Hard to believe, but 40 years have passed since The Doors recorded L.A. Woman, the band’s final rock album with legendary singer Jim Morrison. Next month, Rhino Records will mark the anniversary of that classic album’s release with a greatly expanded, two-CD version. Fact is, during the past four decades, interest in The Doors and their music has rarely waned. Sparked by a fateful encounter between Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, on a Venice, California, beach in 1965, The Doors went on to embody all that was adventurous about late ’60s rock and roll. In the following interview, Manzarek shares his thoughts about Morrison, The Doors’ legacy and the making of L.A. Woman.
What was that fateful meeting with Morrison on the beach like?
We had graduated from film school, and there we were, with no prospects, whatsoever. Remember, this was the mid-’60s. Hollywood couldn’t care less about guys from film school. All they wanted to do was make movies like [the Rock Hudson/Doris Day film] Pillow Talk. So anyway, Jim was originally going to New York, but for some reason he didn’t. And we ended up running into one another on the beach. Talk about being guided by the better angels of your selves – or, even more so, being guided by the spirit of the dead Indian that was in Jim’s body. It was as if he was saying, “The two of you – psychedelic warriors – have to get together.” What the shaman wanted to do was get the word out to white America about Indian tribalism. What did it mean to be a Native American, the first people on the continent? What did they see? What did they worship? It was about knowing God through the eyes of an Indian. That was one of the purposes of The Doors: to open up Native Americanism to the new tribe, as we were called – the new long-haired tribe.
Had you already been composing music when that encounter took place?
I had been writing, but at the time I didn’t even have a piano. I was doing rock and roll, occasionally, with my brother’s surf band, Rick and the Ravens. We were doing some original material, surf songs. I would go up on stage and sing some blues with them, or perform some of our original compositions. As I say, though, it was surf songs, throwaway stuff.
The very first song The Doors rehearsed was “Moonlight Drive.” Was there great chemistry, right away?
I knew instantly we had found “it,” that indefinable, transcendent something that Kerouac refers to. I remember showing Robby the chord changes for a simple “G” progression. He pulled out his bottleneck and said, “I’ve got an idea for this, something sort of liquid-like.” A lot of The Doors music came to be like that – water-y. That came from living on the beach. We were actually there, whereas even The Beach Boys, for instance, didn’t really live on the beach.
How did your playing the bass parts on a keyboard bass affect The Doors’ overall sound?
My right hand played the organ, with all the filigrees, while the left hand played the same thing over and over again, on the bass keyboard. The effect was to go from boring to hypnotic. I remember we had to ask Robby’s father for the money to buy the keyboard bass. We told him we would pay him back, and he said, “Tell you what. You pay me back if you go nowhere. All I ask is that you write a hit single.”
Did Morrison have confidence in himself as a singer, from the start?
No! I had confidence in him, but he didn’t have confidence himself. When we first started performing at [L.A.’s] The London Fog, he would face inward. When you rehearse, you rehearse in a circle, and face one another. The singer doesn’t turn and look at a blank wall; he faces the other musicians. The energy tends to congeal partly as a result of that. Little by little, Jim reached the point where he turned around and faced the audience. That happened at the Whisky A Go Go. Oliver Stone’s portrayal of that in the movie was way over the top, by the way.
Morrison’s problems with alcohol really took hold around the time of Morrison Hotel. Were effective treatments available, back then?
In those days, Alcoholics Anonymous was more for winos. Upper-class, sophisticated alcoholics really had no place to go. But I don’t know that Jim would have gone along with a 12-step program, anyway. He would have had to turn over his life to a higher power, when in fact we are at one with the higher power. Alcoholism ran in the Morrison family line. I think he had a genetic predisposition. That’s what eventually did him in. That’s the great tragedy. He was so brilliant, and such a wonderful guy, and so much fun to be with, but there was that demon alcohol.
Did Morrison feel The Doors – and the music The Doors were making – were a perfect vehicle for what he wanted to accomplish an artist?
He was happy with that. He was satisfied in the sense that we had done what we set out to do. The real fun of the whole experience was imagining the success of The Doors. It was like, “Alright, we’re going to get a rock and roll band together, make fabulous albums, and have the whole world know who were are, like The Beatles and The Stones and Bob Dylan and The Beach boys.” And we accomplished that. That was our conception. We created the art, and the results of that art achieved exactly what we were hoping for. Morrison was satisfied with that, but he also wanted more. We all had more things we wanted to do.
Purely from a sonic standpoint, The Doors’ studio recordings rank among the best-sounding albums of the ’60s. How important were the roles of producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick?
There were six of us making those albums. We couldn’t have done it without those other two guys. They were great to work with. They had cut their teeth making lots of great albums with other people, and were well-versed in the studio. They knew what they were doing, just as we knew what we were doing, on our instruments. Everyone had his area of expertise, everyone had done his homework and everyone knew what he wanted to do. Those things came together to create The Doors’ sound.
An expanded version of L.A. Woman hits record stores next month. What’s your recollection of the making of that album?
The board we used was the same recording board at the first recording session, at Sunset Sound, for the first album. Elektra had bought that board and put it away in storage. Bruce knew about it, and we took it out of storage and brought it to our rehearsal room – The Doors’ workshop. Botnick set up his equipment upstairs, and ran cables out the back window and down through the back door, and baffled off each instrument and set up the mics downstairs. The isolation vocal booth was the downstairs bathroom. So, we had bathroom echo on L.A. Woman. The title track is one of our greatest songs. There are hardly any chord changes at all. It’s basically A to G, with a bit of C and D in there at the end of that slow part that builds up. And then there’s “Riders on the Storm,” the last song that Jim Morrison recorded on this earth. L.A. Woman is a fantastic album.
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