Fact #180253

The seventies yawned ahead of The Doors like the deep, dark chasm of a serpent’s throat.

Their last US top ten single, Touch Me, had been back in April, followed by three releases that didn’t sniff the Top Forty. When their fourth album, The Soft Parade, stalled at No6, it was a disaster compared with the Top 3 status of all their previous albums.

Compounding the misery, their label, Elektra, wanted a live album but gigs were increasingly hard to find because, in the wake of Jim Morrison’s obsenity bust in Miami the previous March, plus another arrest in November for drunken behaviour on a plane from Los Angeles to Phoenix, Arizona, anxious promoters had begun to view the band as not only undesirable but unreliable. Work on the live album had started on 21 July 1969 with the recording of a show at the Aquarius Theater in Los Angeles, but had since been largely abandoned.

So, when the band arrived in New York for two dates at the crescent-shaped, 4,000 capacity Felt Forum on 17 and 18 January 1970, the pressure was on. Although they had not performed together for three months, the first of these dates was to be recorded for the album.

Nevertheless, Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek claims to have been looking forward to the show. "No audience on earth is more insane than New York City, USA. Nor more enthusiastic, nor more intuitive, nor more intellectual. I love the people of that city. When we played New York we were home. You can hear how revved up and inventive we were on those four performances." Morrison, for his part, having lost some weight and shaved off his beard, was looking more like the rock god of old than he had in many months.

After a turgid start, the early show on the 17th did finally ignite, finishing with a high-energy encore of Soul Kitchen. Returning to their dressing room in good humour, the band encountered music journalist Patricia Kennealy who, in her spare time, was also a practising member of a witchcraft coven. Having started an affair with the Lizard King just days earlier, Kennealy, had snorted a blast of mescaline just before the show, and arrived in the dressing room with her womanly charms barely covered by a slinky black jersey minidress, and thigh-high black leather boots.

The jovial ambience was thus tempered somewhat by Morrison’s difficulty in keeping his eyes and hands of Kennealy, while his wife Pam was also in the room.

When The Doors returned to the stage for the second show, the music carried on from the same peak of excitement that the first performance had ended on. Even Morrison’s terse opening announcement that “Everything is fucked up as usual.” did nothing to dampen the spirit of the moment.

Mike Jahn of the New York Times noted that "At least two dozen teen-age girls and quite a few boys had to be dragged away from The Doors' singer, Jim Morrison, by stagehands. The other three Doors played on, unperturbed."

Kennealy, lusting after her new lover from the front rows, remembered Morrison that night, as “singing his heart out, being pelted with flowers, joints, bras, panties, lighted cigarettes and other tokens of affection : the man who says he wants to fuck me right there on the Forum floor."

And, despite the trials of the last year, it was evident that Morrison’s ironic sense of humour hadn’t deserted him. When one miniscule joint landed at his feet, Jim eyed the crowd and said, "That's what I like about New York joints. You can pick your teeth with them."

Potential disaster loomed only once, when they launched into Wild Child from the critically-mauled Soft Parade album. After a couple of bars of disharmony, they stopped and abandoned the song, with Morrison indicating his feelings by holding his nose.

The show climaxed with a devastating performance of their Oedipal epic, The End, inspiring Douglas Sizer of the Hofstra University Chronicle to report that “when they left, you could see they had drained all their passions and were completely spent, like the boy who has just finished his first taste of love-making. The audience clapped and clapped."

The double-album set, Absolutely Live, was completed with tapings of further concerts at the, but the triumphant Felt Forum concert was the turning point where a band on the brink of the abyss had proved its own greatness to itself once again.

When the album was out on the shelves, Morrison declared, “I think it’s a true document of one of our good concerts. It’s not insanely good, but it’s a true portrait of what we usually do on a good night.”

Morrison was justifiably proud of it, but the one thing Absolutely Live wasn’t was a true document of one momentous night. Further concerts were taped at the Philadelphia Spectrum, Pittsburgh Civic Arena and Cobo Hall in Detroit, and Doors’ guitarist Robby Kreiger remembers a seemingly interminable process of piecing all the bits together. “We all sat there for weeks and weeks and we listened to every little thing, so: this verse from this concert, this version of ... Rothchild (producer Paul Rothchild) is famous for that, you know? It sounds like it's a live album, but the whole studio was filled with pieces of tapes hanging up on hooks, one piece after another.”