Los Angeles CA :: Whisky A Go-Go Sunset Strip 1966 & 1967

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Whisky A Go Go Los Angeles Sunset Strip CA 1966 & 1967


The Whisky A Go Go is synonymous with The Doors in the same way The Cavern is with The Beatles.
There is a great deal of myth, half truth and legend when it comes to the bands sojourn there.

The Doors didn't get fired rather dramatically due to The End.

Also they did not make their Whisky debut with Them.

This bit of myth so troubling they made a point of mentioning that fact in The Doors By The Doors their own retrospective.
But of course this piece of tosh only ever came from one source.
Ray Manzarek.
And the funny thing was, he was still peddling this even after the book came out.

This from 1983 one of many times Ray came out with this nonsense.
“Yeah, there were some good times at The Whisky-A-Go-Go, boy that's for sure. We played with Them; the first gig we played at The Whisky was Van Morrison and Jim Morrison - on the same stage. And Van Morrison was insane. You know how he got into just standing there and singing? I haven't really seen him in a long time, but when he was with Them, the guy was ALL OVER the stage, man. Absolutely insane. Did that thing of holding the microphone stand upside down, and singing, and smashing the mic stand into the stage, and just...God, was he incredible! He was so good. Then the last night we played we had a jam, We got a couple of photographs of that somewhere, but nobody recorded it. The Doors and Them, together on stage, the two Morrisons. Mmmmmmmh!”


LA Free Press




18-5-1967
LA Times


“I saw The Doors at the Whisky all summer long in 1966. I was a big fan of Van Morrison and Them and The Doors opened when they came to the Whisky. Love had always been my favourite LA band and I thought The Doors were very strange. But their sound grabbed me. They were covering Gloria and playing Moonlight Drive and it was a whole new sound.”
Paul Body saw the rise of The Doors on the Sunset Strip in 1966.





“I went to see Them at the Whisky and opening were The Doors. Ray denies it but I swear they were billed as The Swinging Doors. I thought Ray looked like John Sebastian and I remember talking to him in the Whisky bathroom. I thought he was a real nice guy but I hated the band. I really didn’t like watching Morrison drape himself over the microphone. I got pissed off and went to Elmer Valentine ,the owner, and said ‘hey, I’ve got a band better than this –can we get a job here’”.
Chris Darrow of fellow Sunset Strip act Kaleidoscope.

"I used to show slides at the Whisky on a couple of screens. Not so much a light show just a colourful close up of everyday objects. I had a picture of a flaming toilet – someone had poured lighter fuel in a motel toilet and I got a great shot of it. It was mixed in my slides at random but I remember it came up right as The Doors started playing ‘Light My Fire’. That’s the way it seemed back then – things would just fall into place very nicely."
Henry Diltz –Doors photographer.




“ A friend and I drove by the Whisky and saw Jim literally sitting in the gutter all by himself. We were on our way
to a party at Eric Burdon’s house so we picked him up. On the way there he was leaning out of the car
and I kept trying to pull him back. He was yelling and I thought he was going to fall out. We got a
little concerned at showing up at Eric’s house with Jim but it turned out to be a wild party and Jim fit right in”
Rodney Bingenheimer LA DJ 1966

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Proof The Doors did not open their 1966 Whisky residency supporting Them.



"I knew Jim had star quality the minute I saw him,.
. . I had a hard time getting hold of him, though,
because in those days he was living on the beach and no one knew quite where (he was sleeping under the
boardwalk in Venice). He didn't have a pot to piss in. I
had to dress him, get him some T-shirts and turtle
necks at the Army-Navy store, the leathers didn't come
until several months later."
Ronnie Haran, on the Doors early Whisky appearances

"He was kinda ahead of his time on certain things, like swearing, . .. But those calls kept coming in. 'When's that horny motherfucker comin' in' The phones were
incredible. We never got that many calls before for just a second group."
Elmer Valentine, Whisky a Go-Go Owner




The Doors at The Whisky



The Doors at The Whisky June 18th 1966








There was one in San Francisco as well but that was more of a strip joint advertising topless fencing on the same night The Doors were there in 1967

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Doors: Dionysian Frenzy
One night while playing at the Whisky a Go Go, Jim Morrison (reputedly while on a massive dose of LSD), began a story riff during "The End" - an atonal dirge which he had been working on about a failed romance.
When Morrison got to the passage about the killer and his Oedipal quest, he piqued the audience's interest with well-timed pauses - and then held back nothing: "Mother?" he said calmly, then shouted: "I want to fuck you!" as the band played in a frenzy behind him.
"John [Densmore] whacked on his drums, I pounded on my organ, Robby [Krieger] made his guitar scream like a banshee, and all hell broke loose," Ray Manzarek later recalled. "The people began dancing madly. Everyone went into a Dionysian frenzy. It was Greek! Oedipus Rex had been exorcised right there that night'

Jim Morrison , the boozing Byronic lyrisist and leather Lizard King leader of the Doors, was "just a mixed-up kid, but a good kid. I kicked his ass off-stage (when) he screwed around. He would never show up on time. But he was a good kid. He meant well. I tried to straighten him out. I saved his ass so many times."
Mario Maglieri



The Doors at The Whisky

On May 23, 1966, the Doors began their legendary engagement as house band at the Whisky A Go-Go. During their tenure at the Whisky, the Doors open for such acts as Them, featuring Van Morrison, Buffalo Springfield, Love, The Chambers Brothers and Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

Exposed to a wide-ranging audience — hardened groupies to Iowa tourists —The Doors began to experiment daringly. Allegedly, the experiments often took the form of drug trips, and weekly tales of The Doors' freaked-out adventures flew: “Morrison was so stoned last night he fell off the stage again”; “Ray sniffed an amyl nitrate cap and played so long he had to be dragged away from the organ”; “They all arrived stoned and started improvising at random—I don't know what it was, but it was great!” According to one friend of the group, Morrison was so consistently high on acid during this period that he could eat sugar cubes like candy without visible effect. But, inexplicably, the music kept getting better.


A pair of modern posters commemorating the bands Whisky debut.

A Not-So-Successful Night
The Doors played second billing to just about everybody at the Whisky. If the high points were nights with Love, Them, the Turtles, the Seeds, Captain Beefheart and others, there were nights which weren't so special ... One of these was the night they shared billing with the number one band in Mexico, the Locos. (“The Locos were a real low point in our careers,” recalls Manzarek. “They were terrible, the kids hated them, and we were caught in the cross fire.”) Fortunately, this was far from the rule during the Doors' installment at the Whisky.

Popular mythology has it that the Doors are repeatedly fired by proprietor Phil Tanzini. This story is not true, and is essentially an embellishment of the tension which existed between them. However, it is Phil who dismisses them in August on the night that Jim inserts the Oedipal section into The End.

The Doors' sets are comprised mainly of songs which will appear on their first two albums. Night after night they develop and refine their songs in front of a live audience. The End is gradually transformed from a rather transient love song of bittersweet departure into the ominous saga which evokes a descent into the dark night of the soul. In addition to their regular sets, they try out newer songs on the slower nights of Monday - Wednesday. Latin Bullshit #2 is an instrumental jazz piece roughly based on a Gil Evans composition. The instrumental serves as a filler, which they continue to play through the Ondine's gigs in New York. It later evolves into Away in India, featured in a medley often referred to as the People Get Ready Jam which they often performed in 1970. Their version of Summertime is a waltz instrumental loosely styled after John Coltrane's version of My Favorite Things. These two instrumentals often serve to open sets when Jim is late arriving at the club.
Eye Magazine

The Doors at The Whisky May 1966





The band at The Whisky May 1966

May 9th 1966 The Doors after losing their spot at The London Fog are invited by Whisky A Go Go talent booker Ronnie Haran to audition for a spot as House band for LA's Premier club spot
The Doors do a live audition for the house band spot and owner Elmer Valentine hires them on the strength of that show.

The band do not start immediately as they are hard to find as they have no permanent address and Haran (who is fixated with Morrison at that time) has a great deal of trouble trying to contact them. She finally tracks them down a couple of weeks later and readies them for their legendary stint at the Whisky A Go Go!

"Fortunately, an extremely sexy, pixie-voiced blond named Ronnie Harran, who booked the Whisky, saw us…She had an ear for talent…the Whisky was finally a gig we could be proud of…"-John Densmore, The Doors' drummer ("Riders On The Storm")

"I just remember that some of the best musical trips we took were in clubs. There's nothing more fun than to play music to an audience. You can improvise at rehearsals, but it's kind of a dead atmosphere. There's no audience feedback. There's no tension, really, because in a club with a small audience you're free to do anything. You still feel obligated be good, so you can't get completely loose; there are people watching. So there is this beautiful tension. There's freedom and at the same time an obligation to play well. I can put in a full day's work, go home and take a shower, change clothes, then play two or three sets at the Whisky, man, and I love it. The way an athlete loves to run, to keep in shape."
Jim Morrison

"Jim Morrison was just like a big kid," said Maglieri, who still speaks with a tough Chicago accent. "He was a good boy. It's too bad I couldn't straighten him out, because I tried awful hard. He would look at me all goofed up, and say, 'Oh Mario, I love you.' The reprimanding I gave him didn't do any good. But I tried my best."
Mario Maglieri