reading

The first article about Jim Morrison (alias Stanislous Bolislavsky), published in 1963 in a Florida State University students’ newspaper.

JIM MORRISON: I traveled around a lot as a child and I went to so many schools, about one different school a year, or every year and a half I’d go to a different one. I didn’t learn too much. The only reason I did it was because I didn’t want to go in the Army and I didn’t want to work, and school was fairly easy for me, so I just kept doing it. I finished up at UCLA. I finished up in the film school ’cause I wanted to make movies. You know how difficult it is to break into the movie game, so I just kind of wandered around. I was living down at the beach in abject poverty and for no reason at all I started writing some songs. They just kind of popped into my head. And I ran into Ray, who was at the film school also, and he’d been working in bands. He grew up in Chicago and he’d been doing it for a long time. I showed him some songs and he said, “Hey, let’s get a band together.” So we did. Since I was writing most of the songs, I just gradually became a singer. I suppose the person who writes the songs ought to sing them, because he’s the one that must feel it more than anybody else.¹⁰ My earliest influences were all the old blues singers and the early rock and roll singers – Elvis Presley was among them. I heard them at an age when I was ready for an influence. It seemed to open up a whole other world which I wasn’t aware of, a strange landscape which I’d only had glimpse of in my daily life. I listened to Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, Gene Vincent – all of them.¹¹

ROBBY KRIEGER: I had been playing only three years when, at the age of 20, I recorded THE DOORS. I studied flamenco guitar in high school and gigged as a folkie and jug band guitarist during a year at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Witnessing Chuck Berry at the Santa Monica Civic reshaped my musical direction. He was incredible. The next day I went out and traded my classical guitar in on a Gibson SG. I played that one until it got ripped off, and then got another. I switched to UCLA to major in physics and study sitar in an Indian music class. I formed the Psychedelic Rangers with John Densmore, and the two of us met Ray Manzarek at a meditation class. Ray was a classically trained keyboardist and he asked John to drum for a band he was forming with Jim Morrison. A few weeks later, when I joined, The Doors’ lineup was complete.¹²

Eye, April 1968

Love & The Demonic Psyche (Part 2)

In the pristine warmth of a sandy beach and a sunny day, The Doors were conceived. Their ‘parent group’ was a band called Rick & the Ravens which featured Ray Daniels (‘the bearded blues shouter’), and they played at a bar on Second Street and Broadway in Santa Monica, improbably called The Turkey Joint West. In the spring of 1965, Rick & the Ravens had a nucleus of the three Manzarek brothers: Ray singing, Rick on guitar and Jim on piano. They had played together in Chicago, and when the family moved to Redondo Beach, the blues band was formed for weekend gigs. A college crowd, often from the UCLA film school, frequented the bar to hear Ray belt out material like Money, Louie Louie, Hoochie-Coochie Man, and I’m Your Doctor, I Know What You Need in simulated Chicago style. “I would switch from film-school grubby to a blue jacket with velvet collar and a frilly shirt to be the bearded blues shouter,” recalls Manzarek. “Immediately afterward, I would put my sweat shirt and corduroy jacket back on and return to being a film student.”

Manzarek never liked his piano lessons back home in Chicago, until he learned to play boogie-woogie at the age of twelve. He studied Bach, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky at the Chicago Conservatory, “but I didn’t really enjoy playing other people’s stuff. I dug blues.” He hung around the clubs on Chicago’s South Side to hear the great blues singers like Muddy Waters, not yet discovered by the white world. “I used to listen to Negro disc jockeys – Al Benson and Big Bill Hill – at home, and developed a stride-piano style.” Majoring in economics as an undergraduate at De Paul University, he went to UCLA to become a lawyer. “I actually did go to law school out here for about two weeks. I couldn’t believe all the nonsense. I figured those guys must be kidding and went into the cinema department.” There, Manzarek completed three short films: Evergreen, Induction, and a design film, Who I Am and Where I Live – all autobiographical segments considered very promising work by the faculty. In December 1967 he married his longtime girl friend, Dorothy Fujikawa, a lovely Oriental native of L.A.

During that summer of 1965, Manzarek was living in Venice, an early cradle of Hippiedom on the oceanfront south of Santa Monica. By accident, he ran into Jim Morrison. “I had been friendly with Jim at UCLA, and we had talked about rock ’n’ roll even then. After we graduated, he said he was going to New York. Then, two months later, in July, I met him on the beach in Venice. He said he had been writing some songs, so we sat on the beach and I asked him to sing some of them. He did, and the first thing he tried was Moonlight Drive. When he sang those first lines – ‘Let’s swim to the moon / Let’s climb through the tide / Penetrate the evening / That the city sleeps to hide’ – I said: ‘That’s it.’ I’d never heard lyrics to a rock song like that before. We talked a while before we decided to get a group together and make a million dollars.”

Morrison and a college roommate, Dennis Jakob, had already joked about forming a rock duo called The Doors: Open and Closed. Their repertory was to consist of two songs, I’m Hungry and Want. Originally a phrase of William Blake’s, used by Aldous Huxley for the title of his book on mescaline experiments, The Doors Of Perception, this title for the group seemed apt.

One of the first meditation centers of the Maharishi, in which UCLA students were particularly involved, was opening at this time, and Ray Manzarek met John Densmore, a drummer, in his meditation class. Densmore, who had played jazz drums almost exclusively until a short stint with a group called the Psychedelic Rangers, joined The Doors.

His experience with a group of jazz musicians from University High School, who sat in at Shelly’s Manne-hole in Hollywood, started him listening to drummers like Philly Joe Jones. He attended five southern California colleges and changed his major five times, ending with anthropology at UCLA, but being most affected by San Fernando Valley State’s outspoken McLuhan disciple, Ted Carpenter. After meeting Manzarek and Morrison, he was still uncertain about the group. “Their songs were really far out to me. I didn’t understand very much, but I figure I’m the drummer, not the lyricist.”

Densmore is still an active adherent of the Maharishi. “I don’t proselytize about it,” says Densmore, “but it turns me on. Turning on doesn’t have to be grass or acid – it’s just being aware. The reason for taking drugs is to get where meditation takes you anyhow. Read it in the Indian Scriptures. It doesn’t help creativity; I was trying to do the same thing when I was taking drugs as when I meditate. It’s done something beautiful for me; before, I took a lot of acid and had died, in a way.” Before the recording session for The Doors’ third album, he and Robby Krieger, The Doors’ guitarist, spent a week at a meditation retreat on the Monterey Peninsula, and the stay culminated in an Indian jam session with Paul Horn on flute, Krieger on sitar, and Densmore on tablas. “I think the most exciting thing that’s happened to me was when Robby and Donovan and I spent an hour with the Maharishi. I felt high for a week!”

In September of 1965, six Morrison originals, including Moonlight Drive, Summer’s Almost Gone, and End of the Night were recorded on a demonstration transcription at World-Pacific Jazz studios on the Aura label. This recording session was Morrison’s first appearance at a microphone, and the instrumentalists included Jim and Rick Manzarek on guitars, Ray Manzarek on piano, Densmore on drums, and an unidentified girl bass player. Shortly after the recording session, Jim, Rick and the mysterious girl bass player decided they didn’t like Morrison’s songs. They split for Redondo Beach and are still presumably playing Louie Louie.

Robby Krieger, who got to know Densmore and Manzarek at the Maharishi’s Third Street Meditation Center (He, like Densmore, is still involved in the discipline), arrived with some hard-driving bottleneck guitar, and the unit was complete.

Krieger had played in a jug band at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and about six months of folk and blues at UCLA, where he majored in physics and psychology. His remarkably individualistic guitar-playing developed from lessons in flamenco-guitar technique from Arnold Lansing and Frank Chin. For him, Transcendental Meditation “…is a way of getting around the darker parts of life. Like any other form of involvement, it concentrates on lighter things.” As a lyricist for the group, his songs reflect this attitude, including Love Me Two Times and Light My Fire, which most people think was written by Morrison.

The Doors continued to audition several bass players, but were never able to find a satisfactory musician. One day, Manzarek saw a Fender piano bass and the problem was solved. He now plays the bass keyboard with his left hand and the organ with his foot and right hand. The quartet rehearsed for four or five months and played at a few private parties, including one given by Krieger’s parents.

After practicing daily in a friend’s house behind the Santa Monica Greyhound Bus Depot, The Doors made a humorously premature debut on the stage of UCLA’s Royce Hall, providing ‘live sound-track’ to a screening of Manzarek’s design film, Who I Am and Where I Live. Krieger played guitar, Manzarek played flute, and Densmore, Morrison and sundry girlfriends pounded on drums, rattles, claves and tambourines.

A small, now defunct club called the London Fog, located between the Hamburger Hamlet and the Galaxy on Sunset Strip, was the first real club date for The Doors. They played for five dollars apiece on weeknights, double on weekends, seven nights a week, four sets per night. Because at that time they didn’t have sufficient original material for such a long job, over half their repertory consisted of blues and rock ’n’ roll classics, such as Gloria, Little Red Rooster, and Who Do You Love. Once again, a faithful core of fans from the UCLA film school followed them, but on the Strip a cross section of other listeners joined. More than anything else, the London Fog job provided the opportunity to play together steadily, experiment with their songs, and to develop as a working group. Jim Morrison in particular changed, progressing from a reserved stage-style to his presently flamboyant manner. Their music was ardently defended by a growing segment of the Strip population; but it also just plain scared a lot of people. Eventually, they were fired. No one in the group can quite recall the reason why.

It may seem hard to believe, but at this juncture The Doors could easily have sunk into small-time oblivion (They were turned down after four auditions at Bido Lito’s and had played at the Brave New World in Hollywood for only a few nights), or disbanded, or at least could have starved a while longer waiting for discovery. But on the very last night of their four months at the London Fog, Ronnie Haran, the chic chick who books talent for the Whisky A Go Go, came in to hear them. “I knew that Jim Morrison had star quality the minute he started singing,” says Miss Haran. “They needed more polish, but the sound was there. Unfortunately, none of them had telephones (Morrison was then sleeping on the beach) and all they could give me was a number where John ‘sometimes’ could be reached. It took a month to contact them again, but I finally booked them into the Whisky.” Miss Haran also helped The Doors join the musicians’ union, get new clothes, and organize the business side of their lives. Her tenacious insistence upon using them as more or less the Whisky house band, despite management objections, was the important break The Doors needed.

They played second billing to everybody, including groups such as Love, Them, The Turtles, The Seeds, and the No. 1 band in Mexico, The Locos. (“The Locos were a real low point in our careers,” recalls Manzarek. “They were terrible, the kids hated them and we were caught in the cross fire.”) Exposed to a wide-ranging audience – hardened groupies to Iowa tourists – The Doors began to intensify their musical Götterdämmerung and to experiment daringly. Allegedly, the experiments often took the form of drug trips, and weekly tales of The Doors’ freaked-out adventures flew: “Morrison was so stoned last night he fell off the stage again”; “Ray sniffed an amyl nitrate cap and played so long he had to be dragged away from the organ”; “They all arrived stoned and started improvising at random – I don’t know what it was, but it was great!” According to one friend of the group, Morrison was so consistently high on acid during this period that he could eat sugar cubes like candy without visible effect. But, inexplicably, the music kept getting better.

In the most important rock club in Los Angeles, The Doors began to enjoy a celebrity audience from the recording industry and the attentions of several record companies. One evening, Miss Haran brought Jac Holzman, president of Elektra Records to hear the group. Holzman was unimpressed. However, he was more enthusiastic on a second visit. Urged on by Billy James, at that time Elektra’s West Coast man, they signed The Doors in late 1966. The arrangement was, and still is, amiable on both sides, for The Doors, according to Manzarek, have been permitted freedom to work in the studio and Elektra has a top group that has enhanced its financial picture greatly. In January, 1967, their first album came out with a cut called Light My Fire.

Before then, however, The Doors and the Whisky had had a parting of the ways, mostly caused by The End. “It started as a simple ‘good-bye song’ – just the first verse and a chorus,” says Morrison. “As we did it each night, we discovered a peculiar feeling: a long, flowing, easy beat; that strange guitar tuning that sounds vaguely Eastern or American Indian. It was a form that everyone brought something to. Our last night at the Whisky, I invented that climactic part about ‘Father I want to kill you…’ That’s what the song had been leading up to.” According to Manzarek, Morrison had missed the first set of the evening and the second set went without incident. “The place was packed for the third set. Saturday night at the Whisky with all the tourists and everything else. Jim sang The End and the place was mesmerized by it. Then he did the ‘Killer awoke before dawn’ sequence. Everything just sort of stopped. It was really weird. When we finished, no one applauded or even talked. Mario (the manager) just said, ‘those guys are nuts – get them out of here,’ and we were fired.” No matter. By that time, The Doors were headed for the San Francisco ballrooms and a national tour.¹³

The Doors – A Not-So-Teenage Idyll Of The Idols (Part 2)

There is a record The Doors made as a demo in a little studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, with the label typed out carefully by the man who runs the place: THE DOORS. It is a funny record, in fact, a hilarious record. The background is faint and shaky. Ray’s brother on harmonica; Ray on piano, playing funky-cocktail-jazz clichés; Robby barely audible, and Morrison, his voice incredibly thin, weak, sounding like Ricky Nelson, breathy, interjecting “Oh yeah” and “Uh huh” and “Drahv on”. In short, the polish is not there, they haven’t the courage of their confusion. But then again, you realize, this is The Doors. It’s funny, but this is The Doors’ sound. It’s not bouncing out of stereo speakers, it’s primitive, but this is it, this is The Doors, fresh from college (“They didn’t understand,” Ray says scornfully of the professors who didn’t like the films they made, “They still don’t understand”) and determined to make a million dollars playing rock and roll. They called themselves The Doors of Perception.

Scores of groups were around back then, all playing the same little clubs: the Sea Witch, the Brave New World, up and down and off the Strip. Something distinctive was needed; Zimmerman created Dylan; Morrison was feeling up for… He was getting his style together. It seemed more imitation than conviction – sometimes embarrassing Jaggerism, leaping about the stage – and they did a lot of blues numbers. But they were different, like the last tune on that demo, something called Insane: Morrison singing in a horrible singsong which he really hadn’t gotten into yet, but the whole thing, the grotesque wah-oah baby-I-like-it screams, the building frenzy, it sets them apart from all those other bands back then playing Paint It Black.

Back then maybe they weren’t getting it on as well, but they had their demo, which they brought to Billy James at Columbia. “I was intrigued,” he says. “Here were these four obviously pretty intelligent guys playing this primitive music. I really didn’t know what to do with them. I signed them at Columbia for the lowest royalty possible, and for six months, which is a very short contract. But they had a guarantee for however many sides, two or four. And I said to them, look, I really don’t know how to record you people. We were trying to figure it out when a guy named Bill Gallagher sent down a memo saying, ‘We do not want The Doors at Columbia.’ I also have his memo around here somewhere saying, ‘We do not want Lenny Bruce at Columbia.’ Anyway, I told the guys, and meanwhile about five months had elapsed, so that if they waited another month they could collect a thousand dollars. Columbia’s default money on the contract, and that was a time when they really needed the money. And that’s what I suggested they do. But instead they asked out of their contract right away. That’s when I started wondering about their sanity.”¹⁴

BOB SEGARINI (Musician): Morrison and me weren’t best buddies or anything, but we did manage to hang out a couple of times and have some great conversations. I, and everybody else who hung out on Sunset, first became aware of The Doors when they had a residency at a little bar on the Strip, although I’m pretty sure I had seen them once or twice at the even more obscure club, The Brave New World. The London Fog was a dark and somewhat dingy bar that was located next to the much more popular Galaxy, and steps away from The Whisky, the most popular club in Hollywood at the time. The clientele was mostly musicians that got wind of the band, and other denizens of the Sunset Strip. The London Fog didn’t have a stage per se, but it did have a very high ceiling. The stage was on top of the washrooms, which were housed in a little wooden ‘building within a building’ that jutted out from the wall next to the bar itself. The band was about 10 feet above the floor of the room and you had to climb a little wooden ladder to get up there. The audience always looked like they were watching a flock of ducks flying overhead. You could cut the cigarette smoke with a knife, but the drinks were cheap and well poured. Hot, twirling hippie chicks were a bonus, and as word of The Doors – and Jim – spread, the dancers from Gazzarri’s down the street and the peelers from The Classic Cat, a classy strip joint on Sunset, started showing up. Every female in L.A. – and probably some of the guys – wanted a piece of Morrison even then.

The first time I ever saw a guitar player use a bottle to play slide was at the Fog when Robby drank the last out of a little green glass six ounce Coke on stage in the middle of a song, and ripped into a solo with the now empty bottle. Every guitar player in town soon emulated the move.

No one in the current pantheon of iconic rock stars from the era were famous yet. The Doors were just another local band and Jim was just another local singer. Within a year they would blow up and out of L.A. with a sound that was totally unique. A rock band covering a song written in 1927 by playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Jim is usually painted as a drug-addled dilettante, a man who went to film school, fancied himself a poet, and made headlines with what mom and dad would consider borderline psychotic behavior. Others wrote of him with stars in their eyes, calling him an iconoclast, a poet born out of time, and a sexual totem who was lusted after by all who witnessed and heard him, a charismatic man beholding to no one, a cipher in so many ways, and a tragedy waiting to happen. A man who had clearly – if you believed his detractors – embraced the dark side. I don’t recall him in quite the same way.

Although we had met a few times in passing – Sunset denizens were a pretty high profile bunch on the Strip; eventually you pretty much knew who everyone was and would nod to each other on the street or in the bars – Morrison and I didn’t exchange pleasantries or have a conversation until the Whisky A Go Go hired The Doors, making them the house band. Earlier, my band The Family Tree had held that position off and on, and would, in fact, open for The Doors on occasion when Elmer Valentine and Mario wanted three acts on the bill.

The Whisky in those days was amazing. The cover was never over 2 or 3 dollars, and for that you would see triple bills like The Byrds, The Doors and Buffalo Springfield. Jac Holzman went to the Whisky to hear The Doors. Not convinced, he made a few more trips to the club and finally signed them.¹⁵

JAC HOLZMAN: I didn’t get The Doors when I first saw them at the Whisky A Go Go. I kept going back and back and back. The reason I saw them at all was because of Arthur Lee. Arthur Lee was the top half of the bill and The Doors were the bottom half. Arthur said to me, “You’ve got to stay around to see this band.” I had come from New York on an airplane to see Arthur, it was 2 o’clock in the morning metabolism-time and I stayed around and was very tired. But I also felt I hadn’t given the group a shot and I had a high regard for Arthur’s opinion. Though he was flaky in many respects I thought he was a talent and still do.

Because I’d been so tired I went back the next night. It was on the third night that I began to hear some of the classical influence in the material. I also was struck by the simplicity of it – lean, clean, straight lines. There was nobody on stage who didn’t belong on stage. I was impressed how John understood how his job was not to provide a rhythmic underpinning only, but to provide that as well as to follow Jim because everybody really followed Jim – whatever he was going to do was where they went. Finally, about the fourth night I got it. Jim was not moving at all, but I understood that this was a coiled spring ready to burst forth. I just went on a gut feeling.

The Doors had recently been signed to Columbia but not recorded by them. I don’t think they were too happy with record companies at the time. I just pursued them all summer long. When I wasn’t in town, my wife at the time, Nina, would cook them dinner. I just went after and after and after them like a dog with somebody’s trouser cuff in its teeth. I just don’t give up when I decide I’m going to do something.¹⁶

BILLY JAMES: The Doors phoned and asked if I thought they should go with Elektra, and I told them I was in no position to give them an unprejudiced opinion since I was about to open the new Elektra West Coast offices. And then later they did decide to go with Elektra, and everything worked out. Rothchild was instrumental in deciding what to accentuate and what not to; he worked a lot with the drums. But basically I think they brought their sound with them. I didn’t see them too much after that, except occasionally in a professional capacity. But one night they came up here to the house to talk things over in general. Morrison was talking – he wasn’t their spokesman at first, but they had gradually allowed him to become the spokesman, the rest of them fading into the background – and he was megalomaniacal, talking about what they would have to do to make it. It was discouraging. I never saw them after that.¹⁴

1967

JIM MORRISON: When I sing my songs in public, that’s a dramatic act, not just acting as in theater, but a social act, real action. We’re a rock ’n’ roll band, a blues band, just a band, but that’s not all. A Doors concert is a public meeting called by us for a special kind of dramatic discussion and entertainment. When we perform, we’re participating in the creation of a world, and we celebrate that creation with the audience. It becomes the sculpture of bodies in action. That’s politics, but our power is sexual. We make concerts sexual politics. The sex starts out with just me, then moves out to include the charmed circle of musicians on stage. The music we make goes out to the audience and interacts with them; they go home and interact with the rest of reality, then I get it back by interacting with that reality, so the whole sex thing works out to be one big ball of fire.¹⁷

ROBBY KRIEGER: We try to connect everybody in the audience to everybody else. We want them to become one mind, one entity. We are revivalists as well as musicians and want our audiences to undergo a religious experience.¹⁸

We. 4 January: Elektra Records releases The Doors’ first album, THE DOORS, and their first single, Break On Through.

JAC HOLZMAN: Everybody at the company – people in the business affairs department – kept everything going smoothly in our relationship with the band. We had a sense of what we were doing. We had a plan. I wrote every one of our 32 independent distributors that we had in 1967. I said, “This is the best thing we’ve ever had and we need everybody’s help on this one. This is it for us.” And it turned out to be true. We had no hint that this thing was going to explode the way it did. THE DOORS sold 10,000 a month for the first two or three months, which was not an insignificant number of records, and then it jumped to 250,000. I would say everybody within the label was important. The distributors caught that we really believed in this and gave some extra special help that was important.¹⁶

Fr. 6 and Sa. 7 January, 9 pm–2 am: The Doors perform for the first time at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, CA, an auditorium with a capacity of 1,250 persons. They are the opening act for Sopwith Camel and the Young Rascals and play two sets each night. The first song they play is When The Music’s Over.

NIK COHN: In 1965, underground clubs started up, the best of them being the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. They weren’t like other dance halls; the audiences didn’t just drift and shuffle and be bored; they really heard the music. Very often, there’d be a genuine involvement between the crowd and the band, a sudden meshing, and then strange nights would ensue. Any group that played the Fillmore at its peak, 1966, will say it was the best gig they ever did.

The common denominator was acid, the fraternity pin, and it formed a huge subterranean brotherhood, freaks and dropouts everywhere united in their struggle against the ogre America, against its violence and greed and conformity, and so the term ‘acid-rock’ came into use, a fairly meaningless phrase that got applied to any underground group, no matter what its style, but that at least summed up a feeling.

The other favorite word was ‘psychedelic’, which, in the dictionary, means mind-expansion. In practice, though, out in California, it only meant faking up a trip. Instead of just standing up on stage and strumming, the psychedelic groups took to surrounding themselves with flashing lights, back-projected films, prerecorded tapes, freak dancers, and anything else they could think of. The idea was that, faced by all this, you’d be hit by a total experience, a simultaneous flowering of all your senses and, just like acid, you’d fly.

You didn’t, of course. Instead, you watched the legs of them sexy go-go dancers and wound up with a headache. Never mind, it wasn’t such a bad idea – at least it took away from the fixed boredom of staring at a group staring back at you.

On the whole, acid-rock groups tended not to come up with many monster singles, but they sold a lot of albums and they earned good gig money. Who were they? Jefferson Airplane, Love, The Doors, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, Moby Grape, Grateful Dead. And Country Joe & The Fish, who were good. And Janis Joplin with Big Brother & The Holding Company. And Frank Zappa with The Mothers Of Invention. And not only in California, but back east as well, The Fugs, and Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground. A massive volume of music.¹⁹

Elektra Records’ invitation to The Doors’ first performance at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, attached inside a fold-out-cover imitation of The Doors’ first LP, among with a promotional copy of the single Break On Through.

January – May 1967

JAC HOLZMAN: Before the album was released, I phoned Bill Graham in San Francisco and pleaded him to book The Doors for the Fillmore. After a heavy pitch, Bill finally agreed, but extracted one option for a repeat date within the next six months of the first booking – and both gigs for scale, hardly enough to cover the air fares. I gulped hard but agreed. San Francisco was the heart of spacey, rebellious rock and roll and The Doors had to be seen there.²⁰

STEVE HARRIS (Vice president of Elektra Records): The show was the Rascals, the Sopwith Camel, and opening were The Doors. When they went on, nobody was paying too much attention. It was a big ballroom and everybody was kind of in the back, dancing and talking. Two or three songs into the set, people started walking up toward the stage. And by the end, no one was saying a word. The audience was completely mesmerized. There was a brief pause for them to realize what they had seen and then they broke into cheers and shouts and screams. After the show, Jim came up to me in the dressing room and said, “I’ve got an idea.” I couldn’t wait to hear it. “Let’s pull a death hoax. Let’s tell everyone that I’m dead.” I said, “Great idea, Jim, except for one thing. Nobody knows who you are. I don’t think too many people are really going to care.”²⁰

Su. 8 January: Robby Krieger’s twenty-first birthday. The Doors play two sets at the Afternoon Dance Concert for All Ages at the Fillmore Auditorium, again as opening act for Sopwith Camel and the Young Rascals.

ROBBY KRIEGER: For me, the most fantastic gig was probably the first time we played San Francisco. We played the Fillmore and it was incredible. Probably because we had never been there, and just seeing everything that was going on in that city. It was just a mind blowing type of gig, especially the light shows. We hadn’t seen that. Everybody was love, peace and love generation and all that. It was kind of weird. We didn’t fit in, really. Of course we found acceptance. There are two sides to any coin, and we represented the darker side of what’s going on. On the outside it was all peace, love and flowers. In reality, the Vietnam war was happening, Kennedy was killed, and the bullshit of the Nixon administration was going on. So it wasn’t all flowers and peace.²¹

Fr. 13 January: The Doors are booked to play two sets at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, CA, as opening act for the Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band and Grateful Dead.

BILL GRAHAM: The Doors had three gigs to do at the original Fillmore. They were just getting hot and we were sold out. All the guys in the band showed up on time, but there was no Jim Morrison. He never showed up at all and no one knew where he was. We had to ask all the people to keep their tickets for another night and we refunded some money. The next afternoon, Jim walked into my little office at the Fillmore and apologized. He told me that as he was leaving Sacramento to drive to San Francisco, he went past this movie house. Casablanca was playing. He just couldn’t help it. He went in to see Casablanca. I kept telling him, “I’m a big Humphrey Bogart fan myself, but Casablanca in Sacramento was not exactly what was on my mind last night. You should’ve called.” Then he said. “I saw it three times.” That was how much he liked the movie.²²

Sa. 14 January, 1–5 pm: The Doors visit the Gathering Of The Tribes For A Human Be-In at the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, which is attended by more than 20,000 persons. Several Bay Area bands perform, among them Santana, Country Joe & The Fish, Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. There are also speeches by political activists and hippie leaders, and poetry readings by beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure.

RAY MANZAREK: Dorothy and I drove across the bridge into San Francisco from Berkeley, where we were staying, and there were 2,000 people at this poetry reading. The place was electric. This was one of the greatest poetry readings of my life.²³

Sa. 14 January, 9 pm–2 am: Grateful Dead are booked as headliners for the concert at the Fillmore Auditorium, but they decide to cancel the performance. They are replaced by The Doors, who play two sets with the Immediate Family and the Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band as opening acts.

Su. 15 January, 4 pm: The Doors play two sets with the Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band and Grateful Dead at the Afternoon Dance Concert for All Ages at the Fillmore Auditorium.

Th. 19 January – Sa. 28 January: The Doors perform for the second time at the discotheque Ondine in New York City.²⁴

CIRCUS: When The Doors hit Ondine, they had a total of $325 in their combined pockets and it had to last them two weeks. That precluded extravagant clothing, so Jim had to count on surfer T-shirts and cerulean blue dungarees.²⁵

DANNY FIELDS: I was an independent publicist and I was to do some publicity for a band coming east called The Doors. They were booked to play at Ondine’s, a small rock and roll club. I went down to the club where The Doors were rehearsing and introduced myself to them. I gave them a brief run-down on some of my ideas for promotion. That was when I first met Jim. I remember how impressed I was by the band, especially the lead singer. A song called Light My Fire kept spinning through my mind. It was a very catchy number. Jim was trying to be dramatic. It was one of the many moods and theatrical performances I was to observe throughout my relationship with him. I found him to be as charismatic off the stage as he came across on the stage.²⁶

RICHARD MELTZER (Journalist): When The Doors came to New York at the beginning of 1967, everybody from Crawdaddy, like four people, went down and expected nothing. It was just very nice to get in the shows free. They played to 4 am at this club called Ondine, which was on 59th street. They were playing three, four sets a night and before the first set was over, we all – everybody from Crawdaddy – looked at each other and we said, “Is this the greatest thing ever or is this the greatest thing ever?” Jim wasn’t even wearing leather yet. He was wearing jeans and a surfer shirt. During the last song of their first set he suddenly leaped up and hit his head on the rafters. The club had a low ceiling and he would jump up and hit his head on the ceiling and then forget it was there. He’d just keep doing it. And eventually he worked that into the act. He’d fall down after hitting his head at least once per set.²⁷

PAUL WILLIAMS (Chief Editor of Crawdaddy): They did When The Music’s Over and The End, and there’d be these musical brackets inside of which Jim would have these one-liners or these little raps and just take off with it. And the energy level was incredible. I don’t mean coming just from him, but from everybody in the room. This incredible thing shimmering out of the darkness while this band was playing. Just overwhelming.²⁰

ANDY WARHOL: The girls all went crazy over Jim Morrison – the word got around fast that there was a group with this very cute, very sexy lead singer. The Doors were at Ondine because the girl who played the records, Billie, knew them from L.A. After The Doors and the Buffalo Springfield played Ondine, the image of the place went from chic to rocking, and groupies started hanging out there – beautiful girls like Devon and Heather and Kathy Starfucker. It was obvious just from watching these kids operate that there were new sex maneuver codes. The girls were only interested in the guys that didn’t go after them. I saw a lot of girls pass on Warren Beatty, who so good-looking, just because they knew he wanted to fuck them, and they’d go looking for somebody who looked like he didn’t want to, who had ‘problems’.

When you walked in Ondine, on the right was the coat check, on the left was a red leather couch, then a narrow strip with tables in it, and then the back room that was the dance floor, with the record booth at the end of it. Jim Morrison got to be a regular there, and The Doors played there again a few times. Jim would stand at the bar, drinking screwdrivers all night long, taking downers with them, and he’d get really far gone – he’d be totally oblivious – and the girls would go over and jerk him off while he was standing there. One night Eric and Ronnie had to actually carry him out to a cab and take him home.

Jim was supposed to be the star of my first ‘blue movie’ – he’d agreed to bring a girl over and fuck her in front of the camera, but when the time came, he never showed up. He was always very sweet to me, though. In fact, I never saw him be anything but sweet to anybody.²⁸

Mo. 30 January, 7.30–8.30 pm: The Doors perform in the television show Shebang to a playback of Break On Through. The show is hosted by Casey Kasem and broadcasted live and in color from the KTLA Studios in Los Angeles by KTLA (Channel 5). It is The Doors’ first appearance on television.

Tu. 31 January – Th. 2 February; 8.15 pm: The Doors perform for the first time at Gazzarri’s in Hollywood, CA.

JAC TTANNA: I was with a Los Angeles-based band, Sons Of Adam, and I was a friend of Pam’s and Jim’s. They were playing Gazzarri’s club and on one night there was no audience except for me and Pamela. He’s into When The Music’s Over and he comes to the part where he freaks out and screams and throws his mike stand on the ground – and he really did it.

Even more than that. And they went off the stage and Pam said, “Why’d you do all that? There was nobody in the club.” And Jim said, “You never know when you’re giving your last performance.”²⁹

MICHAEL McCLURE: I remember Pam recalling the first time The Doors got a job. Jim came home with a check – I think it was for $17 – and they thought they’d hit the big time. Went out, bought dinner, that kind of thing.³⁰

Billboard, 4 February 1967

Pop Spotlight – THE DOORS

A hit LP from the first note. It has everything the teens are digging these days – blues-rock, hard rock, and psychedelic music. All this, plus a potential hit single in Break On Through (To The Other Side), a hard-driving tune that really hits home. The End is a long mover.

February: The single Break On Through is released in Great Britain, Australia and Canada.

Mo. 6 February – Th. 9 February; 3–6 pm: The Doors begin to record their second album, STRANGE DAYS, at Sunset Sound Recorders on 6650 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, CA. They record People Are Strange, Love Me Two Times and My Eyes Have Seen You.

BRUCE BOTNICK: Paul Rothchild opened up the ‘Second Coming’ with, “Well, here we are, recording another Doors album.” We’ve returned to Sunset Sound Recorders, Studio 1. During our sessions it wasn’t uncommon to have members of The Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa, and many others drop by and hang out. For a couple of afternoons I recorded The Turtles and these sessions turned out to be instrumental in how the production of STRANGE DAYS came about. The Turtles loaned me a monaural 33 1/3 rpm acetate reference disc of The Beatles’ SGT. PEPPER, months before its release. I played it for The Doors and Paul Rothchild, and we were all totally blown away by such revolutionary creativity.³¹

PAUL ROTHCHILD: We had lots of meetings to talk about the concept of the record, how adventurous it would be, things we could improve on from the first record. We wanted to explore additional sounds and rhythms, because we had decided from the experience of making the first album that it would be difficult to sustain a career with a band consisting only of organ, guitar, drums and a singer. We had a ton of ideas. Our challenge was to expand The Doors’ sound. We had Ray play harpsichord and piano. Robby got new guitar sounds. John played more percussion instruments. We brought in a bass player, Douglas Lubahn, to free Ray’s left hand.³²

RAY MANZAREK: I did the second album the same way as the first album – with a Vox Continental organ, except we added a Hohner Clavinet and a harpsichord played through a Baldwin amp, which was wonderful. I didn’t use any synthesizers myself. We brought in Paul Beaver to put some things on STRANGE DAYS. Strange Days and Horse Latitudes may have been the first time a synthesizer was used in rock ’n’ roll.³³

Fr. 10 February (?): The Doors perform at the Crescenta Valley High School Auditorium in La Crescenta, CA.

RALPH HULETT: During the latter part of the 1960s, many of the bands that I saw perform seemed to have something to say to young Americans. Recording artists such as Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield and Steppenwolf sang anti-establishment, pro-drug, and even anti-drug songs. Depending on the audience and the performance, a listener could be moved to adhere more closely to the anti-war movement or to the ‘hippie’ lifestyle. Of all the music artists of this era, though, I thought that none would make a lasting impression on me. Then came The Doors.

A Doors performance was not just an ordinary rock concert. It was an experience that an individual as well as an entire crowd could have. The experience was one of mystery, intensity, spontaneity, theatrics, and ceremony. Although lead singer Jim Morrison was the spearhead for the assault on the audience, he also needed the unique blend of jazz, blues and rock produced by the other musicians to complete the moods that he wished to create.

I first heard The Doors perform at my high school in La Crescenta, California, in early 1967. Robby Krieger’s screeching guitar work bounced off the walls of Crescenta Valley High School Auditorium, an explosive response to Ray Manzarek’s pipe-organ introduction to When The Music’s Over. No one had heard this new song before; The Doors’ first album had been out for only a few weeks and When The Music’s Over wouldn’t turn up on record until their second one was released later in the year. Morrison swaggered out from behind some curtains, dressed in black leather pants and a work jacket. He appeared to be drunk as his body arched left and right. He leaned against the mike stand and slurred the first words, which sounded like “When da music’s sober…” Various spectators began to walk out as Morrison pushed himself off and back onto the mike stand, as if fighting with it. He wrapped his legs around the stand and moved his crotch up and down against it. Despite some of the audience’s disapproval, things seemed to go smoothly until the band reached the instrumental break. Krieger let loose a screaming barrage of sound from his Gibson SG. After a few minutes, a loud crackle and buzz made it obvious that his volume was too much for the sound system designed for student body speeches and recent shows by bands like The Association. The group stopped playing altogether and everybody looked at each other. Manzarek shrugged and began a little tune that sounded like Roll Out The Barrel. John Densmore banged along on his drums while stagehands tried to fix the blown fuse. The crowd started to talk and more people got up and left. Some who stayed complained about how dumb the student council had been to bring such a lousy band to the high school.

After five minutes of silence from the stage, while the group members talked, The Doors broke into Light My Fire. Morrison’s vocals were muddled, sounding like he was singing through a megaphone. The instruments sounded clear, though, with Manzarek’s carnival-like keyboard work brilliantly opening and ending the song.

Morrison had leaned on the mike stand during most of the number, his hands clenched around it and his eyes shut, as if in a trance. Due to the sound problems, and also perhaps to Morrison’s stage behavior, the rest of the show was cut short. Total time for my first-ever rock concert was about 20 minutes. It had been pretty disappointing, although I couldn’t get over what I had seen in this strange singer. He had seemed to be in a mood all his own, yet somehow projected this mysterious, dark feeling to the audience. It was like an exploration through music and I felt an urge to have it opened up more.

The Crescenta Valley High concert was not a great one, but it awakened in me a desire to see and hear more of what Morrison was about. His uniqueness really had gotten my curiosity up.³⁴

Sa. 11 February: Jim Morrison is arrested in Los Angeles for drunkenness. It is his third arrest documented by the FBI.

Tu. 14 and We. 15 February, 8.00 pm: The Doors perform as opening act for the Peanut Butter Conspiracy at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a topless joint in San Francisco, CA. Only about a dozen people attend the shows. Originally The Doors were booked to play for two weeks, but the rest of the shows are cancelled upon The Doors’ request and they are replaced by Wildflower.²⁴

Sa. 18 February: The Doors perform at the Hullabaloo in West Hollywood, CA, an auditorium with a capacity of 2,000 persons.²⁴

PAMELA DesBARRES: Jim Morrison moved with the unnatural grace of someone out of control. He looked like a Greek god gone wrong, with masses of dark brown curls and a face that sweaty dreams are made of. It was really mind-boggling. There was no modern sexy American icon at that time and he instantly became that for me and all the girls I knew, and we never missed them. I saw The Doors play a hundred times.³⁵

Tu. 21 February, 8.15 pm: The Doors are the headliners at the Grand Opening night for Gazzarri’s new location on 9039 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, CA. They are booked for seven more shows following the event.

We. 22 February, 7.30 pm: The Doors are the opening act for Hugh Masekela, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and Peter, Paul & Mary at a benefit performance at the Valley Music Theatre in Woodland Hills, CA.

Th. 23 February, 8.15 pm; Fr. 24 February, 9.15 pm: The Doors perform as headliners at Gazzarri’s in Hollywood, CA.

Sa. 25 February, noon: The Doors perform with Alexander’s Timeless Blooz Band, Ma’s Preserve Jug Band, the New World Jazz Company, Sound Machine, City Lights, W.C. Fields Memorial String Band, and UFO at the Human Be-In #2²⁴

Contents

Eye, April 1968

Love & The Demonic Psyche (Part 2)

The Doors – A Not-So-Teenage Idyll Of The Idols (Part 2)

1967

January – May 1967