The Doors Re-emerge

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Doors after Morrison
By Chris Van Ness for Poster Scene November 1971

Jim Morrison went to Paris to die.
We know that now in retrospect.
What not too many people know is that he also went to Paris to get away from The Doors and all the confusion with rock and roll that can destroy an artist.
Even before Jim had left there were rumours that The Doors were finished. Their contract with Elektra had just expired and no one was excited about getting back into the grind of recording and live performances for another four years. Nevertheless the Doors still exist.
Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore made a decision shortly after Jim’s death and their decision was to continue as The Doors. The immediate result is a new Doors album appropriately titled Other Voices. The album itself is a very uneven package to which all three contributed material.
The vocal assignment went mainly to Manzarek although Krieger also contributed.
The question most writers are asking is.
Is Other Voices a new Doors album or is it simply the debut album of a new group of familiar names.
The fact is that Jim Morrison clearly dominated the group and after his death The Doors were bound to take on a new sound.
Certainly there are traces of sounds with which we have become familiar but basically The Doors is a new group. As the title suggests the names are the same but the voices are other than we have come to know.
I spoke with Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to find out just how they had gone about reactivating the group after Jim’s death. Although I sensed some differences amongst the group and some general uncertainty about what they were doing I got mostly straight answers.
They had obviously thought very carefully about the subject before talking.

If I am correct you were planning on going out on your own before Jim died.

ROBBIE: Not exactly, no it was up in the air as to what we were going to do.

JOHN: Jim had gone to Paris because we were all just a little tired of the whole thing and he wanted to get away. I don’t know if he was writing or not!

RAY: We really didn’t know. We really didn’t know exactly what the fuck we were going to do.
JOHN: But we were all sort of still rehearsing because we liked to. And we thought Jim was writing lyrics but we were vague as to when he was coming back and decided to just take three or four months and …… let it all hang out.

RAY: It was one of those periods in life that you go through not too many times fortunately. When you don’t know what the hell you are going to do. It’s like graduating school or something. There you are the whole thing is over with….. now what are you going to do?
And that’s where we were. We didn’t know what we wanted to do and we didn’t know what Jim wanted to do. He didn’t know what he wanted to do.
But like John said we still kept coming down stairs and just fooling around with no specific direction in mind but we just kept making music just for the hell of it.
Cause you have to make music. You don’t lay off too long or you get itchy and you’ve got to get back and play.

When was the new album recorded?

RAY: Late July, August, September, right in there. I guess it took about two months mostly August and Sptember.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

JOHN: A couple of the songs were floating around maybe as long as a year ago but the rest of them are new. They might have been songs we thought of doing but it wasn’t right then and now it is.

Is there any of Jim’s stuff on the album?

RAY: No

Why did you keep the name The Doors?

RAY: Yeah we sure thought about that too.

ROBBIE: We were going to change it or we thought about changing it. We were trying to come up with something better and nobody could come up with anything that didn’t sound really pretentious.

JOHN: And everything else next to The Doors sounded kind of silly.

RAY: Besides that’s who we are and that’s ho we still are. At the beginning we were The Doors. Two thirds of the way through before Jim died it had become Jim Morrison and The Doors. We even thought about calling ourselves ‘And The Doors’.
We tried every different thing every different combination but it was always there in the first place staring us in the face.
The only logical direction was to continue on.

JOHN: But we were happy with the title of the new album indicating a new direction as well as new voices………and maybe at a new way of looking at everything.

But by keeping the name you’re leaving yourself open for a lot of criticism and an uphill battle to get yourself established or re-established?

JOHN: That’s true, we knew that. It’s uphill now but we want to do it. Like we’re going out on the road and boy it’s uphill.
Even with the name The Doors cause Jim’s gone.
But we’ve been hanging out for like eight months and we want to go and make music and play for people.

Who’s doing the singing now?

RAY: Robbie and I did a lot of it. I sang a couple myself and Robbie did a couple himself and then we did half of them together trading off lead lines and harmony lines. It’s really all mixed up now. Everybody gets a chance.

JOHN: Ray maybe sings a little more than Robbie but there’s a lot of harmony too…..
To try to get away from people saying that we’re just trying to replace Jim’s voice.

Did you ever consider finding another vocalist or adding anybody else to the group?

RAY: We thought about it …..we’d thought about maybe finding another guy. But it kind of seemed impossible to bring in another singer, to bring in another psyche, another personality. We’d been together too long and the four of us had worked together……..the three of us had worked together …..so long that the psychic communication is so strong that to bring in an outside personality and try to adapt to our vibrational wavelength and harmonise with another person’s vibrations. It takes a long time to really build that up and maybe you do build that up and what if he’s not the right guy?

JOHN: It would really be hard on the guy too because he would be pegged as Jim’s replacement. This way with Ray singing he’s not Jim’s replacement, he’s in the band and simply playing piano and organ while singing, it’s different.
On the road though we are taking two extra people. It’s so we can capture the sound we made on the record. So we are taking a rhythm guitar player who’s going to sing a little background and a bass player.
We’re finally getting a bass player on the road. It’s going to be really fun.
Bobby Ray is the rhythm guitarist and singer and Jack Conrad is the bass player. Jack did two or three tracks on the album.
We’ve always had a bass player for our albums, as we need that sound.

Are there going to be noticeable changes in the music? I mean Jim did dominate the sound of the group. Lyrically especially.

ROBBIE: I wouldn’t say he dominated musically but lyrically he certainly did. But yeah there’s a great change in both lyrics and music.

JOHN: We were all four equal parts but because of his lyrics and everything we tended to be very Jim orientated. He was a great poet. But now it’s our chance to open up a little more.

Do you feel this is a new group?

ROBBIE Yeah.

RAY: Yeah.

JOHN: Well it’s the same ……I play drums a certain way and it comes out of me. And the same with all three instruments. But it’s hard to be objective because we’re it.

ROBBIE: I don’t know if you’d be able to tell from the record if you didn’t know it was us. After you knew it might be easy.

RAY: Yeah it does sound like us, the way we used to sound and it doesn’t. It’s really strange. For me it’s just a further extension, it’s just the next album. It could never really be a complete departure because I still play the way I play and so do John and Robbie, and we communicate the way we have been communicating.

Who’s writing the material?

RAY: Robbie wrote a good percentage of the songs and I wrote a couple of them and two or three of the songs came through the group effort thing. And that’s pretty much how it’s always been….not that I wrote any before but it’s time to start writing now. And John wrote one himself but they all sort of happened through a group effort.
Sometimes Robbie will bring in songs that are really kind of complete, but sometimes he’ll have an idea and there’ll be an idea that was floating around six months ago and somebody else’ll come up with one immediately and those parts will just fit together and become a piece.

JOHN: I’d say about one third old because it’s the same people playing and two thirds sort of new……new group new scope.

John’s last statement seemed to best capture the consensus of the group. Individually the musicians are still very much themselves but the direction of The Doors has changed so much to the point they are a new group.
Other Voices has all the distinguishing marks of a debut album. Several musical directions some of which work and some of which don’t, but it is an honest album and shows a lot of promise.
The real test will come this weekend when The Doors headline a potentially great show at the Hollywood Palladium with Dr John and Curved Air.
My bet is that they will hold together and re-emerge as the same kind of important group they were when Jim Morrison was still with them.
It will be an interesting growth to watch.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Not a bad interview taken less than six months after Jim had died.

It has to be noted that the dishonesty was creeping in that early as they never mention the disharmony which resulted in Jim most likely leaving the band.
They keep secret the fact Jim had called a meeting and left the band which resulted in their seeking a new singer. Bill Siddons mentioned Mike Stull as a candidate and he would later work with John and Robby in Butts Band II.
They obviously have had plenty of time to work out what to say as an official line and I recall reading Doors Mk II interviews and getting the impression that Morrison had simply gone to Paris for a break and not as a permanent relocation.
They make it sound in the interview as if Morrison's death forces them to re-evaluate the band but John does give the game away a bit when he says..........
'But we’ve been hanging out for like eight months and we want to go and make music and play for people.'
.........they had been working on Other Voices since Jim left for Paris fully aware that he would not be coming back to The Doors fold.

They still had their heads screwed on to know that this knowledge would be damaging to any reimagining of The Doors.
Now the lies have become ingrained in Doors History and they most likely believe their own bullshit as they have been spouting it for 40 years.