“A place where you could start a religion or plan a murder” – why Morrison Hotel presented an opportunity for unrivalled creativity for The Doors

Originally published in Uncut Take 283 (December 2020 issue)…

When The Doors arrived at Elektra Sound Studios in Los Angeles in September 1969, it was a homecoming of sorts. The studio was built in a Mission revival style, with cheerful yellow walls and terracotta roofing. It was just a block from the Alta-Cienega Motel – where Jim Morrison was living out a bohemian existence – while Morrison’s girlfriend Pam ran a boutique called Themis just down the road. But the band had spent the summer at the studio labouring through gruelling sessions for The Soft Parade, an experience so miserable they nearly split. Would their next album go the same way?

“Actually, most of it was really fun,” recalls Robby Krieger, The Doors’ guitarist, who even now seems surprised to be saying this. “We still didn’t think of it as work. It could be long hours and some of it was boring – getting the right sound from the snare drum for four hours – but once we started playing it was always fun. We were a pretty odd lot, but when you put us all together it made sense.”

For The Doors, 1969 had been one disaster after another. In March, a drunken Morrison was alleged to have flashed his penis during a gig in Miami. He was charged with public indecency and many American venues refused to book the band. The threat of imprisonment hung over the Soft Parade sessions. Then, just as the band began work on Morrison Hotel, Morrison was arrested after getting drunk on a plane on the way to see The Rolling Stones in Phoenix. In a bid to get them to focus, Elektra owner Jac Holzman gave the band a pep talk.

“How do you deal with it on a day-to-day basis?” says Holzman. “You support them. You encourage them to go back into the studio to make a terrific album to show the world they are still there. ‘You don’t let something like this ruin your life. At one point, when you are on trial, it will override everything. But right now, nothing is happening and three of you haven’t been arrested. You all contribute to the music, so let’s keep going.’ I told them that we’d show people that The Doors and Elektra were moving forward by making great music, as we always did.”

It worked. Although troubled by post-Miami litigation and Morrison’s antics both on stage and off, 1970 was a surprisingly productive period for The Doors. You can get a sense of their creative engagement from the 50th-anniversary reissue of Morrison Hotel. Before the first take of “Roadhouse Blues”, for instance, we find a relaxed Morrison setting the scene.

“Gentlemen,” he says, “the subject of this song is something everybody has known at one time or other. It’s an old roadhouse down South or maybe Midwest, perhaps on the way to Bakersfield, and we’re driving in a 57 Chevy – dig it? It’s about 1.30 and we’re not driving too fast but we’re not driving too slow either. We’ve a six-pack of beer, a few joints and we’re just listening to the radio on the way to that old roadhouse.” He hardly sounds like a man preoccupied with his own worries.

“I loved hearing that stuff again,” says Krieger. “That wasn’t something Jim did all the time, but it helped us to get the feel he was after and it’s a great reminder of what we were like in the studio for that album. I know that at the back of his mind he would have been worried about going to jail, but he wasn’t going to let it get in the way. Jim was always in the moment no matter what he was doing.”

“Morrison Hotel was basically about trying to climb up from underneath intense negativity,” says the band’s long-serving engineer, Bruce Botnick. “Jim was under terrific stress waiting to hear what the courts were going to do. But they weren’t creatively bust. Morrison Hotel was a springboard forward.”

“Jim was under terrific stress” – bruce botnick

RECORDING MORRISON HOTEL

In 1968, the writer Joan Didion visited The Doors in the studio while they were recording their third album, Waiting For The Sun. Didion later wrote about the encounter in an essay that appeared in her 1979 book The White Album: “Morrison sits down on the leather couch again and leans back. He lights a match. He studies the flame for a while, and very slowly, very deliberately, lowers it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. [Keyboardist Ray] Manzarek watches him. There is the sense that no-one is going to leave this room, ever. It will be some weeks before The Doors finish recording this album.”

The boredom of sitting around waiting for genius to strike is not an uncommon experience in a recording studio. For The Doors, though, Didion’s essay illustrated the different trajectories the various band members were pursuing. By the time of Morrison Hotel, only a year later, the band appeared to present a more unified front. The sessions for Morrison Hotel started in November 1969 and continued through the winter. For the most part, the four band members were present – Morrison, Krieger, Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore – as well as session bassist Ray Neapolitan, producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick.

The main problem was growing tension with Rothchild. He had nursed the band through their early albums, but his painstaking methods were no longer necessary or particularly productive for a band trying to rediscover their sense of fun.

“We had to do something different,” says Holzman. “Soft Parade was more in the Paul Rothchild style – produce, produce and produce with extra instruments. I was all for trying that and they had been unusually willing to be experimental until it got to Take 159, when it began to fall apart. It was too many takes. They didn’t want that and they didn’t need that.”

You can get a sense of the growing tension between band and producer on the Morrison Hotel outtakes. By Take 44 of “Queen Of The Highway” – a song that started life during the Soft Parade sessions – Morrison is getting fed up. “Let’s do ‘Roadhouse Blues’, to shake things up,” he growls at one point, keen to move on.

To his credit, Rothchild was aware of the problem. The Morrison Hotel sessions were, relatively speaking, faster and looser. To spice things up, guest musicians were invited. John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful played harmonica on “Roadhouse Blues”. Lonnie Mack was also present. The blues guitarist had left the industry and was selling Bibles until a friend suggested he get a job at Elektra. He played bass on “Roadhouse Blues” and “Maggie M’Gill”.

“we had to do something different” – Jac holzman

“Paul felt like that Jim would behave better if I was there,” says Sebastian. “But my excitement really was about playing with Lonnie Mack. That was the incentive and it turned out to be absolutely as exciting as I imagined it would be. I loved working with Rothchild. He was such a happy pothead guy, but when he suddenly had to become the schoolteacher I think it brought out the more pedantic part of him.”

With a rich vocal from Morrison, “Roadhouse Blues” was one of the album’s standout tracks, a bar-band blues that set the album’s down-and-dirty mood. “Ship Of Fools”, “Land Ho!” and serene “Queen Of The Highway” were more stripped back, as the band veered away from pop, psychedelia and the avantgarde, towards bluesy hard rock.

“We were trying to get in touch with the first and second albums,” says engineer Bruce Botnick, who also remastered the reissue. “I think it was my suggestion that we mix back at Sunset Sound through the old tube console. That album has a little bit of the old in it and that was a conscious choice. In fact, ‘Indian Summer’ is actually from the first album. You can hear from the timbre of Jim’s voice how youthful he was.”

With the exception of the funky political poem “Peace Frog”, Morrison reined back his more portentous tendencies. He preferred instead to sing about drinking or love affairs, like on schmaltzy ballad “Blue Sunday” and the seedy, slinky “The Spy”.

The rock was heavy, but the mood was light and the studio chat on the reissue is largely good-humoured. Highlights include a rare studio version of original “I Will Never Be Untrue”, covers of “Money” and BB King’s “Rock Me”, plus multiple takes of “Peace Frog/Blue Sunday”, “Roadhouse Blues” and “Queen Of The Highway”.

To shoot the cover, Elektra turned to Henry Diltz. Somebody in the Doors camp had spotted a flophouse at 1246 Hope Street called the Morrison Hotel, which seemed too good to be true.

On December 17, 1969 the band, along with Diltz and his art director Gary Burden, drove down to take a look. The receptionist initially refused to allow them inside, but the band sneaked in and lined up inside the front window. “It was odd, they knew exactly how to pose,” says Diltz. “Jim squatted down and they fell in beside him. I was right up close and my Gary was saying, ‘Back up! Get the whole thing.’ So I backed across the street with a moderate telephoto lens. When I talked to Ray about it many years later he said, “The Morrison Hotel, where you could start a religion or plan a murder.’”

After the shoot, Morrison took them to a dive bar in Skid Row called the Hard Rock Café, where Diltz took more photos, one of which made the back cover. This photo directly inspired the name of the burger franchise. Morrison seemed right at home at the Hard Rock. “He was fascinated by the old guys, he bought them all beers,” says Diltz. “He loved hearing about their lives. Jim was a very internal guy. He was a poet and a filmmaker and he was interested in the world and loved hearing all those stories.”

“there was a lot of emotion on that stage” – john sebastian

TOURING AND THE FINAL DAYS

After Morrison Hotel was released in February 1970, the band returned to the stage, playing shows in New York and San Francisco. Krieger says now that during these shows, they seemed rejuvenated. But by the time The Doors were ready to tour in April, Morrison’s drinking had worsened. He put on weight and grew a beard, regularly hitting the stage full of booze and bitterness. “In Boston his anger was coming out, all the stuff he’d been through during the enforced layoff,” says Botnick. “He was angry about what had happened and he was probably angry at himself.”

In New York, they were joined by John Sebastian. He was not used to Morrison’s modus operandi but learnt to adapt. “The key was that you didn’t watch Jim, you watched Ray,” he says. “Jim would be rolling around on the stage and I’d immediately look at Ray and Ray would be, ‘Yep, here we go.’ Ray would respond to Jim and the music flowed from that. It was starting to get to be like a hurricane and you really didn’t know where Jim was going to go. I felt for the guy. He was a sensitive cat suddenly thrown into this love-god thing and I probably think he just wanted to be a musician. He got isolated by his fame.”

The tour was arranged specifically so Elektra could record a live album, Absolutely Live. Bruce Botnick was on hand to observe Morrison’s conflicted attitude at close quarters. The audience wanted the drama of “The Unknown Soldier” or “The End” and Morrison sometimes complied but on other nights he withdrew, unwilling to perform on demand. The tour ended at the Isle Of Wight Festival in August. The Doors shut off the lights and played in total darkness, Morrison frozen to the mic not moving a muscle – the opposite of the Jim Morrison the audience expected.

“Lots of artists have told me that it gets to a point where they don’t know who the audience has come to see – have they come to see them or have they come to see the performer they think they are,” says Botnick. Morrison’s drinking helped him escape this, but it didn’t do much for his stagecraft. Bodyguards were hired to keep Morrison out of trouble, but the charismatic singer just dragged them down with him. Krieger recalls a show in New York when Morrison downed 20 shots of whisky before going on stage just to see what happened. “Will it make it better? Will it make it weird? He was willing to take the chance,” he says.

The threat of prison hung over Morrison. Once the trial got underway in August, the band testified that the singer had not exposed himself – but it didn’t help. Even today, Krieger is angered by what he describes as a “sham” of a trial. “Don’t you think one of us would have seen it?” says Krieger. “It was pretty hard to miss!” In September, Morrison was sentenced to six months hard labour but released pending appeal. Morrison was free, but for how long?

“I don’t buy that jim was going to quit” – robby krieger

Just as The Doors had exorcised the misery of 1969 by working out their frustration in the studio, they did it again at the end of 1970. They started recording what would become LA Woman at Sunset Sound before relocating to their rehearsal space at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard after Paul Rothchild walked out. It was a relief for all parties, not least because Rothchild was devastated by Janis Joplin’s death in October.

“He thought the same would happen with Jim,” says Krieger. “After Hendrix and Janis died, Jim said to me, ‘Jimi, Janis, I think I’m going to be next.’ I thought he was kidding, but Paul may have seen the writing on the wall.”

Bruce Botnick was promoted to producer. As sessions got underway in December, The Doors were booked to play warm-up shows in Dallas and New Orleans – the latter on December 12, 1970. This would be The Doors’ final show. “New Orleans was even worse than the Isle of Wight,” says Krieger. “In New Orleans, he didn’t want to be there. At one point he just sat on the drum riser and hung his head and wouldn’t even sing. It was really sad. I have kind of blocked it out of mind. All I can really remember is Jim sitting there on that drum riser, not wanting to be there, not wanting to sing a note.”

A drunken Morrison forgot his lyrics, smashed his mic through the floor and told rambling jokes without punchlines. The band gave up and left the stage, eventually returning for an encore where they were joined by the support act, Kansas, astonished to find themselves taking part in The Doors’ last stand. “Jim was blotto,” says Kansas drummer Phil Ehart, who stood at the back shaking a tambourine. “But it was still one of the most incredible musical experiences I ever had.”

The band returned to the studio, emerging with the excellent LA Woman. Krieger last saw Morrison sometime early in 1971 during the mixing of “Riders On The Storm”. Morrison said he was going to Paris but the band should continue to write, awaiting his return. What would have happened had he lived? Even those who knew Morrison best are split. Krieger and Botnick think that without the distraction of touring, The Doors would have built on the success of Morrison Hotel and LA Woman, two of their strongest albums. Morrison had enjoyed the LA Woman sessions. As much as anything, it showed he had survived everything that 1970 had thrown at him and was still producing the goods.

“I don’t buy that he was going to quit to become a poet,” says Krieger. “When he went to Paris he was still jumping on the stage with bands every chance he got. He was a performer, that’s what he did. We fully expected that Jim would come back from Paris and we would record again. I don’t know about playing. The Beatles had stopped touring and then started pumping out album after album, and that was fine with us. We were prepared for that. It was better than Jim always getting into trouble.

Jac Holzman, by contrast, thinks that after 1970, Jim Morrison was done with music, with Elektra and with The Doors. He last saw Morrison at a party for the opening of Elektra’s new studio. “Jim was there and said, ‘Hey Jac, I just came to see what my money was being used for.’ He was waiting for me to respond but I just smiled. Then he said he was going to Paris. He started to walk away and I went up to him and said, ‘What about a hug?’ We had a massive hug that lasted about a minute and then he walked away. I kept looking at him, but he didn’t look back. He kept walking. That’s when I thought that we’re probably not going to see him in a studio again. That was absolutely the end of The Doors.”