How The Doors held it together – then fell apart – after Jim Morrison’s death

First published in Uncut Take 222 (November 2015 issue…)

In Spring 1972 – a year after Jim Morrison’s death – the remaining members of The Doors toured Europe. While in England, they had shows in Newcastle, Birmingham and Guildford as well as a session for The Old Grey Whistle Test.

To promote their new album, Other Voices, and a compilation, Weird Scenes From The Goldmine, they took to the streets of London in a specially decorated double-decker bus. But there was another agenda to their visit: they were hunting for a singer to replace Morrison.

Paul Rodgers revealed to Uncut in 2011 that The Doors had sought him out to offer him the job. “I’d buried myself in the country, working on things, and they couldn’t get hold of me,” he bemoaned. They met, too, with Midlands soul-rock singer Jess Roden and Howard Werth from progressive rock band Audience. “I did some rehearsing with them in a summer house down by the river,” Werth told Uncut in 2011. “Jim Morrison’s name wasn’t mentioned at all.”

But it transpired that Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore had loftier ambitions. They had their sights on Paul McCartney, then thought to be languishing after the breakup of The Beatles. An unlikely story, surely?

“We might have talked about it,” says Robby Krieger today. “But I never really got the nerve to ask him!”

“Well, that would’ve been excellent,” laughs Densmore. “Now? There’s only two Beatles now and two Doors, so let’s see, that’ll be two drummers, guitar and a bass player who’s pretty good on keys. It’s a wonderful fantasy, but Sir Paul is rather high up on the echelon there…”

This was just another curious twist in the adventures of Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore after Morrison’s death. It was a peculiar, transitional time – featuring a former psychiatric nurse from Derby, a mariachi song about a mosquito and multiple bass players – during which The Doors attempted to recalibrate and find a way forward without their singer. “Jimi Hendrix had passed before Jim, and Janis Joplin,” says Krieger. “Jim used to joke that he would be number three. It was kind of weird. We thought he was kidding. He never planned on joining the 27 Club.”

Three months before Morrison’s death, The Doors were enjoying a career high. Their sixth album, LA Woman, was well-received, while a pair of hit singles, “Love Her Madly” and “Riders On The Storm”, bookended the spring of 1971.

“We had a lot of fun making LA Woman,” says Krieger. “For one thing, we produced it ourselves with Bruce Botnick. Before that, Paul Rothchild had produced all of our records. He did a great job and all, but it was always very difficult because he was a real perfectionist. He always took all day to get the drum sound and Jim especially would get bored. But LA Woman, we just recorded it in our little rehearsal place, and it seemed like more of a jam, you know? I think that’s a good way to make records.”

“It was a good atmosphere,” agrees drummer John Densmore. “We said we were gonna make a garage album with a lot of passion and mistakes, and that’s what we did.”

The sessions appeared to revitalise Morrison. Prior to recording LA Woman, his drinking had begun to hamper the band – especially during the making of 1969’s The Soft Parade. He was keen, too, to put behind him his 1970 trial for indecent exposure on stage in Florida. “On LA Woman, Jim was straight,” says Botnick. “He would have the occasional brew, you know, a beer. He was in great form. We were looking forward to doing more after LA Woman.” During his trip to Paris, Morrison wrote poetry, took long walks and luxuriated in the splendour of the city, so different from the California sprawl he knew. Though happily ensconced in an apartment between Bastille and Ile Saint-Louis with his partner Pamela Courson, Paris seems to have always been a temporary home – Morrison kept in touch with his bandmates, keen to find out how LA Woman was selling.

Meanwhile, Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek worked on new songs back on the West Coast, waiting for Morrison’s return. “Jim didn’t say, ‘I’m sick of being a rock star,’” explains Densmore. “He just said he wanted to go to Paris and take a break, rekindle. There’s a tradition of American writers going to Paris. That was the idea. He kind of implied he’d be back eventually to record some more songs.”

“I thought he would return, at some point,” agrees Botnick. “I think he needed to have some space and get away from everybody, and get away from being Jim Morrison. It’s tough for an artist when they’re perceived to be one thing and they’re really another – he was very intellectual. Very, very, polite. Incredibly well read. A great conversationalist. Artists like him, they see things and they’re on such a high plane that it’s difficult for them to have somebody to be on the same plane with. Jim was like that.”

This method of working – where the trio would write the music and then Morrison would add vocals and lyrics – was the standard way of working for The Doors. Often, the singer would look in his many notebooks of poetry and work up a lyric from an existing poem, as on “Peace Frog” from 1970’s Morrison Hotel. When news of Jim Morrison’s death first filtered through to Los Angeles, Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore were jamming new songs in their Workshop studio by the Sunset Strip. “We were downstairs, rehearsing, hoping for Jim to return,” says producer Bruce Botnick, who was present when the news of Morrison’s death reached the others in July, 1971. “We didn’t know for sure if it was real, because there had been so many reports of him dying before that.”

“IT WAS EITHER JUMP IN THE WATER, OR DON’T…”

It soon became clear that the news of Morrison’s death was genuine. “We were just devastated. We didn’t know what to do,” says Densmore. “The music is a healing thing, so we just plunged into this stuff. We just sublimated our sadness into music and that’s why we did it so quick.”

“It was either jump in the water or don’t,” adds Krieger. “We didn’t know what to do, but all we knew was music so we just kept rehearsing and working on those songs. It was a good therapy for us.”

The first person they approached to replace Morrison was Kevin Coyne, the Derby-born former drug counsellor and psychiatric nurse. “I was called in the morning after Jim Morrison died and asked how did I fancy joining The Doors,” Coyne told Uncut in 2003. “It showed how mercenary the music business was, but the leather trousers were a long way from my plans.” They also considered asking Joe Cocker, a year on from his successful Mad Dogs And Englishmen tour. “Then we thought, ‘Shit, we can’t just get some other singer and expect him to follow in Jim’s footsteps,’” says Krieger. “So we just decided it would be better for us to sing. With us not really being singers, the expectation level wouldn’t be so high.”

They focused on the sessions in hand, with Manzarek contributing two songs about Jim: “In The Eye Of The Sun” and “Hang On To Your Life”. “They were unconscious songs about Jim,” says Krieger. “He always taught us when you’re writing a song don’t make it too obvious what it’s about, so the listener can interpret it in their own way.” Without the hedonistic Morrison, Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore found they were able to work much faster – and with greater focus. It was not entirely uncharted territory for them. The band had been forced to work round Morrison’s absences in the past, just not at this level. As early as 1968, in fact, they sometimes had to fill in when their errant singer was late for concerts, with Manzarek often taking on vocal duties.

“The three of us didn’t drink,” says Krieger. “So Jim was tougher and tougher to deal with as time went on. He was always right there and easy to work with as far as the music went, but yeah, the three of us were very tight as a musical unit.”

“You needed three stable guys to balance Dionysus,” laughs Densmore. “It was such strong energy, like a hurricane; we needed the triangle, with Jim stood on top.”

Other Voices was released on October 18, 1971 – three months after Morrison’s death – and reached No 31 on the Billboard chart. Today, the album sounds surprisingly strong, albeit sorely lacking Morrison’s presence. “I’m Horny, I’m Stoned” is a poor facsimile of Morrison’s more facile moments, but the hard boogie-blues of “Tightrope Ride” (featuring Densmore doubling his drumkit) and “In The Eye Of The Sun” would have fitted well on LA Woman. “Ships W/ Sails” is Other Voices’ clear highlight, though, a skilful melding of Latin and jazz that had only been hinted at in the band’s previous work.

With Morrison’s more puritan blues influences absent, the trio felt free to expand their jazz ambitions, bringing in a host of session musicians to assist: Emil Richards provided marimba and whimwhams on “Down On The Farm”, and Francisco Aguabella contributed percussion to “Ships W/ Sails” and “Hang On To Your Life”, while there were a total of five bassists enlisted for the album (four electric and one double-bass). “We were pretty amazed that the album sold as much as it did,” marvels Krieger. “It did pretty well. We got pretty good radio play and did a couple of tours on it, so we were quite happy with it.”

Not everyone was so pleased with the product, though, including their producer. “I didn’t think it was very strong,” says Botnick. “It didn’t have any of the danger that The Doors’ albums had. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t dangerous anymore. One of the legs of the table was missing. How could it not seem like that? I think they will all tell you that they were not individually the greatest musicians in the world, but together the four of them were the greatest musicians in the world.”

Whatever the danger quotient, Other Voices carried on the thread of LA Woman; but its follow-up departed from that template. Botnick wasn’t involved (he says he can’t remember whether he was asked to return, but says he would have turned the job down if asked), the group left the Workshop for the comfort of Hollywood’s A&M Studio, and even more jazz session musicians were brought in.

“The guys wanted to have a chance to work with some other musicians,” says Botnick. “As they went into Full Circle they took that extension even further.”

“I liked them,” says Charles Lloyd, who contributed tenor sax and flute to the recordings. “I’d met Jim Morrison at some parties in the Village around the time that their music was taking off in the mid 1960s. Barriers were down and the lines of demarcation were blurring. It was a unique open, free, time. I was free to bring it at the Full Circle sessions. My contributions were an overdub. But I did play live concerts with them in Central Park and the Hollywood Bowl – they encouraged me to stretch out. In rehearsals they were mellow and having fun. It was a very open feeling of collaboration.”

“Full Circle had a different engineer – Henry Lewy,” says Densmore. “He brought in Charles Lloyd and loads of other great session players. We thought maybe we could get some backing vocals to help fill out the sound of Ray and Robby singing.”

The Doors released Full Circle on August 15, 1972. The complex funk of “Verdillac”, the campfire pop of “4 Billion Souls” and the Latin fusion of “The Piano Bird” were strong cuts, expanding the band’s sound with greater variety and rich textures. Krieger’s quicksilver guitar-playing was a delight as always, with his 12-string solo on “It Slipped My Mind” a highlight.

But with Morrison now dead for over a year, and the rock scene progressing at high speed, fans weren’t exactly turned on by Full Circle’s subtle growth, and the album barely scraped the Top 75 in the US. “We had a lot of cool musicians that played with us,” says Krieger. “It’s always fun to record, but we missed having Jim. There was nothing much we could do other than just quit.”

Joined by Jack Conrad on bass, Bobby Ray Henson on rhythm guitar and occasionally Charles Lloyd or Ron Starr on saxophone, The Doors toured Full Circle throughout Europe and America in summer and autumn 1972, before Ray Manzarek finally decided he’d had enough.

“Ray just kinda said, ‘Look, I’m out of here, I’m getting tired of this, it’s not working,’” remembers Krieger. “So we gave it up. John and I were trying to make it work. Would we have carried on? Yeah, for sure.”

“The Doors had a five-album record deal with Elektra,” says Densmore, also clearly disappointed about the way the group fell apart, “and we stopped and passed on the last three albums. ‘OK, this has been really fun, but without Jim we’re not The Doors.’”

WE PASSED ON THE LAST THREE ALBUMS. THIS HAS BEEN REALLY FUN, BUT WITHOUT JIM, IT’S NOT THE DOORS.”

The Doors played their final gig on September 10, 1972, at the Hollywood Bowl near their stomping ground. They played tracks from Other Voices and Full Circle, including “Ships W/ Sails”, “Tightrope Ride” and “The Mosquito”, along with “Love Me Two Times” and their customary closer, “Light My Fire”, now featuring a saxophone solo in its long jam section. This really was the end.

Reflecting on those two post-Morrison albums, John Densmore has this to say: “I just listened to these albums a couple of days ago. I hadn’t heard them in quite a while. Boy, excuse my patting ourselves on the back, but this is a tight band. Instrumentally, it’s really tight. I do miss the great baritone… nobody had Jim’s voice. This is a guy who never had any proper singing instruction, and to be able to scream from the bowels of his soul and not rip up his vocal cords…”

Robby Krieger is also interested in how the albums would have turned out with Morrison there. “There’s this tribute band here in LA and they did a couple of the songs from Full Circle, like ‘Verdilac’. They actually went in the studio and recorded these things, and they came out pretty good. They had a guy that sang like Jim, or tried to – it was pretty funny to hear the Jim vocal on those songs!”

Six years after they split, though, The Doors got back together, this time with the crucial element they’d been missing – or at least, recordings of Morrison reading his poetry in 1969 and 1970. Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore returned to the studio to put music to his words and create An American Prayer, released in 1978. It was a controversial release for some fans and associates, but the band savoured the opportunity to effectively work with Morrison again.

“It’s one of my favourite records that we’ve ever done,” says Krieger. “Jim’s spoken-word album never came out, but I had a copy. He’d hired this guy, Fred Myrow, to do music for it. I was listening to it one day, and I thought, ‘Shit, John and Ray and I should give it a try – who better?’”

“I remember sitting in the studio recording An American Prayer and his voice is in our headphones,” says Densmore. “He’s not there, but he is there. At first it was eerie, you’d look over to the vocal booth and be like, ‘Shit, I hear him.’ It was like old times, so it was special. You know, I really enjoyed hearing Other Voices and Full Circle again, but I do miss hearing that great voice.”