New York City NY:: Ondine November 1966 & March 1967

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Ondine Discotheque New York City

"If it hadn't been for Jac Holzman and Elektra Records, a New York outfit, we wouldn't have recorded. If it hadn't been for the media, the publicity we got in New York, the press and everybody, the radio, and the fans all behind us, there wouldn't be any Doors today." Ray Manzarek


November 1st 1966 The Doors played their first ever East Coast gigs arriving in NYC and checking into the Henry Hudson Hotel on 57th St.
They attend an extremely weird Halloween party at Ondine's on the Upper East Side.
This is the same place where they will be giving their month long East coast performances booked sight unseen and only by reputation as L.A.'s hippest band with a sound unlike anything that is being played in NYC.

During this time the band assists Paul Rothchild in the mixing of The Doors debut album and the band also shoot the photos for the album cover and a video for Break On Through at Elektra's studio in NY with Mark Abramson who is another of the labels top producers.
It is during the time in New York that Jac Holzman persuades the band to remove the word 'higher' from the mix as he plans to release this as the bands first single.
Elektra house producer Mark Abramson films the Break On Through video at Elektra Studio NYC. Meant for showing on TV slots it is sadly rarely shown which did not help BOT sales and the single is a flop.
During this stay The Doors spend Thanksgiving as guests at producer Paul Rothchild's home and take a night off from playing at The Ondine.
Jim comes on to Rothchilds wife....


There are a good few photos from Ondines.
Here is a selection from both 1966 and 1967.
The band played 3 stints at Ondine


November 1st -30th 1966









January 19th-29th 1967
The band are fortified by the release of their debut album and their first single 'Break On Through'.
Crawdaddy Magazine reviews the band during these performances and gives them more positive responses to the bands New York stay.
On the opening night Jim is filled with a furious energy throughout the set. At the end of the last song he leaps into the air and smashes his head on one of the low rafters.
Dazed and confused he recovers during the set break and is ready for action shortly after.


Crawdaddy January 1967

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

March 13th to April 2nd


Handbill for the concerts


Cashbox March 25th 1967

"First New York opening in a while. The Doors - Fresh from Los Angeles with an underground album of the hour - return. This time, they are worshipped, envied, bandied about like the Real Thing. The word is out or 'in' - 'The Doors will floor you'. So not all the pretty people in New York were present at opening night, but enough to keep a few publicity agencies busy. The four musicians mounted their instruments. The organist lit a stick of incense. Vocalist and writer Jim Morrison closed his eyes to all that Arnel elegance, and the Doors opened up. Morrison twitched and pouted and a cluster of girls gathered to watch every nuance in his lips. Humiliating your audience is an old game in rock 'n' roll, but Morrison pitches spastic love with an insolence you can't ignore. His material - almost all original - is literate, concise, and terrifying. The Doors have the habit of improvising, so a song about being strange which I heard for the first time at Ondine may be a completely different composition by now. Whatever the words, you will discern a deep streak of violent - sometimes Oedipal - sexuality. And since sex is what hard rock is all about, the Doors are a stunning success. You should brave all the go-go gymnastics, bring a select circle of friends for buffer, and make it up to Ondine to find out what the literature of pop is all about. The Doors are mean; and their skin is green."
Richard Goldstein, "Pop Eye," Village Voice, Mar. 25, 1967

March 1967 a photo shoot inside Ondine.







After two early trips East to play New York City’s famous Ondine nightclub — well before they were famous — the Doors returned in March 1967 to a series of shows running through early April that would establish them as a favorite of fans and critics.
The spark they received was a launchpad, especially in the dark days after “Break On Through” had been released (and fizzled on the pop charts) and prior to the national sensation that became “Light My Fire.”

On the third trip to NYC, the Doors intensified their mysticism and mystery for the celebrities and fame junkies that assembled at Ondine. While they had mainly been an underground hit on the two previous residencies, this time the press showed up too, eager to find out more about the psychedelic sounds emanating from Los Angeles and the beautiful singer who fronted the darkness.
Jim Morrison played up the differences between the coasts, which magnified his aura. As always, he spoke in proto-hippie lingo, but under a layer of foreboding. His words were sensuous and of the earth — heat, dirt, its elemental foundations.

“We are from the West. The world we suggest should be of a new Wild West. A sensuous, evil world. Strange and haunting…the path of the sun, you know.” — Jim Morrison
'Roadhouse Blues: Morrison, the Doors, and the Death Days of the Sixties' Bob Batchelor


Newspaper ad for the bands return in March 1967


March 23rd 1967
Village Voice NYC


March 1967
Cashbox Magazine

THE DOORS OPEN WIDE by Richard Goldstein 1967

"We are from the West. The world we suggest should be of a new Wild West. A sensuous, evil world. Strange and haunting....the path of the sun, you know."
That's what Jim Morrison, vocalist and writer-in-residence of The Doors, has to say about his music and his hometown. As part of the new wave in Los Angeles rock, he should know where things are at. Since a pop generation happens every two years or sooner, The Doors have the proximity to revere their elders, and the distance to be original.
Their initial album, on Elektra, is a cogent, tense, and powerful excursion. I suggest you buy it, slip it on your phonograph, and travel on the vehicle of your choice. The Doors are slickly, smoothly, dissonant. With the schism between folk and rock long since healed, they can leap from pop to poetry without violating some mysterious sense of form. But this freedom to stretch and shatter boundaries make pretension as much a part of the new scene as mediocrity was the scourge of the old. It takes a special kind of genius to bridge gaps in form. Their music works because it's blues roots are always visible. The Doors are never far from the musical humus of America- rural, gut simplicity.
The most important work on this album is an extended pop song called "The End." When Dylan broke the three-minute mold with "Like A Rolling Stone," pop composers realized that the form-follows-function dictum which has always guided folk-rock applies to time as well. A song should take as long as it takes.
"The End" is eleven and one-half minutes of solid song. It's hints of sitar and tabla and it's faint aroma of raga counterpoint are balanced by a sturdy blues foundation. Anyone who disputes the concept of rock literature had better listen long and hard to this song. This is Joycean pop, with a steam-of-consciousness lyric in which images are strung together by association. "The End" builds to a realization of mood rather than a sequence of events. It is also the fist pop song in my memory to deal directly with the Oedipus complex. "The End" begins with visions of collapsing peace and harmony, and ends with violent death.
The entire song revolves around a theme of travel, but this journey is both physical and spiritual. It leads to the brass-tacks fantasy of incest and patricide.Morrison provides us with a series of womblike halls and doors and a reference to Greek tragedy in the ancient gallery of masks. And he juxtaposes thisroot fantasy with a bluesy refrain which begins: "Come on baby, take a chance with us" and ends with the proposition: "Meet me in the back of the blue bus."
There is, of course, a danger in so academic an interpretation of a song like "The End." It's whole value is it's freedom to imply. Morrison's delivery (during the murder fantasy, it approaches gospel wailing) tells us to absorb first, and search later.
The Doors are a major event for Los Angeles. Their emergence indicates that the city of Formica fantasy is building a music without neon, that glows anyway.
New York Magazine March 19th 1967