s
pot-smoking and drinking of Scotch. He was pretty spacey.
Then in a teenage way I started groping the girl, she
was about 17 or so. [The Bodyguard] was certainly
having his jollies, too.”
Twice during the Miami proceedings, Morrison took a quick break to perform with The Doors –
first in California, then, on August 29, at the Isle Of Wight Festival. It was not the band’s finest
moment.
“The Isle Of Wight was one of our worst shows that I
remember,” says Robbie Krieger. “Jim was so bummed out about
his trial and he was just going through the motions.
If you listen to it, it sounds pretty good – but if
you watch the show he’s, like, stonefaced, he never
moves from the mike.” Morrison, so downhearted, would
later tell some of the press backstage that the show
might’ve been his last performance.
From the start, L.A. Woman seemed a hopeless
venture. With sessions beginning less than two months
after the Miami verdict, the mood at the Doors Workshop
studio was bleak at best. Paul Rothchild, the producer
who’d been with the band from the start, chose not to
produce the set, instead opting to work with Janis
Joplin. “We were bemused,” remembers Doors guitarist
Krieger, “because he had done all the other ones and…it
was sort of like he didn’t like the music. ‘It sounds
like cocktail music,’ he said about Riders On The
Storm. We were going, Oh shit, what do we do now? We’d
never been in this position before.”
Instead, L.A. Woman would be co-produced by the band and
long-time engineer Bruce Botnick. “We got excited,” says
Krieger. “Like kids in a candy store. Because as great a
producer as Paul was, he tended to overproduce, a little
bit like Hitler in the studio. Jim might’ve needed
that, but on the other hand, if it had been a little
more fun in the studio it might’ve gotten a little
better. With Paul everything just took so long and was so
drawn out that it would just make Jim bored and want to
go and drink. By the time it was his turn to sing,
he was all messed up.”
Botnick, witness to the recording of every Doors album, may have
the most interesting perspective regarding the singer’s behaviour
around Rothchild. When Jim Morrison was being bad, did
he know he was being so bad? “Absolutely,” says
Botnick. “The man did not like authority. Which goes back
to his father. And Paul through the years had become
the General – because of Jim sometimes being out of
control – God and master. After a while, Jim rebelled
against this. Because it wasn’t a group effort at that
time. It was Paul’s show.”
The resultant sense of freedom produced an album that was looser and more
bluesy than any they’d ever recorded. While a few of the tunes had been worked out in earlier live
performance, the bulk of them – including the title track,
Riders On The Storm and The WASP (Texas Radio And The
Big Beat) – were whipped into shape in the studio.
Guesting on the sessions were rhythm guitarist Marc Benno
and bassist Jerry Scheff.
“It was definitely special because we all played
live together,” says Manzarek. “Marc Benno played
rhythm guitar and Robbie played lead which was fun –[no] overdubs!
We were going for a much rawer sound – the spontaneous Zen moment.
Two weeks, man. The songs were all together. L.A. Woman
just fucking exploded in the recording studio, with Jerry Scheff and Marc
Benno. God, did we capture it! We smoked a joint and
locked in. [With] Riders On The Storm, we had a bit of a
problem figuring out the bass part. I sang it to Jerry
Scheff, and he said, ‘That’s really hard to play,’ and I
said, No, no, no – look, it’s easy, a little easy
triad. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way it lays out on the
keyboard, but watch what I have to do on the bass.’ And
then he started to play that bass line, man, it was
just spooky. That song became itself in the recording
studio – those two songs were born
there.”
Recorded at the Doors Workshop, directly across the street
from Elektra Records, L.A. Woman boasts its unique
live-in-the-studio sound largely from practical necessity; no album
had been recorded there previously, and the
soundboard – the same one the band had once used at Sunset
Sound – had been specially carted over from its most
recent home across the street. That the studio had no
echo chamber was easily remedied by a simple matter of
structural acoustics: Morrison did much of his singing in
the studio bathroom. Former Doors manager Bill
Siddons once remarked that he’d seen the singer drink 36
beers in one day during the recording of L.A. Woman.
“That was a new record for him,” noted Siddons. “And,
needless to say, that was a day when the bathroom got a
lot of use.”
On December 12, 1970, Jim Morrison and The Doors gave their last performance
at the Warehouse in New Orleans. Within three months, the
singer would leave the country and never return.
Local scenemaker Pamela Des Barres had known Morrison in the
early days of The Doors and recalls the last time she saw
him in Los Angeles. She’d been walking down La Cienga
Boulevard, on her way to audition for a commercial, when
Morrison, driving in the other direction, spotted her and
did a U-turn.
“He was so sweet and so full of life,” says Des Barres. “I hadn’t seen him that way in a long time.
So I thought that, wow, something good is happening for Jim.
Because he was sort of a down-and-out figure before he left for France.
Everybody thought he was pathetic. Everyone was used to seeing him in a
real bad way. He was quite a debauched, drunken sot
before he moved away, and he’d become almost a sad
fixture in Hollywood. Part of the reason he went away was
to start fresh. He had his big beard and everything,
but he was slimmed down somewhat and looked really
good and vibrant. He just said, ‘I wanted to say goodbye – I’m going to France.’”
Soon enough, he did.
UK
September 2001 Issue
Death Cat Bounce
With L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison
emerged from a dark well of booze for The Doors' final
comeback. A rock god's last stand by Dave
DiMartino.
City of light or city at night? It is 1968, maybe '69,
and we are walking through the throngs of people
crowding the Sunset Strip. The sweet aroma of marijuana
fills the air, and the crowd is thickening somewhere
between Clarke and Hilldale. Traffic has slowed to a near
standstill, and, beautifully, nobody actually seems to care -
except maybe the cranky few in Cadillacs and
Continentals who chose this traffic route on their way home to
Beverly Hills and Bel Air.
Equally jammed is the
Whiskey A Go-Go, sweltering, smoke-filled and happening
indeed. At a table near the back a contest is going on.
Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, is tonight
just another spectator, matching Three Dog Night's
Jimmy Greenspoon drink for drink while the band - who
can remember their name? - play on obliviously. Not
quite obliviously, however. Because Jim Morrison, when
not drinking, is screaming very loudly at every
possible oppertunity. He is having a good time. So good a
time, in fact, that the Whiskey's manager strolls over
and tells the Lizard King that - regardless of who he
is - if he doesn't keep his mouth shut, he will be
asked to leave the premises.
Within minutes, more drinks arrive and James
Douglas Morrison is happily perched atop a table,
screaming louder than ever. Minutes later, the contest has
moved outside, where Morrison and Greenspoon, forcibly
ejected, now take brief respite. “I’m out on the kerb
sitting next to Morrison,” Greenspoon would later recall.
“I said, Now what? And Jim said – very calmly –
‘Well, now let’s go to the Galaxy.’”
“The mood
was weird, the mood was strange. Jim was struggling
mightily with the difficulties of success and stardom.”
The year is 1994, the speaker is late Doors producer
Paul Rothchild, who helmed all of The Doors’ recordings until their L.A. Woman finale.
“They always thought they might have a nice little career. The
group they patterned themselves on and aspired to be as
big as was Them. The fact of the matter is that Them
were never a big band – they were underground even at
the height of their very small success. Their other
heroes were Love. To them that was stardom. Of course
Arthur Lee never went on the road, and they never really
met Van Morrison until much later. So they really had
no grasp of what it was like to have this sudden
incredible celebrity. So Jim, with the publication of a lot
of the photographs – the famous photographs,
bare-chested and looking real good – wound up as a sex idol.
And Jim found that difficult. And the way he dealt
with the instant celebrity was to dull it with
alcohol.”
In late 1969, The Doors were up against it:
1) Singer Jim Morrison had just returned from Miami, where
he’d pleaded not guilty to four separate charges
resulting from the band’s riotous performance there in
March.
2) The Doors had effectively been banned from performing
in the States as a result of the Miami concert, with
30 planned dates cancelled by wary
promoters.
3) Though a commercial success, their previous album The
Soft Parade, was poorly received by critics who found
the horns and string-laden affair distinctly
un-Doors.
4) By all indications, Morrison’s creative wellspring
might be running dry, as the majority of The Soft
Parade’s material had been penned by guitarist Robby
Krieger.
5) Morrison had an alcohol problem.
Then again, the year was 1969 when an album a year, at the very least, was the norm.
When the majority of American concert
promoters have essentially told you you’re not wanted,
making a new album is the very least you can do. And so
it was that The Doors entered the studio and began
to record what would become Morrison Hotel.
“Because of Miami, there hadn’t been much songwriting,
especially from Jim,” recalls engineer Bruce Botnick, the
man at the board for each and every Doors album
through to L.A. Woman, which he co-produced. “He wasn’t
into it. And they didn’t woodshed together as much as
they had in the past, no time. [Morrison] was deluged
with legal problems. I can equate it with if you’ve
ever had a break up with a girl, or your wife or
something like that. There’s a lot of pain, and that’s
about all you can think about – that’s what the trial
was like. So it was very hard for him to write. Some
people get off on that and write love songs or whatever.
He didn’t, he didn’t have the……he just wasn’t into
it.”
Among the things Jim Morrison was into was drinking.
Heavily. According to keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who
founded The Doors with Morrison in August 1965, there
were two batches of drinking buddies: the earliest was
a pair named Frankie and Wes, whom the ever polite
Manzarek calls simply “cowboy trash”; the latter a trio
referred to as Morrison’s “faux Doors”, including pals
Babe Hill, Paul Ferrara and Frank Liscandro. “A couple
of them were from UCLA,” Manzarek now recalls. “And
actually…..you can’t blame them. They were running around with
Jim Morrison. A fucking rock star, man, and we know
him from UCLA! And he wanted to drink! Well, shit
man, we’ll drink with you! I don’t think anybody led
him into it – but they certainly didn’t say, ‘You
know, Jim, you really ought to stop drinking with us
and go back home and write some good poetry to record
with The Doors.’”
As one of Morrison’s very best friends, Manzarek could only tolerate the situation with great disdain.
“I couldn’t go along with
it,” he says, “I wasn’t going to go out to a bar and
drink all night. I always wanted to say, Jim, stop
doing this, but never did. He was dissipating his
artistic abilities in loose bar talk. After you’ve talked
for three or four hours, with a bunch of guys
laughing heartily at your jokes, there’s no reason for you
to go home and write. You’ve talked your creativity
away. That’s what drunks do. And for that, I had
nothing but disdain.
“But Jim wanted to sit around and drink – ad, by God, there wasn’t anything I could say.
He’d come in with songs, with lyrics, and they were always excellent – so if he chose to destroy
himself through drink….my God, that’s your choice, man.
Who knew he would die? This was an era of potheads
and acidheads. 27-year-old people weren’t alcoholics.
Alcoholics were bums on skid row.”
Familiars of the band point to the drawn-out
recording of the previous The Soft Parade as being
Morrison’s relative low-point in the studio – his “total
drunk phase”, as Manzarek calls it. Much of it had to
do with producer Rothchild, then in – as Manzarek
puts it – “his anal-retentive perfect recording
phase”.
Having recorded the first two albums at Sunset
Sound and Waiting For The Sun at TT&G Studios, the
fourth Doors album was put to tape at the brand new
Elektra Sound Recorders studio in LA. The plush studio
would later be proudly displayed on the inner sleeve of
the late ‘60s Elektra albums, with the charming
notation: “Artists who have recorded here include Judy
Garland, The Doors, Rhinoceros, and Delaney and Bonnie.”
Entering the premises in late November, the band would
take a total of nine months – a century, by past
standards – to finish the disc.
Typical procedure for making Doors albums
involved getting an appropriate sound from each instrument
– which often took hours – balancing the sound and
then, finally, when it all was satisfactory, Morrison
would be called in to sing. The Soft Parade’s
instrumental intricacies, which involved strings, horns and
even the odd fiddle (on Runnin’ Blue), meant that
Morrison had an enormous amount of time on his hands; that
time, by and large, was spent, you guessed it,
drinking.
Still, according to Manzarek, by the time the band came
into Sunset Sound to make Morrison Hotel, things had
actually been getting better. “Jim was over his great
drunk and knew he has to be in the recording studio. He
was there, on top of it and didn’t come in totally
intoxicated. He knew what he had to do.”
“Miami had happened,” said producer Paul
Rothchild in 1994, “and we knew we weren’t going to be able
to tour. We needed to try to expand The Doors’ fan
base with a more commercial album – The Soft Parade –knowing that after we did that album, we would do
something very roots, go all the way back to
Venice.”
Though the blues had been a part of The Doors’ music
since their four-sets-a-night at the Sunset Strip’s
London Fog club in 1966, the only recorded evidence to
date had been the memorable Back Door Man from the
band’s debut album. But the imprint of the blues never
left their live performances, and often served as
ground zero when the band jammed together in their
workshop. Opened in February 1968 and located near the
intersection of La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevards in West
Hollywood, the Doors Workshop would serve as a rehearsal
space and, eventually, the recording studio for L.A.
Woman. (Three decades later it’s long gone, its
structure proudly sitting – in true City Of Light fashion –
between a Koo Koo Roo chicken restaurant and an auto
stereo shop.)
“John [Densmore] didn’t like the blues thing,” recalls guitarist Robby Krieger today.
“Because whenever Jim would get drunk, he’d always want to do the blues. So it was like,
‘Oh God, here we go again’ – in which many nights in the studio were kind of
wasted, ‘Hey, let’s play Jimmy Reed for an hour.’ you
know? I could see his point. But I personally loved
playing Jimmy Reed for an hour, so I never had a problem.
But I know he was thinking – just doing blues to fuck
off is one thing…it’s not really making a record.
Although some great songs did come out of that
environment.”
One of those was Morrison Hotel’s towering opener
Roadhouse Blues, featuring harp playing by John Sebastian
(credited as G. Puglese) and which today Bruce Botnick
rightly calls “the quintessential bar band song. Go to
any bar in the United States and you’ll hear it.” It
set the mood for an album that seemed to roar out of
the stereo with a confidence reassuring to those who
felt that the band had lost their way. Those who cared
about songwriting credits noticed Jim Morrison’s name
on each of the tracks; each of Morrison Hotel’s
tracks once again bore his seal of poetic approval. The
remainder of the tracks rocked, hard, while softer tracks
like Indian Summer even envoked the melancholy majesty
of The End.
But the material hadn’t come entirely easy; nor was all of it new.
Indian Summer was one of the very first songs the band had attempted
in the studio when laying down the demo for Moonlight
Drive in 1965. “We recorded Indian Summer just to hear
the sound,” Manzarek remembers. “It was just a little
ditty. We never did it [live], we had The End. We
weren’t going to do a short little raga when we had 12-15
minute Oedipal love song to do.” Likewise, both Blue
Sunday and Waiting For The Sun had been sitting around.
They’d attempted the latter during the album sessions
bearing the same name, but “it hadn’t baked enough”, says
Manzarek.
More interesting was the construction of Peace Frog,
which typified the process by which the band would come
up with an appropriate music track. “Peace Frog was
a song that created itself in the studio,” says
Manzarek. “Jim had these lyrics ‘She came, she came, she
came, just about the break of day.’ Said Paul
Rothchild, “ We need more of that, man, that’s not
enough. Paul and Jim went through some of Jim’s notebooks
and found a poem called Abortion Stories, and said,
‘This one, right here. “Blood on the streets.” Great.
Fit that in there somehow.’ And Jim did, ‘Blood
stains on the palm trees and rooftops of
Venice.’
For once, everyone was happy with Rothchild’s
suggestions.
“He had a lot of suggestions and Jim took them
readily,” says Manzarek, “When Paul went through that
anal-retentive phase on The Soft Parade John Densmore said ‘We
can’t do this ever again, man.’ Paul kind of got the
point. ‘Oops, maybe I have gone too far. He definitely
lightened up for Morrison Hotel.”
The seeming return to form signalled by Morrison
Hotel should have meant that The Doors were back.
However, the same month that recording started on the
album Jim Morrison was back in legal trouble. On a
November 11 Continental Airlines flight from LA to Phoenix
to see The Rolling Stones, a drunken Morrison and
“faux Door” Tom Baker engaged in behaviour sufficiently
rude to get them arrested upon their airport arrival.
Newspaper accounts at the time reported the pair had “used
vulgar language…and threw glasses across the aircraft
while it was in flight”. Though Morrison would
eventually be acquitted (an airline employee had confused
Morrison with Baker), the charge of interfering with the
flight of an aircraft was still another crisis looming
over the singer’s head during the sessions. And the
Miami trial proceedings had yet to even
begin.
“People ask me about Morrison, ‘What was he like, man?’”
says Henry Diltz, the distinguished LA photographer
whose work adorns the covers of some of the biggest
albums in pop history, including Crosby, Stills And
Nash’s debut and The Eagles’ Desperado. “I always say he
really was a poet – he had a poet’s attitude. The word I
use is ‘bemused’. He always had a kind of bemused
little smile on his face when he would talk to people.
Especially the day we went and did the Morrison Hotel cover,
down in the flea-bitten area of LA.”
Diltz, not only a photographer but an member of
the Modern Folk Quartet, remembers Morrison well. “I
would see him around town. The Modern Folk Quartet
played at the Whiskey around the same time as they did –
so I saw him first as a fellow musician before I
ever became a photographer – and he was always very
friendly. I’d see him in stores around town, in shops with
his girlfriend, and he’d say, ‘Hey, man, how are you
doing?’ It was a ‘60s thing, outgoing, small talk. Never
standoffish or anything. But I would say he was a quiet guy – he was introspective. Definitely.”
Morrison’s on going legal skirmishes were spoken of so rarely that
Diltz can’t fully remember if the Morrison Hotel cover
shoot took place before or after the Miami concert
(it was in fact afterward). Instead, he recalls an intelligent man who simply enjoyed life.
“We went down to skid row to have a drink, “ Diltz says of the
shoot, which showcased the band behind the front window
of the last-legs, decrepit Morrison Hotel at 1246
South Hope Street in downtown LA. “And we ended up in
the old Hard Rock Café – which had been there since
the ‘30’s, so it didn’t mean rock n’ roll, obviously.
We were all in a Volkswagen van, saw that, and then
said in one voice – Oh man, we’ve got to stop in
there. We spent about an hour in there, having a couple
of beers and talking to all these old guys. Jim
loved to hear them talking about there lives. When we
were through, he said, ‘C’mon, let’s go into a couple
of other bars.’ We’d just sit at a table, buy some
guy a drink and just get him to talk. [Jim] didn’t
talk much himself. He’d sit there and just nod and
have that little smile on his face, like he was
drinking stuff in, observing life and people.”
And for all the talk of the image of the Lizard
King, it is interesting to note that the one-time
shirtless Morrison allowed photographer Diltz to shoot to
his heart’s content without offering direction. “It
never seemed to be a big deal to him. I just shot a rap
group who were very concerned about every stance and
how they looked; they really wanted to throw shapes
in a very certain way, very controlling. He wasn’t
at all. Very natural. We spent a day walking around
Venice Beach taking pictures, and he was right there –
into it but quiet. Very accessible.”
The last full year of Jim Morrison’s life was an odd mixture of
the very good and the very bad. Simon & Schuster
released his book, The Lords And The New Creatures,
bearing a photo of its author, the bearded “James Douglas
Morrison”; he and writer/author Patricia Kennealy were
joined together in some unofficial form of matrimony,
the holiness of which remains debatable, and both
Morrison Hotel and the Absolutely Live set garnered
respectable reviews. “I know this is a most horrifying rock
‘n’ roll,” said Creem’s Dave Marsh of the former,
“and I know The Doors have presented us with the best
record I’ve ever heard. So far.”
Additionally, on April 20 Morrison was acquitted of the Phoenix charges
stemming from the airline incident when the key witness –an airline stewardess –
reversed her testimony,
resulting in the case being thrown out of the court. At the
same time, shows such as Detroit’s Cobo Hall performance –
now documented on CD – proved The Doors were still a viable,
and powerful, rock ‘n’ roll band. On the other hand, the night before flying to Miami to finally
stand trial, Morrison was arrested in LA for public drunkenness after a resident found the singer
curled up and sleeping on his front doorstep. The next
day?
Miami.
Beginning on August 10, 1970 and extending
intermittently through a month, Jim Morrison’s Miami trial
ultimately resulted in a guilty verdict, rendered on
September 20. Though guilty only of two misdemeanour
offences – indecent exposure and public profanity – the
offences were enough for him to potentially face six
months in jail. As might be expected, his attorneys
immediately appealed the verdict. And what did Jim Morrison
do that month in Miami? Aside from stand
trial?
Not especially glamorous – but previously unreported
– are two encounters between Jim Morrison and Doors
fan Steve Rosenberg, a 16-year-old medical student
doing advanced placement research at Miami’s Cedars Of
Lebanon Hospital, today an obstetrician/gynaecologist in
private practise in LA. Taking his mother’s car to drive
to the hospital, Rosenberg also spent much of August
1970 attending Morrison’s trial.
“As the crowds died, I finally actually got to talk to him a little
bit,” says Rosenberg today. “I talked to him about some
poetry – Rimbaud – and what kind of music he was
listening to – Pink Floyd. At one point during a lunch
break he asked me what I was doing, and I told him I
was doing this medical research thing. He asked me if
there was a Burger King around there. And I said, Yeah,
I’m going back to the hospital, I can give you a
ride. Instead of just dropping him off, I joined him
for lunch. He had two Cheese Whoppers and a
malted.”
What did he look like?
“He was fat. Fat and bearded. Looked like he did on American Prayer and a little spacey.
Not, like, warm and friendly but cool,
never an asshole. I had to draw him out, and I think he
was more engaged because I had a brain. I was the
only one who was there every day of the trial so he
actually saw I had an interest in stuff. And he liked my
mother’s car . He thought
it was cool. I’m not making this up [but] I vaguely
remember him liking the air conditioning – ‘Cool air
conditioning, it really blows a lot of air.’ Then I dropped him
back off there.”
A second meeting took place, says Rosenberg,
“either at the Deauville or Carrillon” hotel, where he
shared a drink with Morrison and a bodyguard. Rosenberg
and the [bodyguard] when to the singer’s room. “He
came back up later with a couple of girls, the three
of us with these two girls. The girls are all ogling
Jim, he goes into the bedroom with them. I’m out in
the den area, it’s a suite, and one of the girls sort
of emerges pretty much undressed. There’s
pot-smoking and drinking of Scotch. He was pretty spacey.
Then in a teenage way I started groping the girl, she
was about 17 or so. [The Bodyguard] was certainly
having his jollies, too.”
Twice during the Miami proceedings, Morrison took a quick break to perform with The Doors –
first in California, then, on August 29, at the Isle Of Wight Festival. It was not the band’s finest
moment.
“The Isle Of Wight was one of our worst shows that I
remember,” says Robbie Krieger. “Jim was so bummed out about
his trial and he was just going through the motions.
If you listen to it, it sounds pretty good – but if
you watch the show he’s, like, stonefaced, he never
moves from the mike.” Morrison, so downhearted, would
later tell some of the press backstage that the show
might’ve been his last performance.
From the start, L.A. Woman seemed a hopeless
venture. With sessions beginning less than two months
after the Miami verdict, the mood at the Doors Workshop
studio was bleak at best. Paul Rothchild, the producer
who’d been with the band from the start, chose not to
produce the set, instead opting to work with Janis
Joplin. “We were bemused,” remembers Doors guitarist
Krieger, “because he had done all the other ones and…it
was sort of like he didn’t like the music. ‘It sounds
like cocktail music,’ he said about Riders On The
Storm. We were going, Oh shit, what do we do now? We’d
never been in this position before.”
Instead, L.A. Woman would be co-produced by the band and
long-time engineer Bruce Botnick. “We got excited,” says
Krieger. “Like kids in a candy store. Because as great a
producer as Paul was, he tended to overproduce, a little
bit like Hitler in the studio. Jim might’ve needed
that, but on the other hand, if it had been a little
more fun in the studio it might’ve gotten a little
better. With Paul everything just took so long and was so
drawn out that it would just make Jim bored and want to
go and drink. By the time it was his turn to sing,
he was all messed up.”
Botnick, witness to the recording of every Doors album, may have
the most interesting perspective regarding the singer’s behaviour
around Rothchild. When Jim Morrison was being bad, did
he know he was being so bad? “Absolutely,” says
Botnick. “The man did not like authority. Which goes back
to his father. And Paul through the years had become
the General – because of Jim sometimes being out of
control – God and master. After a while, Jim rebelled
against this. Because it wasn’t a group effort at that
time. It was Paul’s show.”
The resultant sense of freedom produced an album that was looser and more
bluesy than any they’d ever recorded. While a few of the tunes had been worked out in earlier live
performance, the bulk of them – including the title track,
Riders On The Storm and The WASP (Texas Radio And The
Big Beat) – were whipped into shape in the studio.
Guesting on the sessions were rhythm guitarist Marc Benno
and bassist Jerry Scheff.
“It was definitely special because we all played
live together,” says Manzarek. “Marc Benno played
rhythm guitar and Robbie played lead which was fun –[no] overdubs!
We were going for a much rawer sound – the spontaneous Zen moment.
Two weeks, man. The songs were all together. L.A. Woman
just fucking exploded in the recording studio, with Jerry Scheff and Marc
Benno. God, did we capture it! We smoked a joint and
locked in. [With] Riders On The Storm, we had a bit of a
problem figuring out the bass part. I sang it to Jerry
Scheff, and he said, ‘That’s really hard to play,’ and I
said, No, no, no – look, it’s easy, a little easy
triad. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s the way it lays out on the
keyboard, but watch what I have to do on the bass.’ And
then he started to play that bass line, man, it was
just spooky. That song became itself in the recording
studio – those two songs were born
there.”
Recorded at the Doors Workshop, directly across the street
from Elektra Records, L.A. Woman boasts its unique
live-in-the-studio sound largely from practical necessity; no album
had been recorded there previously, and the
soundboard – the same one the band had once used at Sunset
Sound – had been specially carted over from its most
recent home across the street. That the studio had no
echo chamber was easily remedied by a simple matter of
structural acoustics: Morrison did much of his singing in
the studio bathroom. Former Doors manager Bill
Siddons once remarked that he’d seen the singer drink 36
beers in one day during the recording of L.A. Woman.
“That was a new record for him,” noted Siddons. “And,
needless to say, that was a day when the bathroom got a
lot of use.”
On December 12, 1970, Jim Morrison and The Doors gave their last performance
at the Warehouse in New Orleans. Within three months, the
singer would leave the country and never return.
Local scenemaker Pamela Des Barres had known Morrison in the
early days of The Doors and recalls the last time she saw
him in Los Angeles. She’d been walking down La Cienga
Boulevard, on her way to audition for a commercial, when
Morrison, driving in the other direction, spotted her and
did a U-turn.
“He was so sweet and so full of life,” says Des Barres. “I hadn’t seen him that way in a long time.
So I thought that, wow, something good is happening for Jim.
Because he was sort of a down-and-out figure before he left for France.
Everybody thought he was pathetic. Everyone was used to seeing him in a
real bad way. He was quite a debauched, drunken sot
before he moved away, and he’d become almost a sad
fixture in Hollywood. Part of the reason he went away was
to start fresh. He had his big beard and everything,
but he was slimmed down somewhat and looked really
good and vibrant. He just said, ‘I wanted to say goodbye – I’m going to France.’”
Soon enough, he did.