Post by darkstar on Jan 1, 2005 23:59:32 GMT
LIVE AT THE WHISKY – SUNSET STRIP
By: David Kamp
Vanity Fair Magazine
November 2000
For most of America, the Whisky was one of the bossest things going in 1964. It quickly spawned imitators and hastily hired go-go girls frugging in hastily erected cages; even the Whisky itself spawned two short lived satellite franchises, in San Francisco and Atlanta.
Over in L.A.’s Westwood section, two U.C.L.A film students with intellectual pretensions, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were duly unimpressed with the goings-on a few miles off to the east. “The Whisky was for Hollywood swingers,” says Manzarek. “When you were at U.C.L.A., it was the antithesis of everything artistic that you could imagine. Everyone derided it. It was slick and Hollywood and Sunset Strip – a rock ‘n’ roll version of the Rat Pack…….And then we wind up being the house band there. How ironic life is.”<br>
The Doors were always different –never schmoozer-socialites in the John Phillips vein, nor folkies like the other bands had once been. As late as mid-1966, they were still considered something of a loser out-cast band, playing in a seedy dive next door to the Whisky called the London Fog, which came complete with indifferent drunken sailers and a B-grade go-go dancer. “Her name was Rhonda Lane, and was as little, as the Japanese say, genki – meaning substantial,” says Ray Manzarek, the band’s keyboardist. Densmore remembers peering forlornly through the door at the Whisky = which he couldn’t afford to get into – and seeing Love playing to adulation. “I really wanted to be in Love – they were making it,” he says. “But I was in the demon Doors.”<br>
But they got a break when Ronnie Haran, a young woman working as Valentine’s promotions director, sauntered to London Fog one evening and like what she saw. “She saw Jim, and that was it – she was smitten,” says Manzarek. “The arrows of eros went flying and struck her directly in the heart.”<br>
“That’s bullshit,” says Haran, who now goes by the name of Ronnie Haran Mellen. “Jim was too rough trade for me. I was smitten with the group. The poetry of the words – I’d never heard lyrics like that.”<br>
Whatever the case, Haran Mellen confirms that she launched an all-out campaign to sway her boss. Ronnie said, “You’ve got to put this band in,” and she told her friends to call and ask for the Doors,” says Elmer Valentine, who admits he was skeptical. “Well, I got so many phone goddamn phone calls, so I put them in. The 60s! Actually it wasn’t quite that smooth a trip to stardom fro Morrison and company. Though their residency at the Whisky in the summer of 1966 afforded them a fantastic opportunity to workshop the now famous songs that would form the first album – songs such as Break On Through, Light My Fire, and The End – the flower power kids didn’t always get Morrison’s Baudelaireisms or the band’s jazz odyssey explorations. As Densmore says, “We were darker. We were not folk rock. We would scare people.” And Morrison was even them a loose cannon, prone to scream unprompted “Fuck You, Elmer!” from the stage when drunk or otherwise chemically altered. Nevertheless, they became the toast of the Strip as the summer went on, their music proving to be particularly conductive to the Dionysian swaying of Vito’s dancers, whom Densmore admired for their ability “to Martha Grahamize what they were hearing.”<br>
One night, however, the Doors fierce experimentation proved too much to bear even for the indulgent Valentine. And it finished them off as a Whisky house band for good. A Doors set had traditionally ended, appropriately enough with The End. It had started off as a little two and half minute love song, a good bye song to a girl: “This is The End, beautiful friend,” says Manzarek. But though repeated improvisatory explorations at the London Fog and the Whisky, the song had grown into a 10 minute plus show stopper: Morrison would extemporize some Beat poetry, Densmore, Manzarek, and guitarist Robby Krieger would noodle around experimentally on their instruments, and they’d bring it home for a big finish. On the night in question, though, I looked as though they wouldn’t even get to play The End: Morrison had failed to show up for work. The other three made do playing jazz and blues instrumentals and would have done so for the second set had Phil Tanzini, still a presence at the club in ’66, not made plain that he was paying for a four man band and that the singer better show up or else.
Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore piled into Densmore’s Volkswagen bus and drove to the Tropicana, the Sandy Koufax – owned motel where Morrison happened to be living at the time. They found him in his room, “eyes blazing, wearing underwear and cowboy boots,” says Manzarek – totally gone on acid. Hastily, they dressed him, packed him into the van, and drove back to the Whisky. “He seemed to revive in the dressing room,” says Manzarek. “He had a beer and went back to normal. But his eyes still had that strange LSD blazing intensity about them.”<br>
Just three songs into the set, Morrison called for “The End” – way premature since they had about 40 minutes of performance time left. But the band obeyed and kicked in. As usual, they played a few verses before transitioning into the improvisatory section, where the instruments undulated in a raga style, leaving space for Morrison to freestyle on top. The musicians vamped and vamped, waited and waited….until Morrison finally spoke up. “The killer awoke before dawn,” he said. “He put his boots on….He took a face from the ancient gallery, and he walked on down the hallway…” It was the lead up to the famous Oedipal climax that everyone now knows from the recorded version of “The End.” But that night in 1866, no one had ever head of it before – including the other three Doors.
Morrison’s recitation was so mesmerizingly bizarre that the room fell silent – even the ambient nightclub hum was extinguished. The band continued to vamp quietly, perplexedly as Morrison got to the part where he says, “Father?’ Yes, son? I want to kill you.” “At that point, I realized. My God, he’s doing Oedipus Rex!” says Manzarek. “And then I thought, My God, I know what’s coming next!”<br>
Sure enough, Morrison, after a dramatic pause, came forth with “Mother…..I want to FUCKYOUMAMAALLNIGHTLONG YEAHHH!”<br>
The band instinctively erupted into a cacophonous frenzy and the audience broke out in furious free form dance – protomoshing. The crowd evidently, had loved it. But to the old fashioned, Runyonesque fellas in Valentine’s crew, this was way, way outta line. An appalled, disbelieving Maglieri summoned Tanzini as the drama unfolded to witness the scene for himself. “Phil Tanzini came running up the stairs (to the dressing room) saying ‘You filthy mother fuckers! You guys have the dirtiest fuckin’ mouths I’ve ever head in my life. Morrison, you can’t say that about your mother – ‘Mother I want to fuck you.’ What kind of pervert are you? You guys are all sick with that crazy, loud music! You’re fuckin’ fired!” Tanzini had already called Valentine, who was at home, and reported, “You got this fuckin’ Jim Morrison singing a song about fucking his mother! What are you gonna do?” Valentine responded, “Pull him off the stage and break his fuckin’ legs!”<br>
“I was serious!” says Valentine. “I was a redneck ex-policeman from Chicago! Catholic boy. Fuck your mother? That’s the worst thing I could ever….” The Doors were allowed to finish out the week, but were then sent packing. Though they would become only more famous in the following year as their debut album came out, they never played the Whisky again.
Ironically, though, Valentine and Morrison subsequently struck up an intimate friendship. As the fame got to Morrison and he began to self destruct, he used Valentines’ house as a hideaway when he felt like shirking his responsibilities. “He had four or five guys like me, people he’d hide out with,” says Valentine. “He couldn’t handle being that big. Remember how he got arrested in Miami for indecent exposure? He was up here in the house one night, and he said, “Would you like to hear what really happened? You don’t know what it’s like to be a pop star. They think I have a 12 inch dick. I wanted to show that I have a little one’ – and he did have a small dick –‘so that they’ll leave me alone.”’ In 1969, by which time Morrison was an alcohol-bloated mess alienated from the rest of the band, Valentine tied to get the singer into acting – his buddy Steve McQueen was involved in the production of a picture called Adam at 6 A.M., about a young college professor, and maybe Morrison could star in it. He persuaded Morrison to cut his hair and shave the beard he’d grown, the better to impress McQueen’s co-producers at a lunch meeting, but it was to no avail. Michael Douglas got the part.
By: David Kamp
Vanity Fair Magazine
November 2000
For most of America, the Whisky was one of the bossest things going in 1964. It quickly spawned imitators and hastily hired go-go girls frugging in hastily erected cages; even the Whisky itself spawned two short lived satellite franchises, in San Francisco and Atlanta.
Over in L.A.’s Westwood section, two U.C.L.A film students with intellectual pretensions, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek were duly unimpressed with the goings-on a few miles off to the east. “The Whisky was for Hollywood swingers,” says Manzarek. “When you were at U.C.L.A., it was the antithesis of everything artistic that you could imagine. Everyone derided it. It was slick and Hollywood and Sunset Strip – a rock ‘n’ roll version of the Rat Pack…….And then we wind up being the house band there. How ironic life is.”<br>
The Doors were always different –never schmoozer-socialites in the John Phillips vein, nor folkies like the other bands had once been. As late as mid-1966, they were still considered something of a loser out-cast band, playing in a seedy dive next door to the Whisky called the London Fog, which came complete with indifferent drunken sailers and a B-grade go-go dancer. “Her name was Rhonda Lane, and was as little, as the Japanese say, genki – meaning substantial,” says Ray Manzarek, the band’s keyboardist. Densmore remembers peering forlornly through the door at the Whisky = which he couldn’t afford to get into – and seeing Love playing to adulation. “I really wanted to be in Love – they were making it,” he says. “But I was in the demon Doors.”<br>
But they got a break when Ronnie Haran, a young woman working as Valentine’s promotions director, sauntered to London Fog one evening and like what she saw. “She saw Jim, and that was it – she was smitten,” says Manzarek. “The arrows of eros went flying and struck her directly in the heart.”<br>
“That’s bullshit,” says Haran, who now goes by the name of Ronnie Haran Mellen. “Jim was too rough trade for me. I was smitten with the group. The poetry of the words – I’d never heard lyrics like that.”<br>
Whatever the case, Haran Mellen confirms that she launched an all-out campaign to sway her boss. Ronnie said, “You’ve got to put this band in,” and she told her friends to call and ask for the Doors,” says Elmer Valentine, who admits he was skeptical. “Well, I got so many phone goddamn phone calls, so I put them in. The 60s! Actually it wasn’t quite that smooth a trip to stardom fro Morrison and company. Though their residency at the Whisky in the summer of 1966 afforded them a fantastic opportunity to workshop the now famous songs that would form the first album – songs such as Break On Through, Light My Fire, and The End – the flower power kids didn’t always get Morrison’s Baudelaireisms or the band’s jazz odyssey explorations. As Densmore says, “We were darker. We were not folk rock. We would scare people.” And Morrison was even them a loose cannon, prone to scream unprompted “Fuck You, Elmer!” from the stage when drunk or otherwise chemically altered. Nevertheless, they became the toast of the Strip as the summer went on, their music proving to be particularly conductive to the Dionysian swaying of Vito’s dancers, whom Densmore admired for their ability “to Martha Grahamize what they were hearing.”<br>
One night, however, the Doors fierce experimentation proved too much to bear even for the indulgent Valentine. And it finished them off as a Whisky house band for good. A Doors set had traditionally ended, appropriately enough with The End. It had started off as a little two and half minute love song, a good bye song to a girl: “This is The End, beautiful friend,” says Manzarek. But though repeated improvisatory explorations at the London Fog and the Whisky, the song had grown into a 10 minute plus show stopper: Morrison would extemporize some Beat poetry, Densmore, Manzarek, and guitarist Robby Krieger would noodle around experimentally on their instruments, and they’d bring it home for a big finish. On the night in question, though, I looked as though they wouldn’t even get to play The End: Morrison had failed to show up for work. The other three made do playing jazz and blues instrumentals and would have done so for the second set had Phil Tanzini, still a presence at the club in ’66, not made plain that he was paying for a four man band and that the singer better show up or else.
Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore piled into Densmore’s Volkswagen bus and drove to the Tropicana, the Sandy Koufax – owned motel where Morrison happened to be living at the time. They found him in his room, “eyes blazing, wearing underwear and cowboy boots,” says Manzarek – totally gone on acid. Hastily, they dressed him, packed him into the van, and drove back to the Whisky. “He seemed to revive in the dressing room,” says Manzarek. “He had a beer and went back to normal. But his eyes still had that strange LSD blazing intensity about them.”<br>
Just three songs into the set, Morrison called for “The End” – way premature since they had about 40 minutes of performance time left. But the band obeyed and kicked in. As usual, they played a few verses before transitioning into the improvisatory section, where the instruments undulated in a raga style, leaving space for Morrison to freestyle on top. The musicians vamped and vamped, waited and waited….until Morrison finally spoke up. “The killer awoke before dawn,” he said. “He put his boots on….He took a face from the ancient gallery, and he walked on down the hallway…” It was the lead up to the famous Oedipal climax that everyone now knows from the recorded version of “The End.” But that night in 1866, no one had ever head of it before – including the other three Doors.
Morrison’s recitation was so mesmerizingly bizarre that the room fell silent – even the ambient nightclub hum was extinguished. The band continued to vamp quietly, perplexedly as Morrison got to the part where he says, “Father?’ Yes, son? I want to kill you.” “At that point, I realized. My God, he’s doing Oedipus Rex!” says Manzarek. “And then I thought, My God, I know what’s coming next!”<br>
Sure enough, Morrison, after a dramatic pause, came forth with “Mother…..I want to FUCKYOUMAMAALLNIGHTLONG YEAHHH!”<br>
The band instinctively erupted into a cacophonous frenzy and the audience broke out in furious free form dance – protomoshing. The crowd evidently, had loved it. But to the old fashioned, Runyonesque fellas in Valentine’s crew, this was way, way outta line. An appalled, disbelieving Maglieri summoned Tanzini as the drama unfolded to witness the scene for himself. “Phil Tanzini came running up the stairs (to the dressing room) saying ‘You filthy mother fuckers! You guys have the dirtiest fuckin’ mouths I’ve ever head in my life. Morrison, you can’t say that about your mother – ‘Mother I want to fuck you.’ What kind of pervert are you? You guys are all sick with that crazy, loud music! You’re fuckin’ fired!” Tanzini had already called Valentine, who was at home, and reported, “You got this fuckin’ Jim Morrison singing a song about fucking his mother! What are you gonna do?” Valentine responded, “Pull him off the stage and break his fuckin’ legs!”<br>
“I was serious!” says Valentine. “I was a redneck ex-policeman from Chicago! Catholic boy. Fuck your mother? That’s the worst thing I could ever….” The Doors were allowed to finish out the week, but were then sent packing. Though they would become only more famous in the following year as their debut album came out, they never played the Whisky again.
Ironically, though, Valentine and Morrison subsequently struck up an intimate friendship. As the fame got to Morrison and he began to self destruct, he used Valentines’ house as a hideaway when he felt like shirking his responsibilities. “He had four or five guys like me, people he’d hide out with,” says Valentine. “He couldn’t handle being that big. Remember how he got arrested in Miami for indecent exposure? He was up here in the house one night, and he said, “Would you like to hear what really happened? You don’t know what it’s like to be a pop star. They think I have a 12 inch dick. I wanted to show that I have a little one’ – and he did have a small dick –‘so that they’ll leave me alone.”’ In 1969, by which time Morrison was an alcohol-bloated mess alienated from the rest of the band, Valentine tied to get the singer into acting – his buddy Steve McQueen was involved in the production of a picture called Adam at 6 A.M., about a young college professor, and maybe Morrison could star in it. He persuaded Morrison to cut his hair and shave the beard he’d grown, the better to impress McQueen’s co-producers at a lunch meeting, but it was to no avail. Michael Douglas got the part.