Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 22, 2011 20:22:43 GMT
The Doors: Stoned Immaculate
"The man's been dead for seven years — or gone for seven years — and he's still causing trouble!" — Ray Manzarek
In my opinion, by far the most interesting album which came out last year, although maybe not the best — that's something that'll require thought for some time yet — was the very long awaited poetry LP by Jim Morrison and the Doors. Regular readers may recall that I caught John Densmore over here on holiday during 1977, when he suggested that the completion of the album was something like imminent. It was eventually released right at the end of last year, for reasons which we'll come to, but I'd definitely say that the wait was worth it — An American Prayer brought back to me so quickly the incomparable magic of the Doors, something which has been missing from our lives for far too long.
Of course, the interim period has seen various releases by various Doors, individually and collectively doing their best to recapture the unique spark that just blew away all the competition during the four years or so that the group functioned as a quartet. But there always seemed to be something missing — obviously it was Jim Morrison, but it wasn't just the sound of his voice or his excellent lyrics. Something happened when the four Doors played together that can only be described as a chemistry which produced something which has never been approached before or since, at least in musical terms. Well now, before we get really stuck back in a late '60's timewarp, with hippie mythology and indirect, meaningless adjectives, let's get on with documenting the conversation which took place last December when the three visible Doors, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, came to London to talk about An American Prayer, along with Frank Lisciandro, a friend of Jim Morrison, who had actually been around when Morrison recorded his unaccompanied 'vocals'.
So whose idea was it that this album should be made after all this time?
RK: Before Jim died, he went into the studio and started to record his poetry for a possible album, some kind of poetry album. The stuff was in the can, and Jim went to Paris where he finally died, but he was hoping to keep working on the project, although he never did. About five years later, I was thinking about that poetry he'd recorded — somebody must have mentioned it to me or something — and I called John Haeny, who was the producer who'd worked with Jim on the original recordings, and asked him what had happened to them. He said he still had them, and suggested that Ray and John and I come over and listen to them, to see if there was anything there, to see if there was something we could do with them, and that's how it started.
Were any of you other than Frank involved in the recording in any way at the time it was made?
RK: No, not at the time of recording. Jim had gone into the studio on his birthday, coincidentally — December 8th, 1970 — to record this, and what purpose it really had, I don't think anyone can be sure. I think Jim just wanted to get a lot of his stuff down on tape. He had a lot of poetry, he'd always been intrigued by poetry reading, so here was a chance for him to do a reading, and if possible put some kind of album together at some time or other. But he never got the chance to do that, so what we, the Doors, have done is to make Jim's poetry album for him, to try to complete it for him and put his words out in front of the public. He was a great poet, a brilliant poet, and I don't think people understand that — they think of him as he was, of course, a great rock 'n' roll entertainer, but he was more than that. He was a poet, and the Doors' original conception was poetry and music — that's why we got together in the first place, because Jim's words were so strong and the music we were able to make fit so well with what he was saying that it became one thing that was four people acting as one mind. So this is our tribute to Jim, our completing his poetry album for him.
Frank, what was your actual involvement in the recording with Jim?
FL: I was there on the evening of the recording — it was his birthday, I was a friend of Jim's, we'd made some films together, and Ray and Jim and I went to the film school at UCLA at the same time, so we'd known each other for a very long time. Jim was dedicated to the idea that he was a poet — he worked on his poems constantly — and he wanted to put them down one night, and his birthday seemed like an appropriate kind of celebration evening to put them on tape. Three or four of us went with him and he proceeded to spend four hours in the studio, we took a dinner break, came back, and he recorded some more of them. That was my involvement in the recording of the original poetry.
Were any of the poems on the album published in printed form before?
FL: Jim published himself three books, one called The Lords, one called The New Creatures and one called An American Prayer, and the only thing that's used in the record is the small edition, five hundred or so, of An American Prayer. (Note: The Lords and The New Creatures were published together in America as a paperback by Simon and Schuster.)
RM: An American Prayer was a private edition that Jim had put together to be distributed to friends and certain fans, and in the last seven years I've heard many people come up to me and say 'How can I get a copy of it? How can I get a mimeograph? How can I get anything? I've heard of An American Prayer, I want to read it.' So naturally, we thought that it would be one of the best things to include on the album — it was so good that it belonged in a larger scope than just five hundred copies out there somewhere. We wanted the whole public, everybody, to hear it.
Why do you think it is that the world is still ready for more Jim Morrison when most of the late '60s contemporaries of the Doors have vanished without trace, or are pale shadows of themselves?
JD: I think it's because of something we had in a record contract ,saying that nothing can be released without our approval — this record's quite good, and we've only put out what we consider quality, so we're really proud of this as a statement.
RM: I think that one of the reasons people are still intrigued with Jim Morrison is because his themes were universal — he was talking about a lot more than just the late days of hippiedom. The fact that we were recording in '67, '68, '69, '70, doesn't necessarily limit us to that time frame of when the revolution was happening, when the riots were happening in England. We've been sort of linked with that, but we've always felt that the Doors' themes were, as Jim used to say, primeval, back to the basic feelings of humanity. What we're talking about, and what Jim's talking about in this album, is life itself. He's not talking about any transient, trendy sort of thing, he's talking about a man on the planet. Where did we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we going? What happens at the end? That's why some people say Jim was obsessed with death, but it wasn't an obsession, it was an understanding that death is our constant companion. If there's one thing you know on this planet, the only thing, it's that you're going to die, and you'd better be able to come to peace with that idea. If you can come to peace, come to terms with the fact of your death, your life all of a sudden takes on a new meaning and blossoms open, because you don't have to worry about 'My God, I'm going to die, I've got to prevent my death’. You can't prevent your death. You have to live closely with your death, and I think Jim did — he lived with death over his shoulder, just waiting there at all times. "The future's uncertain, the end is always near", as he said. Not only did he deal in universal kinds of images and statements, he was himself a mythic, heroic figure, who lived his life in vital and dramatic terms all the time, so he gave a lot of credence to what he said by acting out the statements in his life. He defied the conventions of morality, he defied the conventions of what could or couldn't be said on stage, and that made his statements even more valid to young people who were themselves trying to break free, as every generation does, of the conventions of their parents. And now he's defying the conventions of morality one more time on this album. The man's been dead for seven years or gone for seven years — and he's still causing trouble.
How did you actually achieve the backings you put on the poems — I assume there was nothing but his voice on the original tapes...
RM: That's right, it was just the poems. But Jim, in his poetry, has always had a rhythmic sort of quality. I've always felt him to be in the tradition of the Greek poet, the classic spoken or changed poet, a man who gets on the stage and recites his poetry to handclapping or a drum beating, or to an implied beat. Jim always had that sense of implied rhythm in his poems, so consequently it was easy for us as musicians to lock into a rhythm one way or another. When we heard the poetry, we decided to use the implied beat and to make that rhythm explicit, to put the rhythm down that applies to each particular song. The first song on the album is ‘Ghost Song’ — in the end, he gets to talking about the dead Indians, the story about the dead Indians on the highway, so we knew that that needed an Indian beat — let's give it some feeling of the desert. So John got started on the drums, using that great tom-tom beat, and I put in an E minor seventh and E minor ninth on top of that, feeling that same rhythm, and Robbie started on his guitar, a couple of little licks and lines, and then on top of that, we put Jim's poetry. We spaced it out a little bit, made a little cut here — 'Wait, Jim, wait four bars, let us play this line, then you come back in again.' It was almost like working with the man in person. Having the words there was, in a way, a very eerie feeling, because Jim was there with us in the rehearsals. It was the three of us and Jim on tape — he wasn't there in person, but his presence was always there.
How well were you all getting on with Jim at this time, because there was a theory that he'd more or less left the group at the time he recorded this poetry...
RK: I think he recorded the stuff before L.A. Woman, and we were certainly together at that time — that was our last album with Jim, and there was no hint of the Doors breaking up at that point. In fact, I think L.A. Woman was our largest album since the first one.
JD: It was every day up and down — frustration — normal. But I think he was eager to make another record after L.A. Woman.
RM: Didn't he call from Paris and ask when we were going to do the next one? He'd heard that L.A. Woman was doing well, and wanted to get ready for the next one. Although it was always difficult working with Jim. The man was a genius and genius is allowed a very schizophrenic behaviour. Jim's behaviour — sometimes he could be an angel, and sometimes he could be a devil, but that's what was inside him, that's what was brilliant about the man. He had these demons — angels and demons were inside him. You never knew from one day to the next which Jim Morrison was going to be there — was it going to be the saint or was it going to be the devil? Whichever one it was, the words were going to be brilliant. So it was hard to work with him, of course, but on the other hand, it was a great joy to work with a man who was such a genius.
There appears to be one track here which is an out-take from Absolutely Live in ‘Roadhouse Blues’. Why did you choose that one particularly — was it the only one that was suitable?
JD: No, it's not that it was the only one that was suitable, we were just looking for a live cut to represent section four of the record which is Jim's public life, and that one just seemed to be right.
RM: It was real serendipity in a sense that we listened to all the out-takes from the live album. We knew we needed something live for the public life, and we had a live album out called Absolutely Live. Listening to the tapes, we found about six or seven takes of ‘Roadhouse Blues’, and we all wondered why we'd never used it on the live album. I think that be the grace of God it wasn't on Absolutely Live because it was just lying there, just waiting for its time to come out. It had never been used before, so there was something — we didn't have to go back and use a song we'd already used, here was a brand new piece of recorded material.
RK: Also, ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came out on the album right before we started working on the live album, so we figured that as we'd just done that one, we couldn't put it out live so soon afterwards. In fact, there was another thing we were going to use, but we had some trouble among ourselves as to whether we should use it. I don't want to say what it was —
RM: We can say it here in England — it was ‘Gloria’.
RK: Jim always liked to do ‘Gloria’ onstage, and we always figured we'd like to get a version of it out on some kind of record some day.
JD: We used to do it in the early days as one of our required top 40 songs in a club — you know, you had to play something popular, and we had a good time with that one.
Of the other music that's on the new album, was any of it recorded earlier than these latest sessions to complete the album? Obviously, there are bits of ‘The Unknown Soldier’, ‘WASP’ and ‘Riders On The Storm’ — are they from the original records or did you remake them?
RK: Those bits are from the original records, but all the new material was recorded in a two-month period. None of that is old, it's all brand new.
When John [Densmore] came over in June 1977, he said the album was likely to be completed by the autumn of '77. What have you been doing?
RM: Runing into snags. It was a difficult album to put together, because there was so much to choose from, so much to put into perspective, to put into a form. We tried to make the record biographical, in a sense. It traces the man from his childhood — the first part is his childhood, the second part is High School, the third part is the young poet with dreams of a poet, stoned on a rooftop in Venice (California) — acid dreams. The fourth part is public life with the Doors, and the fifth part is a final summation in a way of the man's entire life and his philosophy. So to get it in proper perspective, it took a long time. [Note: Those, like me, who are confused by the fact that the booklet with the album seems to have sections numbered one to eight should know that these numbers are merely page numbers within the booklet — you can tell which of the five sections is which by referring to the rear of the sleeve, where the five parts are separated.]
RK: The fact is that this album is so revolutionary in the way it was made that we really shouldn't have projected any dates, because there's no way to tell how long something that new was going to take to do. It turns out that for each little thing we thought shouldn't take longer than a month, we took three months.
RM: We had no models to fall back on: a record like this has never been made before, so there was no way we could say, 'Well, that's how they did it, so maybe let's take an idea from there'. I hate to brag and maybe toot our own horn, but in a sense, this is a totally unique album. A poetry and music album like this has just never been done — it's a unique experience, and I hope the audience, the people who will be listening to this album, will perceive that it's a unique experience. It's not an album to put on while you're doing your dishes or working on your car or making a model airplane, and it's not a disco album. You have to put this record on, sit down and listen to it. All it asks for is forty minutes of your time — if you'll give us forty minutes of your time, we'll take you somewhere that maybe you've never been before.
[Note: It was later suggested by someone that the ideal situation is after dark, with a joint. The album is not supposed to be played during daylight hours.]
There's been a rumour that you three gents [Ray, Robbie and John] are about to start performing together again. What's the truth or otherwise of that?
JD: Exactly what you said — a rumour. We just saw the press clipping and had a laugh.
OK then, what exactly are you all doing? John, you're an actor nowadays, aren't you?
JD: Yeah, I've been studying acting for a couple of years. As far as the three of us being together again in the future, it's uncertain. But we've really enjoyed working on this, I can say that.
Ray, since the demise of Nite City (or presumed demise), little has been heard of you until now. What have you been doing?
RM: There's a new Nite City record coming out here in Europe early in the New Year (1979) called Golden Days and Diamond Nights. That's an album we recorded about a year and a half ago back in Los Angeles, and due to internal complications with the company — the President being fired and that sort of thing — somehow the album got lost in the shuffle. (Another note, this time to Blondie freaks: among the members of Nite City was cuddly Nigel Harrison, who joined Nite City after leaving Silverhead). But at the moment, I'm a free agent; I'm not doing anything.
Robbie, you had an album out on Blue Note, which I suppose must have been quite an ego massage. Is that jazz way the direction you're going in?
RK: Yeah, I'm interested in jazz fusion and rock applied to jazz rather than the other way round, and I hope to be doing some more of that type of thing in the future.
Frank, what are you going to contribute to all this now this album's finished?
FL: Hopefully, I'm going to get back into being a film maker, which is what I started out doing and did for many years. I'm going to try to extract myself from the record business, which is a crazier world than the film business in Los Angeles, and try to get sane again.
RM: And we do have 50,000 feet of film footage on the Doors...That's lurking in the wings, and very possibly, that might be one of the next main projects.
JD: The reason it's lurking in the wings is because, like this album, if it's going to be done, it's going to be done right, and with time. That's why we have to all agree to pursue it, and then it'll come out properly.
Keeping the name of the Doors alive over years and years by taking a long time over anything you do...
FL: Rather just doing it well, so that the name stays around longer because the quality of the work is so high.
RM: I think that's the important thing for any artist — any record should be made with the idea that you're making something that's going to go down in history. The Doors have always had history on our minds, so we know that every record we've made, we've tried to make up to the top level of our standards. Nothing was put out just for the sake of making a buck, making that evil dollar, which is what's wrong with the world today.
*
It's not my intention to debate that last point, but there's more than a grain of truth in it, I suspect... Anyway, this latest piece of Doors documentation comes with the firm recommendation that you should try rather harder than usual to hear An American Prayer, which in my darker moments seems like the proverbial oasis in a sea of poor quality sand. But it is not recommended that you play this to those of a puritanical disposition, unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to come across the radio station version of the album, which omits, for obvious reasons, a lot of Jim's more extreme naughty words.
Now Jim, it seems to me that the statute of limitations on your Miami bust should have expired by now, so how about coming back and showing all the young pretenders to your rock 'n' roll throne just who is the King. Quite a lot of us are waiting, you know....
John Tobler, ZigZag, March 1979
"The man's been dead for seven years — or gone for seven years — and he's still causing trouble!" — Ray Manzarek
In my opinion, by far the most interesting album which came out last year, although maybe not the best — that's something that'll require thought for some time yet — was the very long awaited poetry LP by Jim Morrison and the Doors. Regular readers may recall that I caught John Densmore over here on holiday during 1977, when he suggested that the completion of the album was something like imminent. It was eventually released right at the end of last year, for reasons which we'll come to, but I'd definitely say that the wait was worth it — An American Prayer brought back to me so quickly the incomparable magic of the Doors, something which has been missing from our lives for far too long.
Of course, the interim period has seen various releases by various Doors, individually and collectively doing their best to recapture the unique spark that just blew away all the competition during the four years or so that the group functioned as a quartet. But there always seemed to be something missing — obviously it was Jim Morrison, but it wasn't just the sound of his voice or his excellent lyrics. Something happened when the four Doors played together that can only be described as a chemistry which produced something which has never been approached before or since, at least in musical terms. Well now, before we get really stuck back in a late '60's timewarp, with hippie mythology and indirect, meaningless adjectives, let's get on with documenting the conversation which took place last December when the three visible Doors, Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore, came to London to talk about An American Prayer, along with Frank Lisciandro, a friend of Jim Morrison, who had actually been around when Morrison recorded his unaccompanied 'vocals'.
So whose idea was it that this album should be made after all this time?
RK: Before Jim died, he went into the studio and started to record his poetry for a possible album, some kind of poetry album. The stuff was in the can, and Jim went to Paris where he finally died, but he was hoping to keep working on the project, although he never did. About five years later, I was thinking about that poetry he'd recorded — somebody must have mentioned it to me or something — and I called John Haeny, who was the producer who'd worked with Jim on the original recordings, and asked him what had happened to them. He said he still had them, and suggested that Ray and John and I come over and listen to them, to see if there was anything there, to see if there was something we could do with them, and that's how it started.
Were any of you other than Frank involved in the recording in any way at the time it was made?
RK: No, not at the time of recording. Jim had gone into the studio on his birthday, coincidentally — December 8th, 1970 — to record this, and what purpose it really had, I don't think anyone can be sure. I think Jim just wanted to get a lot of his stuff down on tape. He had a lot of poetry, he'd always been intrigued by poetry reading, so here was a chance for him to do a reading, and if possible put some kind of album together at some time or other. But he never got the chance to do that, so what we, the Doors, have done is to make Jim's poetry album for him, to try to complete it for him and put his words out in front of the public. He was a great poet, a brilliant poet, and I don't think people understand that — they think of him as he was, of course, a great rock 'n' roll entertainer, but he was more than that. He was a poet, and the Doors' original conception was poetry and music — that's why we got together in the first place, because Jim's words were so strong and the music we were able to make fit so well with what he was saying that it became one thing that was four people acting as one mind. So this is our tribute to Jim, our completing his poetry album for him.
Frank, what was your actual involvement in the recording with Jim?
FL: I was there on the evening of the recording — it was his birthday, I was a friend of Jim's, we'd made some films together, and Ray and Jim and I went to the film school at UCLA at the same time, so we'd known each other for a very long time. Jim was dedicated to the idea that he was a poet — he worked on his poems constantly — and he wanted to put them down one night, and his birthday seemed like an appropriate kind of celebration evening to put them on tape. Three or four of us went with him and he proceeded to spend four hours in the studio, we took a dinner break, came back, and he recorded some more of them. That was my involvement in the recording of the original poetry.
Were any of the poems on the album published in printed form before?
FL: Jim published himself three books, one called The Lords, one called The New Creatures and one called An American Prayer, and the only thing that's used in the record is the small edition, five hundred or so, of An American Prayer. (Note: The Lords and The New Creatures were published together in America as a paperback by Simon and Schuster.)
RM: An American Prayer was a private edition that Jim had put together to be distributed to friends and certain fans, and in the last seven years I've heard many people come up to me and say 'How can I get a copy of it? How can I get a mimeograph? How can I get anything? I've heard of An American Prayer, I want to read it.' So naturally, we thought that it would be one of the best things to include on the album — it was so good that it belonged in a larger scope than just five hundred copies out there somewhere. We wanted the whole public, everybody, to hear it.
Why do you think it is that the world is still ready for more Jim Morrison when most of the late '60s contemporaries of the Doors have vanished without trace, or are pale shadows of themselves?
JD: I think it's because of something we had in a record contract ,saying that nothing can be released without our approval — this record's quite good, and we've only put out what we consider quality, so we're really proud of this as a statement.
RM: I think that one of the reasons people are still intrigued with Jim Morrison is because his themes were universal — he was talking about a lot more than just the late days of hippiedom. The fact that we were recording in '67, '68, '69, '70, doesn't necessarily limit us to that time frame of when the revolution was happening, when the riots were happening in England. We've been sort of linked with that, but we've always felt that the Doors' themes were, as Jim used to say, primeval, back to the basic feelings of humanity. What we're talking about, and what Jim's talking about in this album, is life itself. He's not talking about any transient, trendy sort of thing, he's talking about a man on the planet. Where did we come from? What are we doing here? Where are we going? What happens at the end? That's why some people say Jim was obsessed with death, but it wasn't an obsession, it was an understanding that death is our constant companion. If there's one thing you know on this planet, the only thing, it's that you're going to die, and you'd better be able to come to peace with that idea. If you can come to peace, come to terms with the fact of your death, your life all of a sudden takes on a new meaning and blossoms open, because you don't have to worry about 'My God, I'm going to die, I've got to prevent my death’. You can't prevent your death. You have to live closely with your death, and I think Jim did — he lived with death over his shoulder, just waiting there at all times. "The future's uncertain, the end is always near", as he said. Not only did he deal in universal kinds of images and statements, he was himself a mythic, heroic figure, who lived his life in vital and dramatic terms all the time, so he gave a lot of credence to what he said by acting out the statements in his life. He defied the conventions of morality, he defied the conventions of what could or couldn't be said on stage, and that made his statements even more valid to young people who were themselves trying to break free, as every generation does, of the conventions of their parents. And now he's defying the conventions of morality one more time on this album. The man's been dead for seven years or gone for seven years — and he's still causing trouble.
How did you actually achieve the backings you put on the poems — I assume there was nothing but his voice on the original tapes...
RM: That's right, it was just the poems. But Jim, in his poetry, has always had a rhythmic sort of quality. I've always felt him to be in the tradition of the Greek poet, the classic spoken or changed poet, a man who gets on the stage and recites his poetry to handclapping or a drum beating, or to an implied beat. Jim always had that sense of implied rhythm in his poems, so consequently it was easy for us as musicians to lock into a rhythm one way or another. When we heard the poetry, we decided to use the implied beat and to make that rhythm explicit, to put the rhythm down that applies to each particular song. The first song on the album is ‘Ghost Song’ — in the end, he gets to talking about the dead Indians, the story about the dead Indians on the highway, so we knew that that needed an Indian beat — let's give it some feeling of the desert. So John got started on the drums, using that great tom-tom beat, and I put in an E minor seventh and E minor ninth on top of that, feeling that same rhythm, and Robbie started on his guitar, a couple of little licks and lines, and then on top of that, we put Jim's poetry. We spaced it out a little bit, made a little cut here — 'Wait, Jim, wait four bars, let us play this line, then you come back in again.' It was almost like working with the man in person. Having the words there was, in a way, a very eerie feeling, because Jim was there with us in the rehearsals. It was the three of us and Jim on tape — he wasn't there in person, but his presence was always there.
How well were you all getting on with Jim at this time, because there was a theory that he'd more or less left the group at the time he recorded this poetry...
RK: I think he recorded the stuff before L.A. Woman, and we were certainly together at that time — that was our last album with Jim, and there was no hint of the Doors breaking up at that point. In fact, I think L.A. Woman was our largest album since the first one.
JD: It was every day up and down — frustration — normal. But I think he was eager to make another record after L.A. Woman.
RM: Didn't he call from Paris and ask when we were going to do the next one? He'd heard that L.A. Woman was doing well, and wanted to get ready for the next one. Although it was always difficult working with Jim. The man was a genius and genius is allowed a very schizophrenic behaviour. Jim's behaviour — sometimes he could be an angel, and sometimes he could be a devil, but that's what was inside him, that's what was brilliant about the man. He had these demons — angels and demons were inside him. You never knew from one day to the next which Jim Morrison was going to be there — was it going to be the saint or was it going to be the devil? Whichever one it was, the words were going to be brilliant. So it was hard to work with him, of course, but on the other hand, it was a great joy to work with a man who was such a genius.
There appears to be one track here which is an out-take from Absolutely Live in ‘Roadhouse Blues’. Why did you choose that one particularly — was it the only one that was suitable?
JD: No, it's not that it was the only one that was suitable, we were just looking for a live cut to represent section four of the record which is Jim's public life, and that one just seemed to be right.
RM: It was real serendipity in a sense that we listened to all the out-takes from the live album. We knew we needed something live for the public life, and we had a live album out called Absolutely Live. Listening to the tapes, we found about six or seven takes of ‘Roadhouse Blues’, and we all wondered why we'd never used it on the live album. I think that be the grace of God it wasn't on Absolutely Live because it was just lying there, just waiting for its time to come out. It had never been used before, so there was something — we didn't have to go back and use a song we'd already used, here was a brand new piece of recorded material.
RK: Also, ‘Roadhouse Blues’ came out on the album right before we started working on the live album, so we figured that as we'd just done that one, we couldn't put it out live so soon afterwards. In fact, there was another thing we were going to use, but we had some trouble among ourselves as to whether we should use it. I don't want to say what it was —
RM: We can say it here in England — it was ‘Gloria’.
RK: Jim always liked to do ‘Gloria’ onstage, and we always figured we'd like to get a version of it out on some kind of record some day.
JD: We used to do it in the early days as one of our required top 40 songs in a club — you know, you had to play something popular, and we had a good time with that one.
Of the other music that's on the new album, was any of it recorded earlier than these latest sessions to complete the album? Obviously, there are bits of ‘The Unknown Soldier’, ‘WASP’ and ‘Riders On The Storm’ — are they from the original records or did you remake them?
RK: Those bits are from the original records, but all the new material was recorded in a two-month period. None of that is old, it's all brand new.
When John [Densmore] came over in June 1977, he said the album was likely to be completed by the autumn of '77. What have you been doing?
RM: Runing into snags. It was a difficult album to put together, because there was so much to choose from, so much to put into perspective, to put into a form. We tried to make the record biographical, in a sense. It traces the man from his childhood — the first part is his childhood, the second part is High School, the third part is the young poet with dreams of a poet, stoned on a rooftop in Venice (California) — acid dreams. The fourth part is public life with the Doors, and the fifth part is a final summation in a way of the man's entire life and his philosophy. So to get it in proper perspective, it took a long time. [Note: Those, like me, who are confused by the fact that the booklet with the album seems to have sections numbered one to eight should know that these numbers are merely page numbers within the booklet — you can tell which of the five sections is which by referring to the rear of the sleeve, where the five parts are separated.]
RK: The fact is that this album is so revolutionary in the way it was made that we really shouldn't have projected any dates, because there's no way to tell how long something that new was going to take to do. It turns out that for each little thing we thought shouldn't take longer than a month, we took three months.
RM: We had no models to fall back on: a record like this has never been made before, so there was no way we could say, 'Well, that's how they did it, so maybe let's take an idea from there'. I hate to brag and maybe toot our own horn, but in a sense, this is a totally unique album. A poetry and music album like this has just never been done — it's a unique experience, and I hope the audience, the people who will be listening to this album, will perceive that it's a unique experience. It's not an album to put on while you're doing your dishes or working on your car or making a model airplane, and it's not a disco album. You have to put this record on, sit down and listen to it. All it asks for is forty minutes of your time — if you'll give us forty minutes of your time, we'll take you somewhere that maybe you've never been before.
[Note: It was later suggested by someone that the ideal situation is after dark, with a joint. The album is not supposed to be played during daylight hours.]
There's been a rumour that you three gents [Ray, Robbie and John] are about to start performing together again. What's the truth or otherwise of that?
JD: Exactly what you said — a rumour. We just saw the press clipping and had a laugh.
OK then, what exactly are you all doing? John, you're an actor nowadays, aren't you?
JD: Yeah, I've been studying acting for a couple of years. As far as the three of us being together again in the future, it's uncertain. But we've really enjoyed working on this, I can say that.
Ray, since the demise of Nite City (or presumed demise), little has been heard of you until now. What have you been doing?
RM: There's a new Nite City record coming out here in Europe early in the New Year (1979) called Golden Days and Diamond Nights. That's an album we recorded about a year and a half ago back in Los Angeles, and due to internal complications with the company — the President being fired and that sort of thing — somehow the album got lost in the shuffle. (Another note, this time to Blondie freaks: among the members of Nite City was cuddly Nigel Harrison, who joined Nite City after leaving Silverhead). But at the moment, I'm a free agent; I'm not doing anything.
Robbie, you had an album out on Blue Note, which I suppose must have been quite an ego massage. Is that jazz way the direction you're going in?
RK: Yeah, I'm interested in jazz fusion and rock applied to jazz rather than the other way round, and I hope to be doing some more of that type of thing in the future.
Frank, what are you going to contribute to all this now this album's finished?
FL: Hopefully, I'm going to get back into being a film maker, which is what I started out doing and did for many years. I'm going to try to extract myself from the record business, which is a crazier world than the film business in Los Angeles, and try to get sane again.
RM: And we do have 50,000 feet of film footage on the Doors...That's lurking in the wings, and very possibly, that might be one of the next main projects.
JD: The reason it's lurking in the wings is because, like this album, if it's going to be done, it's going to be done right, and with time. That's why we have to all agree to pursue it, and then it'll come out properly.
Keeping the name of the Doors alive over years and years by taking a long time over anything you do...
FL: Rather just doing it well, so that the name stays around longer because the quality of the work is so high.
RM: I think that's the important thing for any artist — any record should be made with the idea that you're making something that's going to go down in history. The Doors have always had history on our minds, so we know that every record we've made, we've tried to make up to the top level of our standards. Nothing was put out just for the sake of making a buck, making that evil dollar, which is what's wrong with the world today.
*
It's not my intention to debate that last point, but there's more than a grain of truth in it, I suspect... Anyway, this latest piece of Doors documentation comes with the firm recommendation that you should try rather harder than usual to hear An American Prayer, which in my darker moments seems like the proverbial oasis in a sea of poor quality sand. But it is not recommended that you play this to those of a puritanical disposition, unless, of course, you are fortunate enough to come across the radio station version of the album, which omits, for obvious reasons, a lot of Jim's more extreme naughty words.
Now Jim, it seems to me that the statute of limitations on your Miami bust should have expired by now, so how about coming back and showing all the young pretenders to your rock 'n' roll throne just who is the King. Quite a lot of us are waiting, you know....
John Tobler, ZigZag, March 1979