Fact #113749
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While working on their album The Soft Parade in Sunset Sound Recorders, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA, The Doors improvise on a set of rock classics, including Love Me Tender, Pipeline and Mystery Train.Full article:
Paul Rothchild (producer) : 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. When we did The Soft Parade, it was like pulling teeth to get Jim into it.
It was bizarre making it. It was the hardest I ever worked as a producer. It was nearly impossible to get Jim to sing well and the band to play well on a whole take. It was HELL. You see, by this time, they'd run out of all their material, and what they came in with was raw, very green stuff.
When he was sober, he was the nicest, brightest, most articulate human being I knew. He was well-read, perceptive, sensitive. Give him three drinks and he was a monster. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. He was the worst. Ninety percent of the time, when he was drunk, he was impossible to deal with. The other ten percent, he transcended himself, and was brilliant. The ten percent is on his records. The other ninety percent is garbage. It would make you throw up to hear this stuff.
Off-key singing. Mush-mouth. Bratty stuff. Fooling around. It's not great stuff. It stinks. You can't put out an album of Doors outtakes because they're embarrassing. It's not like Jimi Hendrix where you might say "The song's not great, but what a guitar solo!" Jim was not good to record drunk.
From the third album on, we got into heavy vocal compositing because Jim would come in too drunk to sing decently. Sometimes we'd put together eight different takes of a song to make one good one. Every single song from the third album on was done that way. Every one. I don't mean a verse at a time, either. Sometimes it was a phrase at a time, from one breath phrase to another.
(Source : interview with Blair Jackson, BAM magazine, San Francisco, Jul 3, 1981)
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It was bizarre making it. It was the hardest I ever worked as a producer. It was nearly impossible to get Jim to sing well and the band to play well on a whole take. It was HELL. You see, by this time, they'd run out of all their material, and what they came in with was raw, very green stuff.
When he was sober, he was the nicest, brightest, most articulate human being I knew. He was well-read, perceptive, sensitive. Give him three drinks and he was a monster. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. He was the worst. Ninety percent of the time, when he was drunk, he was impossible to deal with. The other ten percent, he transcended himself, and was brilliant. The ten percent is on his records. The other ninety percent is garbage. It would make you throw up to hear this stuff.
Off-key singing. Mush-mouth. Bratty stuff. Fooling around. It's not great stuff. It stinks. You can't put out an album of Doors outtakes because they're embarrassing. It's not like Jimi Hendrix where you might say "The song's not great, but what a guitar solo!" Jim was not good to record drunk.
From the third album on, we got into heavy vocal compositing because Jim would come in too drunk to sing decently. Sometimes we'd put together eight different takes of a song to make one good one. Every single song from the third album on was done that way. Every one. I don't mean a verse at a time, either. Sometimes it was a phrase at a time, from one breath phrase to another.
(Source : interview with Blair Jackson, BAM magazine, San Francisco, Jul 3, 1981)