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Combined Shape .st0{fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;fill:#fff} region-beach-cities-lax region-downtown region-hollywood region-valley region-westside .st0{fill-rule:evenodd;clip-rule:evenodd;fill:#fff} SMS Main navigation Things to Do Attractions & Tours Arts & Culture Outdoors & Wellness Shopping Family Hidden Gems Luxury Pet-Friendly Eat & Drink Bars Clubs Dine LA Restaurant Week Restaurants Business Spotlight Find Events Itineraries Where to Stay Celebrate LA Heritage AAPI Heritage Black LA Latino Heritage LGBTQ+ Tourist Information Meetings About LA Tourism Travel Trade Membership Business Spotlight Media Research Careers Today's must read The Guide to Outdoor Music in Los Angeles Log in Search Search Things to Do Arts & Culture Experience The Doors in Los Angeles From the band's birthplace in Venice Beach to iconic music venues

Laurel Canyon

In the mid-1960s to 1970s, the Laurel Canyon area was home to some of the greatest musicians of the rock era, including The Doors, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and members of The Mamas & The Papas, The Byrds and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Jim Morrison and his girlfriend, Pamela Courson lived at 8021 Rothdell Trail , the street that inspired The Doors song, "Love Street." Restored after a 2011 fire, the house was most recently sold in June 2015 for $1,625,000.

In July 2018, The Doors became the first band to be honored by the City of Los Angeles with a cultural marker recognizing one of their songs. The "Love Street" marker has a Shazam logo - visitors can scan it with the app for additional info about the song, its cultural impact, and The Doors.

The house is just steps from the Canyon Country Store  (2108 Laurel Canyon Blvd, Los Angeles 90046), the "store where the creatures meet." The Doors Guide says that Morrison and Courson "no doubt visited the store all the time, as did most of the rock and roll royalty that lived in the Canyon at that time."

Griffith Observatory

The Griffith Observatory is one of LA’s greatest cultural attractions, offering spectacular views from the Pacific Ocean to Downtown LA from its perch on Mt. Hollywood in Griffith Park. The observatory and accompanying exhibits were opened to the public on May 14, 1935. Today, the Griffith Observatory is renowned as a national leader in public astronomy and a beloved gathering place for visitors and Angelenos alike.

The Griffith Observatory has appeared in numerous TV shows and films, including an unforgettable scene with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land (2016), and two major sequences of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) starring James Dean and Natalie Wood. A bust of James Dean is located at the west side of the observatory grounds. Jim Morrison and photographer Paul Ferrara were both "huge fans" of James Dean. As an homage to Rebel Without a Cause , the Griffith Observatory was chosen as the site of Ferrara's iconic 1968 photo shoot with Morrison.

Morrison Hotel

The cover photo of Morrison Hotel , The Doors fifth studio album, was taken by Henry Diltz at the actual Morrison Hotel in Downtown LA. Diltz photographed the band from outside the lobby window, with the hotel signage acting as the album title. The album sides were named after Jim Morrison's favorite bars, "Hard Rock Café" (Side A) and "Morrison Hotel" (Side B). The back cover of the album features a photograph of the Hard Rock Café on E. 5th Street. Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton, who founded the Hard Rock Cafe chain of theme restaurants, based the name on The Doors album photo.

According to Urbanize LA , Relevant Group is restoring the Morrison Hotel, which was built in 1914 and has been vacant since 2008. Scheduled for completion in 2024, the mixed-use complex will include a new 15-story expansion of the hotel and a 25-story residential high rise with ground-floor retail and restaurant space.

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“Love Street House” – Where Jim Morrison And Pamela Morrison Lived

Please do not disturb current residents!

Morrison and Courson referred to Rothdell Trail as “Love Street” because they would sit on the balcony and watch numerous hippies walk by.

“I see you live on Love Street/ There’s this store where the creatures meet/I wonder what they do in there?/Summer Sunday and a year/I guess I like it fine, so far” . The store mentioned was the Laurel Canyon Country Store down the street from their home.

Doors Discography

1967 – The Doors 1967 –  Strange Days 1968 –  Waiting for the Sun 1969 – The Soft Parade 1970 –  Morrison Hotel 1971 – L.A. Woman 1971 – Other Voices 1972 – Full Circle 1978 – An American Prayer

Private Residence 8021 Rothdell Trail Los Angeles CA 90046

Celebrating their 25th anniversary, this highly acclaimed act pays tribute to Jim Morrison and The Doors by recreating the magic and intensity of a Doors concert experience. Based out of Venice, California, lead singer Tony Fernandez lives out every move of Jim Morrison on stage and delivers a powerful recreation of true likeness in presence, vocals, mannerisms and spirit. Peace Frog is the drama and rock theater that made the Doors famous. Dark and spooky, mystical and hypnotic, the band demonstrates the ability to transform any room into an actual Doors concert experience. With intoxicating renditions of “Hello, I Love You”, “Light My Fire”, “L.A. Woman”, “The End” and many of the Doors classic songs, Peace Frog has the crowd entranced! Jim Morrison can no longer perform live, but when you witness Peace Frog you will think you are at Doors concert. It is a must see for all Doors fans and for anyone looking to experience an amazing recreation of a Doors show!

Peace Frog is available for Regional, National and International bookings, as well as theatres, night clubs, festivals and parties. To find out when Peace Frog is playing in your area, check the performance calendar on their web-site.

Here are some of the venues that Peace Frog has performed 1998 – 2018: Las Vegas NV – Monte Carlo Caesars Palace, Venetian, Sunset Station,  Palace Station The Cannery, Las Vegas Hilton, Cliff Castle Casino, Camp Verde, AZ Harrah’s Casino, Maricopa, AZ San Manuel Casino, Highland, CA Santa Anita Park, Arcadia, CA Bicycle Club Casino, Bell Gardens, CA Pala Casino, Pala, CA Feather Falls Casino, Oroville, CA Edgewater Casino – Biker Run, Laughlin, NV Avi Casino, Laughlin, NV The Hilton, Reno, NV OutLaws, Portland, OR Black Bear Bay Casino, Carlton, MN Fortune Bay Casino, Tower, MN Boomer’s Garden, Lewiston, ID The Railyard Casino, Billings, MT Largo Art Center, Hilton Hotel New York City, NY, Largo, FL Jazzbone, Oak Harbor, WA The Red Wind Casino, Olympia, WA Run 21 Motorcycle Rally, Birkenfeld, OR Coeur d’ Alene Casino, Worley, Idaho Central Club Casino, Whitefish, MT OC Pavilion, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Santa Ana, CA The Big Easy Concert House – Spokane, WA & Boise, ID City of Venice Beach, CA – 100th Anniversary Celebration Largo Cultural Art Center, Clearwater, FL Whisky a Go Go / Key Club – Hollywood, CA House of Blues – Hollywood, CA, Anaheim, CA, San Diego, CA Television VH-1 “From the Waist Down: A History of Music & Sexuality, Sound Track Recording for “The Linda Mc Cartney Story” Sony Pictures, Dick Clark Productions: “Your Big Break *INTERNATIONAL –  Mexico, Australia, Tahiti, Panama, Japan, El Salvador, Canada, Greece, Finland, Sweden, India.

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• May 23, 2024

2024 Thank you for visiting!

Though no longer on the streets of Los Angeles, Dearly Departed Tours continues online. Leaving our beloved Hollywood broke our hearts, but it allows me the freedom to travel and give “tours” on YouTube. Everything contained in our Museum of Tragical Artifacts (including the car) is stored away until a new location can be found in the Palm Springs area.

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How Jim Morrison’s final sessions with the Doors produced an L.A. classic out of chaos

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During the period in late 1970 and early ’71 when Jim Morrison and his bandmates in the Doors were recording their sixth and final studio album, “L.A. Woman,” at their West Hollywood rehearsal space, the singer was drowning in a booze-fueled bender: drunk nearly every night but sober by morning and ambling across Santa Monica Boulevard for the day’s session.

“When he got too drunk, he would become kind of an a—,” recalls Doors guitarist Robby Krieger of Morrison during the “L.A. Woman” sessions, on the phone from his home in Benedict Canyon. “It got harder and harder to be close with him. He’d have his drinking buddies, and we were always trying to keep them from being together.” Krieger’s new memoir, “ Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar With the Door s,” doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Morrison’s dark side, nor does it minimize his creative light.

“L.A. Woman” is the subject of a new reissue from Rhino Records. Called “L.A. Woman: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition,” the physical set features a remaster of the album by original co-producer Bruce Botnick, two discs’ worth of fascinating studio outtakes, extensive liner notes and a vinyl copy of the original stereo mix.

That Morrison, Krieger, drummer John Densmore and keyboardist Ray Manzarek managed to create “L.A. Woman” wasn’t a foregone conclusion. After all, Morrison was the kind of guy who, after entering the Empire State Building in 1969 for a tour and boarding a crowded elevator, “swiped his hand across all the buttons, to the annoyance of all the other passengers who then had to wait as the elevator stopped at every single floor,” Krieger writes in his memoir.

But the musicians were locking in at rehearsals and Morrison was writing, Krieger says. “Jim would stay in this crappy motel called the Alta Cienega, which was right across the street. That was good, because getting Jim to show up for recording sometimes wasn’t easy. This time, because he was so close, he was usually the first one there.”

By then, he’d become a certified rock star. Each of the Doors’ earlier albums, including their early 1967 self-titled debut and their fall follow-up, “Strange Days,” had gone platinum, though none had hit No. 1 until their third, “Waiting for the Sun,” and its smash, “ Hello, I Love You ,” in 1968.

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Initially tentative during their early years at the Whisky A Go Go, by the time the Doors released “Morrison Hotel” in early 1970, Morrison and his bandmates had toured incessantly. Morrison’s writhing, explosive performances made headlines, and were way wilder than those of pop-oriented L.A. peers the Byrds, Joni Mitchell or the Mamas and the Papas. (As he was becoming Iggy Pop, young fan James Osterberg drew inspiration from Morrison at a Doors concert.)

Morrison had been increasingly tanked onstage across the band’s two dozen shows in 1970, where the Doors were playing their hits alongside blues classics including Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train,” Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” and John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling King Snake,” which they’d end up recording for “L.A. Woman.”

“Jim loved singing the blues, especially when he was inebriated,” says Botnick on the phone from his studio in Ojai.

At the Doors’ disastrous Dec. 12, 1970, tour stop in New Orleans — Morrison’s final concert — the rest of the band bailed on Morrison midset due to his narcissistic between-song tirades; at one point he told a misogynistic joke about a blind man passing a fish market and rambled on to a bored, restless crowd. During a stop in Dallas the night before New Orleans, they’d debuted then-new song “Riders on the Storm” and it had sounded great. “We thought, ‘Wow, we’re going to be a cool rock jazz group,’” says Densmore. “Then the next night Jim was so drunk it was terrible. I hated the erosion.”

The drummer, who last year published “ The Seekers: Meetings With Remarkable Musicians (and Other Artists) ,” hoped that by returning to L.A. they could gather themselves and figure out how to help Morrison. “I thought, ‘F— man, if we don’t get an album or two more out of Jim, so what? Maybe we’ll save his life.’”

Their longtime producer Paul A. Rothchild, who at the time was mourning the October death of close friend Janis Joplin (he oversaw her album “Pearl”), had produced the Doors’ most popular songs, including “Light My Fire,” “People Are Strange” and “Love Me Two Times.” He was scheduled to return for “L.A. Woman” but bowed out before the sessions really began. Included among the outtakes and demos is a recording of early attempts at “Riders on the Storm,” which are said to have prompted Rothchild to dismiss the song, and the band’s direction, as “cocktail jazz.”

Krieger disputes this telling of Rothchild’s departure, though. “The real reason was that he’d just done Janis and then she died. He had the feeling that something might happen if he produced our album.” Rothchild, continues Krieger, “didn’t want to be known as the guy who produced somebody and then they died.”

Aiming to record in a comfortable spot instead of their usual Sunset Sound, Botnick and band set up a studio at their rehearsal space, called the Doors Workshop, at 8512 Santa Monica Blvd.

Morrison’s return from touring meant the reemergence of his enabling sycophants. In his 1998 memoir, “Light My Fire: My Life With the Doors,” Manzarek described these hangers-on as “reprobates, degenerate descendants of indentured servants, slimeballs, and general Hollywood trash.”

“On Sundays, when we were off, he would go to bars, get drunk, and crash his car,” wrote Manzarek.

Still, somehow from this chaos came one of the great songs about Los Angeles.

“’ L.A. Woman ’ is in three parts because we didn’t get it all at once,” Botnick recalls of the process. “It was a fairly complicated song, and to get it to sound uncomplicated took a little bit of woodshedding.” The new 50th-anniversary edition includes all 40 minutes of the band’s recorded attempts at nailing “L.A. Woman.”

“That album was the first time that we actually wrote songs together as a whole band,” says Krieger, noting that to free themselves up musically they had hired bassist Jerry Scheff, who was then in Elvis Presley’s TCB Band, and rhythm guitarist Marc Benno. For the title track, “I was free to play my leads without having to overdub them later,” explains Krieger. “Jim was singing in the bathroom, and he could hear everybody.”

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What Morrison wrote and sang attempted to capture the essence of Los Angeles through an extended metaphor:

I see your hair is burning Hills are filled with fire If they say I never loved you You know they are a liar Driving down your freeways Midnight alleys roam Cops in cars, the topless bars Never saw a woman so alone.

For Botnick, “The ‘woman so alone’ is Los Angeles, and it shows what he thought of the city and how he lived in it, down to the Hollywood bungalows.”

“What’s so brilliant about Jim on ‘L.A. Woman,’” says Densmore, “was his idea of writing about our town as a woman. ‘I see your hair’s burning, the hills are filled with fire.’ ... That’s our fires.”

Across seven epic minutes, the band maneuvers through the measures as if winding along Mulholland at midnight. When the singer hits the words “Mr. Mojo Risin’” — an anagram of “Jim Morrison” — the band moves into the bedroom.

“‘Mr. Mojo Risin’ is a sexual term,” says Densmore, “so I suggested that we slowly speed the track back up, kind of like an orgasm.” The aim was to return the tempo to the same rate as when the song began. “I think I overshot it a little,” Densmore says with a chuckle.

The true revelation in the demos, though, is how sober and excited Morrison sounds. Between takes on the haunting “Riders on the Storm,” he playfully starts singing the theme to the western TV show “Rawhide.” “I don’t follow orders. I’m just a dumb singer,” he says after another take.

For Krieger, hearing those outtakes offered a reminder of the ways in which musical connection manifests itself. “There’s magic in that one take,” he says. “The other ones are very similar but the magic just wasn’t there. It shows you how lucky you have to be to capture it.”

They weren’t uniformly lucky on the album, which remains a polarizing listen that often finds Morrison adopting the demeanor of a cigarette-stained prowler who boasts and moans his way through simply written blues lyrics. Capturing the tenor of Manson family-era L.A., the album’s inner sleeve included an image of a naked, lifeless woman being crucified on a telephone pole. The Doors’ label, Elektra Records, also used the illustration for an eerie Sunset Boulevard billboard. The marketing campaign worked. “L.A. Woman” sold more than 2 million copies.

Reviewing in New Musical Express upon its release, critic Roy Carr called it “one of their best in sometime,” praising it with a notably backhanded compliment: “Accusations of it being insipid, tired and monotonous are, for the most part unfounded, for many cuts on this album have great depth, vigour and presence.” “The Rolling Stone Record Guide” gave the album five stars.

Morrison’s critics, though, were many. Most memorably, critic Lester Bangs explored his allure in a 1981 essay called “Jim Morrison: Bozo Dionysus a Decade Later.”

“One thing that can never be denied Morrison,” wrote Bangs, “is that at his best (as well as perhaps his worst, or some of it at any rate) he had style, and as he was at his best as a poet of dread, desire and psychic dislocation, so he was also at his best as a clown.”

By 1971, Morrison didn’t seem much concerned with his public image. He’d nearly quit music a few years earlier to pursue poetry, self-publishing books as James Douglas Morrison. (His collected works were recently published by Harper Design.) With the “L.A. Woman” recording sessions in the can, Morrison decided to fly to Paris for an extended stay with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson.

After the album’s release in April 1971, Densmore received an out-of-the-blue phone call from Morrison. “He seemed a little loopy and I thought, ‘Aw, f—,’” says Densmore. “But I loved that he was calling me to find out how ‘L.A. Woman’ was doing, and I was excited to tell him that ‘Love Her Madly’ was a big hit.”

Densmore told Morrison that “Riders on the Storm” would be the next single. “He said, ‘Great,’ and that he’d be back eventually.”

Morrison died on July 3, 1971, of heart failure in the bathtub of his and Courson’s apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis.

In the decades since Morrison’s death, Densmore says that he’s regularly been asked if he thought Morrison could have avoided his fate and gotten clean and sober had he not gone to Paris.

“I used to say, ‘No, he was a kamikaze drunk,’” says the drummer. “But I’ve changed that answer. It’s a different time. Substance abuse clinics weren’t cool. Now, angry, creative guys like Jim are clean and sober. And why not? Jim was smart.”

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Former staff writer Randall Roberts covered Los Angeles music culture for the Los Angeles Times. He had served various roles since arriving at The Times in 2010, including music editor and pop music critic. As a staff writer, he explored the layered history of L.A. music, from Rosecrans and Sunset to Ventura Boulevard and beyond. His 2020 project on the early Southern California phonograph industry helped identify the first-ever commercial recording made in Los Angeles.

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The Doors are arguably the most iconic Los Angeles-based band of all time. In this article, we’ll go over the places they lived over the years and some of the stories that happened there. Additionally, f or the current homes of John Densmore and Robby Krieger, we chose to omit the street addresses in an effort to respect their privacy. Aside from that, they will be covered fully.

Laurel Canyon

8021 rothdell trail.

Located off Laurel Canyon Boulevard and a short walk from the Sunset Strip, this house on Rothdell Trail was where Jim Morrison and his girlfriend Pamela Courson lived in 1968. Moreover, the song “Love Street” was inspired by Rothdell Trail because there was a group of hippies that hung around outside this house.

In addition, “Love Street” wasn’t the only song that was written here. Morrison also wrote a large portion of the lyrics to the songs that appeared on Waiting For The Sun and The Soft Parade while residing in the house.

Built in 1922, this house is 1,800 square feet and contains one-and-a-half bathrooms and three bedrooms. Morrison would write on the walls of the original shower. Further, the markings still exist and can be accessed via a hidden area closed off from the rest of the current home.

8826 Lookout Mountain Ave

In 1966, this was the home of Jim Morrison, Robbie Krieger, and John Densmore. This house has three bedrooms, and two bathrooms and is 2,000 square feet. In addition, it was built in 1939 and the defining feature is that the backyard has a number of large trees just off the balcony that provides both shade and privacy.

8216 1/2 Norton Avenue

Morrison lived in this West Hollywood apartment building in 1970 and 1971. Also, it was his last residence in the USA. In addition, It’s where Morrison conducted his last American interview for Rolling Stone’s Ben Fong-Torres in February 1971.

The house has five units and its architecture is done in a Spanish style. The home was built in the 1930s. In addition, outside of the building, there is a plaque that cements its status as the rocker’s last American home.

1000 N. La Cienega Way

The Alta Cienega Motel is essentially a flophouse that Morrison would stay at when he would get into a fight with Courson. Morrison typically stayed in room 32. However, he stayed in other rooms as well. Also, he liked this room because the view overlooked the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica. Doors fans from all over the world have stayed in this room and it’s covered in graffiti.

8585 Santa Monica Boulevard

This was the location of the Tropicana Hotel. Prior to the Alta Cienega Motel, this was a place that Morrison would sometimes use to crash. In addition, this was also the location of the original “Duke’s Coffee Shop” where Jim often ate breakfast. Nevertheless, the building was torn down in 1986 and a Ramada Inn went up in its place.

8401 Sunset Boulevard

In 1967, Jim used to frequent the Continental Hyatt House Hotel, which earned the nickname “the Riot House” from all the rock star shenanigans that took place here. Morrison was reportedly thrown out of this establishment for hanging off the balcony by his fingertips. The hotel still exists, however, it’s now called the Andaz West Hollywood.

461 Bellagio Terrace

Robby Krieger commissioned this single-story hexagonal mansion in Bel-Air in the late 1960s. It was designed by architect Matthew Leizer, who also designed the Santa Monica Library. The 6,600 square-foot mansion sits on one-and-a-half acres and contains four bedrooms and five bathrooms.

Construction was completed in 1971 and Krieger lived here with his family through the 1970s. Additionally, the hexagonal property, which has no right angles, features a pool, with views of the Getty as well as the Pacific Ocean.

Beverly Hills

Robby krieger’s current home.

Krieger’s current home in Beverly Hills is just off Benedict Canyon Dr. Built in 1948, it sits on just over an acre of land and contains four bedrooms and four bathrooms with a square footage total of just over 3,500.

232 South Rodeo Drive

232 South Rodeo Drive was the last home of Ray Manzarek in Los Angeles. This 2,900 square foot home contains four bedrooms and three bathrooms. He lived here for many years until moving up to wine country in Napa.

Santa Monica

147 fraser avenue.

T his was the first home of Ray Manzarek and his future wife Dorothy Fujikawa, which they moved into in 1965. Soon after Manzarek and Morrison’s initial meeting on the beach, Morrison moved in with them. Subsequently, Ray and Dorothy gave Jim the main bedroom and they moved their mattress into the living room to be closer to the heater.

2536 Beverly Avenue

John Densmore lived in this home from 2002 until 2008. This 1,500-square-foot home was built in 1912 and contains four bedrooms and four bathrooms.

14 Westminster Avenue

This apartment building was a place Morrison stayed during the summer of 1965. He would typically eat with a friend that had an apartment here, Dennis Jacobs. At night he would go and sleep up on the roof.

John Densmore’s Current Home

Densmore’s current was built in 1951 and contains 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and is 2,400 square feet in size.

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The Doors’ arrival on the rock scene in 1967 marked not only the start of a string of hit singles and albums that would become stone classics, but also of something much bigger – a new and deeper relationship between creators and audience. Refusing to be mere entertainers, the Los Angeles quartet relentlessly challenged, confronted and inspired their fans, leaping headfirst into the heart of darkness while other bands warbled about peace and love. Though they’ve had scores of imitators, there’s never been another band quite like them. And 50 years after their debut album, The Doors’ music and legacy are more influential than ever before.

Morrison’s mystical command of the frontman role may be the iconic heart of The Doors, but the group’s extraordinary power would hardly have been possible without the virtuosic keyboard tapestries of Ray Manzarek, the gritty, expressive fretwork of guitarist Robby Krieger and the supple, dynamically rich grooves of drummer John Densmore. From baroque art-rock to jazz-infused pop to gutbucket blues, the band’s instrumental triad could navigate any musical territory with aplomb – and all three contributed mightily as songwriters.

The group was born when Morrison and Manzarek – who’d met at UCLA’s film school – met again, unexpectedly, on the beach in Venice, CA, during the summer of 1965. Though he’d never intended to be a singer, Morrison was invited to join Manzarek’s group Rick and the Ravens on the strength of his poetry. Krieger and Densmore, who’d played together in the band Psychedelic Rangers, were recruited soon thereafter; though several bassists auditioned of the new collective, none could furnish the bottom end as effectively as Manzarek’s left hand. Taking their name from Aldous Huxley’s psychotropic monograph The Doors of Perception, the band signed to Elektra Records following a now-legendary gig at the Whisky-a-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip.

Their eponymous first album, released in January 1967, kicked off with “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” and also featured the chart smash “Light My Fire”, the scorching “Back Door Man” and the visionary masterpiece “The End”. The Doors arrived fully formed, capable of rocking the pop charts and the avant-garde with one staggering disc. Before ’67 was over, they’d issued the ambitious follow-up Strange Days, with such gems as “Love Me Two Times”, “People Are Strange” and “When the Music’s Over”.

Next came 1968’s Waiting for the Sun, boasting “Hello, I Love You”, “Love Street” and “Five to One”. Over the next few years they minded over new territory on such albums as 1969’s The Soft Parade (featuring “Touch Me” and “Tell All the People”), 1970’s Morrison Hotel (which includes “Roadhouse Blues”, “Peace Frog” and “Queen of the Highway”) and 1971’s L.A. Woman (boasting “Rider’s on the Storm”, “Love Her Madly” and the title track).

They released six studio albums in all, as well as a live album and a compilation, before Morrison’s death in 1971. Their electrifying achievements in the studio and onstage were unmatched in the annals of rock; and though Morrison’s death meant the end of an era, Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore collaborated on two more original Doors albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, and a set of tracks they composed to accompany Morrison’s 1969 recording of his poetry, released in 1978 as An American Prayer. They also pursued individual music projects, books, theatrical productions and other enterprises – and remain restlessly creative to this day.

In the decades since the Doors’ heyday, the foursome has loomed ever larger in the pantheon of rock – and they remain a touchstone of insurrectionary culture for writers, activists, visual artists and other creative communities. Their songs, featured in an ever-increasing number of films, TV shows, video games and remixes, always sound uncannily contemporary. No matter how the musical and cultural tides turn, The Doors will always be ready to help a new wave of listeners break on through to the other side.

The Doors were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 1993.

JIM MORRISON

Singer for the doors.

Morrison was a film student at UCLA when he met keyboardist Ray Manzarek on Venice Beach in 1965. Upon hearing Morrison’s poetry, Manzarek immediately suggested they form a band; the singer took the group’s name from Aldous Huxley’s infamous psychedelic memoir, “The Doors of Perception.”

Constantly challenging censorship and conventional wisdom, Morrison’s lyrics delved into primal issues of sex, violence, freedom and the spirit. He outraged authority figures, braved intimidation and arrest, and followed the road of excess (as one of his muses, the poet William Blake, famously put it) toward the palace of wisdom.

Over the course of six extraordinary albums and countless boundary-smashing live performances, he inexorably changed the course of rock music – and died in 1971 at the age of 27. He was buried in Paris, and fans from around the world regularly make pilgrimages to his grave.

In 1978, the surviving members of the band – keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore – reunited to record the accompanying music for An American Prayer, a compilation of Morrison’s poetry readings. He remains the very template of the rock frontman, and his singing, poetry and Dionysian demeanor continue to inspire artists and audiences around the world.

RAY MANZAREK

Keyboardist for the doors.

The group was born in 1965, when Jim Morrison and Chicago native Manzarek — both UCLA film students — met on Venice Beach. The singer’s poetry was a perfect fit for the classically trained keyboardist’s musical ideas, and eventually they decided to form a band. Though several bassists auditioned for the group, none could match the bass lines provided by Manzarek’s left hand. Signed to Elektra Records, The Doors released six studio albums, a live album and a compilation before Morrison’s untimely demise in 1971.

Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore released two albums as a trio under the Doors moniker, with Manzarek and Krieger handling vocals. Manzarek next formed the group Nite City, which invited comparisons to Mott the Hoople and Aerosmith; the quintet released its one album in 1977.

The surviving Doors reunited to create a musical backdrop for Morrison’s recorded poetry on the 1978 release An American Prayer. Manzarek produced and performed on five of the L.A. band X’s albums, including Los Angeles, which remains one of the high-water marks of the punk movement. The keyboardist authored several books, and recorded numerous solo albums. Ray lived with his wife of 45 years, Dorothy, in Napa, CA until his passing in May of 2013 following his ultimately fatal bout with bile duct cancer.

JOHN DENSMORE

Drummer for the doors.

Inexorably drawn to music from childhood, Los Angeles-born Densmore honed his sense of dynamics playing with his high school marching band. In the mid-’60s he joined guitarist Robby Krieger in a band called Psychedelic Rangers; shortly thereafter they hooked up with keyboardist Ray Manzarek and Morrison, and an explosive chapter in the development of rock ‘n’ roll began. A raft of paradigm-shifting recordings and epochal live performances would follow.

Morrison’s death in 1971 marked the end of an era, though the surviving trio recorded two more albums of songs and an instrumental backdrop for the late singer’s recorded poetry.

The versatile musician explored reggae and jazz in subsequent projects, wrote books and articles and became active in L.A.’s adventurous theater community. He earned an L.A. Weekly Theatre Award for the music he created for the Tim Robbins-directed stage production Methusalem. He also co-produced the play Rounds, which was given the NAACP award for theatre in 1987.

Densmore’s autobiography, Riders on the Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison and The Doors, was published in 1991 and was a New York Times bestseller. He’s written articles and essays for Rolling Stone, London Guardian, The Nation, and many nationally syndicated newspapers.

ROBBY KRIEGER

Guitarist for the doors.

Before picking up the guitar at age 17, the L.A. native studied trumpet and piano. The inspiration for switching to guitar came not from rock ‘n’ roll, but Spanish flamenco music. His first guitar hero, however, was jazz legend Wes Montgomery.

After Morrison’s death in 1971, Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore carried on as a trio. They released two more albums as the Doors before calling it quits in 1973, though they did reconvene a few years later to create music for poetry Morrison had recorded shortly before his death, released as the 1978 album An American Prayer.

Krieger went on to enjoy success as a jazz guitarist, recording a handful of records with the Robby Krieger Band in the 1970s and ’80s. Versions (1983) and No Habla(1986) amply demonstrate his versatility. “I think playing guitar is probably the one thing that gets better with age,” he says.Robby Krieger is listed among Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.”

Doors’ ‘L.A. Woman’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know

By Jordan Runtagh

Jordan Runtagh

The Doors  had crammed several lifetimes into just five years as band, and by late 1970, the psychic toll of Jim Morrison ‘s addiction and legal hassles threatened to overwhelm the group. Any attempts at making an album under these conditions should have met with unmitigated disaster, but on L.A. Woman – the final Doors LP released during Morrison’s lifetime – the band succeeded almost in spite of themselves. Self-produced and recorded in their private rehearsal space, the album was a homecoming in both a musical and spiritual sense. “Our last record turned out like our first album: raw and simple,” drummer John Densmore reflected in his autobiography. “It was as if we had come full circle. Once again we were a garage band, which is where rock & roll started.”

Morrison left on an extended trip to Paris as the final mixes were being prepared, hoping to rediscover his muse in the City of Light. He would never return: The singer died there in July 1971. As his final recorded work with the Doors turns 45, here are some surprising facts about the creation of L.A. Woman .

The Doors’ longtime producer quit the sessions, dismissing the songs as “cocktail music.” L. A. Woman got off to an inauspicious start in November 1970, when the band played their new material for producer Paul Rothchild. They possessed only a handful of semi-complete tunes, and Rothchild was less than impressed. He dismissed “Riders on the Storm” as “cocktail music,” but reserved particular scorn for “Love Her Madly,” which he cited as the song that drove him out of the studio. “The material was bad, the attitude was bad, the performance was bad,” he said in the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive . “After three days of listening I said, ‘That’s it!’ on the talk-back and cancelled the session.”

They convened for an emergency meeting at a nearby Chinese restaurant, and Rothchild laid his cards on the table. “I said, ‘Look, I think it sucks. I don’t think the world wants to hear it. It’s the first time I’ve ever been bored in a recording studio in my life. I want to go to sleep.'” With that, the so-called “Fifth Door,” who had produced the band since their debut, walked out. Once the shock had worn off, the Doors turned to engineer Bruce Botnick, whose credits included all of their previous albums, as well as the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds , and the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed . With his help, the reinvigorated band vowed to coproduce their new album. Gone were the days of Rothchild’s studio strictness, where it was normal to record 30 takes or spend hours on perfecting a drum sound. “Rothchild was gone, which is one reason why we had so much fun,” Robbie Krieger told Guitar World in 1994. “The warden was gone.” 

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Jim Morrison recorded his vocal parts in a bathroom. Eschewing the high tech luxury of Sunset Sound, the Doors decided to record in their unassuming “workshop” at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard. “It was the room we had rehearsed in forever,” recalled John Densmore in the documentary Mr. Mojo Risin . “Our music was seeped into the walls. We were very comfortable. It was home.” Like a fraternity common room, the cramped space was littered with empty beer bottles, dog-eared magazines, an endless tangle of cables and assorted instruments – plus a jukebox and pinball machine. “It was tight,” says Botnick, who was ensconced in the upstairs office behind a portable mixing board. “It was like sardines.” 

Doors’ ‘L.A. Woman’: 10 Things You Didn’t Know , Page 1 of 4

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Jim Morrison’s Favorite Hangouts in West Hollywood

The lead singer of The Doors knew this neighborhood well

If Jim Morrison were alive today, there’s no doubt the Lizard King would still be hanging around West Hollywood. Some of the most memorable music moments of Morrison’s life happened in local establishments—and a few of them are still around. Below, we share several of his favorite haunts.

Former site of The Extension

8500 Santa Monica Blvd West Hollywood, California

Today’s it’s an Al & Ed’s Autosound but back in the 1960s it was called The Extension and it was a regular hangout for Jim Morrison. This is where he’d often meet with journalists to give interviews and in fact, the now famous Rolling Stone magazine interview with Jerry Hopkins was conducted at this site.

Former site of Themis

947 La Cienega Boulevard West Hollywood, California

Themis was the boutique run by Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson. It was basically financed by Morrison and was in business for about three years starting in the late 1960s. Back then, it would not be uncommon to find the singer hanging out here.

Former site of The Palms

8572 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood, California

Between band rehearsals, Jim Morrison would frequent this bar to drink beer and whiskey during the breaks in the action.

Monaco Liquor

8513 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood, California

This liquor store is where The Doors would often buy booze during rehearsal breaks. Its close proximity to the band’s studio, offices, and other haunts made it the perfect spot to stock up—and it remains virtually unchanged today.

Former site of Kaleidoscope

8433 Sunset Boulevard West Hollywood, California

Today it’s the world famous Comedy Store, but back in the 1960s, after first starting out as Ciro’s restaurant and nightclub, it was known as The Kaleidoscope. Many bands played here during that time, including The Doors who appeared here April 21-23, 1967.

Former site of Cinematheque 16

8818 Sunset Boulevard West Hollywood, California

Today it’s the wonderful store Book Soup but back in the 1960s it was a small movie theater called Cinematheque 16. It was here that Jim Morrison read his poetry during a Norman Mailer Benefit on May 30-31, 1969. He was accompanied by former Doors member Robby Krieger on guitar, and the song Far Arden Blues was recorded during this stint and later appeared on the album An American Prayer .

Gil Turner’s Liquor Store

9101 Sunset Boulevard West Hollywood, California

This is sometimes called the “Liquor store to the stars,” and Morrison would often walk over here from the nearby Whisky a Go Go in between sets to buy booze (the Whisky did not yet have a liquor license).

Former site of The Cock’n’Bull

9170 Sunset Boulevard West Hollywood, California

This was at one time a prime rock ’n’ roll hangout in LA and also a place where you could often find Jim Morrison eating. Infamously, back in 1970, he supposedly left here drunk and began acting like a matador out on Sunset Boulevard in front of the restaurant, waving his jacket at passing cars.

Barney’s Beanery

8447 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood, California

On the night she died, Janis Joplin (a regular at this classic LA haunt) sat at her favorite booth, #34, and downed two screwdrivers before heading up to the Landmark Hotel where she died later that evening, on October 4, 1970. But this was also a favorite spot of Jim Morrison’s, who hung out here with Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, among many others. A plaque at the bar commemorates the former Doors singer.

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Revisiting Jim Morrison’s Disastrous Last Doors Show

Jim Morrison was already in a headlong downward spiral by the time he performed his final show with the Doors .

Mired in a losing battle with alcohol, the troubled singer had multiple legal woes hanging over his head when he took the stage on Dec. 12, 1970 at the Warehouse in New Orleans. The disastrous performance would bring the group to a screeching halt and prove sadly prophetic for the doomed Morrison, who had only months to live.

The once-svelte frontman had carved out a niche with his hyper-sexualized stage persona and leather pants, but by 1970 his severe drinking problem had turned him into a caricature of his former self: He was an overweight, bloated alcoholic with an unkempt beard whose performances sometimes degenerated into wrenching self-parody.

Morrison's burgeoning problems with alcohol also made him wildly unpredictable as a performer; he was arrested onstage at a gig in New Haven in December 1967, and charged with exposing himself at a concert in Miami on March 1, 1969, causing many venues to ban the Doors outright. The group retreated to the studio to record what would become L.A. Woman , and at the New Orleans gig – one of only two scheduled – they debuted several of those new songs and performing their hits.

But midway through the set, Morrison began to forget the words to songs, and then tried to compensate by launching into a long, rambling joke that fell flat. The singer was reportedly hanging on to the mic stand for support as the group launched into "Light My Fire," and during the solos he went and sat down on the drum riser, failing to get up to sing the last verse. Drummer John Densmore finally nudged the recalcitrant singer with his foot, whereupon Morrison went over to the mic stand and repeatedly smashed it into the stage until it splintered, then threw down the mic and abruptly walked off stage, ending the show early.

The other band members had a meeting at which they agreed that the New Orleans show should be their live swan song, since Morrison's unpredictability – as well as the charges from Miami – made further touring impractical. Morrison participated in the recording sessions for L.A. Woman , then went to Paris in March while the rest of the band finished up the mixing sessions.

Released in April, the album was a huge hit, spawning such lasting classics as the title song, "Love Her Madly" and "Riders on the Storm." It would also be the group's final recording with Morrison, who was found dead in a bathtub on July 3, 1971 in Paris.

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Venice Spots Jim Morrison Fans Must Visit

Freelance writer

In 1965, on a beach in West Los Angeles, a young Jim Morrison sat with film school classmate Ray Manzarek and dreamed of starting a band. This meeting spawned The Doors, and fans from across the globe to flock to L.A. in search of the group’s legacy. Discover seven of the must-visit locations Morrison loved in Venice, Santa Monica, and Marina Del Rey.

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The First Apartment

Manzarek and his girlfriend Dorothy invited Morrison to stay with them at their first apartment in Venice. Morrison slept in the master bedroom while the couple chose the living room, which was closer to the space heater. It was inside this tiny nook that they cooked meals together and planned the beginnings of what would become The Doors. The apartment still exists on the same street. Many people come to visit this place and remember the humble beginnings of this now world-famous rock group.

The Rehearsal Space

Inside this house, in 1965, organist Ray Manzarek first invited Morrison to sing with him. They were later joined by guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore and formed The Doors. In this rehearsal space, they made hit songs like “Light My Fire.” In 1969, the house became a condominium. By early 2000, the property surrounding the building doubled as an outdoor venue for art showings and live music shows. Take a moment to simply relive the history, or take a photo and bring a bit of history home.

Morrison’s Secret Writing Spot

Dennis Jacob, a friend of Morrison’s allowed him to hang out on the roof of this apartment complex. Here Morrison would find inspiration and write poems, many of which were made into hit songs. Jacob and Morrison were friends from UCLA film school before Morrison graduated. Filmmaking was what brought Morrison to California before he ever dreamed of being in a band. Now known as The Morrison Apartments, people from all over stop by for a photo and to see this piece of music history.

The Hotel Room

After dropping out of film school at UCLA, Morrison often stayed in room 205 of the historic Ellison Suites, sometimes with his girlfriend Pamela Courson. During an inspection in 2015, Courson’s diary was found hidden in this room. This historic hotel is still exactly the same as it was in the days of The Doors. The staff often allows fans inside to see the room and relive the nostalgia of “The Lizard King.”

The Local Hangout

Once known as Venice West Café, this historic hangout for post-beatnik intellectuals became a local and national hub for poets, artists and liberals interested in carrying on a tradition which began in 1950s America. Morrison would come here often to drink espresso, read books, and discuss his passion for beat-era poetry. In 2010, the Cultural Heritage Commission of Los Angeles paid tribute to the history, mounting a plaque on the wall outside in remembrance of this cultural renaissance. The building inspired the Beat Generation to head West from New York and brought together a community of artists and poets such as Jim Morrison. After being closed for years, the building is now a high-end Italian restaurant.

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The First Gig

Ray Manzarek and his brothers played as a rhythm and blues group here called Rick and the Ravens. At the time, this site was a local dive and live music venue known as the Turkey Joint West. Morrison would attend shows and shout requests for songs while drinking heavily. Manzarek eventually grew tired of Morrison’s behavior and challenged him to guest-sing the group’s version of “Louie, Louie” by Richard Berry. Soon after, Manzarek and Morrison put together a few singles with the group including “Hello, I Love You” and “Midnight Drive,” all eventually made famous by The Doors. Now known as The King’s Head, the tales of Morrison’s first gigs here still live on.

The Soul Kitchen

The inspiration for Morrison’s hit song “Soul Kitchen,” Olivia’s was a popular soul food restaurant in Santa Monica during the 1960s. It was known for its comforting food that was easy on the wallet. Morrison and other young, struggling art students from UCLA often ate here. The establishment’s namesake, Olivia, was a sweet older woman who was a pillar of the community. She would offer discount cards to needy patrons and give away meals to the less fortunate. Now a popular surf and skate shop called the Z.J. Boarding House, stop in and pay homage to the spirit of Morrison’s favorite soul food kitchen.

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The Doors: the story of Strange Days and the madness of Jim Morrison

They started the Summer Of Love a pop phenomenon and ended it in whirlwind of booze, LSD and out-of-control hedonism. Yet in between, The Doors still managed to make their unsung masterpiece

New York City, April 1967, Ondine Discotheque on 59th Street. Standing at the bar throwing back double shots of vodka and orange is Jim Morrison, 23-year-old singer of rising stars The Doors , who are halfway into their third residency at the club. In his new black leather suit, his tea-coloured hair falling in angelic ringlets about his face, Morrison looks exactly as he’s remembered now, 45 years later: the iconic rock god in mock crucifixion pose, nailed to the cross of his own imperturbable beauty.

Looking on is pop artist and underground film-maker, Andy Warhol, who has been obsessively in thrall to Morrison since he first clapped eyes on him some months before. Warhol wants Morrison to appear in one of his films, naked and surrounded by Warhol’s Factory ‘girls’, some of whom are not girls at all, nor even good facsimiles; some of whom, like Nico, are so ball-achingly beautiful Morrison will soon begin a brief, hopelessly doomed affair with her.

Warhol, never normally shy about introducing himself to the beautiful and the damned, can’t bring himself to approach Morrison. He’s too scared of what might happen if he interrupts the rock star from the attentions he’s receiving from two equally enthralled female fans, one of whom has the singer’s penis in her mouth while the other unbuttons her cheesecloth blouse so Morrison can drunkenly fondle her breasts.

“Oh gee,” sighs Warhol, his stock response to any situation in which he finds himself reeling. “I guess I’ll talk to Jim later…”

But later never comes, not on this trip anyway. Despite giving some of the most powerful performances of The Doors’ short career, Morrison’s offstage life is going to hell. He may look like a decadent angel, but inside he’s fighting just to keep his head above the dark waters he now finds himself in. He’s caught between his own idealised vision of himself as a hedonistic poet and artist and the earthier expectations of a record company, Elektra, who are about to enjoy the biggest success of their existence with Light My Fire , the second single lifted from The Doors’ self-titled debut album that is on its way to becoming the fluke hit of the summer.

Though no one is saying it – at least not to the faces of the band themselves – Elektra and everyone else in the music business know this is The Doors’ big break, and one they would be fools not to capitalise on by coming up with a convincing follow-up as soon as possible. Within a few weeks, The Doors will be flown back to Los Angeles and bundled into Sunset Sound studio, the featureless four-track bunker where they recorded their first album, and where, under pressure, they will start work on their second album.

These sessions will be abandoned, as Light My Fire overtakes The Beatles to become the defining hit of this most intoxicating of summers, but not before The Doors have recorded two tracks that will become their next single and its B-side: People Are Strange and Unhappy Girl . Everybody is excited about the new songs. What nobody knows yet is that this is just the beginning of what will become much more than a rushed follow-up to a band’s debut hit; that this album, Strange Days , will eventually become The Doors’ unsung masterpiece.

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But right now, Morrison is barely aware of his present, let alone his future. He might not know it, but standing at the bar of Ondine, only partly conscious as he throws back the booze, wheedles Quaaludes out of strangers and gets his ego massaged to orgasm, he has already begun his fast track ascent towards rock god status, and along with it, his personal descent into the quagmire.

When he’s not drinking he’s tripping, and when he’s tripping he’s still drinking. Torn apart by the wayward behaviour of his long-term girlfriend, Pamela Courson, who has begun sleeping with one of his drinking buddies back in LA, Morrison is roaming wild but not free. Each night he stays on at the club after The Doors have finished their set, drinking until he blacks out, at which point he is carried to a cab and driven back to the apartment on 45th Street. Most mornings he awakes to find at least one, sometimes two or three groupies sharing his bed: girls whose names he doesn’t know or will ever bother to learn. One night at around 4am, while drunk and tripping, Morrison decides to pay a visit to Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra, pounding on the door to be let in while Jac and his family hide inside, fearing for their lives.

These are bad scenes, even for the anything-goes rock milieu of the late 1960s. Morrison doesn’t care, though. The only thing he gives a fuck about, he says, are his music and his poetry. Meanwhile, the rest of The Doors – keyboardist Ray Manzarek , guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore – can only look on and wonder ‘what if?’.

“You know, self-destruction and creativity don’t have to come in the same package,” Densmore ruefully remarks now. “Picasso lived to be 90. But in Jim they came together so I had to accept it. We all had to. That was the card we were dealt as a band.”

“With Jim, it wasn’t always easy,” adds Krieger. “It was worth it because of the stuff that we got. But it would have been a lot easier if he’d been just a normal genius.”

Genius or not, Jim Morrison had never been what passed in the mid-20th century for a normal person. The eldest son of Rear Admiral George Morrison of the United States Navy, he grew up a well-educated but self-absorbed child who became a major disappointment to his father when, instead of following in the family footsteps and going to naval college, he plumped instead for a degree course in film studies in Los Angeles. This was where he met the professorial Ray Manzarek, another parental disappointment who’d already tried his hand at forming a rock group with his brothers. In 1965, Morrison sang Manzarek the opening verse to the song that became Moonlight Drive , while tripping on the beach at Venice. Manzarek famously “saw dollar signs” as Morrison crooned him his as-yet musically unaccompanied verse. Morrison, famously, saw only stars.

The band that they formed, The Doors, arrived just as rock was at its most fearsomely individualistic, before the rules of the road had been written. “We would make our own rules,” Manzarek explains, his deep baritone booming down the line from his home in the Napa Valley in Northern California.

“Because we have ingested LSD, we have opened the doors of perception. And we have seen that we are the equal, and perhaps better, of any generation that ever existed – that we could do anything. And we were so fuelled with life and possibilities that we were bursting at the seams, mentally and certainly semen-wise. We were bursting with life.”

By the start of 1967, the first, self-titled Doors album was ready for release. Now acclaimed as a cornerstone moment in the history of rock, it wasn’t until April of that year, when producer Paul Rothchild took the seven-minute Robby Krieger-penned Light My Fire and cut it in half for release as their second single – and their first No.1 – that The Doors became known outside what was then still an almost claustrophobic LA scene. It was also then that Jim Morrison, college dropout and hippy Hollywood maverick, began his transformation into the Lizard King – the alternate, take-noprisoners, no-one-here-gets-out-alive rock-consciousness that would ultimately both build his legend and deprive him of his senses, until all that was left was a bloated body floating in a cold bathtub .

The success of Light My Fire coincided with Morrison’s first public appearances in his new black leather outfit. Just six months before, the band had been depicted in promo shots wearing mod-style suits, their longish hair neatly styled.

Now, with their first album smoking up the charts, they emerged on to the covers of magazines as the epitome of a darker, more mysterious kind of cool. Morrison’s neo Gothic croon and Manzarek’s ghostly, cathedral-like organ spoke of murkier climes than those offered by The Beatles’ brand of polychromatic pop. If Sgt Pepper was the symbol of pop’s raising from gutter-level singsong to symphonic high art, The Doors gave the lie to such positivism, drawing on the growing feeling of ‘us against them’ that pervaded a generation of young Americans in fear of the draft to Vietnam, or in protest against what they saw as the overarching dead hand of a society where long hair was now a symbol of angry defiance.

On the surface then, The Doors seemed to be on-message like no other band of the moment. Yet as Manzarek says, “There really were no plans. We were excited that our record was doing so well but that wasn’t what was driving us forward. It was the thought of what we might do next. Suddenly it felt like we could do anything…”

Strange Days , then, would be aptly named. The first track they recorded, a song Morrison and Krieger had written together called People Are Strange , had been the result of a bad trip Morrison had needed Krieger to talk him down from at five o’clock one morning, at the tiny hilltop villa they shared in Laurel Canyon.

“He was talking about killing himself and all this stuff,” Krieger recalls, his voice fragile as he whispers down the line from a hotel room in Miami, where he’s on a promo tour for a new Doors DVD, Live At The Hollywood Bowl . “And so we decided to take a walk up to the top of Laurel Canyon. Like, ‘Let’s go up and watch the sun come up.’ And when the sun came up he suddenly got this idea about the fact that when you’re strange then people are strange. The whole idea just popped into his head – ‘Oh, I got an idea for a song!’, you know – and half an hour later we had it.”

Not all such occasions ended so harmoniously though. Morrison loved Krieger, yet hated him too for having written Light My Fire . Everywhere the singer went, people slapped his back, thanking him for writing a song he’d struggled to learn the lyrics for and to get the metre right when he recorded it, seeing it as almost a throwaway. Not any more, though. And that fucked with his head, along with all the other things that would fuck with his head from hereon in.

The only way he could deal with it was to let it out, and to hell with the consequences. Arrested for public drunkenness on Sunset Strip one night during the original Strange Days sessions, Morrison begged another of LA’s most famous teenage groupies, Miss P (aka Pamela Des Barres, future acquaintance of Jimmy Page and several others), to believe him when he said his rock star persona was “just a trip” and that really he was a sensitive poet. Janis Joplin didn’t get that impression when Morrison suddenly forced her face into his crotch at another Hollywood party during the same period. When he tried to laugh it off, she broke a bottle of Southern Comfort over his head and called him an asshole. “I am an asshole!” he hollered after her as she stomped off, giving him the finger.

It was a relief when the initial Strange Days sessions were called to a halt while the band returned to the road to promote their big hit. Their young management team, themselves struggling to keep up with the demands brought on by their band’s sudden unforeseen success, booked them gigs anywhere and everywhere. Anywhere and everywhere, that is, except for the biggest concert event of that long, purple-hazed summer: June’s Monterrey Pop. It’s something that still stings in the band’s collective memory. “When Monterrey Pop was happening, we were stuck at the Scene Club in New York for three weeks,” says Krieger offhandedly.

But to miss out on Monterrey, which took place in their own Californian back yard, and is now regarded as one of the most historic events in rock history – with a bill that included Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Ravi Shankar – that must have hurt more than a little?

“Oh yeah,” he says, tremulously. “ We were just… it was all new to us. If I had realised that fact I probably would have really been mad. But we didn’t know Monterrey Pop was gonna become a huge, iconic concert. We had no clue.”

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What the band weren’t told until later was that one of Monterrey Pop’s chief organisers, Lou Adler – still apparently angry over the browbeating he’d received the year before from a typically drunk and foul- mouthed Morrison, in the wake of Adler’s dismissal of one of the band’s early demo tapes – was said to have put the block on The Doors getting on the bill.

As a result, despite their burgeoning success, The Doors had spent the Summer Of Love largely in New York, playing the Village Theater on Second Avenue (very soon to be renamed the Fillmore East when legendary promoter Bill Graham bought it) and other smaller venues.

Life magazine’s critic Albert Goldman was so stunned by what he saw in The Doors that he switched overnight from writing about jazz to covering the emerging rock scene. Goldman, who would later become famous for his witheringly salacious biographies of Elvis Presley and John Lennon, wrote down Morrison’s proclamations and presented them in Life as tablets brought down from the mountain of rock by the new Moses of music.

“We’re really politicians,” Morrison told Goldman, straight- faced. “You could call us erotic politicians… a Doors concert is really a public meeting called by us for a special kind of dramatic discussion and entertainment.” The audience, he said, “go home and interact with their reality, then I get it all back by interacting with that reality”.

Back in New York for more shows in July, Morrison, the self-anointed prophet of the Summer Of Love, began an impossible affair with his psychic and spiritual opposite – Nico , Teutonic ice-queen and co-vocalist with New York’s most celebrated yet least famous band, the Velvet Underground . According to rock orthodoxy, the Velvet Underground and their followers – in particular, the Velvets’ vituperative singer Lou Reed – despised everything The Doors stood for. When just four years later Reed heard of Morrison’s death, he sneered: “He died in a bathtub? How fabulous…”

Yet in July 1967, Morrison appeared blissfully unaware of either Reed or his still unknown outfit of, as he would have seen it, Broadway dropouts and Bowery freaks. The Doors were now riding high, selling more records per week than the Velvets would manage in their entire career together, and when Morrison saw Nico he simply had to have her. He loved her platinum-blonde hair and her thick Berlin accent; loved that she was part of Warhol’s coterie; that she’d spent time in Europe with arthouse film-maker Federico Fellini; that she was older than him and in control. Because of her crystal beauty and her metallic accent, others – including a jealous Reed – made fun, said she didn’t have a heart like other women. But Nico now gave her heart to Jim Morrison.

Two inches taller than him, broader shoulders, bigger legs and hips, when Nico sat on Morrison’s face – which is what she liked doing best – he almost suffocated. The singer was used to crazy women, groupies and hangers-on, but Nico was different and Morrison offered to help write her songs, many of which later ended up on her solo album, The Marble Index . Songs with an undeniable Morrison flavour like Lawns Of Dawns, Frozen Warnings and Evening Of Light – none of which she would eventually offer him any credit for, on the record sleeve or in interviews.

When Nico dyed her platinum-white hair red – like Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson’s – he burst into tears. “He was the first man I was in love with,” Nico would later lament. “I wanted to please his taste… like a teenager or something.”

Yet Morrison – who kept notebooks and journals where he routinely wrote down versions of everything that happened to him as poems or just scraps of ideas – never once mentioned Nico’s name in his secret diaries.

It was as if she never really existed outside his own tripped- out fantasies.

In the end, it only lasted a month or so. Pamela Courson knew where Morrison was, and whom he was with. When she started a very public affair of her own with Hollywood actor John Phillip Law, Morrison finally came to his senses. Early one morning, while Nico was still asleep, Morrison got in his car and drove back to LA, and Courson. Nico, utterly distraught, flew back to New York, where she dyed her hair an even darker shade of hell red.

“Despite the pressure, I would say that was our most fun recording,” says Densmore now. “First of all, we had written both albums before we even went in the studio – 30 or 40 songs. But the first album, we were a little intimidated by the studio. It wasn’t our turf. We had to learn how to make records. And I would say by the second album we were more relaxed and we started using the studio as the fifth Door. I think we had an early copy of Sgt. Pepper and we were really turned on to experimenting with the studio and doing backward piano tracks and having a lot of fun.”

Some tracks came easier than others. My Eyes Have Seen You dated back to the original demo that had won them their deal with Elektra the year before, but made more frantic with this telling, sounding more like the Stones, with barrelhouse piano and Tequila Sunset-drenched guitars. The title track came with a suitably disconnected lead vocal, fear and mystery and the chase to catch the new dawn. Moonlight Drive , the very first thing Morrison had ever sung for Manzarek, but never properly captured on tape well enough to make the first album, now came alive in the new studio, helped not a little by a new Moog synthesiser and a far-out new solo from Krieger.

Nevertheless, even Jim Morrison couldn’t ignore the clamour for more success, from both the record company and from inside his own head. As always, alcohol was his preferred stress-buster and now he began to hit the bottle in earnest. All the while they continued gigging, too, adding to the pressure, allowing them no rest, fitting in weekend gigs between late- night sessions in the studio. After one spectacularly bad show opening for Simon & Garfunkel in Queen’s, in August 1967, Morrison got so wasted in an Irish bar he didn’t bother to go home – he just stayed on drinking right through the next day too. Another time he ended up on someone’s couch where he began reciting a new poem he’d been working on for months called Celebration Of The Lizard …

Poet Michael McClure, whose latest play The Beard Morrison was a fan of, visited during these sessions. Installed in the latest eight-track facility at Sunset Sound, Rothchild would turn the lights down low, burn incense and light candles, and allow the band to smoke weed and drink freely – anything to capture the right mood for each song. The only thing they actually stopped short of was dropping acid while they worked.

“No, no, no, no, no!” says Manzarek, aghast at the very idea. “LSD was a sacred sacrament that was to be taken on the beach at Venice, under the warmth of the sun, with our father the sun and our mother the ocean close by, and you realised how divine you were. It wasn’t a drug for entertainment. You could smoke a joint and play your music, as most musicians did at the time. But as far as taking LSD,that had to be done in a natural setting.

It was for opening the doors of perception. Perceiving why we’re alive on this planet, where we’ve come from, where we’re going. Answering those basic human questions that all people have asked themselves. Then bringing that information back and getting into your rehearsal studio, getting into the recording studio, creating your music, creating your songs, creating your words. That’s where all of that came out. You didn’t do it on LSD. LSD was your foundation. Psychedelics were your foundation on which to build.

“Each song has its own sound,” Manzarek continues. “The first album was ‘The Doors Live At The Whisky A Go Go’. That’s essentially what it is. The aural spectrum is the same. But on Strange Days , The Doors begin to show their versatility. That’s what it’s all about. My god, I played an entire song backwards! I wrote out the chord changes for Unhappy Girl , then started at the bottom right-hand side of the page and moved to the left and up the page… and I’m thinking, ‘Oh god, let me be on the beat.’ When I’d finished, I went back into the studio to a round of applause. It was a great sound but it was insane. It was totally insane! It was youth having no idea of its limitations…”

And very little idea of its responsibilities either – certainly as far as Jim Morrison was concerned. When it came time to record the album’s pivotal track, the 10-minute eco-anthem, When The Music’s Over , Morrison absolutely insisted the whole track be sung and played live in the studio, rather than broken down into its constituent parts. Live, When The Music’s Over now rivalled The End from the first album as the band’s most climactic moment. First aired publicly during a stint at the Matrix club in San Francisco back in March, Morrison would break the piece up with two different poems, Who Scared You and Everything Will Be Reported (At Night Your Dreams Will Be Recorded) . But in the studio, it all depended on the moment. No matter how great the new eight-track equipment was, Morrison wanted this one kept raw and alive.

The band acquiesced, then sat there for more than 12 hours waiting for him to show up. He never did. Instead, he phoned the studio at 3am and spoke to Krieger. “We’re in trouble here,” he told the guitarist. He and Pam Courson were tripping on strong acid and wanted Krieger to drive them to nearby Griffith Park where they could “cool out”. Krieger wearily agreed. When he dropped them off at Courson’s again at daylight, he reminded Morrison he was due back in the studio at noon. Once again, however, Morrison didn’t show up. They sent out people to find him but no go. The band eventually hung on until nearly three o’clock the following morning when they decided they could wait no longer. They recorded the music with Manzarek singing lead.

When Morrison finally showed – at noon the following day, 48 wasted hours after he was supposed to, John Densmore had it out with him. Densmore, who was the hardest of the three surviving Doors to pin down for this interview, was also the band member most likely to question Morrison’s quasi-philosophical standpoint during his lifetime, becoming ever more frustrated at the increasingly over-indulgent antics of the only guy in the band who couldn’t actually play an instrument.

It was never Morrison’s art that Densmore wanted to rein in, simply his self-destructive behaviour. “Musically, I wanted it to go out further on the edge!” he says. “I was a jazz buff before The Doors. I even was a snob about rock. I mean, I knew about Elvis and Little Richard, loved it. But I came from a sort of improvisational, experimental background, so I loved exploring the edge.” Densmore just didn’t want to waste time. “Morrison knew I disapproved of his self- destruction, that’s for sure. More than anyone else in the band.” He denies that they ever had an out- and-out fight, though. “But he could feel my vibe.” Gentle chuckle. “You know?”

Rothchild eventually broke the tension by suggesting they simply get to work. Morrison began whining about having to overdub a vocal that was always a product of his imagination at any given moment. But the track was recorded and Manzarek insisted he would simply cue him in. To everyone’s astonishment and no little relief, a riled- up yet secretly repentant Morrison nailed what would become the album’s finest moment on the second take.

It was Krieger’s turn to need some extra help, however, when it came to recording his solo for You’re Lost Little Girl, the first song the guitarist ever wrote, and one which pre-dated his time in The Doors. Much as he agonised over it, he simply could not get it down. Again, Paul Rothchild provided the remedy when he turned Krieger on to some super-strength black hash, imported from London, then threw everybody else out of the studio and recorded Krieger playing in the dark. When the producer then suggested getting a hooker in to give Morrison a blowjob while he did the vocal, things did not go so well, though. “We went with a later take,” Densmore concludes diplomatically.

A few nights later, Jefferson Airplane singer Grace Slick showed up while the band were recording Horse Latitudes, Morrison’s 16-line poem set to Manzarek’s musique concrète-style keyboard vortex. Recording yet again in pitch darkness, save for the candles, incense and the glowing ends of several joints, and amid an entourage of whooping and screaming freaks and followers, Slick went back to San Francisco saying The Doors had scared the living daylights out of her.

On September 2, The Doors played with a black leather-clad Morrison in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where an 18-year-old Bruce Springsteen was in the audience. When they performed When The Music’s Over at the Village Theater in Manhattan the following night, Albert Goldman again wrote of it as “an incredible moment”. Morrison was already working on new material that would not see the light of day until the following year, like The Unknown Soldier and Five To One , while the band and Elektra did what they could to keep him focused enough to finish the second album first.

With work on Strange Days all but completed, on September 17 The Doors made their fateful appearance performing Light My Fire live on The Ed Sullivan Show. Before the show, Morrison promised Sullivan that he would not sing the line, ‘ Girl, we couldn’t much higher .’ When Morrison broke his promise, Sullivan reacted angrily, informing the singer that The Doors would never do the show again, to which Morrison sardonically replied, “Hey man, we just did The Ed Sullivan Show.” With advance orders topping half a million, Elektra rush-released the first single, the delightful People Are Strange , and watched as it skimmed the US Top 10, then vanished without trace. Light My Fire , meanwhile, was still nailed on to the charts more than six months after its release, even returning to No.1 early the following year with the release of the José Feliciano cover version.

The Doors, though, were never seen by their fans, or even their record company, as a singles-reliant act. Unlike The Beatles and the Stones, who’d begun that way then evolved into album-oriented acts, The Doors were always about the albums, recording epic rock suites double-digit minutes long before Zeppelin, Floyd or even Hendrix had given it a shot. The Doors may or may not have been the beginning of rock-as-art, but they were certainly the most successful end product of that idea.

And it was something they brought to bear on all their live performances too. “As Jim once said, ‘We perform a musical séance’ – not to raise the dead, but to palliate the dead, to ease the pain and the suffering of the dead and the living,” explains Manzarek. “And in doing that, we dove into areas that were deeply, deeply Freudian, and psychologically deeply Jungian at the same time. So we were a merging of both Freud and Jung, which might seem impossible but it happened onstage, and it upset the establishment. There was just something about the power in the music, and that insane sexuality of Jim Morrison that drove the establishment right over the edge.”

Determined to ram home the fact that The Doors stood for more than just mere pop stardom, at Morrison’s insistence the band then put its foot down and vetoed the album cover originally suggested for Strange Days – another group shot, similar to the one that adorned The Doors.

“I hated the cover of our first album,” Morrison explained to The LA Free Press. For the new album, he claimed that he’d told Elektra: “Put a chick on it. Let’s have a dandelion…” What he actually told the label was that he wanted the band in a room surrounded by a pack of dogs. When their art director Bill Harvey asked him why, he shrugged: “Because dog is god spelled backwards.”

Trying to keep a straight face, a compromise was finally reached with the now-famous scene of half a dozen carnival freaks, comprising a midget, a juggler, two acrobats, a trumpet-player and a strongman. On the reverse, there was the extraordinary sight of ‘surreal’ fashion icon Zazel Wild, wearing a flowing kaftan, regarding a midget coolly from her doorway at Sniffen Court, off East 38th Street in New York, where the pictures were taken. Elektra thought the shots too weird even for The Doors but Morrison loved them. The only sign that this was the new album from The Doors came with the glancing shot of a Doors poster, placed at a slant on the back of the sleeve, with the strap Strange Days slapped across the foot. Other than that, you either knew what you were looking at, or you were from the wrong planet.

When the album was released at the end of September 1967, it was raved over rapturously by a rock media already primed to receive anything their new favourite group did next. Their audience, however,remained unsure.

With no comparable anthem to Light My Fire to rally the freak flag around, the album tiptoed rather than raced to near the top of the US charts, eventually stopping off at No.3. It would soon be superseded in the public’s imagination by the next album, 1968’s Waiting For The Sun , and that record’s breakout single, Hello, I Love You . In the UK, where the first Doors album had been a minor commercial hit but a major critical success, Strange Days came and went in a flash, without getting anywhere near the charts. Again, it was only Waiting For The Sun that finally introduced The Doors to the UK Top 20, by which time no one could recall anything about Strange Days other than its, well, strange cover.

As if to live up to their somewhat neglected new album’s title, The Doors spent the final weeks of 1967 imprisoned on the road, living out a dream that was already turning into a nightmare . Their tour schedule had grown so out of control that they were often playing auditoriums on the West Coast one night, only to be sent flying across country back to New York to play some club – a hangover from their days before they’d hit it big which their inexperienced management had not had the foresight to renegotiate – leaving all four band members exhausted, disoriented, flat and, in Morrison’s case, all too often simply unconscious.

When John Densmore’s new girlfriend, Julia Brose, asked to be introduced to Morrison, the drummer merely pointed at a figure curled up under a bench at the airport, where he was sleeping off his latest drunken, hell-for-leather binge. Two trashcans had been strategically placed in front of him to discourage the multitude of teenage fans that now routinely followed the band everywhere. “There he is,” Densmore told her with barely concealed loathing. “That’s our famous lead singer.”

On December 9, 1967, the day after his 24th birthday, Jim Morrison drove with the rest of The Doors to a show in New Haven, at the local hockey rink. Just before the start of the show, Morrison was cautioned by a police officer for taking a young girl fan into a shower stall with him, where they had been making out. When Morrison told the cop to “go fuck yourself”, the cop grabbed his can of Chemical Mace and sprayed it straight into Morrison’s face. Morrison fled, screaming and gasping. Onstage later that night, still furious, he launched into the whole story before the packed arena. When the band then launched into When The Music’s Over, Morrison screamed, “We want the whole fucking world and we want it now!”

The crowd surged forward and the cops, fearing a riot, panicked and ran onstage and arrested the singer there and then. They then dragged him, punching and kicking, to a squad car. “That was horrible,” says Krieger. “We didn’t know what the hell was gonna happen. They beat the hell out of him on the way to the car too.”

Morrison became the first singer ever to be arrested by police during an actual concert performance, charged with inciting a riot, indecency and public obscenity. Three writers and photographers from Life magazine who tried to intervene were also arrested. Although all charges were later dropped, the next morning it was national news across America. Thus was born Jim Morrison, rock star martyr, a role he would continue to play right up to and beyond the grave.

One of the final Doors shows of 1967, however, ended on a more surreal note. Having pre-recorded blistering performances of Light My Fire and Moonlight Drive for TV’s The Jonathan Winters Show, The Doors interrupted their second of three shows at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on December 28, in order to wheel a TV set onstage, so they could watch themselves perform. They had been halfway through Back Door Man when Winters’ show started. They simply stopped playing, downing tools, as it were, and walked over to the side of the stage the set was on and gazed at themselves on TV.

“Yeah, we had the audience watching us, while we watched us – onstage and on TV,” laughs Manzarek. When it was finished, Manzarek simply walked over and switched the TV off, went back to his keyboard and counted them all in again.

Looking back now, all three surviving Doors agree that Strange Days was a watershed moment in the band’s story. That it was, was arguably, their finest, purest moment.

“Well, I’m surprised you think that because very few people realise that,” says Krieger. “But I think you’re right. I think it is one of our best albums. And we thought so too at the time. We loved it. You know, we took our time making it and really, really liked how it came out. The record company did too. Jac Holzman played it for Paul Simon. And Paul Simon, after listening to the record, said: ‘The Doors are the best band in the United States.’ Strange Day s was really the four of us working together kind of on the same path. After that, things got kind of…”

He trails off and I remind him of the famous quote from Paul Rothchild about never knowing which Jim Morrison was going to turn up in the studio: the forward-thinking poet determined to create great art, or the monstrous drunk whose ego was so out of control he viewed the rest of the band almost as an appendage. That, though, says Krieger, was a phenomenon that only truly began on their next album, Waiting For The Sun .

“In the Strange Days period, Jim was more interested in psychedelics than, you know, getting wasted. I mean, he still might not show up if he was on too much acid but he was still just one part of this bigger… thing. I always used to joke and say after Light My Fire , it was all downhill from there. But it kind of was. Except for Strange Days . That was probably us at our best, when it was still fun.”

Listening to the album now, it’s easy to see what the drummer means. The band, using the studio for the first time as almost a fifth instrument, have a wonderfully light touch, even as they shift gears through some of the most poignant material of their catalogue: the swirly, candy-coloured organ on the title track; the joyful interplay between Krieger’s spidery guitar on Love Me Two Times ; Densmore’s feathery percussion on Moonlight Drive ; the sheer youthful exuberance of tracks like Love Me Two Times and My Eyes Have Seen You . Morrison’s young voice still contains its honeyed purr, even as he’s declaiming loudly on Horse Latitudes , or flailing wildly on When The Music’s Over .

The treacly way he softly delivers the deliriously wistful I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind is a far cry from the growling, out-of-control drunk of the final Doors album, LA Woman , which still casts its own tawdry spell but evokes none of the beauty of the voice on Strange Days . Here, you can hear the birth of The Lizard King – but also the death of Jim Morrison.

The final word goes to to Ray Manzarek, the first to grasp Morrison’s potential that hot afternoon on Venice Beach. “That line in When The Music’s Over that Morrison sings: ‘ Cancel my subscription to the resurrection/ Send my credentials to the house of detention ’ – I think that was almost his way of saying, ‘Okay, I already see what this whole fame trip is about, and I won’t let you make me play by those rules.’”

Manzarek, who has a tendency to speak in italics whenever the subject of his late friend comes up, then goes into overdrive.

“I mean, my god, Jim Morrison should have been up there running for political office. Jim Morrison is the son of the admiral. He is the well-born young man, white Anglo Saxon protestant, who is heir to the throne. He should have been a well-behaved young Republican, except he’s not, he’s in The Doors and he’s totally misbehaving. And proof of that is the captain – Captain Kelly, the classic Irish cop, who arrested him onstage in New Haven – he said to Jim: ‘You’ve gone too far, young man!’ And I thought, it’s perfect. He has broken no law, other than the law of civil restraint – and he had gone too far. Into a land where no so-called rock star had gone before.”

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 132 .

Max Bell worked for the  NME  during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for  The Times  and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the  Standard  and mags like  The Face  and  GQ  kept him honest. Later, Record Collector  and  Classic Rock  called.

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