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\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What were you listening to during the Summer of Love? \u00a0\u00a0Listening to the radio then meant AM Top 40 as FM was just getting to be the next big thing. \u00a0At 13 going on 14 years old, I was listening to a lot of pop songs and chumming around with a new piano playing buddy named Jeff Lewis. \u00a0We had heard the short version of The Doors <\/span>Light My Fire<\/span><\/i> and Jeff hatched the bright idea that we should pool our money and share the album. \u00a0Jeff was always a bit of a con-man, so my suspicious side thinks that his mother wasn\u2019t keen on him buying the album so I was his excuse. \u00a0In the end, I took the sonic leap from the first LP I ever owned (The Monkee\u2019s debut) and found myself neck deep in a very different sound. \u00a0Landmark albums usually catch people off guard and in the case of The Doors eponymous album, this is not an understatement.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Doors were not your average, normal band. \u00a0In fact, they were more like two bands in one. \u00a0The four members were all integral parts of their sound, but over time, they became Jim Morrison and the other three Doors. \u00a0It was Morrison, however, who insisted that they sign an agreement that gave them all an equal share of the songwriting credits and publishing rights. \u00a0No decision could be made about the use of The Doors music without unanimous agreement between the four members, yet the public polarized them as \u2018Jim Morrison and those other three guys\u2019. \u00a0Add to the mix Morrison\u2019s penchant for being a wild and crazy guy, and one can understand the rest of the band\u2019s frustrations with their career. \u00a0As guitarist Robbie Krieger stated, \u201cWith Jim, it wasn\u2019t always easy. \u00a0It would have been a lot easier if he\u2019d been just a normal genius.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The moment that sold Elektra Records owner Jac Holzman on the band came from their version of the 1925 Bertolt Brecht – Kurt Weill song <\/span>Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)<\/span><\/i> that he heard the fourth night he came to see them perform at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood. \u00a0The first three nights he heard the band, \u00a0Holzman said, \u201cMorrison made no impression whatsoever. \u00a0There was nothing that tagged him as special.\u201d \u00a0What Holzman didn\u2019t know that Arthur Lee of Elektra Records recently signed psychedelic rock band Love had clued Morrison that there was a \u201csuit\u201d coming to hear The Doors. \u00a0Morrison had no desire to put on a show for some record company executive. \u00a0Holzman would never have signed the band to Elektra based on his first impression, but everyone he talked to in LA kept pushing The Doors forward as being the next big thing. \u00a0Finally, on the fourth night, when \u00a0the band did <\/span>Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar), <\/span><\/i>Holzman finally heard something from The Doors that he wasn\u2019t hearing from a million other bands at the time. \u00a0Holzman later said, \u201cWhen I heard that fourth night (at the Whisky), I knew this was a great band.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The band didn\u2019t jump on the contract Elektra offered, but in truth, they were lucky to have any offer at all. \u00a0Columbia Records had let a previous deal expire before they even recorded any music with the band. \u00a0Just after meeting Holzman, they were fired from their residency at the Whisky, yet they still played coy with him for several months before signing with the label. \u00a0Holzman eventually paired The Doors with producer Paul A.Rothchild and his recording engineer Bruce Botnick. \u00a0They knocked out The Doors album in less than a week, but they actually had most of the material that would become their first two albums (the second being <\/span>Strange Days<\/span><\/i>), in hand when they arrived at the first session. \u00a0As Botnick later recalled for Classic Rock Magazine, \u201cThey were totally different than anything else I was recording. \u00a0I was recording the Beach Boys, The Turtles, The Ventures. . . and The Doors were totally different, it was the beginning of that era of American sixties music.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Morrison had his wild and crazy moments, but he wasn\u2019t totally out of touch with reality. \u00a0His father was a career Navy man in line to become a Rear Admiral. \u00a0Morrison didn\u2019t want to chance messing up his father\u2019s career so he briefly toyed with changing his name to James Phoenix. \u00a0The rest of the band hated the idea so he went to plan B: \u00a0when asked for biographical information for the record company promotional material, Jim simply told them his family died in a tragic car accident and he was an orphan. \u00a0His family was understandably mystified by this turn of events, but it was just another example of the enigmatic Morrison building his own legacy. \u00a0The \u2018young lion\u2019 photographs taken by Joel Brodsky in 1966 made him a poster boy and fueled the cult of Morrison, but the look was taken directly from Gerard Malanga who Morrison had no doubt seen in several of Andy Warhol\u2019s classic art films. \u00a0The photos are how many remember Morrison to this day, but as Brodsky says, \u201cHe never really looked that way again. \u00a0I photographed Morrison at his peak.\u201d \u00a0Malanga was more direct in his appraisal of Morrison\u2019s shirt open to the navel, leather pants wearing persona: \u00a0\u201cHe stole my look!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The music press jumped on anything that Morrison did and the record company paid for the damages because any press was good press if it helped sell records. \u00a0The story of Morrison returning to Sunset Sound and trashing it by spraying fire extinguisher foam all over the place was knitted into a tale of the singer as a tortured artist. \u00a0The truth is closer to the artist as a casualty of altered reality. \u00a0It is true that he returned to the studio after a recording session, but with the intent to record. \u00a0The studio had a series of glass block partitions lit from the inside with red light bulbs and in his altered state of mind, Morrison thought the place was on fire. \u00a0He not only emptied a fire extinguisher, he also spread the sand from the ashtrays all over the floor. \u00a0Rothschild got there in time to spirit Jim back to his place where they spent the rest of the night listening to Stones, Howlin\u2019 Wolf, and Donovan records. \u00a0Once he made it home, Rothschild fielded a phone call from the angry studio owner who wanted to know if he knew anything about the vandalism. \u00a0He claimed he did not, but he did tell the owner to send the bill to Elektra.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The band hoped to have the album released before Christmas of 1966, but Holzman talked them into delaying until the new year so they could get the PR campaign rolling first. \u00a0Morrison really liked the idea of The Doors being the first rock band to be featured on the giant billboards on Sunset Avenue. \u00a0The record company loved the album but knew that the line <\/span>She gets high<\/span><\/i> (from <\/span>Break on Through<\/span><\/i>) was going to be a problem so a little creative editing reduced it to <\/span>She gets . . . She gets . . . She gets . . .<\/span><\/i> which did not make the band happy. \u00a0Miming to the edited version of the song in their first television appearance (January 1,1967 on <\/span>Shebang<\/span><\/i>), an unhappy Morrison made no effort to sell that he was actually singing the song. \u00a0In <\/span>The Doors<\/span><\/i> movie with Val Kilmer in the role as Morrison, \u00a0the band is asked to change the line by the producer of the Ed Sullivan Show. \u00a0They deliberately sing the banned line and lamely explain, \u201cWe are so used to singing it that way that we forgot.\u201d \u00a0This enraged Ed Sullivan but added to the myth The Doors were building. \u00a0No doubt it also added to the angst of the establishment who were still trying to figure out this renegade band of bad boys. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The seven minute version of <\/span>Light My Fire <\/span><\/i>was getting played in its entirety on FM radio, but the strict AM code of the day (songs could not be less than 2:45 and no longer than 3:00 minutes of needle time) kept it off Top 40 radio. \u00a0Holzman set Rothschild to the task of editing out the long solo section in the middle of the song to make the single fit the AM format. \u00a0Whether the band liked having nearly five minutes of their opus being hacked off the album track is unclear, but it was this little editing job that made <\/span>Light My Fire<\/span><\/i> the biggest selling anthem for the Summer of Love. \u00a0It no doubt spurred a lot of album sales and that made Elektra a new force in the record industry.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I wasn\u2019t following all of the wild stories about The Doors. \u00a0I was spinning the record endlessly and learning to play a different type of rock and roll drums from John Densmore. \u00a0Densmore is a rock drummer with jazz leanings (or vice versa) and his playing made learning The Doors songs a challenge. \u00a0It also made me a better musician because I had to really listen to the songs and dissect the arrangements in order to play along. \u00a0Densmore has taken a lot of flak in recent years for not yielding to the lure of the big money that could be made licensing The Doors music for commercials. \u00a0Does Densmore still harbored some remorse about how things turned out for the band? \u00a0\u00a0When \u00a0asked about Morrison in 2012, \u00a0he looked back on the band\u2019s heyday of the late 1960s and simply said, \u201cYou know, self-destruction and creativity don\u2019t have to come in the same package. \u00a0Picasso lived to be ninety-one. \u00a0But in Jim they came together so I had to accept it. \u00a0We all had to. \u00a0That was the card we were dealt as a band.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Doors album turns fifty this year and Morrison is still the poster boy for the \u201cburn bright, die young\u201d rock star model that has been repeated too many times. \u00a0Too bad he isn\u2019t here to celebrate one of the greatest albums of all time. With only Robbie Krieger and John Densmore still standing, we won\u2019t be spinning any new Doors tunes, but we will spin The Doors classic music on WOAS-FM 88.5 and remember them as they were.<\/span><\/p>\n Top Piece Video – Gee, you can hardly tell they are lip syncing the sanitized version of\u00a0Break on Through<\/em><\/p>\n