FTV: Sixty Years of The Doors

 

     The Doors were the hottest band in the summer of 1967.  Like a lot of bands who record a massive breakout album, people assume they spontaneously appeared on the radio without really knowing their backstory.  To me, a band’s backstory is key to how they get on the radio and become ‘the next big thing’.  The Doors’ jump to ‘success’ around the world in 1967 can be traced back to their true origins in Los Angeles in 1965.  To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the band’s founding, Classic Rock Magazine sat down with the two surviving members of The Doors (Issue #338, April 2025).  

     Drummer John Densmore set the stage by telling CM’s Rob Hughes, “How the (expletive deleted) have we lasted so long?  I’d hoped to just be able to pay the rent for a couple of years but now we’re on to sixty.  I could never have known we were going to have this big an impact.  I mean, wow!”  Guitarist Robbie Krieger’s take was a little different on how the chemistry in the band made it work:  “Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was meant to be, but it turned out to be the perfect amount of people at the right place at the right time.  I don’t know if The Doors could’ve worked with a different combination of people.”

     As the band reachs their six decade milestone, there will be a flurry of Doors related articles, books, and reissues hitting the market.  One of the first announced was Night Divides The Day, a book from Genesis Publications.  Genesis was given unlimited access to The Doors archives and the expansive feature will contain interviews with Densmore and Krieger, archival text from Ray Manzarek, rare photos, memorabilia, a limited-edition vinyl seven-inch disc plus the usual contributions from other famous artists like Van Morrison, Slash, and Krist Novoselic.  The Doors were the big thing in July of 1967 but let’s go back to the beginning and see where they got their start.  There is no doubt The Doors will be a hot topic (again) in the summer of 2025.

     Forget what you may have seen in The Doors biopic starring Val Kilmer as lead singer Jim Morrison.  He did an admirable job right down to singing their iconic songs, but it was a movie.

Movies live in a much smaller time frame than real life so some facts are ‘rearranged and/or edited’ to fit that format.  The movie kind of glosses over Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s shared UCLA Film School connection.  After graduating from that program, Morrison joined Ray’s band, Rick & the Ravens which included Ray’s two brothers.  When Densmore was invited to join the band, he found that he and Ray enjoyed the same kinds of music, particularly jazz.  Morrison was supposed to be the singer but he seemed reluctant to sing.  What the drummer did find fascinating about him was his poetry:  “He was kind of crazy and  really a novice (with his role as the lead singer), but I was staggered by his words.  I just heard rhythm in his lyrics and thought, ‘Poetry and rock ‘n’ roll!  I’m down.’”

     Apparently Ray’s brothers were not as ‘down’ with it as Densmore was so they quit.  John put in a good word about his high school friend Robby.  Krieger recalled, “At the audition, I think it was between me and my friend Bill Wolff, who started playing guitar before I did and was a little more experienced.  I was expecting him to get the job.  But the very first song we played was Moonlight Drive.  I thought, ‘That will sound good with slide on it.’  And that was it right there.”  Densmore continued:  “Ray and Jim kind of went, ‘Oh my God!  Put that bottle neck on everything,’ which would have been ridiculous.  But he was in.”  They all loved jazz and Robby’s interest in Indian music and flamenco guitar began to seep into the music.  They mined Ray’s extensive record collection for further inspiration.

     The biopic shows the early Doors holding court at a beach-side rental in Venice.  Before they got there, they bounced between Kreiger’s parent’s garage and a little place a friend let them use in Santa Monica.  Once they got a few more gigs and had the rent money, then they settled into life at Venice Beach.  Densmore told Hughes, “Venice was empty except for a few old Jewish people near the temple and a few old beatniks.  The Beat Generation was just before the Hippies, so it was deserted.  The rent was cheap and it was slightly dangerous (to live there).  We were writing all these songs and sitting on the beach, watching all the planes take off from LAX and dreaming that we’d be on one some day.”

     Densmore said he and Jim would make the rounds of bars and clubs that didn’t usually book bands and begged them to give them a shot.  Most didn’t, but they finally got a chance at the London Fog.  Jim was shy and insecure – he would perform facing the band with his back to the audience.  The first night they packed the Fog with UCLA film school friends by word of mouth but the place was all but empty the next night.  It was a crucial step because Morrison was still developing his vocal style and trying to shake his nerves.  They were fired one night after a fight they had nothing to do with.  Fortunately, the booker for the Whiskey Au Go Go happened to catch them that night.  “Ronnie Haran liked the band and the singer, and she talked the Whiskey owner into booking us,” according to John.  “When we started playing there, Jim began turning around and facing the audience.”

     There were several advantages to moving a couple of blocks over to the Whiskey.  First of all, they were playing several sets every night and Morrison began getting more comfortable with his singing.  Secondly, they were opening for big acts like Frank Zappa, The Byrds, and Van Morrison.  Krieger said he would never forget sharing the bill with Van Morrison:  “Them [Morrison’s band] was one of our favorite groups and we used to cover Gloria live, so it was cool to meet those guys.  The last night that we played with them, we all got up on stage together and did Gloria.

     Another condensed ‘plot mover’ from the biopic was the evolution of the song Light My Fire.  This was actually Krieger’s first attempt at writing a song and the movie shows them hashing it out at the Venice Beach house.  When they take a break, Kyle McClachland’s ‘Ray’ stays behind noodling while the others are basking on the beach.  He calls them back to play the iconic Bach inspired organ riff that everybody who has heard the song recognizes.  In reality, Light My Fire and The End (which were both on their eponymously titled first album) began life as three minute pop songs.   

     As they played the songs live, they evolved into the longer six and ten minute versions that would appear on the album.  As they extended the Light My Fire guitar and organ solos live, Ray introduced his Bach like organ figure as a way to get them out of the solo section and back into the verse.  When the time came to record Light My Fire for the album, producer Paul Rothchild heard the organ lick and said, “That part’s really cool.  Why don’t we start the song with that?”

Krieger points out they took his advice and it worked so well, they decided to tack it on at the end of the song.  Pop radio demanded ‘hits’ be three minutes long, so The Doors ended up trimming the solo parts for the 45 rpm version.  Manzarak’s catchy organ riff remained at the beginning, in the middle transition, and at the end. 

     Morrison was, “The most well-read guy on the planet,” in Densmore’s words.  If other band members wrote a lyric, he was free to make changes.  Many of the lyrics came from the pages of poetry he was constantly jotting down.  If he had a melody in mind, he would sing it to the band and we would work it out.”  Densmore continued, “Some were very complicated melodies.  The Crystal Ship, for instance.  Oh, my God! (sings) Before you slip into unconsciousness . . . I couldn’t compete with him philosophically, but musically I knew how to enforce these words.  Here was this really gifted guy who heard a concert in his head, and we helped him get it out.”

     Recording with only four tracks, there were some limits as to what they could do in the studio on the first album.  Krieger cites Break On Through as an example:  “Jim sings ‘Break on through to the other side’ three times on the first chorus, but he forgets to come in on the second chorus, so he only sings it twice.  We did stuff like that quite often.  Nowadays you’d never get away with some of the stuff we did on there.  They’d just fix it with Pro Tools.  But to us, it sounded pretty perfect.”

     With Light My Fire getting constant airplay, the band moved from the small clubs in L.A. to booking larger concert halls.  They auditioned bass players including a girl (“which would have been cutting edge,” Densmore commented) but in the end they opted to stick to Ray doing double duty on organ and bass.  Densmore said, “Ray and I had stumbled onto this piano bass at Wallichs Music City in L.A., and it had kind of this drone going, which gave it this open, transparent thing with my drums.  When we started making records, a lot of times we had bass players overdub Ray’s left-hand line to give some punch.  But live it was just the trio and that crazy singer.”  

     The bassists employed while recording varied and even included the legendary guitarist Lonnie Mack.  When they were recording their fifth (or sixth if you count a double live album thrown into the mix), Mack had started to record for their label, Elektra.  He had never played bass before but you wouldn’t know it from the groove he set down for Roadhouse Blues.  John Sebastian also happened to be on hand and added his harmonica talents to the track.  Morrison always wanted to do a bluesy album and Morrison Hotel is certainly more than a nod in that direction.

     Krieger and Densmore made some interesting observations about their other albums in the CRM article.  People Are Strange was the result of a trek to the top of Laurel Canyon to watch the sunrise on a day when Morrison arrived at their Lookout Mountain house feeling somewhat down.  When they came back to the house, Morrison said, “I need to write this down:  “People are strange, when you’re a stranger / faces are ugly when you’re alone / Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, streets are uneven, when you’re down.”  People Are Strange was released as their lead single from the Strange Days album and Densmore noted,”It is a wonderful example of an artist channeling their angst into his work.” 

     Entering the studio, The Doors had enough material for two albums but by the third, they were writing tracks in the studio as fast as they could record them.  Waiting For The Sun found them using eight tracks instead of four so they spent a lot more time experimenting.  Morrison was drinking to excess and tensions were high.  Even the easy going Densmore got fed up and quit at one point but he came back the next day.  “ What else was I going to do?  I had found my path in life.  I could make a living playing music.  I just happened to be in a band with a crazy singer, but I had to continue,” John explained to Hughes.  Producer Rothchild was more of a problem on the third album;  he decided to combat the chaos created by Morrison and his stoned hangers-on by pushing the band to do tracks over and over again.  Seeking the ‘perfect cut’ only amped up the tension.  The album benefited greatly from Krieger’s growth as a songwriter which saw him contribute Yes, The River Knows and Spanish Caravan (where he got to show off his flamenco chops).  The fuzz tone effect Krieger added to Densmore’s beat (borrowed from Cream’s Sunshine of Your Love) made Hello, I Love You the ear-worm hit of 1968.

     With their fourth album, The Soft Parade, Rothchild pushed them to do a change up and add strings and horns.  Morrison was dealing with some personal issues and wanted to concentrate more on his poetry which gave Krieger a larger role in the songwriting department.  While Touch Me drew some criticism from Doors fans (some felt it was ‘too slick’), it widened their audience. It seemed to fall in line with what The Beatles were pioneering with their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album.  In fact, George Harrison happened to wander in during the Touch Me session and when he spied all of the horn and string players, he simply commented, “Oh, Sgt Pepper. . .”  The song was originally called Hit Me (Krieger was inspired by Blackjack) but it seemed to rise to another level when Morrison rewrote it as Touch Me.  They had their hit single, but many still think this was their weakest album made with Morrison.

     As for the legal imbroglio following the Miami concert on March 1, 1969, Krieger and Densmore said it was one of those ‘bad-good-bad-good’ scenarios.  The first ‘bad’ happened  when the band lost a lot of bookings over the bad press.  Film from that night showed the band happily having beers with the police after the show.  Morrison was a bit off that night but the drummer said Jim had seen a very political group called The Living Theater and decided to try to insert a little activism into his raps.  After touching off a near riot, Morrison simply said, “Okay, we had our riot.  Now let’s go to an island and start over,” meaning it was just something he tried on for size (which made Densmore think, “Good, we can get back to business.”).

     The second bad came around when the politicians decided to make an example of the band.  It could have been a good publicity stunt but as it turned out, bookings dried up for fear of this ‘evil rock ‘n’ roll band’ coming to their town.  The last ‘good’ was a mixed blessing.  With fewer shows to play, the band could get back to writing and recording without having to pull up stakes and travel halfway around the country every other week.  Morrison was convicted but the charges were later overturned and he was posthumously pardoned.

     With time to woodshed they went back to the basics, or as Densmore put it, “We went back to Ray’s garage.”  Morrison Hotel was still produced by Paul Rothchild but the band wanted to step back from the horns and strings he had pushed them to use on Soft Parade.  The album didn’t produce any hit singles but it did contain FM staples Roadhouse Blues and Peacefrog.  Morrison’s relationship with Pamela Courson caused some scenes during the recording sessions, but engineer Bruce Botnick maintains some of it was ‘Morrison theater’ put on to see what kind of reaction it would get.  After one such session where Jim was shaking Pam and she was crying, Botnick said, “Hey man, it’s pretty late,” to which Morrison responded, “Yeah, right.”  He and Courson hugged and left the studio arm in arm.

     Rothschild wasn’t into the sessions for L.A. Woman party because he had just finished working on Janis Joplin’s latest album before she died.  He heard an early version of Riders on the Storm and called it ‘cocktail music’.  Engineer Bruce Botnick was left in charge and he told the band, “You know what you are doing.”  With Rothchild not there pushing for take after take and Botnick guiding with a light touch, the band moved across the street to their rehearsal workshop instead of recording at the Elektra studio.  With no time pressure and no Rothchild present, they proceeded to make the record on their own terms.  

     They weren’t sure what they wanted to record.  As a warm up, they were just noodling around with Ghost Riders In The Sky when Jim decided to sing ‘Riders on the storm’ instead.  The song came together and the rest of the album fell into place.  Krieger and Densmore recalled playing the song live for the first time in Dallas on December 11, 1970.  “The next night, Jim, was so drunk, Ray and Robbie finally agreed to take some time off, which I had been begging them to do for about a year,” Densmore told Hughes.  “Jim’s demise was heartbreaking, but I later realized that he was supposed to be a shooting star – a quick impact and then goodbye.”

     Krieger thought when Morrison left for Paris in March of 1971, “He’d be back at some point and we would start playing again.  But it wasn’t meant to be.”  The three remaining members weighed their options, one of which was continuing as a jazz trio (an idea that Manzarek liked).

They put out two albums with Ray and Robbie singing (Other Voices (1971) and Full Circle (1972).  They were well received but they were not ‘The Doors’ to many.  Manzarek pursued solo work while Densmore and Krieger tried a new band but all found it was hard to escape the past.  In 1978, Manzarek discovered a present Morrison had left him – a book of poetry and studio recordings he had made back on his 27th birthday (December 8, 1970).  When he heard the rhythm in Jim’s voice, they decided to  get together again to add music to Morrison’s spoken word poetry.  American Prayer was the last hoorah for The Doors with Jim Morrison. 

     Manzarek and Krieger would do a tribute tour as The Doors of the 21st Century with The Cult vocalist Ian Astbury filling Morrison’s shoes.  Densmore refused to take part and filed an injunction to keep them from using The Doors name.  I have seen clips and Astbury did an admirable job channeling Morrison’s vocals.  With Densmore and Krieger appearing together to talk about the 60th anniversary of the band, one can assume John no longer holds a grudge against Robbie for taking part in the tour.  Certainly he holds no ill will with Ray as he passed away from cancer in 2015.  They may be down to only two surviving members, but it seems nobody has forgotten The Doors over the past six decades.

Top Piece Video:  Break On Through performed at the Isle of Wight in 1970