Chapter 11
Brecht and Weill at the next whiskey bar ... Diaghilev to the Doors ... Days of Morrison, nights of Warhol ... Eve of destruction at Delmonico's 1967
JAC: I never forgot Fred Hellerman's advice to me in the late Fifties when I was complaining to him about running like crazy and only inching forward. Keep at it, Fred told me, and I would find myself standing in the right place at the right time.
For me any time could be the right time. But where was the right place? New York was under an A&R microscope from competing labels. To multiply my opportunities I traveled constantly between the coasts.
In San Francisco, Paul Rothchild and I tried to recruit Janis Joplin for Elektra. On a spring afternoon in 1966, she brought her guitar and sang for us at a mutual friend‘s apartment—incredible power, the room was too small to hold her, she just about pushed you against the wall. Paul and I knew she deserved a better backing band, but Janis insisted on sticking with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and she was equally reluctant to let us talk to her record company about buying out her contract. I think she liked the idea of being signed to a local San Francisco label. Her ambition was very much in check.
LENNY KAYE: It strikes me as funny that Jac never really participated in the San Francisco scene. You'd figure that would be a really natural place for Elektra to make its stand, but they never really signed any of those bands. But he did love LA. Maybe that's where the millionaire part comes in.
JAC: The San Francisco scene was charming but chaotic. No one seemed serious and I didn't get that this was the reason people loved the place. I was not at the center; I felt like a voyeur.
LA was where I finally found what I was looking for. The time was the summer of 1966, and the place was the Sunset Strip, which had suddenly morphed before everyone's astonished eyes into the hippie navel of the universe.
BILL GAZZARI: Out of nowhere popped all these guys and girls with long hair, and they just started hanging out.
EVE BABITZ: One minute there was beatniks and then the next minute some guy introduced himself to me as a hippie and from then on there were just hippies.
JAC: I remember Jackson Browne saying that the first time he heard the word hippie, he thought it was an affectionate term for a small, hip person.
EVE BABITZ: A hiplet! There were millions and billions of them.
RAY MANZAREK: People who had let their hair grow long, people who saw the Beatles and the Stones and the English invasion and thought that was definitely the way to look. And the Strip was a safe haven for that kind of person, the freaks, the outsiders, the different people.
SHERRI KANDELL: It was definitely the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
1BILL GAZZARI: I guess you could describe it as a zoo.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Every night in the summertime it was just one big street scene. Cars lined up bumper to bumper.
JIM DICKSON: It had the exciting feeling of carnival. People were coming into Ciro's to see The Byrds, dressed in a new costume every night that they made that day.
SHERRI KANDELL: By day I was a high school girl from Bel Air, by night I was a Strip chick, hip huggers, bell bottoms, with my belly button showing. Sixteen years old, and I had a job dancing in the window at Mad Man Muntz in a leotard and fish net stockings, to attract people to buy car stereos and cassettes, to help me buy an Austin-Healy convertible. I danced at Gazzari's, I was a featured dancer and I had a picture of myself outside—my picture on the Strip! Once at Canter's I got up on the counter and danced on top of the deli.
ROBBY KRIEGER: We hit all the clubs. The Sea Witch, an underground kind of place. Pandora's Box, the Unicorn, the Trip, The Galaxy, next to the Whisky, Brave New World, Bido Lito's.
BILLY JAMES: Frank Zappa did a little map of Hollywood freakout hotspots for the edification of travelers.
MIRANDI BABITZ: My shop was right next door to a shop called the Psychedelic Conspiracy, so we had a hot little corner, right where Holloway runs into Sunset. My husband was in a band, and the shop was full of musicians. We had a drum kit set up in the back for anybody that dropped in.
John Densmore's band at the time and my husband's band were sharing a set of equipment. I had this big old Cadillac, and we would load the band stuff in the trunk and drive back and forth on Sunset, unload it on the stage and they'd play an early set, and then we'd truck it all down to the other end of the Strip for the other band to play a late set.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Gazzari's was where the local groups played, more or less.
BILL GAZZARI: The Doors were boys who kept sitting on the stoop and asking me if they could come in and audition. The one that did the most talking was Jim Morrison. I said, “Well, Jim, you got to wear shoes to come in here.” So he turned around, went back out and sat out there on the ledge, just joined the hippies, as inside the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield and Ike and Tina Turner would play. And then he'd hit me up again a couple of days later: “We want to audition.” And I said, “Well, Jim, we can work it out, but you gotta wear shoes.” One day he said, “Bill, can we come in now?” I leaned over the counter and he had one shoe on. I walked around the counter and I seen that he didn't have a shoe on the other foot. I said, “Did you lose a shoe?” He said, “No, I found one, so I could get in.”
JOHN DENSMORE: Our first real paying gig, if you could call it that, was at a little club called the London Fog.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Like a little dive, but it was near the Whisky, so that was good. This guy who ran it was named Jesse James. Like a hustler guy. A nice guy, though. Years later I saw him, he was driving a cab.
RAY MANZAREK: For our audition he said, “Come down and I'll let you play one entire night.” We called everyone we knew, all the guys from UCLA, all the girls. The place was packed. Jesse was just delirious: “God, you guys, this is great. You're a really good band, and I haven't seen this place so crowded in a long time. You're definitely hired. Can you start tomorrow, Friday?” And of course Friday night came round and all our friends were gone, there were six or seven people in the club. Jesse said, “Gee, I can't understand it, there were so many people last night, it's Friday night, I thought the place would be packed. I wonder where everyone is.” Of course we never said a word.
Next night, five people came in the club, the night after that four, the night after that six, and on the weekend all of ten or eleven. An occasional sailor would come in, two sailors, an occasional businessman. Most of the time there were about seven people in the club, the four Doors, the waitress, the bartender, who was none other than Jesse James, and Rhonda Lane, go-go dancer.
Now, Rhonda Lane, go-go dancer, was slightly overweight, but she certainly could shimmy. She was wearing a fringed outfit, she had go-go boots and sort of a discreet bikini, circa 1966. She go-goed to our music in her go-go cage, but it was extremely difficult for her. You could go-go to Johnny Rivers, do the Frug and the Watusi, but unfortunately Rhonda was attempting to dance those patterned, styled dances to the music of a group of acid-heads who had completely spaced out and gone into the ozone and were playing Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Muddy Waters and Igor Stravinsky rhythms all wrapped into one. I mean, we were in our own universe and our own floating, bobbing time structure and rhythmic structure, to which you could not dance the Frug or the Watusi or the Swim. Poor Rhonda. She was absolutely delightful, but Rhonda and the Doors never really had any kind of communication at all. We thought we were Dadaists, German surrealists. That was everything we had studied, that was the whole ball game, to be Brecht and Weill. Or if we couldn't be Brecht and Weill, we were going to be Stravinsky and Diaghilev and Nijinsky. We were going to do the “Rite of Spring” musically before your very ears. Listen while we play for you at the London Fog, and Rhonda Lane tries to do a nautch girl coochie dance to the Indian rhythms of ‘The End.'
There's nobody in the club, but we knew that we were doing it for ourselves, we're preparing for the onslaught, the assault on the psyche of complacent, bourgeois America. We had been burnt by the fire of emptiness, the fire of vacuity. There was no one in the damn place, we had to create the fire within ourselves, to nurture ourselves and to create that spontaneous moment that we could be artists for the four of us.
We had made a demo. And we walked the streets of Los Angeles, record company to record company, saying, “Hey, we're a new rock and roll band, we're called the Doors.” And we got turned down by everybody. We walked into Lou Adler's office and he put the first song on, played it for ten seconds, lifted the needle, on to the next song, five seconds, next song ten seconds, next song five seconds, last song two. It was like nnnnnnnnnn-nnnnn-nnnnnnnnn-nnnnn-nn. And at the end of it he said, “Sorry, nothing here I can use.” Liberty Records—Joe Sarasino played the first couple of songs and didn't like them. He had a hit with some kind of rock and roll surf song with Twilight Zone stuff going on, and I said, “Play the one at the end of the demo, ‘A Little Game,' “ because I thought it had that same kind of tink-tink sound like outer space. And when he heard the lyrics, “Once I had a little game, I think you know the game I mean, the game called go insane,” when he heard “Crawl back in my brain, go insane,” he freaked and just ripped the needle off and said, “Get outta here! Take this record and get out! You guys are sick! Don't ever come back in my office again!” So we got rejected by everybody, except Billy James at Columbia Records.
BILLY JAMES: They had no appointment. Somehow they got into the building. Somehow my secretary took a liking to them. When I got back from lunch, there they were around her desk. They weren't falling all over themselves with eagerness to see me. If they were salivating over a possible record contract, they weren't showing it. Jim and Ray—right away I could see that they were smart, the intelligence behind the creative soul. Oh, UCLA film students? How interesting. Tell me more. They had their acetate with them. We had maybe a hundred acetates a week coming in. Their music was different. It had an insidious quality, not just moody, almost threatening, a quality of implied danger. “The game called go insane”—what an odd idea for a three-minute song that you want to get on AM radio and have little girls dancing to. “Go insane”—that's an option we hadn't considered in rock and roll.
RAY MANZAREK: Billy was great. At the time, you could tell a person who was turned on, shall we say, as opposed to a person who had not expanded his consciousness. I looked in Billy's eyes and I started to giggle. Jim said, “Shut up, Ray.” And Billy said, “What are you laughing at?” And I said, “It's so good to see you, man.” Finally, somebody who had expanded their consciousness. And Billy said, “I like what you guys are doing. You guys are now signed to Columbia Records.”
BILLY JAMES: But Columbia did nothing. Weeks went by, months, and then they put the Doors on their drop list.
ROBBY KRIEGER: The funny thing is that we never doubted for a minute that we were going to be big. We knew immediately that we had the best material of any group, we knew that we had the best-looking singer of any group. What could go wrong?
RAY MANZAREK: Back to the London Fog.
JOHN DENSMORE: But the Whisky was the best club on the Strip.
RAY MANZAREK: Every other night we would stroll over and stand at the doorway and look in.
JOHN DENSMORE: Mario was the infamous doorman who, you know, loved everybody and knew everybody, all the bands, all the people. He sort of like ran the block. It was his ship. He loved the street. He saw it all. Kept the police happy, and loved the music, and loved to keep law and order. If there was a row, he loved that too. I saw him level folks that were out of line. “That'll show ‘em!” Then, “How ya doin', John? Yeah, yeah, how's Julia?” Yin and yang.
RAY MANZAREK: The place was packed and people were dancing and rocking and singing, and boy, we would just look in there, knowing they would never let us in, you'd have to pay to get in and we didn't have enough money, because we didn't make enough at the London Fog. But we were dying to play the Whisky. If only we could play there then we would really have made it.
Jesse said to us, “We're not getting a lot of people in here, I'm going to have to fire you guys.” On our last night, who comes walking in but Ronnie Haran, the booker at the Whisky. She had nothing to do, just came down the street, or maybe had heard something about the group, who knows, but came in, took one look at Jim Morrison and fell head over heels mad in love. She said, “I'm the booker at the Whisky, and I want you guys to be the house band.”
We looked at each other and said, “Far out. Serendipity”—this is how things were construed in the psychedelic age. Ronnie said, “Can you start on Monday?” I of course said, “Yeah!” Jim said, “I don't know, I'm not so sure. Give me a call tomorrow and we'll see.” Ronnie walked out and I said, “What are you doing?” And he said, “Of course we're going to take the gig. But, Ray, we don't want to appear over-anxious.”
We were the house band. We'd play a set, the headliner would play a set, we'd play a set, the headliner would play a set. The Turtles and the Doors. Captain Beefheart and the Doors. John Lee Hooker and the Doors. Otis Redding and the Doors. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and the Doors. Buffalo Springfield and the Doors. And Van Morrison and Them and the Doors. Jim Morrison and Van Morrison on the same stage—what an incredible gig that was. That was a famous jam. We did ‘Gloria,' and of course nobody taped it.
ROBBY KRIEGER: It's funny, because we never knew Van Morrison or what he was like until he came to the Whisky, and there he was stomping around, throwing the mike just like Jim would, you know—oh, no, my God, another Morrison! You think of him later more as doing nice songs and stuff, but in the early Whisky days he was a terror. I mean you'd be afraid to come anywhere near that stage—drunk as hell, throwing the mike around, screaming and railing and stuff. He had some real devils inside.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: The thing that was so interesting to me was to learn how much chaos there was inside the group Them. It's almost as if Jim studied their chaos and brought it into the Doors.
DIGBY DIEHL: The Whisky was always a tourist place, but the local crowd that came was very much attracted to that darker side, the powerful weird thing that they were doing.
SHERRI KANDELL: There were Vito and his dancers, kind of a commune family that would come in and dance together. Very snaky Indian psychedelic dancing. Long hair, free-flowing diaphanous clothes, see-through, lots of skin showing, no body shame. I saw them once at a recording session, with all their commune kids crawling through everybody's legs, I couldn't tell if they were boys or girls. The Whisky would call me if someone couldn't come in to dance. I was a substitute go-go dancer, a substitute shimmyer, like a substitute teacher. I would come down out of my cage and dance on the floor, among the men doing their testosterone stomp. I always felt secure, never threatened. I remember Vito looking at me with that charismatic look, a wild look to him in the eyes.
JAC: Vito was famous for his conception of extended family. He was the old man of Szou and the father of a son, Godot, and a daughter, Groovee Nipple. And he was like the Old Man of the Whisky, always poised to reach out and take hold of the slender ankle of some young dancer, all in the name of Sixties love. And it's only three years from there to the Manson Family . . .
ROBBY KRIEGER: Finally we started getting some nibbles. Zappa wanted to produce us. Terry Melcher wanted to produce us. But we didn't want a producer, we wanted a record contract.
RAY MANZAREK: And this is where Elektra enters the picture.
JAC: In May of 1966 I had flown to LA and was picked up at the airport by Ronnie Haran in her white convertible. Arthur Lee was playing the Whisky and expected me to drop by. It was 11pm LA time, 2am New York metabolism time. I was beat, but I went. Arthur urged me to stick around for the next band. Whoever they were, Arthur had a high opinion of them, and I had a very high opinion of Arthur's opinion, so I stayed.
It was the Doors, and they did nothing for me. There was another group that played the Whisky that I had fallen in love with and tried desperately to sign, Buffalo Springfield, but Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic was far more convincing. We were a smaller label without Atlantic's amazing track record of hit singles. Love had gotten my foot in the rock door, and now I needed a second group to give Elektra more of that kind of credibility, but the Doors weren't showing it to me.
Jim was lovely to look at, but there was no command. Perhaps I was thinking too conventionally, but their music had none of the rococo ornamentation with which a lot of rock and roll was being embellished—remember, this was still the era of the Beatles and “Revolver,” circa 1966. Yet, some inner voice whispered that there was more to them than I was seeing or hearing, so I kept returning to the club.
Finally, the fourth evening, I heard them. Jim generated an enormous tension with his performance, like a black hole, sucking the energy of the room into himself. The bass line was Ray Manzarek playing a second keyboard, piano bass, an unusual sound, very cadenced and clean. On top of Ray, Robby Krieger laid shimmering guitar. And John Densmore was the best drummer imaginable for Jim—whatever Morrison did Densmore could follow, with his jazz drummer's improvisational skill and sensitivity. They weren't consistent and they needed some fine tuning before they would be ready to record, but this was no ordinary rock and roll band.
In my folk days, I would mike voices and instruments very close up, and the records sounded fat and full, the voice popping out, right in front of your living room speakers. I thought that with equivalent miking and proper stereo spacing we could make a virtue of the group's sparseness. Kurt Weill's ‘Alabama Song' was a surprise coming from a rock band, and their arrangement impressed me. And when I heard, really heard, Manzarek's baroque organ line under ‘Light My Fire,' I was ready to sign them.
RAY MANZAREK: Someone said, “The president of Elektra Records is here to see you and he wants to talk to you about a recording contract.” All right! We just started jumping up and down. Elektra was a very hip label from New York. We were very impressed with the roster.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Koerner, Ray & Glover being on Elektra—when I was in high school they were my idols, that band and that label. To be on Elektra was the greatest thing.
RAY MANZAREK: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was on Elektra. Jac had Love. The Doors wanted nothing more than to be as big as Love. We thought it was absolutely marvelous that Elektra was a folk label that had gone electric and were now interested in the psychedelic Doors.
Fortunately that night we had played ‘Alabama Song.' I think that pushed it over the edge—Jac said, “Aha! Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht. These Doors are not just California pretty boys, they actually have some brains.” Finally, somebody's hip enough to understand what we're doing. And then up to the dressing room came this tall, distinguished-looking gentleman.
JOHN DENSMORE: He seemed a little strange, with those glasses. But kinda hip. Hearing how he started with a motor scooter and a tape recorder and recorded folk groups—we loved it. An incredible entrepreneur.
RAY MANZAREK: He talked in his very officious and very correct manner, and we thought, “Jesus, this guy is not only hip, he's smart too.” Because, frankly, the people we'd met in the record business in Los Angeles were a little less than brilliant, a little less than bright. He was a bit pompous, but why not? The man was standing six-three and had a good brain in his head, had a good carriage and a good delivery. I was, frankly, very impressed with him. I thought, “This is going to be real, real good.”
On the other hand, when he offered us the money and the points—absolutely minuscule. $2,500 front money—oh. Five percent—heinous. And he keeps all the publishing—yiyiyiyi! Jesus, he sure drives a hard bargain! This was like a Brill Building deal.
JAC: Here are the facts. I offered what was slightly on the generous side of a standard deal in 1966 for an unproven group. Elektra would advance all recording costs plus $5,000 cash to the band against a five percent royalty with a separate advance against publishing, of which the Doors would own seventy-five percent and we would own twenty-five. And as a show of faith, I committed to release three albums. If the first album did less than well, the Doors wouldn't be out on the street, another disheartened and discarded LA band.
BILLY JAMES: Ray came up to my house to have me tell him what I knew about Elektra. I told him in confidence that Jac had asked me to come work at Elektra, that my job was to establish a presence on the West Coast, in LA, and I could think of no better group to support than the Doors. By all means sign with Elektra—I thought it was a terrific idea.
RAY MANZAREK: Jac wasn't offering much money. But a guarantee to record and release three albums—that was fabulous. We could create anything we wanted to, and Elektra would put it out. We had material for two albums. So we knew that all the songs we had would be recorded, and the records would be in record stores, and we also had the option of doing another record on top of that. So we felt incredibly secure.
Jac was fabulous that way: “We're signing you, because we want you to be creative.” In effect, Jac Holzman to the Doors was like Diaghilev to Nijinsky and Stravinsky.
It had all gotten rather anticlimactic at the Whisky because we had gotten our recording contract. That was the important thing, to make records, and we had been playing there for quite a while. So Jim was getting a little lackadaisical about some of his performances. One night—
ROBBY KRIEGER:—Jim is late.
RAY MANZAREK: We expect him to walk on stage any moment, and he doesn't. We play a whole first set without him, some blues, some jazz, little Miles Davis imitations and Coltrane songs. The headliners come on, and Phil Manzini, one of the owners, grabs me and says, “You better get that Morrison boy. I got a contract here for four performers.”
ROBBY KRIEGER: We were in trouble.
RAY MANZAREK: Maybe he's passed out in his room, maybe he's asleep. John and I go over to the Alta Cienega and pound on the door of his room. We hear a little scurrying around inside. “Hey, Jim, it's John, its Ray. Come on, open up.” We hear boots rustling, we can hear movement, a body is moving in the room. “Jim, come on, man, you missed the first set. Phil is going to have a conniption fit. We're gonna be on in half an hour. We know you're in there, just open the door!”
Finally the door knob turns, very slowly, and the door opens, and there is Jim Morrison standing in his underwear with his eyes blazing. Totally zonked out. We looked at him and said, “Oh my God, what are you on?” He sat down on the bed and reached over and opened the bottom drawer of the night stand—and it was like when I entered that room I was no longer in reality, I had entered a strange kind of film noir movie, vaguely black and white, and it had a little bit of color to it, and when Jim opened that bottom drawer of the night stand, a purple light came out of there. There was no purple light, it was in my mind, but I could see purple—and what he had in there were thirty vials, purple vials, of liquid LSD. It's glowing and throbbing, whoom-whoom, and Jim reaches down and picks up one of these vials and holds it in front of us. “You want some?” I took his hand and put it back down, closed the drawer. “Not now, man. Come on, we've gotta be on stage.”
Here he is in his underwear. He falls back on the bed, going mmmmmmmm. John and I start dressing him, we get his pants, put his boots on him, finally drag him out to the car, and off to the Whisky. He's humming like a generator, a dynamo or something, mmmmmmmm, you could feel the energy coming off him.
Phil Tanzini says, “You're lucky you got that Morrison. Alright, get on stage and play a great set.”
We start to play, and Jim is sort of half there, half not there. Some of the songs he's singing, some he's mumbling, he's standing with his back to the audience, and the crowd is getting slightly restless. Then he wants to do ‘The End.' The club is filled, people are drinking and dancing. ‘The End' closes the evening, and Jim wants to do it in the middle of the second set.
But he wants to do it. So we started to play it. And we never played it so brilliantly. It was just great. Jim being on acid, it was like everyone was getting a contact high from him. It just became more and more hypnotic. Little by little the dancers stopped dancing, they were just standing there looking at us.
We got to the middle of the song and there's an improvisational area where Jim could do anything he wanted. We're playing very softly, just keeping the vamp going, waiting for him to come in. And he begins. “The killer awoke before dawn . . . He put his boots on . . . He took a face from the ancient gallery . . . And he walked on down the hallway.” And I thought, ”Oh my God, I don't know where he's going with it or what he's going to do.“
But John and Robby and I were absolutely transfixed. He had us mesmerized. John was just accenting, chnk-boom, Robby was playing snaky Indian stuff, and I was just keeping that whole hypnotic thing going. When he said, "The killer awoke before dawn . . . He put his boots on," it just sent a shiver through the entire place. It froze the Whisky. I looked out at the audience and I could see that nobody was dancing. The waitresses had stopped taking drink orders. Now John and Robby and I don't know where he's going but we'll follow him into the jaws of the hell hound itself if we have to. This is Jim, our man, our main man, this is Dionysus, the wild, crazy poet who's free of all the chains. He's taking us on this psychic journey, we don't know where—"Driver, where you taking us?" So he begins to tell the whole story of the killer going down the hallway, his family, and finally—he gets to "Father, I want to kill you!" and "MOTHER, I WANT TO FUCK YOU!"
JOHN DENSMORE: Oh, God, I didn't know we were going oedipal! I didn't know my Greek mythology! And oh, God, my God, it's so intense in this band!
RAY MANZAREK: Jim screamed out, and John and Robby and I just jammed on our instruments, smashing, crashing, playing volume, and we shocked the entire audience, everyone, from this state of hypnosis to an absolute primal primordial scream shock of volume.
And then we went back into the song, and you could see the people taken out of their trance state, and the dancers began to dance again, and the waitresses and everyone began to go back to what it was that they were supposed to be doing. And we played the remainder of the song as we usually played it.
We finished the set and left the stage to a thunderous ovation. And there was Phil waiting for us, and he said, “You filthy foulmouth, Morrison, you guys are fired. You're disgusting, Morrison, nobody can say that about their mother, you're fired!” Like a fool, I said to him, “Phil, haven't you ever heard of Oedipus Rex?” He screamed, “Get outta here, you college-educated asshole! You guys think you're better than anybody, don't you? Get out, you're fired, don't ever come back here!”
The whole point of it is that Jac saved us. What did it matter that we were fired from the Whisky? We had signed with Jac Holzman and Elektra Records, and we were going into the recording studio in two or three weeks.
JAC: I toyed with the idea of taking them into the studio myself, but I wasn't the ideal producer for them. Paul Rothchild was. Paul was itching to sign a band of Albert Grossman's, the Paupers, but I had heard them and thought they sucked. At my insistence, Paul went to LA and watched one of the Doors sets, and told me I was nuts. I said, "I don't think so." I looked at other producers, but kept coming back to Paul. Paul was part martinet, which was fine, because the group needed a force they couldn't push around, someone who could earn their respect, and Rothchild was all of that. And once Paul made a commitment he stuck to it. Paul also owed me a favor, because I had stood by him during a difficult time. With great reluctance I finally said, "Paul, I never thought I'd say this to you, but you owe me. You've got to do this band. You are the only person for the job." And Paul said—partly out of relief that the books between us could now be in balance, plus my appeal to his pride that only he could record this band—"Well, if you put it that way."
ROBBY KRIEGER: We didn't know about producers. We saw the name Paul Rothchild on a Paul Butterfield record. We loved that record. Plus, the guy had just gotten out of jail, so we figured he couldn't be all that bad.
JAC: Paul was still on parole, and to leave the New York-New Jersey area required permission, some genuflecting, and mounds of paperwork. Paul's parole officer knew he wasn't a criminal but a person caught in circumstances. Still, if Paul didn't come directly from home to the office, or if he wanted to go out of state, we had to ask first. Now I was requesting that Paul be allowed to go it alone in California—Sodom and Gomorrah West, for an extended stay. His parole officer interviewed me at our offices. I guaranteed Paul's good conduct, whatever that meant. I must have passed muster. Done.
BILL SIDDONS: Paul was the smartest guy about the business that I knew. And a kind of intense, consumed-with-passion-for-life kind of guy. Always an enthusiast, a real positive force.
BOB NEUWIRTH: He was an innovator, an instigator, and a motivator, very supportive, and he had the patience of an insect and the confidence of a rhinoceros.
BILL SIDDONS: He was also the only guy who could intimidate all the Doors. He could yell and scream in a very specific way. Where Bill Graham could throw a tantrum and you kind of went, “What's really going on here?” Paul was absolutely clear about what he was yelling at you for. He was a very well-equipped negotiator and fighter. He busted you point by point. He did not speak in generalities whatsoever. He was so detailed that whatever he went into, he knew every molecule in the structure of it. He had a very Germanic feel to him. He could always put you in your place. He was the leader, he was the producer.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Paul had plenty of time in jail to think about techniques and styles. He dreamed about it. He put a lot of that to work. He developed a lot of techniques that are standard today.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I didn't want a Doors record to sound like anybody else's records, because that's like buying bread, it becomes stale very quickly. But if you create your own sound, if you've got something unique, the best thing you can do is keep it as pure as possible, so that it's not copyable. For example, Robby Krieger was enchanted with the wah-wah pedal, which Jimi Hendrix is associated with. But you could buy that off the shelf, and it immediately made any guitar player sound like any other guitar player. Instead I said, “I prohibit you from using off-the-shelf material. Create it. Invent it.”
Bruce Botnick at the Sunset Sound console 1966
BRUCE BOTNICK: I was doing the engineering. We had gotten the sound the first day, and after that nobody touched anything. It was all live. We didn't do the effects afterwards. Even tape delays on the voice, we did at the moment.
JAC: The album was recorded in about a week.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: We could record four-track. Two tracks for the band, one track for the singer, leaving one glorious track for fucking around. We used that sometimes for Jim's voice, occasionally to bring another musician in, like we got Larry Knechtel to play bass on ‘Light My Fire.' We stamped on a wooden floor to give us the very Nazi sound for ‘Twentieth Century Fox.' Why we wanted to do that, I couldn't tell you today.
BRUCE BOTNICK: In the studio it was nothing to see them smoking grass. But acid—it wasn't obvious, somebody wasn't waving a flag saying I'm on acid. In the middle of ‘The End,' they were really doing a very magical performance, the kind that you pray for, and that's when Jim kind of went sideways and I didn't know why. He went across to the Catholic church on Sunset, Blessed Sacrament, and I guess he was reading some vespers or something, and he peaked on acid and he had some kind of revelation.
We did two takes of ‘The End.' One of them is where the acid started peaking. He had these vespers and he started reading from it and tearing it up and got into “Kill the father, fuck the mother.” I just thought it was far out, you know. I figured it was part of the thing, because I had not heard the music before they recorded it.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: In my entire career in the studio, who knows how many hundreds of hours, I can count on two hands the true magic moments. And it happened once on that album. We were in the middle of recording ‘The End,' a landmark composition. We had it choreographed. Sometimes Jim was leading the band, and at other times the band was full-out cranking rock-style and we couldn't have Jim in the room, so we had him in the vocal booth, and he'd be running back and forth between the booth and the mike set up out there, and Bruce Botnick, all of nineteen years old, making all the moves.
We were halfway through, and I got chills top to bottom. I said, “Bruce, do you know what's happening out there? That's history. Right at this moment. That's why we come here.” It was one of those few times you can turn and say to somebody, “Pay attention, this is it.” I remember it so vividly, and at the end of the take I was as drained as anyone out in the room from the experience.
Then in my true tradition—anyone who has ever worked with me has heard this phrase from me, and everyone has suggested it be my epitaph, on my tombstone—I got on the talkback and I said, “That was great! Let's do it one more time.”
JAC: I edged into the studio control room during the second take and could tell by the beatific expression on the faces of Bruce and Paul that this was a blessed moment. The lights were dimmed and the mood flowed from the music and the intensity of Jim's inner light. I moved off to the side so that the boys wouldn't be distracted.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: On that take the front part wasn't as good but the back part was awesome. So we cut those two pieces together. And at that moment I knew the band was going to be famous.
ROBBY KRIEGER: When we did ‘The End,' Jim was so strung out on acid that he was totally out of hand. I think he tried to throw a TV set through the control room window.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Supposedly. It was my portable set. He never threw it through the window, because the glass would have broken. It just bounced off, and we kept on recording.
ROBBY KRIEGER: He was on this Oedipus complex trip and he was saying, “Fuck the mother and kill the father! Goddamn it! Fuck the mother and kill the father!” and he would just rant on like that for hours. So we finally get him in to record and he did it great.
Then we decided he was too high to continue the session so we closed up and left. Jim didn't want to stop, so he climbed back in the place and he started having fun by hosing down the whole place with a fire extinguisher, including all the instruments.
BILLY JAMES: The sight of all that stuff on the harpsichord! Bad, bad boy.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Paul Rothchild jumped the wall and dragged him out of there.
BRUCE BOTNICK: The next morning I got a phone call from Tutti Camarata, the owner. “Get down here! What's goin' on?” This studio was built basically to do Disney records, which Tutti Camarata was the head of. So we'd be doing Mickey and Minnie and “Cinderella” in the daytime, and in the afternoon and night doing the Doors. It was really Disney's house, and to have a little madness in there kind of made things uncomfortable to Tutti. But Jac in his infinite wisdom was able to soothe the savage beast, I mean both savage beasts, Jim and Tutti. Jac's a great negotiator.
JAC: After Tutti and I settled the Morrison Misdemeanor Matter, Tutti draped a fatherly arm over my shoulder and said, “You're spending a lot of money on a band that can't behave itself. You've been a good customer and I'd hate to see Elektra hurt.” The five thousand dollars I had spent in studio time seemed like a lot to Tutti who was used to bringing in a group of musicians who could knock out four tracks in three hours. I thanked Tutti for his concern and said I wasn't worried. Privately I took a deep breath and hoped I was right.
JAC: Did I believe, when I signed the Doors, that their music would last, for thirty years now and counting? Could I ever have imagined that album sales would be closing in on forty-five million units? No. I believed they were musically distinctive, and worth the effort—even to doing pick-up diplomacy with Tutti and writing a check for the studio damage. It wasn't until we were mixing that I knew we had made an album that was historic.
The Doors debut album EKS-74007
Recording is a very special art and far more than a sonic snapshot of a performance. Music must first be stripped of all its live ambiance to make it work in what is essentially a cool medium. People listening understand, at an unconscious level, that what is coming to them through recordings is another beast entirely, but it lets them create their own excitement at their own pace. There is no chorus of agitated fans, no visual clues of any kind. It is just you and the music and you must create that experience for yourself with your only tools, great material, superb performance and willing ears.
And that is why Rothchild's production of the Doors is so brilliant. Rothchild did what I only understood much later. In physics there is a theory of the perturbation of systems—that evolution is not always well behaved and Darwinian, that occasionally a linearly developing system goes through a period of gigantic and unexpected upset, and from that upset evolution moves to a higher level, an order of magnitude beyond where it started. Rothchild perturbated the Doors. He really pushed them. He took enormous risks, and he was able to get them to want to perform for themselves and for their audience in a way that transcended “going into the studio,” because they weren't just going into the studio, they were going into the soul of the music.
JAC: In October of 1966 we brought the Doors to New York and booked them into Ondine, a club cheek by jowl with the 59th Street bridge made famous by Paul Simon. It was the first time they had been east.
RAY MANZAREK: We played a month there. Terrific place. Everything very mod, very slick, very neat, very clean, very tight. Very sophisticated crowd. All the Andy Warhols and plastic inedible kinds of chicks and mod guys.
DANNY FIELDS: The uptown amphetamine crowd.
STEVE HARRIS: I went over in the afternoon before they opened. They were doing a sound check. Robby and John and Ray were on stage doing some instrumental work, and I introduced myself, and I turned around and this person slid off a bar stool and started sauntering over toward me. We met and we talked, and I called Jac and I said, “Jac, if he can read the phone book on key we're going to sell millions of records.” He was that alluring and that demanding that he be noticed.
PAUL WILLIAMS: They did ‘When The Music's Over' and ‘The End,' and there'd be these musical brackets inside of which Jim would have these one-liners or these little raps and just take off with it, and the energy level was incredible. I don't mean coming just from him but from everybody in the room. This incredible thing shimmering out of the darkness while this band was playing. Just overwhelming.
BILL HARVEY: When we were shooting the album cover, we had the idea of overlapping the faces. Because at that time I didn't know who the star was. I mean, we really didn't, because they were all extremely good musicians, and the fact that Jim was the lead singer had nothing to do with it, except that he was absolutely beautiful. I mean, he was a gorgeous-looking kid. You began to realize that in front of the camera he was the one.
JAC: When it came to their visual image, the Doors knew what needed to be done—put their personal egos aside and Jim in front. They were smart about issues that had broken up other groups. For another—and very important—example, all monies from performing, writing and publishing were split equally between the four, and all copyrights were listed in the name of the whole band.
Originally I had promised to release the album in November of 1966 and now I had to talk them out of that. The record was so beautifully realized and important that I wanted to spotlight it free from the crush of year-end releases. Mid-to late January was when albums would start being released again, after everything had been absorbed from Christmas. I wanted to slip it in on the first Monday in January, when there was a wide open window.
Initially they were disappointed, so I made a commitment that I would release no other album in January. We would focus on the Doors exclusively for that month.
I also promised to take a large illuminated billboard on the Sunset Strip. This was a new idea for the record business. No one in music had tried it before, but it was my way of saying to everyone in the music community of Los Angeles that Elektra had arrived, and we were big-time serious about a band that had a tenacious local following. It was a message to radio and our distributors that we were willing to spend to make it happen.
I also wrote an encouragement letter to my distributors saying that “The Doors” would be issued on January 4, 1967, our major push. “Theirs is the finest rock LP we have ever heard and the knowledgeable tradesters and insiders who have had the privilege of hearing their completed LP have been equally unstinting in their enthusiasm. Get behind the Doors. They are the most important sound in contemporary American music.”
I took my LA distributor aside and insisted that the Doors were the best shot we were likely to have, a great West Coast band with an album that had no filler. If we could graft radio success in LA onto the rest of the country, we could break the Doors nationwide. He just had to deliver.
That first month the album sold ten thousand copies, which wasn't bad, although they were mostly sold into our West Coast distributorship.
Simultaneously with the release of the album we came out with a single, ‘Break On Through.'
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Every one of us was positive that ‘Break On Through' was going to be a hit record on some level.
JAC: It received polite but modest airplay, but didn't make it onto the Top 100. It “bubbled under” and stalled at Number 106. I did not want to lose even the slightest momentum. I decided to go immediately with a second single, ‘Light My Fire.'
The full album version was seven and a half minutes long, way beyond the tolerance of Top 40 radio, but it was being played—and requested—on FM in a number of widely scattered stations in solid markets like New England, New York and of course, the entire West Coast, which is where FM rock really got started. This was enough airplay to give us a sure sense of spontaneous interest. The issue was—should we leave it at seven minutes plus and go on hoping? Or, if we shortened it, would that make the critical difference? Would that break it on AM?
Of course the Doors would be against cutting it and you couldn't blame them.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: They said, “Forget it. It can't be cut.” The era of purity—when it's there, it's done. I defended that position for about ten minutes, and then Jac said, “Paul, you're a great editor. You can find something,” And within half an hour I had a cut. I called the Doors up before I played it for Jac and said, “Listen to this.” And amazingly, when I said, “Should we ship?” they said, “Sure, put it out.”
PAUL WILLIAMS: I was in the Elektra office with Paul, and he showed me the splices in the tape. He had a little glass thing that allowed you to see the magnetic impulses on each of the four tracks on the tape. I had never heard of it anywhere else in my life, but Paul showed me and said, “I cut this right here, cut this out, and with this little device I could see how to link them up.” He was so proud of these razor blade cuts he had made and that it worked so well. And he played it for me. So that's a little moment of history.
JAC: For extra punch in the monaural singles version, Paul and Bruce mixed through the Dolby noise reduction system and then elected not to “resolve” the tape, leaving it in its stretched form. It sounded just right on AM radio.
JAC: ‘Light My Fire' was like nothing ever heard before. And the Doors as a group were strange and dangerous. There were sections of the country that had no idea what to make of them. When they toured, no one knew what or who to expect.
RAY MANZAREK: We played a college town in Iowa. Beautiful old auditorium, held fifteen hundred. There must have been seventy-five people in the whole damn place. Seventy-five acid-heads, whatever they were—in Iowa, you know, mushroom eaters and cow pies. And they loved it. They were a great little audience. After the show the hall manager came up and said, “Gee, I don't understand why you guys aren't much of a draw here. We had the Association three weeks ago and they sold the place out.” Thank you, thank you very much, we really appreciate that, that puts it all in perspective. The Association. ‘Windy.' Right.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Another time in Seattle, nobody came. They didn't promote it right or something. It was like twenty people or something in this huge hockey rink. Jim was pissed and he wouldn't sing.
RAY MANZAREK: Detroit. We arrived at this theater in the afternoon to do a sound check, and it was very, very fucked up. This could possibly be the funkiest, worst place we've ever played, just really filthy and dilapidated, and the graffiti on the wall said it all: “You are now in the asshole of the world.” But when the cover of night comes, and the lights are brought out and the people come into the place and the music starts to play, it's transformed. And nobody notices the rats and filth. So it was fine. The gig was fine, the people were fine.
JAC: Before the album was released I phoned Bill Graham in San Francisco and pleaded with him to book the Doors for the Fillmore before they broke wide. Though Bill and I trusted each other without question, selling him an unknown band was not going to be easy. After a heavy pitch, Bill finally agreed but extracted one option for a repeat date within six months of the first booking—and both gigs for scale, hardly enough to cover the air fares. Bill Graham was doing a Jac Holzman on me! I gulped hard but agreed. San Francisco was the heart of spacy, rebellious rock and roll and the Doors had to be seen there.
STEVE HARRIS: The album was not long out. The show was the Rascals, the Sopwith Camel, and opening, a new group—the Doors. When they went on, nobody was paying too much attention. It was a big ballroom, and everybody was kind of in the back, dancing and talking. Two or three songs into the set, people started walking up toward the stage. And by the end, no one was saying a word. The audience was completely mesmerized. There was a brief pause for them to realize what they had seen, and they broke into cheers and shouts and screams.
Jim came up to me in the dressing room and said, “There's something I really have to talk to you about.” There was a storeroom above, with old mikes and furniture, with a ladder to get us up there. We climbed up and I said, “What is it, Jim?” He said, “I've got a great idea.” I couldn't wait to hear it. He said, “Let's pull a death hoax. Let's tell everyone that I'm dead.” And I said, “Great idea, Jim, except for one thing. Nobody knows who you are yet. Your album has just come out, so I don't think too many people are really going to care.”
But people were starting to care. The Doors came at a time when there was a searching to find new things and good things. I think the audience became very possessive about certain artists, and when they first saw the Doors and heard the Doors, it had that cult feeling about it. Long, long songs like ‘The End,' very poetic dark green kind of music. It became every listener's—every record buyer's—fantasy to say, “I've discovered this act.” It's almost like the taste makers all woke up one sunny Tuesday morning and everyone discovered the Doors existed the same day.
JONATHAN TAPLIN: You couldn't turn on the radio anywhere without hearing ‘Light My Fire.' I remember Geoff Muldaur, who was a very jealous kind of guy, being so pissed off that he couldn't avoid it.
BRUCE BOTNICK: I remember standing in the middle of the Village in the midst of a huge New York lightning storm, with Paul Rothchild introducing me to Jimi Hendrix, and ‘Light My Fire' on the radio.
STEVE HARRIS: You couldn't go into a hip club that had a juke box and not hear the Doors. The hip place in New York at that time was Max's Kansas City, on Park Avenue at 18th Street—
DANNY FIELDS: Max's had an amazing confluence of creative types that you wouldn't find now. You would think that you were heirs to the Algonquin Round Table or something. To get in, you had to get past Dorothy Dean at the door. She was a brilliant, short, black Radcliffe graduate who ruled the world of gay culture. She was affectionately known as the spade of queens. She sat on a stool and gave the wrong people the You Are Not Welcome look. Her aura was ferocious. When you first walked in there was a large John Chamberlain crushed automobile on which all the women tore their stockings. At the bar were the original friends of the owner, Mickey Ruskin, the artists, the abstract expressionist heterosexual alcoholics. The waitresses were all beautiful. They all wore little black skirts and black stockings and black sweaters. They were all smart; you couldn't be a waitress at Max's and not be smart. A lot of them ended up marrying either Mickey himself or one of the up and coming artists, and many of those waitresses now rule New York left-wing society. There was a good juke box, a lot of Johnny Cash—‘Ring of Fire,' I remember that. The famous back room, which really had the feeling of a club, was where the Warhol crowd gathered, Andrea Feldman showing her tits and all that, and Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe hanging around the edges, knowing this is the society in which they want to be elevated. The musicians preferred this room, the gay people preferred this room. Germaine Greer came in with Sargent Shriver. People came in from a performance. You might see the whole Grateful Dead sitting there one night, or Janis Joplin might stagger in, with lots of feathers, or the Cockettes.
STEVE HARRIS: The way I knew that we had really broken through was, ‘Light My Fire' came out, and immediately, about three or four days later, it was on the juke box at Max's. That was all you heard. And the funny thing was, I had come out of the john and I knew Jim was in there right before I was, and there was some graffiti just saying, “Ray's cuter.”
JAC: ‘Light My Fire' kept burning brighter and brighter.
STEVE HARRIS: I would always say to the boys, “Oh, the record jumped from this to this, and it's got a bullet,” and they would act kind of amused. And they gave the facade, or at least Jim did, of I don't care: “Here you go again, Steve, telling us all these things about how great we are, and we really don't care.” And so, with tongue in cheek, I would go a couple of days and never mention how the record was doing, and Jim cornered me: “Well, where did the record go? How much is it selling?”
ROBBY KRIEGER: Jim never thought we were big enough. He thought we should be at least as big as the Stones. It never happened fast enough for him. He kept saying, like, “Why isn't it faster? Look at the Beatles—swoosh, straight up.”
JAC: ‘Light My Fire' was moving from west to east like a slowly gathering blaze, receiving concentrated air play, but I was worried that it might not reach Number 1 nationally. We had already peaked in California, and by the time it was established on the East Coast it was no longer Number 1 in the West. And Stevie Wonder had a single nipping at our heels. Would we still have enough critical mass of airplay and sales to make it?
It went all the way. June, 1967, Elektra's first—my first—Number 1 single.
The moment I heard from Steve Harris that in Monday's Billboard ‘Light My Fire' would be sitting on top of the Hot 100, my watch suddenly stopped. I shook it, rapped it on the desk—nothing. The next day, Saturday, I went to Tourneau, the most exclusive timepiece emporium in New York, and paid retail for a new Rolex. One era over, another beginning.
To have both the music and the label held in such high respect had me walking on air. I smiled so wide my face hurt. And to have your personal taste and judgment confirmed by the whole country was like flying a fighter jet on afterburners. The Number-1 single, and the album went gold on its way to platinum. Euphoria!
We celebrated with gifts to the boys. Ray and Robby got the very first Sony black-and-white reel-to-reel video tape recorders with a clock for off-air recording. John was into equines, so he received a horse. I gave Jim a gag “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
I also ordered a gold record to be mounted on a plaque and sent to Paul's parole officer.
The Doors were booked on Ed Sullivan, absolutely the de rigueur prime time, nationwide television variety show, and live. Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones—all the bands that had “arrived” paid homage to Ed Sullivan.
I accompanied the group to rehearsal and we decided to grab a bite before air time. A crowd was hanging around the stage door. I was in my leather jacket. They screeched: “There they are! He's one of them!” We took off and they chased us until we dove into the protective cool of a nearby deli that had never heard of Jim Morrison or the Doors.
The Sullivan people were self-appointed guardians of the morals of America. When the Rolling Stones played the show, which was broadcast live, Ed and his acolytes didn't want Mick Jagger singing, “Let's spend the night together.” Mick caved and sang, “Let's spend some time together,” and concerned mothers everywhere could sleep easy. With the Doors, Bob Precht, the show's producer (and Ed's son-in-law) was going on about how much he loved ‘Light My Fire,' but Jim mustn't sing “Girl, we couldn't get much higher”—“high” being a drug word that would contaminate the purity of the CBS airwaves. Morrison promised to be a good boy, and in rehearsal he was. But then on the air, of course he not only sang “higher,” he leaned on the word. There was apoplexy in Edville, and the Doors were banned from the Sullivan show.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: The four Doors took it all on various levels of cool, Ray being the coolest and most careful of the career from that moment on. John and Robby, the two transcendental meditators, I don't think ever recovered from the awesomeness of it all. And it gave Jim Morrison access to excess.
DANNY FIELDS: He instantly loved New York, the darkness of it, the intrigue, the possibilities.
EVE BABITZ: I ran into them in Washington Square, so I took them over to meet Andy Warhol, and from then on they didn't need any more introductions in New York, because they had the right introduction.
STEVE HARRIS: Jim had a way of knowing who was important and who was going to be important in his life, and conquering that person—man or woman. My wife made a comment too: “When he looks at me, he really looks at me with the idea he wants to conquer me.” I mentioned it to Nina and she said, “He looks at me the same way.” He had a way of looking at you and talking to you and listening to you that said, “Whatever it is that you do, you'd better do it right and you better do it for me, because I'm going to be a big star.” For all intents and purposes, he was a star within himself before he was a star for the public. We'd be flying somewhere, he would get a magazine at the airport that he had given an interview, and he'd look at me and say, “How come I'm not on the cover?” Yeah, I remember watching him getting in and out of a limousine for the very first time and it was like he had been doing it all his life.
MIRANDI BABITZ: When I opened my store—very near the beginning—he came to me. This was by appointment. Nobody ever walked in, because all we did was custom. He asked me if I would design some stage clothes for him. He had ideas of what he wanted, and that was exactly what I did, was work with people on their concepts. He wanted a double-breasted suit in black leather with silver buttons and a broad green suede lapel and a navy-front pant. That was the first suit I made for him. He loved it and he looked great in that suit. I made a lot of just pants for him. Heavy silver conch belts, and sometimes with a conch on the flap of the leather that was actually the fastening. I think he was one of the first stage performers to really go for that leather look, solid leather. It wasn't fringes and it wasn't western or medieval. A lot of people wore suede or multi-colors, intricate design work, going more for the hippie medieval look, and Jim was not a hippie. That was not his thing. He wanted something that was sleek. Something that looked totally different, didn't look like what anyone else was wearing. The flap around those pants is something that he came up with. There is no fly. He wanted that smooth piece of leather across the front instead of a fly. It's a sailor front. But that was never done in leather.
BRUCE BOTNICK: This Adonis in black leather, right? They had never seen anybody—I mean, in those days black leather was associated with bikers and gays.
RAY MANZAREK: An intellectual poet rock star. He knocked New York on its ass.
BRUCE BOTNICK: Oh, he destroyed them. He swept them off their feet.
RAY MANZAREK: New York had the intellectuals, San Francisco had the soul, and LA was a plastic place, it couldn't possibly have an intellectual. And how could anybody in leather pants possibly be a poet? How could anyone that handsome be a poet? A poet was a scraggly guy with a scraggly beard who would scratch the side of his face a lot. A poet didn't look like Michelangelo‘s David, for God's sake, with ringlets of hair and a Steve Canyon jaw—
BRUCE BOTNICK: New York, that reception, definitely changed Jim. That whole thing created a major shift in his demeanor and attitude. Because he started to believe it. And they, like vampires, bled him. There are groups of people, the intelligentsia, that are literally like vampires. They take anything young that's coming along and they will suck them dry and corrupt them.
EVE BABITZ: Oh, well, everybody does that in New York. That's what New York is for. That's what innocence is for—to be ravaged.
STEVE HARRIS: I set up a gold record party for ‘Light My Fire' at Delmonico's wine cellar. A wonderful place. The usual suspects were there—you know, the Warhol crowd, DJs and press people, some people who owned record stores.
RAY MANZAREK: Jac really outdid himself. Here's the Number 1 in the nation, probably Elektra's first Number 1 anything, certainly our first. We were all as pleased as punch with each other, feeling awfully smug and great.
We're in the wine cellar. Mistake. Morrison proceeds to get rip-roaring drunk. He's reaching behind and pulling bottles out of the wine rack, calling the waiter over to open them, having a sip—"I don't like this, forget it." He was, like, blind tasting, alternating between pulling out twenty-dollar bottles and fifty-, seventy-five-, hundred-dollar bottles.
Steve Harris and friend in Delmonico's Wine Cellar
STEVE HARRIS: He just banged them open and drank them right out of the bottle.
RAY MANZAREK: People are toking, the smell of marijuana is in the air. People are just like kinda crawling over tables, laughing, joking, screaming.
JAC: I contemplated the scene in its entirety and decided that it was a good place to be absent from.
RAY MANZAREK: Jac was gone. The rest of the Elektra people were gone. The photographers had disappeared. The people from Billboard had disappeared. I looked around the place and thought, “This is like seventy-five to a hundred hippie animals, and there's not an adult in the whole goddamn place. This is absolutely insane.” The manager walks in, the cops walk in: “That's it. The party is over. Everyone out.” So we all stumbled and bumbled out of the place.
STEVE HARRIS: We headed for Jac's apartment. The intention was to listen to some new tracks.
Andy Warhol had given Jim a present, a sort of Louis XIV gold phone in a box. The car stopped at a light, there was a bum on the sidewalk, Jim rolled down the window and handed him the box, and as the light changed and the car rolled away into the night, the bum is standing there opening the box.
JAC: This is the famous night when Jim allegedly came hammering on our apartment door, and when we wouldn't open up, peed in an empty wine bottle and left it. Or, in another version, peed in the corridor. Or peed on the wall and the fabric peeled off in sympathy. The sensitive artist and the insensitive record company president, creative rage delivering righteous judgment on the crassness of commerce, or something. The stuff of rock legend.
The Doors receive plaque certifying "Light My Fire" as Billboard's No. 1 single, June 1967
Leaving aside the certainty that Jim would not have got past the doorman, especially at that time of night and even more especially in his condition, we wouldn't have been there to fail to come out, because from Delmonico's we went to check out an act at a downtown club. Furthermore, the forensic evidence does not support the urinary testimony. There was no bottle of pee outside our door, not even a carpet stain.
A year later I returned to Delmonico's wine cellar. The racks were happily full of bottles, intact and properly displayed, but they contained no wine. They were just for show. For the Delmonico management, one Morrison wine festival was enough.
