Fact #113700

THE DOORS : L.A.WOMAN by Johnny Black.


As 1970 drew to a close, The Doors were widely considered a spent force.

Their previous album, Morrison Hotel, had been patchy to say the least, and frontman Jim Morrison's embarrassingly-public descent into drink and drug-fuelled confusion had recently climaxed in a performance at The Warehouse, New Orleans, during which he had slumped to the floor, battered the stage with his microphone until the wood splintered, then sat down and refused to participate in the rest of the show.

Clearly, Morrison was not fit for live performing but they were the biggest act on Elektra Records so, inevitably, sessions for another album had been scheduled.

“They were gigantic,” pointed out Elektra founder Jac Holzman some years later. “Remember, this was a time when (radio) DJs were playing whole albums. They would play all The Doors’ albums. The buzz and recognition of the band was continuous. A new Doors’ album was going to be a huge event no matter what.”

Naturally, The Doors first attempt to create a sixth album was made with their long-time producer Paul Rothchild who had helmed the previous five. "We just kind of took it for granted that he would produce and we would do things his way," said guitarist Robby Krieger. "You stick with success."

This plan, however, quickly floundered because Rothschild and the band were no longer sympatico. "The Doors' career had been going downhill for sometime when we started L.A. Woman," Rothchild later explained. "Jim was really not interested after about the third album. He wanted to do other things. He wanted to write. He wanted to be an actor. Being lead singer of The Doors was really not his idea of a good time. It became very difficult to get him involved with the records.
"It wasn't just Jim, though. They'd all been lazy. They only had four or five songs that were even defined enough to play as songs at that point. The most complete were L.A. Woman and Riders on the Storm, both of which I thought were great, great songs. My problem was I couldn't get them to play either of them decently. It was like trying to watch an 80 year old man trying to run the marathon. There was simply nothing there. There was no energy."
Krieger has a noticeably different take on how that initial encounter went down, saying, "We were pretty up about the music we were making. We had rehearsed for a couple of weeks before we played some things for Paul. He came down to the studio and listened one day – and you know, maybe we weren't at our best; it's hard to say … but he just wasn't into it."
"We rehearsed and rehearsed, but it didn't get any better," reckoned Rothschild. "Finally I said, 'Let’s go in the studio. We've got to make a record sometime.' I figured I'd be able to do it like the last few - patch together the best stuff. Ray would be a great cheerleader, and we'd finally get this thing going.
"Well, we went in the studio, and it was dreadful. Wall to wall boredom. Jim wasn't into it at all. He'd get into his spoiled brat thing, and drag everything down deliberately. It was the military kid showing his father what a punk he could be. It was that simple.
"I worked my ass off for a week, but it was still just fucking awful. I'd go into them and tell them that, hoping that it would make them angry enough to do something good: 'This isn't rock 'n' roll, it's cocktail lounge music!' But they just didn't have the heart any more. You know, it got so bad that for the first time in my career, I found myself drifting off to sleep, putting my head on the console and nodding off. It was just bad.
"I finally turned to (sound engineer) Bruce Botnick and said, 'I know another producer would stick with this because it's a quarter of a million dollars for the producer, but I can't do it. The reason I went into production was I loved music. But I cannot prostitute myself. This is whoring.'
"I went into the studio finally and said, 'Guys, I think the best thing that could happen is for me to leave, because you've become too reliant on me to come up with the energy and the ideas and the direction, and I just don't want to do it anymore. The only way you'll survive is if you make this record yourself. You'll have to generate the enthusiasm and the brilliance.'
"They freaked. Robby got pale. Ray sat down heavily. Jim turned around and walked to the other side of the studio. John looked like he was going to have a coronary. 'What are we going to do', they asked. I said, 'You’ve seen how I work. Bruce has seen me do it for years. Use that as a jumping-off point and make your own Doors record. Because, if I put together what we've got and presented it to a record company, we couldn't even get a deal.'
"We said a very warm and tender and loving goodbye and I left. I'm still dear friends with them. If Jim were still alive, we'd still be making poetry records together.
"The Doors did go on to produce their own record with Bruce, and from it came two excellent cuts - L.A. Woman and Riders on the Storm, the two that had been excellent in rehearsal. As far as I'm concerned you can take the entire rest of the record and throw it in the garbage can. I think it's terrible."
"He was like a rat deserting a sinking ship," is how Krieger, rather more succinctly, has described Rothschild’s departure. "I think he figured it was time to bail."
Wasting no time, The Doors met with engineer Bruce Botnick in a local Chinese restaurant on the night Rothschild quit, and told him they wanted to work with him. One of Botnick’s first suggestions was to bring in rhythm guitarist Mark Benno to free up Robby for more adventurous lead parts. "Basically, we wanted somebody to play the rhythm parts so I could concentrate on the leads without overdubbing them," remembers Krieger. "I would just play them as we were recording. It worked out pretty well. Marc (Marc Benno) knew what he was supposed to do. I thought he did a great job."

Botnick also brought in former Elvis Presley bassist Jerry Scheff to relieve Ray Manzarek of the chore of having to play bass on his keyboard.

Nor were those Botnick’s only helpful contributions. "I think it was Bruce who had the idea of doing it at our rehearsal space rather than having to be under the gun of a big-money recording studio," remembers Robby Krieger.

The Doors’ drummer John Densmore recalls that, "Bruce’s idea was that we had made a lot of records, so why not just do it live? It was perfect that we did it with Bruce. Jim's drinking never affected the work in the studio. I think he got empowered by us doing it ourselves."

That rehearsal space was located in their office building, The Doors’ Workshop (on the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica Boulevards), where a clubhouse atmosphere prevailed and there was a pinball machine. “It was a place where they could come and go with zero pressure,” observed manager Bill Siddons.

They moved in during late December 1970 and the bulk of recording was completed by mid-January 1971.

According to Krieger, "Bruce wanted to make it as natural and comfortable as possible for us, and that really worked. We knew the sound of that place from rehearsing in it all the time."

The room itself was not large - about 20 by 12 feet - but it had to accommodate five musicians, a large drum kit, two guitars, a piano, a Hammond B3 organ, a Fender Rhodes, a Wurlitzer, a Farfisa, various amplifiers, an eight-track tape machine (borrowed from Sunset Sound studios) and, of course, that pinball table. “It was tight,” noted Botnick. “It was like sardines.”

Despite the initial dramas with Rothchild, Jac Holzman seems to have been fairly sanguine about the prospects for the album. “I trusted the band, and I trusted Botnick," he later declared, "who I knew had done a lot of the important production work on Love’s Forever Changes. I thought The Doors would be in good hands. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have rubbed a rabbit’s foot if I’d had one.”

Krieger, who spent more time in close proximity with Morrison, could see reasons for anxiety. "He was definitely a little rough. The whole trial thing (relating to their recent obscenity bust in Miami) was hanging over his head and all that. He wasn't feeling too well health-wise. I remember him coughing and spitting up blood, probably from smoking too many cigarettes. But in my mind, Jim was indestructible. I thought he'd be drinking a fifth of whiskey a day until he was 90 years old. Guess I misjudged that…"

Frank Lisciandro, a photographer who attended the sessions, felt that despite his public image, Morrison was in good shape for the sessions. "He was the most relaxed I’d ever seen him in a studio. He was in an optimistic mood. I think the absence of Paul Rothchild gave him an opportunity to step forward as a bandleader.”

Krieger adds that, "LA Woman felt like we were making a demo. We were in a rehearsal place, we weren't in some $100-an-hour studio, and we knew the sound we wanted to hear. It felt like we were coming home, in a way. The whole thing was great."

Although The Doors were known as a rock band with psychedelic leanings and other eclectic influences, when they got down to work on L.A.Woman, they were looking back to their earliest influences. “We were all in the mood to play some blues," explained Krieger. "Jim was really into the blues at that point. The blues pretty much set the tone for the whole album.”

Krieger’s guitar sounds dominate much of the album, and he explains, "It was pretty much my (Gibson) SG. For slide I used my Les Paul Black Beauty, which I still have. Other than that… let me think... Oh, I did use a 12-string [a Gibson ES-335] on a couple of songs, like Love Her Madly and Texas Radio. I used Twin Reverbs (amps). In those days, the Twins had JBL speakers, and you could get a really clear sound out of them. If you played really loud, though, they would break up really nice. So you could have the best of both worlds. They were very reliable amps, and I just liked the way they sounded on recordings."

Apart from that, Krieger occasionally used a Maestro Fuzztone pedal.

The first track recorded for L.A.Woman was The Changeling, an enigmatic mid-paced rocker, prominently featuring Manzarek’s Hammond C3. It is said to be a tribute to James Brown but generally assumed to be about Morrison’s frequent changes of character.

This is followed by the ultra-commercial Love her Madly. Written by Krieger, it gave them a Top 20 hit, but was famously dismissed by Rothchild as "cocktail music". Composed on a 12-string Gibson ES-335 guitar, it refers to the numerous times Krieger’s girlfriend (and later, wife), Lynn, threatened to leave him. "Every time we had an argument," revealed Krieger, "she used to get pissed off and go out the door, and she'd slam the door so loud the house would shake."

The album’s three bluesiest tracks, Been Down So Long, Cars Hiss By My Window and Crawling King Snake were all laid down in one day, confirming not only Krieger’s contention that Morrison was deep into the blues around this time but also that the band’s work rate could still be impressive.

"There were no drugs, no women, no sycophants," insists Botnick. "Jim still liked to drink, and there was plenty of beer around, but he wasn’t drunk. He was extremely creative and he really led the sessions. And since he was staying at the Alta Cienega Motel right across the street, he was usually at [The Workshop] before we were.”

John Densmore confirms that, “He didn’t need handling. He sang most of his vocals in one or two takes. He really rose to the occasion.”

The first of those blues outings, Been Down So Long, features a raw Krieger slide guitar solo executed on his Les Paul Black Beauty. Morrison’s inspiration for the song’s first two lines probably come from Richard Farina’s 1966 book Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, but blues purists will know that, way back in 1928, bluesman Furry Lewis used an almost identical phrase in his song I Will Turn Your Money Green.

This is immediately followed by a more innovative blues cut, The Cars Hiss By My Window, with a dark, sinister ambience and a startling outro in which Morrison utilises a wordless vocal to imitate the sounds of both a guitar and a harmonica. "That was our Jimmy Reed piece," states Krieger. "Jim was really getting into the blues at that time and he loved it when I would just play straight blues. He’d sit there and make up songs on the spot. He just wanted to play all night. It’s too bad because I really think that had we done another album it would have been a lot more straight blues stuff, which I always loved."

The album’s title track follows, maintaining the sinister nocturnal feel. "I’ve always considered this the quintessential Doors song," says Krieger. "It’s just magical to me, and the way it came about was fantastic. We just started playing and Jim started coming up with those words, and it just poured forth. Jim was sitting in the bathroom, which we were using as an iso (isolation) booth, singing. I don’t know how he came up with that whole concept on the spot like that, but he did. You would think that would have been a poem that he had written before, as many of our songs were, but it’s not. That was just written on the spot.

"It’s very natural and sums up a lot of our best qualities. All the interplay with Ray just happened. We really understood each other at that point. We could anticipate where one another were headed and just play.
"On some of the songs, when Jim didn't know what to sing, he would look in his poetry books and get ideas from that. This time, he came up with that stuff about L.A .and an L.A. woman."
In the song's coda, Morrison repeats the phrase "Mr. Mojo Risin'," which is an anagram of "Jim Morrison".

Once again, John Densmore takes up the story. "Here’s this song, and it’s got a really nice groove, and then we broke it down and went into the slow section which began "Mr Mojo Risin'". Mojo was an old blues term for sexuality, so I thought, 'Well, what if I slowly increase the tempo, like an orgasm?'
"The problem was that it was a seven minute piece, an epic, which I liked, but we were doing it live and I wanted to get back to the same exact original tempo, and so I had to approximate that, but I think I got pretty close. It was a real challenge and I'm really proud of that song."
Organist Ray Manzarek describes it as, "A song about driving madly down the LA freeway - either heading into LA or going out on the 405 up to San Francisco. You're a beatnik on the road, like Kerouac and Neal Cassady, barreling down the freeway as fast as you can go."

Densmore points out that, "The metaphor for the city as a woman is brilliant: 'cops in cars, never saw a woman so alone' - great stuff. It's metaphoric, the physicality of the town and thinking of her and how we need to take care of her, it's my hometown."

If the album has a low point, it comes with the next two tracks. The almost throwaway L’America and the pseudo-intellectual Hyacinth House, both of which superficially sound deep and feature some fine playing, but on repeated listenings they come across more like sixth-form poetry than smart rock.

The band is back on home turf with their effective interpretation of John Lee Hooker’s Crawling King Snake, punctuated by Krieger’s ingeniously orgasmic guitar spurts, and the proceedings take another leap up with The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat), a threatening Morrison poem-song said to be based on his teenage memories of hearing Mexican radio stations blasting blues across the border into Texas.

Krieger also took some inspiration from the radio for this track, revealing, "I heard this thing on the radio, I don't know what it was... It was something on one of the FM stations, and it was that little thing I did on Texas Radio – 'da-daa-dupp!' – I kind of stole it from that song."
It’s hard to think of any other album which closes as atmospherically as L.A.Woman does with Riders On The Storm. "We were fooling around with (country music hit) Ghost Riders In The Sky one day," reveals Krieger, "and somehow it turned into Riders On The Storm. It just happened."

Manzarek expands on Krieger’s recollection, adding, "Robbie was jamming on his guitar, playing Ghost Riders In The Sky, and Jim says, 'Hey, I got some lyrics for that.' And what he had was Riders On the Storm. I had to adapt it so we weren't playing the old Vaughn Monroe song, put a little jazz in there. After we'd done the song, Bruce said, 'Oh, I get it, rain on the desert, and thunder,' so we added those sound effects. So it's basically a blues song, a 1-4-5, except that we changed the 5."

The already spooky atmosphere of the song was enhanced by one final touch. "There’s a whisper voice on Riders On The Storm, if you listen closely, a whispered overdub that Jim adds beneath his vocal," revealed Manzarek. "That’s the last thing he ever did. An ephemeral, whispered overdub.”

John Densmore has said that L.A. Woman, “got us back to our roots. We’d started out in a garage in Venice, California and we finished up in a rehearsal studio – making LA Woman quickly, spontaneously, going for the feel.”

Robbie Krieger seems to agree, stating, "I think we came up with something so loose because there was no pressure. We figured we were already screwed, so we were having fun again. we were so far gone that it was like our first album."

Immediately after the sessions, Morrison left to live with his girlfriend Pamela Courson in Paris, not even waiting for the playback for Holzman. The album was released in April 1971, restoring their credibility with the music critics, peaking at No9 in the USA, No28 in the UK, and and going gold in the space of two months.

Rolling Stone critic Robert Meltzer declared, "This is the Doors' greatest album (including their first) and the best album so far this year. A landmark worthy of dancing in the streets."

Just three months later, on July 3, 1971, Morrison died of what was first reported as a heart attack in his bath in Paris, although subsequent reports suggest that an accidental overdose of heroin was the more likely cause.

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Sources : Quotes and other information in this feature are drawn from Uncut magazine, Guitar World, Classic Rock, Goldmine, BAM (Bay Area Magazine), Music Radar, and from the documentary The Story Of L.A.Woman.