Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Sept 13, 2011 13:42:48 GMT
GUITAR WORLD February 2003
"The Scream Of The Butterfly" by Alan Paul
Ignited by the success of 'Light My Fire,' the first two Doors albums introduced rock audiences to the tortured mind of Jim Morrison and his world of dark and strange possibilities.
In 1967, the Doors released their first two albums, The Doors and Strange Days, within 10 months of one another. It was an extraordinary feat of productivity, made more noteworthy by the fact that both albums spawned hit singles, while The doors went Platinum within months of its release. The surviving members of the group have various explanations for their prolific year. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, prone to spouting hippie wisdom, attributes it to "an intense visitation of energy" caused by the societal earthquake unleashed by the Vietnam War and a burgeoning youth culture. Robby Krieger, the group's pragmatic guitarist, merely shrugs his thin shoulders and notes that the band had been playing together for a few years and had a lot of good material ready to roll.
In any case, the band certainly had a busy year. More than 35 years later, both albums remain rock landmarks, so far ahead of their time that they never became dated. While most of the band's contemporaries long ago began sounding as frozen in time and place as Austin Powers, the Doors' music remains fresh and vibrant in a new millennium.
At the dawn of 1967, when the Doors appeared on the national scene, the hippie aesthetic was on the verge of exploding into America's mainstream. The Doors rode that crest to stardom with "Light My Fire," the song that in 1967 became the soundtrack to the Summer of Love. but they also saw beyond the dippy flowers-in-your-hair utopianism so popular at the time. Several years before it became apparent to everyone else, the Doors exposed the dark side of the psychedelic revolution in eerie songs like "The End." That epic, which closes The Doors, begins as a funeral dirge and ends nearly 12 minutes later with singer Jim Morrison ranting about fucking his mother and killing his father.
These aren't exactly typical hippie sentiments, but the Doors were always chock full of oddities. They were a rock trio with a jazz-oriented drummer, John Densmore, and they had no bass player -- Manzarek ably substituted by fingering a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass with his left hand while playing a Vox Continental organ with his right. Morrison was himself a bundle of contradictions, a strikingly handsome teen pinup and magnetic frontman who was also a poet and a deeply tormented alcoholic. And their secret weapon was a shy, spacey physics student named Robby Krieger. A flamenco guitarist who had been playing electric guitar for only six months when he joined the band, Krieger had a marvelous melodic knack. But even he wasn't aware of his gift until he wrote "Light My Fire," his first song and, of course, one of rock's most enduring classics.
"I really learned to play as a member of the Doors," he says. "I just tried to sound like myself -- I consciously avoided copying Chuck Berry or B.B. King because that's what everyone was doing. I tried to come up with the right part for the song and play something that would complement Jim's singing."
Krieger joined the band in the summer of '65, shortly after Manzarek's two brothers had quit. His presence jumpstarted the struggling, unnamed group. "The Doors did not really exist until I brought Robby in," says Densmore. "He added not only a great lead presence but incredible songwriting, which none of us knew he possessed."
With Krieger onboard, the band members began writing in earnest. They were still auditioning bass players in January 1966 when they were hired to play four nights a week at the Sunset Strip's London Fog. At this point they had about 25 original songs, including "Light My Fire," "Break On Through" and "The End," which was still a fairly simple ode to lost love. The band was signed and dropped by Columbia Records and seemed on the verge of breaking up when the Fog fired it after four months. But the female booker at the Whisky a Go-Go, L.A.'s premier club, had an open lust for Morrison, which helped the band become the Whisky's house band, a coveted gig for any group. The Doors, as Morrison had christened them, built a loyal following while opening for everyone from Van Morrison's Them to the Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. Following a tip by Arthur Lee, leader of Love, Elektra Records signed the Doors to a one-year, one-album contract with two one-year options and an advance of $5,000.
Thrilled with the deal, the band entered Sunset Studios to record its debut with Paul Rothchild, an Elektra house producer who had just gotten out of jail on a marijuana charge. In the studio, the group was anything but relaxed.
"We were all kind of freaked out and intimidated by the studio," says Krieger. "We were used to playing really loud, and suddenly our volume was brought way down because it would be too echoey to capture. It was a big adjustment.
Volume wasn't just an incidental matter; the band's entire sound was based on playing at very high decibels, something necessitated by Krieger's insistence on pushing his Fender Twin Reverb to the point of distortion. "In those days before decent overdrives, you had to be at 10 in order to get the speakers vibrating right and get the sound breaking up," Krieger says.
Initially, Manzarek was opposed to Krieger's high stage volume, primarily because he couldn't hear himself play. At the time Manzarek was playing an electric piano. Pushed to compete for volume, the keyboardist switched to playing the Vox organ that has become a hallmark of the Doors' sound. "My piano just didn't have the volume to compete with Robby and his Twin Reverb cranked to 10," Manzarek says. "I needed something to defend myself, so I got an organ and said, "'You're playing through a Twin Reverb, and now so am I. Let's go at it, sword to sword.' And we would just slash that Whisky a Go-Go audience with our sheets of sound."
In the studio, the band members used their stage gear, which had been upgraded thanks to the Elektra advance. Krieger played a Gibson Melody Maker and an SG through his Twin Reverb, augmented by a Gibson Maestro Fuzz. The guitarist needed this early pedal to compensate for the lower volume and resultant lack of natural distortion. Despite the band's hesitations, the debut album, recorded on four tracks, was completed in six days. After a single day of stumbling around, the Doors cut "Break on Through" on day two, then kept right on rolling.
Says Krieger, "Despite our comfort, we were able to do everything quickly because we basically just set up and played live, and we had been playing those songs for so long that we really had the material down cold. Everything was cut in one or two takes, usually with all of us playing live and Jim singing along, though he almost always redid his vocal later."
On the third day, when the band was going to record "The End," Morrison dropped acid and spent most of the day pacing the studio changing, "Fuck the mother, kill the father. Fuck the mother, kill the father," mirroring the song's dramatic and shocking lyrical climax.
"We were going, 'Yeah, right, Jim, but we've got to record. How about singing?' " recalls Krieger. "We finally got him into the studio for two takes, and we nailed it -- the vocal is actually Jim's live take. And then we thanked God, because we knew we weren't going to have too many cracks at it. But to this day, I don't think that particular version of 'The End' was anywhere near as good as the way we played it many other times."
"Actually, all the songs on the first album were skeletons of how we really played them," the guitarist continues. "It was just a combination of not having any studio experience and doing everything so fast. I also think that studios are, by nature, limiting. You cannot get the sound of five big amplifiers on a little piece of tape."
The band recorded for three more days, then spent two weeks mixing, and the album was finished. Released in the first week of 1967, The Doors surprised everyone in the group with its cover photo, which featured Morrison dominating the foreground and the other three members positioned deep in the background. "Nobody liked that," Krieger says. "Jim was adamant about it being the Doors, not Jim Morrison and the Doors. " They were more pleasantly surprised when Elektra sprang $1,500 to promote the album on a huge billboard on Sunset Boulevard, the first such prominent rock advertisement.
The album had such a good buzz and sold well in the Doors' hometown but did not immediately make much of a national impact. "Break On Through," the first single, made it to number 11 in L.A. with the help of incessant request calls to local radio stations by the band's friends and families. Nationally, the single peaked at 98 on Billboard's Hot 100. Right after the album's release, the Doors traveled north and made their first appearance at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, rock's premier room. They were paid $350 and billed third to the Young Rascals and Sopwith Camel. They returned three weeks later and were billed below the Grateful Dead and Chicago bluesman Junior Wells. For two months, the band didn't leave California, and neither did its impact.
Meanwhile, Dave Diamond was playing the nearly seven-minute-long "Light My Fire" on his pioneering FM radio show and receiving tremendous response. He invited Krieger and Densmore to his house, where he showed them a stack of letters from listeners requesting "Light My Fire." Diamond urged Krieger and Densmore to make a radio edit of the song that would put its length closer to the three-minute duration dictated by the then-dominant AM radio format. Convinced, the band tried and failed to re-record the song before allowing Rothchild to severely edit both Krieger's and Manzarek's jazzy solos.
"That song changed everything," recalls Manzarek. "We certainly would never have been as big without it. Our success would have remained more underground. 'Light My Fire' had the magic in it. In the Bible, when the Holy Ghost blesses Jesus' disciples, a little tongue of flame descends upon all of their heads. Well, a tongue of flame descended upon Robby's head when he wrote 'Light My Fire.' The fire touched him and he was blessed."
Eventually, "Light My Fire" would transform the Doors' world, turning them from a hip underground band into top-tier rock stars. But as the single rose in the charts, the band was still working the clubs. In June, the Doors were 3,000 miles from home and playing a cramped New York room when Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Grateful Dead and many others took part in the Monterey Pop Festival, the first great gathering of the hippie tribes. But by July, "Light My Fire" hit No. 1, where it remained for a month. The Doors had broken through.
The band kept touring, crisscrossing the country and heading back to New York for another club gig and a big round of press interviews. In August, the Doors returned to Sunset Sound to record their second album, which included a mix of old and new material. The first thing they did was work up the brand-new "People Are Strange," written days before by Krieger and Morrison in a sudden rush of inspiration.
"Jim came up to my house in Laurel Canyon one afternoon in one of his suicidal, downer moods," Krieger recalls. "I suggested walking up to the top of the canyon to look at the view and see the sunset. We went up and looked down on the sun reflecting off the top of the clouds. It was incredibly beautiful, and Jim had a total mood flip-flop. He said, 'Wow! Now I know why I felt like that. It's because if you're strange, people are strange.' And he wrote the lyrics right there. Then we went back down the hill and I came up with the music."
With The Doors riding high, advance orders for the new record were an astounding 500,000. That didn't seem to intimidate anyone in the group, though something else did -- engineer Bruce Botnick had received a mono, one-track reference disc of the Beatles' soon-to-be-released Sgt. Pepper's album from the Turtles, an L.A. group with whom he had recorded the hit 1967 single "Happy Together." The Doors listened to the album in amazement. They considered themselves the cutting edge of pop music and took pride in the rumor that the Beatles bought 10 copies of The Doors, but they immediately understood that the stakes had been raised. Listening to Sgt. Pepper's pushed them further toward experimentation, already underway thanks to the studio's seemingly remarkable leap from four tracks to eight in the few months since they had recorded their debut.
"Strange Days is when we began to experiment with the studio itself, as an instrument to be played," recalls Manzarek. "Having eight tracks to work with seemed really liberating. The studio became like a fifth member of the band."
Paul Beaver, a Hollywood musician and the West Coast distributor for the then-new Moog synthesizer, came to the studio to distort some instrumental and vocal sounds, including Morrison's vocals on "Strange Days," which sound on the second verse as if they're underwater. For "Unhappy Girl," Rothchild had Manzarek overdub his piano part with the tape running backward. With the track played forward, the instrument ended up sounding as if a shaker or tambourine were playing the correct chords.
But the group's experimentation involved more than working with different sounds. When it came time for Morrison to cut his vocal track for "You're Lost Little Girl," Rothchild suggested that the singer's girlfriend, Pam Courson, give him head while he sang. The idea was embraced by all.
Unfortunately for Morrison, studio antics of this sort were a rare occurrence. He was frequently bored by the extra time spent fooling around with sounds, and he would vanish for long lengths of time. But for the most part, he remained easy to deal with.
"Jim at that point was generally very professional," says Botnick. "When he was there, he was there. He listened to what was going down and had opinions. They worked as a unit."
On the whole, the band members were more confident and relaxed in the studio this time out, thanks to the success of The Doors -- and perhaps also to the large quantities of hashish they smoked throughout the sessions. But the sessions did have their Morrison-induced dramas. One night, Densmore and Krieger returned from the studio to find the house they shared thoroughly trashed. The singer had even urinated in Densmore's bed.
Morrison also caused problems when he didn't show up the night the band was supposed to record "When The Music's Over," the epic track that closes the album. The trio proceeded to cut the song without him, but was uncertain what to play during the middle, spoken-word section, which was completely improvised in performance, with the band responding to Morrison. On a hunch, the band guessed he would recite his new poem "The Scream Of The Butterfly," named after a porno film the band had seen emblazoned across a Times Square marquee. They were correct, and when Morrison showed up the next day to record his part, the results were perfect.
This difficulty aside, "When The Music's Over" is one of Krieger's shining moments. His psychedelic solo consists of several guitar tracks blasting off against one another, as Krieger alternates between minimalist, Eastern-influenced riffs and fuzz-laden freakouts. "He's entering Jimi Hendrix territory there," says Densmore, "experimenting with sound and making noise like airplanes landing while remaining within the song."
Krieger is equally proud of the song. He proclaims the solo his favorite and notes that the song's static harmony provided him with a serious challenge. "I had to play 56 bars over the same riff, which isn't easy but which we tried to do at the time thanks to our Miles Davis and John Coltrane infatuations. Coltrane soloed brilliantly over minimal chord progressions and I was always trying to play something that sounded like him -- just totally out there in terms of tonality. 'When the Music's Over' is the closest I ever came."
Just after the release of Strange Days, on October 30, 1967, Elektra announced that "Light My Fire" and The Doors had sold 500,000 and a million copies, respectively. The Doors had their first Gold single and Platinum album -- and immediately worried that there was no hit single on Strange Days. Morrison didn't seem to care, but the other three members fretted over how to duplicate the success of their debut and "Light My Fire." Eventually, "People Are Strange" was selected as a single, and it rose into the Top 10 before stalling. "Love Me Two Times" was released as a second single and was beginning to rise up the charts when an event got the Doors banned by the generally conservative AM radio stations.
On December 5, prior to the band's performance in New Haven, Connecticut, a cop in the venue's backstage area mistook Morrison for a fan and ordered him to leave his dressing room. The singer responded with a provocative kiss off and was promptly maced by the officer. During the show, Morrison used the middle section of "Back Door Man" to tell his tale to the audience, taunting the police, who remained in force. Egged on by Morrison, the cops circled the stage and moved in to grab the singer. They hauled him off to jail as the angry crowd threatened to rampage.
Morrison's arrest ended the Doors' incredible year in a way that set the tone for the rest of their tumultuous career. Soon after the New Haven show, the singer's drinking reached epic proportions, making the recording of 1968's Waiting For The Sun a torturous affair. The following year he was prosecuted in Miami for allegedly exposing himself onstage, a charge that got the Doors banned by the Concert Hall Manager's Association and effectively killed their performing career. Even the Grateful Dead never met such a fate, despite routinely serving their audiences garbage cans full of LSD-spiked Kool-Aid.
By the time they gathered to record L.A. Woman in 1970, Krieger says, the Doors felt like a "sinking ship." They produced a brilliant album -- and one last hit. Just days after the album broke into the Top 10, Morrison died in a Paris bathtub on July 3, 1971. The Doors' chaotic ride was effectively over.
Recently, Krieger and Manzarek played some Doors dates with singer Ian Astbury and former Police drummer Stewart Copeland. These collaborations will continue with a spring tour of the U.S. and summer tour of Europe, and may be followed by more American dates. Krieger and Manzarek are also planning to work on an album of new material.
It's significant that, although the Doors released numerous albums, their recent concerts have been dominated by material culled from the group's first two releases. They remain justifiably proud of their musical legacy -- and in awe of what they accomplished in just 12 months more than 35 years ago.
"We were just doing our thing," says Manzarek. "We were not under any kind of intense external pressure. But, God, it's incredible to look back upon what we did."
