The Doors Debut Album: 40 Years On

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

[glow=red,2,300]24th August 1966 The Doors begin the recording of thier first album.[/glow]

TheDoors4Scorpywag has been celebrating 40 years of The Doors for more than a year now and this is one of the GREAT milestones in that History and one that should separate us as fan from the T Shirt sellers……..
The band choose to celebrate 40 years since the release of the album in 2007, as there is money to be made in that, whereas the fan should choose to celebrate the actual recording of the album because the History of this great band is far more important than the shallow trivialities of sticking a 40 year label on a cover and flogging a few extra copies…………..to The Doors its about the record sales but to the fan its about the art of producing an utter masterpiece of recording History….Food for thought eh folks?

For the rest of August we will celebrate The Doors first LP here on Scorpywag Doors Talk.......we want to know what you think as a fan about the LP and the significance of this as far as the History of rock music is concerned.
This is without doubt one of the most important events in the History of rock and arguably the most pivotal event in The Doors History.
40 years on this record is hailed by many, even none Doors fans, as the greatest debut LP a band has ever produced.
So what do YOU as Doors fans think!

Wednesday Aug. 24th 1966 was a day in rock History unlike any other as four unknown musicians walked into Sunset Sound Recording Studios - 6650 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles and created Rock History in six amazing days.

What opinions do YOU have on this…
What was the significance of this recording, was it really worthy of hailing as one of the best rock debuts ever, do you actually like it, what are its strong points, what are its flaws, does it deserve to be remembered 40 years later?


For further information check out these related Doors debut LP threads

The Doors LP Info& reviews

Light My Fire: Doors Icon!

Paul Rothchild Speaks, March 1967

Artaud Rock: The Dark Logic of the Doors

The Scream Of The Butterfly

50 moments that changed the history of rock & roll

Doors Open Up - Freak Out, USA Feb 1967

Vote for The Doors!

Vote In Our Doors 40 Year Poll

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The Doors Record Their First Album with Paul Rothchild
They finish recording in six days which is remarkable considering what they end up with is considered the finest debut record any band in music History has ever recorded. Starting on Wednesday 24th August through to Friday 26th........a weekend off which may have been to fulfill a concert booking.....restart Monday 29th and completed Wednesday August 31st.


The first take they complete is Moonlight Drive which will not feature until the follow up Strange Days.
Also completed during this session is a version of Indian Summer which will be revamped years later for Morrison Hotel!

"Moonlight Drive....this is the first song we cut with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick at Sunset Sound in late August of 1966. Without them it would never have happened. All six of us were equally responsible for the magic."
Ray Manzarek Doors Box Set Booklet 1997.

The End is one of the albums strongest tracks and Rothchild nails it by switching between the two takes they record just before 'the killer awaoke before dawn' section.

The album is delayed until January 1967 to allow maximum impact but fails to ignite the music world until March 1967 when it enters the lower reaches of the charts not breaking the top 100 until May and the top 10 until July.

NB#1 Rothchild finds Ray's piano bass unsuitable for the recording studio so recruits well known session man Larry Knechtel, a member of what was referred to in LA as "The Wrecking Crew", on bass guitar and The Doors will feature session bass players on all their studio albums.....

NB#2 "The Wrecking Crew" was a loose aggregation of West Coast session musicians, who played every day in the L.A. studios it included the Infamous Carol Kaye (who claimed The Doors did not play a note on their albums), Leon Russell,Glen Campbell and Dr John (Mac Rebennack aka The Night Tripper).......................

SOME DOORS DEBUT THOUGHTS

Jac Holzman talking to DCM magazine
DCM: Whose idea was the famous 1967 LA billboard?

Jac: I saw a billboard and decided it was a good idea. Arthur Lee claims that I stole the idea from him which is not true. . .I had a feeling about the group. But here's the story of the record release delay [The Doors]. When the record was finished and mastered, which was October 1966, I had told them that we'd release the record in November. I began to get cold feet because I was worried about certain records that were coming out toward the end of the year that might take away from the impact I wanted The Doors to make, and also Christmas records had a longer season than they do now. So I was concerned about that. And also the boys wanted it out. I sat down with them and said, "Look guys, let's come out in January. January 4th when nobody's going to come out with a record. I won't release any other album that month so you have a clear shot."And that's what we did. That was an immensely important decision and concession on their part.

Paul Rothchild was always my choice to make that record, to work with that band. Paul, at first, didn't want to do it. There was a band that he saw in New York called The Paupers that he was more interested in. I finally just kind of pushed him into it and said, "You've got to do this." He agreed and he tackled it with the usual Rothchild energy which was total. I also thought he'd be the only guy able to stand up to every member of the band, either individually or collectively. I also thought that they had done a lot of wood-shedding [working with each other to create a unique sound] but their music wasn't organized for a record yet. And that Paul was the right person to help them give it shape but it had to be done skillfully. He was a terrific technician in the studio and backing him up with Botnick. . .Botnick was my favorite engineer for this kind of stuff and Bruce and I had worked together on Love. So I thought that was the right combination and I insisted that it be that way. It worked out brilliantly. Everybody at the company-people in the business affairs department kept everything going smoothly in our relationship with the band. We had a sense of what we were doing. We had a plan. I wrote every one of our 32 independent distributors that we had at the time in 1967. I said, "This is the best thing we've ever had and we need everybody's help on this one. This is it for us." And it turned out to be true. We had no hint that this thing was going to explode the way it did. It sold 10,000 a month for the first two or three months which was not an insignificant number of records and then it jumped to 250,000. I would say everybody within the label was important. The distributors caught that we really believed in this and gave some extra special help, so that was important.

DCM: Break On Through wasn't well received as a first release. Any thoughts in retrospect?

Jac: I've been faulted for releasing that single first. In the context of its day and at the time it was the right thing to do because if we were going to learn our way we were not going to learn our way on Light My Fire, rather with Break On Through and get the marketplace prepared. It was just too early to start with Light My Fire. Break On Through was a good tune for that, and we made a video for it. There is a film on that which we shot using our own camera with our own people, in-house, with an optical as well as a magnetic soundtrack, which was sent out to the various TV stations that ran dance shows. Elektra was independent without a lot of money and we couldn't afford necessarily to tour the band, but what we could afford to do was send this "video" out. And it worked. We sent out a lot of them.

Paul Rothchild Speaking to Paul Williams March 1967

Which are the earliest songs on the album?
‘I Looked at You’ and ‘Take It as It Comes.’ Those represent probably the genesis of the group, more than any others. The newer of the tunes are the ones that are deeper, the ones that show a greater maturity. ‘The End’ is newer. ‘The End,’ it's interesting, ‘The End’ was always a changing piece. Jim used it as a, almost an open canvas for his poetic bits and pieces and fragments and images and little couplets and things that he just wanted to say, and it changed all the time, it was always a changing thing. Now it rarely changes. Now that it's on record and the musicians can listen to it on record it is the statement they wanted to make and Jim tends to perform it that way. Sometimes he'll leave something out, sometimes he will put something else in but now it's a formed piece, it isn't that open canvas any more. And because of this, Jim commented to me recently, the thing he's most deeply concerned with right now is opening another canvas of that nature, something as broad in concept as ‘The End.’
Paul Rothchild Speaking to BAM magazine in 1981

PAUL: On the first album we used an uncredited bass player named Larry Knechtal on a few tracks. He was one of Phil Spector's boys. He came and played where Ray's piano-bass thing wasn't hot enough. We also overdubbed Morrison singing
harmony to himself on a couple of things.

"We didn't start out with such big ideas. We thought we were going to be just another pop group, but then something happened when we recorded 'The End'. We saw that what we were doing was more important than just a hit song. We were writing serious music and performing it in a very dramatic way. 'The End' is like going to see a movie when you already know the plot. It's a timeless piece of material . . . It was then that we realized we were different from other groups. We were playing music that would last for years, not weeks."
Jim Morrison

"The group was promoted modestly but enthusiastically. The BOT film was to be in places where The Doors couldn't appear to promote themselves. Primarily, it was for television. But it was getting their name out that was important then."
Danny Fields, Elektra promotions

"The first few days were frustrating because recording was not the same as playing live.
On the second day we laid down the track to 'Break On Through'. Jim did a work vocal that we could hear live in our headphones but which could be replaced if he wanted. Listening through the phones bothered me so I put one on my right ear and the other on the side of my head so I could hear the drums naturally..........After stumbling on a second take Jim did a third, erasing the second, as we were out of free tracks. We were recording on four track equipment.
'I like the first half of the original vocal and the second half of my second one'..............
'No problem' said Paul 'Bruce and I will glue them together in the mix'"
John Densmore from Riders On the Storm.

"The first album was like number ninety, and that was about all it was gonna be, and then came 'Light My Fire' and it went whee up to number one! . . . It happened so fast that we were still playing The Scene when the song hit the Top Ten. We could have been playing giant places and here we were stuck at The Scene making twenty bucks a night."
Robby Krieger

"The songs for the first album were written by all four of us. Ray wrote the introduction to "Light My Fire", but the lyrics for most songs were Jim's. The music was developed by all of us. For the lyrics Jim was a phenomena. He came to our sessions with a piece of paper he had scribbled some lyrics on. He was humming the music to it, and we all started work on the melodies. Especially the rhythm and the solo parts".
Robby Krieger 2000.

"When it came time to do 'The End' a very different mood took Jim over. He became shamanistic and led the small group on a shamanistic voyage. He put himself into a trance and, through that, put us all into a trance."
Ray Manzarek

"It was beautiful, it was one of the most beautiful moments I've ever had in a recording studio, that half hour when "The End" was recorded. I was emotionally wrung. Usually as a producer you sit there listening for all of the things that are right and all of the things that are about to go wrong. You're following every instrument simultaniously, you're following the feeling, the mood all the way through. In this take, I was completely, I was absolutely audience. I had done my job, there was nothing actually for me to do once the machines were rolling, I had made sure the sound was right on each instrument, you know when we did our setup, Bruce Botnick, the engineer, had been cued by me on everything that I wanted to do, and at the beginning of the take I was sitting there- producer- listening to take. Midway through I was no longer producer, I was just completely sucked up into it, and when we recorded it, the studio was completely darkened, the only lights visible were a candle burning in the recording studio right next to Jim whose back was to the control room, singing into his microphone, and the lights on the VU meters in the control room. All the other lights were off... it was...very dark...
It was a magic moment... Jim doing "The End", he was just doing it, for all time, and I was pulled off, right on down his road, he said come with me and I did it. It was almost a shock when the song was over, you know when Robbie played those last little tinkling notes on the guitar. It felt like yeah, you know, like it's the end, that's the end, it cannot go any further, that's the statement. I felt emotionally washed. There were four other people in the control room at that time, when the take was over and we realized the tape was still going. Bruce, the engineer, was completely sucked along into it and instead of sitting there at attention the way engineers are wont to do, his head was on the console and he was just- immersed. Just absolutely all the moves right, because Bruce and I had established a kind of rapport, he knew where I wanted things done and when, and when his work was done he did exactly the same thing, involuntarily, without volition, he didn't know he was going to do it, but he became the audience, too. So the muse did visit the studio that time. And, all of us were audience, there was nothing left, the machines knew what to do."
Paul Rothchild Crawdaddy Magazine August 1967

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Press reaction from 1967..........

"The Doors, a quartet who have been playing in the Los Angeles area for some time, have come up with their first album, which is named after them.
This Elektra album has a strange, new sound, but it is not strange in the fascinating directions pursued by the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Donovan or the Beatles.
Jim Morrison, lead vocalist, has a voice similar to that of Eric
Burdon, the Animals' singer, but he is somewhat overmannered, murky, and dull.
The best example of his faults is "The End," an eleven-minute thirty- five second exploration of how bored he can sound as he recites singularly simple, overelaborated psychedelic non sequiturs and fallacies. Many of the numbers drag and there is an abundance of banal lyrics, but The Doors do sound fairly good on "Break on Through," their current single, "Twentieth Century Fox," and "Alabama Song," which has a good rhythm backing and passable harmony."
"Doors Open Up," by Pete Johnson,
Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1967.

"If the Stones offer the experience of a great and established group performing up to complete expectations, a new group, The Doors, bursts into quick and deserved prominence like a sudden, unexpected bolt of lightning. The Doors (Elektra), superbly produced by Paul A. Rothchild, is a record which balances a lot of seeming paradoxes: expert, controlled, and precise in attack, the group nonetheless excels in performances which grow from pregnant understatement to exhilarating incandescence in a matter of seconds.
Judging from their premier effort, The Doors are the new group by
which all other new groups must, for a time at least, be measured."
"The New Group" by Paul Nelson, Hullabaloo, May 1967.

THE DOORS •
Somewhere out on Long Island there is a guy who is keeping himself busy by fashioning a Jim Morrison doll. Some think he is a sick boy, a very sick boy. But maybe there was nothing better to do? Why not? So for lack of anything better to do, he did this: he took a Marine G.I. Joe model, he threw away the camouflage clothing, which left exposed a groovy pink plastic body with an unprecedentedly large number of unmutated limbs and organs, and then he got himself some soft black leather, sewed it up (learning how as he went or maybe some random girl did it) on a machine, and planned, I think, to top it off with a brownish Barbie doll wig brushed back. iiiiiiiiiiR. Meltzer, too, has spoken of Morrison and leather: with Morrison, "Leather must be treated as functional—not the Warhol-Reed bit—held up in its black splendor by metal, or supporting a frail yet happy chuck-wagon bell." Clearly Morrison is the hero. As Gloria Stavers of Sixteen magazine has said: "Morrison is magic." Obviously. Morrison can inspire faith. He puts life into the scene. Ed Sullivan thinks, "Isn’t he handsome." And to quote the mystic and voodoo adept L. Silvestri, "I believe him to be a being not of this earth." But, we shouldn’t be entirely misled. The Doors, as a group, have a lot to do with faith. Morrison is merely the prettiest one dressed in leather. But, for example, who knows what evil lurks in the heart of Manzarek? iiiiiiiiii"Back Door Man" seen live many times, and then heard—at last—dead on the grooves, is a very neat thing. With all those grunts and stuff, it’s where the inordinacy really starts. (As well as the leather.) "I am," Morrison says, "the back door man. The men don’t know but the little girls understand." This is the spot for categorical statement. After too many years of bluesy overuse, this song can’t even prove disconcerting through embarrassment. "I am." And we are in the presence of definitive charisma. Mere categorical assertion slipping up and off into arrogance. "I am." Absolutely categorical assertion has here become systematically assertive. (If you say something strangely enough it assumes an inexplicable aura of strength.) The strength of this categorical assertion is so enormous that not only does it encompass the whole world (i.e., as a systematic construction), but it becomes unnatural. That’s when it surpasses all reason and arrives at Meltzer’s categorical magical. Starting with household fornication we’ve gotten to a magical collapse of the world. This is no sly boy. This Back Door Man has absolute faith ("I am") and is also inspiring. iiiiiiiiiiThe Doors are spectral. Maybe more than anybody. What counts is the impression for which no significant referent detail can or should be found. The music ends and there is no detail which you can refer to to actually justify your impression. But you have that impression. iiiiiiiiiiMovie music could have been a big influence. Check the surrealist organ on "Strange Days" and "Unhappy Girls," or that bass entrance on "You’re Lost Little Girl" which smacks of the pulp mystery (crime-detective) movie music of the era 1940-1960. I can see The Doors scoring the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" or even the fabulous "Mysterians." But it is your Krieger who really outdoes himself. This nice boy, often looking perplexed on stage, who may be the first with the Jimi Hendrix hair, who plays slowly with not as many notes as some, is revealed as a master of the left hand. A guitar scientist like the above Hendrix, he uses the instrument to produce explicitly technological-sounding sounds. Radically distending all sorts of notes on "Moonlight Drive." An inordinate number some might think, without realizing that with The Doors (especially on Strange Days) inordinacy (as with Hendrix) has become stylistic. iiiiiiiiiiDisorder has been rationalized by The Doors into something both comprehensive and modular. The spirit is comprehensive so as to taint anything they turn to. And modular so as to be applicable anywhere. That’s how The Doors taint the world. But understand there are kinds of purity. And the world can be purified by tainting it. Morrison has said: "It is a search, an opening of doors. We’re trying to break through to a clearer, purer realm." (And along these lines don’t you forget that the melody for "My Eyes Have Seen You" starts off like the Ajax ad, "Stronger Than Dirt.") Now if things have been absolutely tainted, they have also attained a certain absolute purity. An arrangement according to a perfect order.
CRAWDADDY MAGAZINE! 1967 by Sandy Pearlman

[jym]

I think The Doors' rise to fame is absolutely incredible, July 65 Morrison is some kid scribbling poems on Venice beach (now you have hundreds at any given time), & by August 66 they're in the studio, and July 67 a #1 hit song!? That's got to be one of the fastest climbs from obscurity there ever has been, less than 2 years & you have a hit song is about as close as you can get to an overnight sensation.

[cobriaclord]

The Doors didn't have time to waste in becoming popular. They were only around for 4 years.

[jym]

there was some calendar telling them in advance they only had 4 years?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

One noteworthy point about the Doors debut album is the element of spontaneity which came from a transition from The Whisky A Go Go to the recording studio that took only a few days which meant that the band brought the atmosphere from the club with them into their first album sessions. A longer wait may well have diluted that effect and as such made for a less enthralling debut recording.

“So what we did to break The Doors recording Cherry was to go into the studio with the band feeling they were going in for a session. I realised that we would probably blow a day or so but we went in to cut masters not screw around. We went in and cut two tunes…neither of which showed up on the first album. We didn’t stop at a perfect take…..we stopped at the one we felt had the ‘muse’ in it…..that was the most important thing for the take to have ‘the feel’ even if there were musical errors…..When the muse came that was the take.”
Paul A Rothchild.

"Jim and Robbie were constantly writing. What's more, they were a gigging band, so most of the songs had already been worked out and arranged. This was especially so during the first album, when they were playing at the Whiskey every night. They did a lot of woodshedding, and so when they came in it was just a case of translating the material into an album. There was some doubling of Jim's vocals and we overdubbed Larry Knechtel's bass on a couple of tracks, but ostensibly that record captured what they were like live."
Bruce Botnik

“Our first album has a certain unity of mood. It has an intensity about it. It came after a year of almost total performance, every night. We were really fresh and intense and together.
We started almost immediately, and some of the songs only took a few takes. We'd do several takes just to make sure we couldn't do a better one.It's also true that on the first album they don't want to spend too much.The group doesn't either,because the group pay for the production of an album. That's part of the advance against royalties.You don't get any royalties until you've paid the cost of the record.So the group and the record company weren't taking a chance on the cost.
For economic reasons and just because we were ready,it went very fast.”
Jim Morrison Rolling Stone 1969

"We were all kind of freaked out and intimidated by the studio” says Robby 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.”
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 chanting, "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."
Robby talking to GUITAR WORLD February 2003