From LA misfits to No 1 by summer: how The Doors and Jim Morrison ignited America in 1967
When The Doors flew north to play their first San Francisco dates in January 1967, they were completely unknown there. Jim Morrison’s reputation as an unpredictable frontman had spread around the LA club scene throughout ’66 (he often performed on LSD), but then again, the Los Angeles Times had written of “a hungry-looking quartet with an interesting, original sound but… possibly the worst stage appearance of any rock’n’roll group in captivity”. Jazz-based and self-consciously collegiate, The Doors were few people’s tip-for-success in ’67.
When The Doors flew north to play their first San Francisco dates in January 1967, they were completely unknown there. Jim Morrison’s reputation as an unpredictable frontman had spread around the LA club scene throughout ’66 (he often performed on LSD), but then again, the Los Angeles Times had written of “a hungry-looking quartet with an interesting, original sound but… possibly the worst stage appearance of any rock’n’roll group in captivity”. Jazz-based and self-consciously collegiate, The Doors were few people’s tip-for-success in ’67.
So it was all the more audacious when, just before they left LA in January, a bullish Elektra Records launched the debut album (The Doors), and its lead-off single, “Break On Through (To The Other Side)”, with a giant billboard ad on Sunset Strip. It read: “Break On Through With An Elektrifying Album”. The single – an urgent bossa nova – was different and catchy, and bore an abstract Morrison lyric that hinted at a revolutionary idea: breaking free from the shackles of society, from your schooling, your parents, the Vietnam War, America’s entire Judaeo-Christian capitalist structure. To Ronald Reagan, sworn in as the new governor of California on January 5, it would have been tantamount to high treason.
America and Morrison were not yet on a formal collision course – Morrison’s first arrest would come at the end of the year – but their ideological motivations made conflict inevitable sooner or later. Morrison, in a performance of “The End” in August ’66, had improvised some of the most shocking words ever heard in a rock venue (“Father, I want to kill you… Mother, I want to fuck you!”), and been fired from the Whisky A Go Go on the spot. Ronald Reagan, in a famous 1964 fund-raising speech for Republican Party Presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, had declared: “The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.”
In San Francisco, by 1967, it was certainly a time for choosing. On January 14, The Doors attended the “Human Be-In”, a free concert held at the city’s Golden Gate Park. A spontaneous assembly of counterculture humanity, it was the first event of its kind in the country. “A stage was set up in the middle of the polo field,” recalls keyboard player Ray Manzarek, “and approximately 30,000 hippies showed up. We couldn’t believe our eyes. The new tribe of Americans had gathered – longhairs, dopeheads, LSD-takers – and it was magnificent.”
The Doors’ modern-day image as dark existentialists who looked down their noses at, or even opposed, the hippy movement, is not accurate at all. Manzarek lists the alternatives as they appeared at the time: “Love or death. Peace or war. New Christians against old. The stoners against the squares. From the establishment’s perspective, it was a battle to the death as to which direction America would go in.”
It was a battle that would soon involve The Doors directly. In the meantime, however, after playing bottom-of-the-bill to The Grateful Dead and Junior Wells at the Fillmore, the band returned to LA to find that their Sunset Strip billboard hadn’t worked its magic, and “Break On Through…” had disappointingly failed to make the Top 100.
The origins of The Doors were cinematic even before Oliver Stone made them literally so. Consider: singer and keyboard player, both recent UCLA film school graduates, meet in Venice Beach one day by chance. Keyboard player is stunned by beautiful lyrics recited by singer; says “let’s form a band”. Keyboard player happens to meet guitarist and drummer on a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi meditation course, where each has gone in search of psychic serenity after months of experimentation with LSD. All four Doors (as they would become) bring personal influences and tastes to the table: jazz, flamenco, Brecht Weill, Rachmaninov, the cinema, poetry, Latin rhythms, the blues. There is no bassist, an inspired (but controversial) touch.
All of the band’s keynote darkness and psychological depth come from Morrison; guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore agree The Doors would have been a very different band without him. Morrison writes in surreal form, or in impossibly romantic language – as on “The End”, where, after first “putting black crepe over the end of a relationship” (Manzarek), Jim embarks on a heaven-and-hell odyssey culminating in his notorious Oedipal episode. In offstage moments Morrison, the son of an admiral from Florida, is extremely intelligent, “funny-as-all-get-out” (Manzarek), and “really friggin’ shy” (Densmore), but prone to spur-of-the-moment acts of madness when he’s drunk or on drugs.
He and The Doors learn their stagecraft at clubs such as the London Fog and the Whisky, where “The End” grows from three minutes to almost indefinite. They work on things like dynamics, drama and repetition. Manzarek: “Jim had that haunted, Chet Baker voice, and was singing those songs of great tragedy and loss, but you could also ignore him and get into the throbbing bassline of my left hand [playing a Fender Rhodes piano bass]. The music was hypnotic and asked you to surrender. Surrender control. Surrender your conscious mind.”
But prior to signing with Elektra in August 1966, The Doors spent a luckless six months on Columbia (no recordings, no releases) and were rejected by several other labels in LA. “They were considered lightweights, because they didn’t have a bassist, so there wasn’t a driving, forceful groove,” says John Echols, who played lead guitar in Elektra’s folk-rockers, Love. “It was like a theatrical group, like a play, or a throwback to the Beatniks and coffee-house bands. We’d let them do shows with us because we liked them as people, but I never thought they would achieve success.”
Densmore: “It took a while for people to get onto us, because we were so weird. I remember one or two audiences watching us with their jaws hanging open.” Krieger: “I thought The Doors would last a year at the most. Then we’d all just go on to other things.”
“Self-destruction and creativity don’t always come in the same package. picasso lived to be 90. but in jim’s case, he was destined to have a short, quick life” – John densmore
Tipped off by Love’s Arthur Lee, Jac Holzman of Elektra saw The Doors four times at the Whisky before becoming convinced they had merit. “Finally, the fourth evening, I heard them,” Holzman recalled in his book, Follow The Music.
“Jim generated an enormous tension with his performance, like a black hole, sucking the energy of the room into himself… They weren’t consistent, and they needed some fine tuning before they would be ready to record, but this was no ordinary rock’n’roll band.”
Bruce Botnick, engineer on the first five Doors albums (and co-producer of the sixth, LA Woman), met them for the first time when they began work on their debut LP at Sunset Sound Recording Studios in August/September ’66. “Morrison was shy,” Botnick remembers. “He was surprised that people thought he had a good voice. I put him in the vocal booth, where I had a Neumann U 47 [microphone] set up. Morrison froze, then started to giggle. He said: ‘That’s the same mic that Frank Sinatra sings into.’ I said: ‘Absolutely.’”
Morrison’s initial reticence as a frontman (he had sung with his back to the audience at early gigs) had been superseded by a remarkable, highly sexual, arrogant transformation. He was not yet the Lizard King, but, as Holzman had seen on that fourth night, he was not far away. Densmore: “It was exciting, scary. Everyone – the band, the audience – was wondering: ‘What the fuck is the wild man going to do tonight?’” At one gig in Long Beach, New York, in June ’67, Morrison drank 15 shots of bourbon before taking the stage. Shortly before he passed out, he tried to take all his clothes off. The next night, he was too hungover to perform. That same weekend, on the other side of America, a celebrated pop festival took place in Monterey. The Doors were not yet widely known, and hadn’t been invited to play.
Military-Staccato at times, bottleneck bluesy at others, and exotically strange whatever they did, The Doors were “the Modern Jazz Quartet of rock’n’roll”, in Manzarek’s words. A new two-disc Rhino release, Live At The Matrix, documents their impressively diverse repertoire (Gershwin’s “Summertime”, blues standards “I’m A King Bee” and “Crawling King Snake”, as well as their own originals) as they played a near-deserted San Francisco club in March 1967. A feature of their set every night was the lengthy “Light My Fire”, a stunning tour de force written mostly by Robbie Krieger, with one verse (“The time to hesitate is through…”) by Morrison.
“We all knew ‘Light My Fire’ was our best song,” says Krieger. “The only problem was that it was six-and-a-half-minutes long when we recorded it.” In fact, it was closer to seven. It needed to be. The solos by Manzarek and Krieger were both sublime, taking listeners on a mazy, heady jazz-rock journey perfectly in keeping with Morrison’s sensuous vocals at the song’s beginning and end. There were constant requests to Elektra and The Doors from radio DJs (in particular Dave Diamond of KBLA in Burbank) to release “Light My Fire” as a three-minute single, so that it could be played on commercial radio.
In 1967, seven-minute tracks were not permissible on AM stations (and FM rock radio wasn’t yet established), so The Doors reluctantly agreed to an edit. Producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick came up with a version that excised the two solos, cutting the song down to 2’52”. The Doors were appalled.
“Rothchild took the intestines out of it!” exclaims Densmore with a chuckle. Manzarek told Elektra it was so horrible he never wanted to hear it again. “Bruce and Paul were imagining hearing it through the ears of a young kid in Minnesota who didn’t even know there was a long version,” Manzarek acknowledges now. “And my God, it worked.”
By June, there were 448,000 American troops in Vietnam. To avoid being among them, at least two members of The Doors had claimed to be homosexuals at their draft board inductions a couple of years earlier. “You know that it would be untrue, you know that I would be a liar…” These were now the words coming out of every radio, every jukebox in the Summer of Love. By the end of July, The Doors – that odd, studious-looking, theatrical art-jazz-blues band with a crazy singer and no bassist – had the No 1 single in America.
Apart from the incident where he’d taken acid before singing “The End”, and another where he’d set off a firehose in the studio, Morrison had been a model of courteous behaviour during the making of the first album. The follow-up, Strange Days, recorded in the summer of ’67, was where he began to be a problem. While he looked and sounded fabulous on The Ed Sullivan Show in September, the truth was that he was becoming an alcoholic. He had started to miss recording sessions, or roll up too inebriated to sing.
“I saw him indulging too much, but I thought he’d snap out of it,” admits Manzarek. “I thought he would eventually say, ‘Enough drinking, let’s get back to work.’ I thought, OK, he’s going on these drunken benders – but this is rock’n’roll, who said it was gonna be easy? He’s Brendan Behan, he’s an Irish poet. And he’s worth it.”
“Self-destruction and creativity don’t always come in the same package. Picasso lived to be 90,” notes Densmore. “But in Jim’s case, he was destined to have a short, quick life.”
After a busy itinerary in October and November (they were now playing to thousands, often two sets a night), The Doors arrived in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 9, the day after Morrison turned 24. The previous night’s show in Troy, New York (birthplace of the 19th-century meatpacker Samuel Wilson, aka “Uncle Sam”), had gone badly and Morrison was in a depressed, volatile frame of mind. Backstage at the New Haven Arena, he was interrupted by a policeman while groping an 18-year-old local college student in a shower cubicle. When told to vacate the area, he refused and was promptly maced in the eyes. “The guy wouldn’t have known who Jim was,” points out Manzarek. “He probably would’ve recognised Fabian, you know, or maybe Frankie Avalon.”
Morrison walked onstage in a vicious mood. Densmore remembers there being “a row of cops all along the front of the stage. We were becoming big. The authorities were taking a look at us.” When they played “Back Door Man”, Morrison extemporised new lyrics that taunted the police and encouraged the audience to attack them. The lights were turned on and Morrison was arrested. The crowd, many of them incensed, went on to destroy the hall. “We were on the establishment’s list,” reasons Manzarek. “The same list that Jane Fonda was on. The captain of police in New Haven, I remember he was standing to one side of Jim, and he said, ‘You have gone too far, young man.’”
The first rock singer to be arrested onstage, Morrison was charged with breach of the peace, resisting arrest “and immoral or indecent exhibition”. (In January 1968, these charges were unexpectedly withdrawn. Later that month, Morrison was assaulted by security guards outside a Las Vegas nightclub, and then arrested by police for “vagrancy and public drunkenness”. Again, these charges were soon dropped. In May, he invited a riot at the 4,000-capacity Chicago Coliseum, reportedly because he wanted to see what it would look like.)
It was a time for choosing, and Morrison, the admiral’s son who’d coldly told the world that his perfectly healthy father was dead, had now chosen. Alcohol was to be his companion, and civil disobedience his response to all authority. For the other three band-members, the die was cast.
Densmore: “Jim was smart, so he was mindful of public image. On the other hand, it wasn’t a ‘show’. He wasn’t faking being dangerous. We never knew what the fuck he was going to do half the time.”
“We were amazed sometimes that he was still alive,” says Bruce Botnick. “But he never talked about dying. Jim was so well-read, you could have a conversation with him on almost any subject. And if he didn’t know about it, he’d go and get books and read up on it. He was that kind of person.”
