"Light My Fire" by The Doors: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the little known facts and secret histories behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your backdoor men of banality, your leather clad lizard kings of kind of cool stories, your Oedipus Rexes of rock. My name is Jordan run Togg and I'm Alex Heigel ed. Today we are talking about The Doors, specifically their self titled first album, which is one of the all time great debuts in rock history. Oh yeah, boasting deathless classic rock radio staples like break On Through the End and of course Light My Fire. No real reason to talk about this album today. I just love it. And one of the things that I love about it is how truly weird it is. I wrote an article about it for Rolling Stone for his fiftieth anniversary a few years ago, and this line from my intro kind of sums it up for me. If you wanted to craft the perfect rock debut, the most obvious route wouldn't be to meld Bavarian Oopbah with Willie Dixon, Chicago blues back minuettes with John Coltrane, charts twelfth century Celtic myths with ancient Greek tragedy, topped off with plenty of existential angst and a healthy dose of psychedelics. That's about right. He's lightning in a bottle baby, you know, yes it was, and a lot of that was thanks to the appeal of the man, the myth, the legends, the himbo to end all Himbo's mister James Douglas Morrison.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, I felt like, I feel like you're trying to bait me.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: A bit, a bit.

00:01:39
Speaker 2: I don't know, man, I mean, Morrison is like you know my I mean, my dad liked the Doors because of ray Man's eric.

00:01:46
Speaker 1: Uh and he is my favorite door.

00:01:48
Speaker 2: Well that's why I like the doors. Ray Man's are incredible. Like the guy like went and you know when the Doors broke up, he was like, I'll produce X and like play keyboards for iggy pop and just do all this really cool nivorous. So he's like clearly the best door. But yeah, so like I grew up listening to the Doors and was a product of the boomer industrial complex that like, yeah, this just forced all this and like, yeah, man, Jim's real cool. When you're like thirteen. Yeah, he's a Charles Bokowski, you know, he's exactly like Thompson. Yeah, just one of those guys that like, if you don't escape containment, you become such a piece of like becomes such a toxic loser if you like don't hit that point where you're like, looking back on it, I was incorrect. This man is adult, but like people don't. There's still people out there who are like once in a lifetime sham and like peace and love man spreading enlightenment. And it's like was he though, like really honestly was he?

00:02:58
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:02:58
Speaker 2: And it's like it's again, it's one of those things where it's like, well, reseparating the art from the artist because we knew he was a drunken buffoon, but like he has a tremendous voice and like really one of the coolest iconography's and stage presences for you know, about three years before you got fat and started whipping it out. But yeah, man, I mean it's he really, It's it's like, you know, you don't want to lionize the guy, or you don't want to pillory the guy for having like a thousand useless bastard sons that followed in his in his footsteps.

00:03:35
Speaker 1: But at the same time.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: I think you can be mad at the mold maker for what is made out of their mold, Like If, Jerey, If and and you know are all the people that enabled him. And at the end of the day, he was just like a super handsome guy with a pretty great voice and like great stage presence and what about the poetry, Yeah, well absolute dog dog. But like I was just a Penshant for self mythologizing and like that converged in such a spectacular way in him. And also just in the sixties, Like again I don't think you have I mean the guys in the the guys who came after him, like Ian Astbury for the cult, like any goth singer who started singing down in that register and like croon yelling, were like all guys who when people saw them, they were like, they're doing Jim Morrison, you know. So it's hard to say whether he would have had success in a different era or in a different setting because he he does not exist in the context of all which came before him. He exists in the internal presence of those stupid black and white photos pouting sensually at the camera and like yelling his way through this debut record that slaps And if you're one of those people who are compelled to read about the artist or find out more about the artist, it's dismal.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: Because he's like kind of a guy who peaked. He's like the guy who peaked in high school. Man, oh wow, high school.

00:05:06
Speaker 2: His high school was like nineteen sixty seven to like mid nineteen sixty nine, you know, and then everything else was just like, well, I'm fat and sad now, and then I'll die in the bath, like.

00:05:19
Speaker 1: You know, by the grace of God. Goal. Yeah, Like truly, you were describing kind of the the process of being a Doors fan. I feel like getting into the Doors is such a rite of passage as a young music fan. I mean, they are the pre eminent teenage band. It's I think it was a description of Donnie Darko from our Donnie Darko episode where somebody called the movie your first deep thought, and that's kind of how I It sort of sums up my feelings on the Doors. Yeah, and you know, members of the Doors camp support this. There's their manager, Bill Siddons is quoted as saying in the classic Albums documentary. This band wasn't about flower power but personal power. It's about who can you be? And I feel like that's a very important sentiment at a certain crucial age. Making a stink face, Yes, you are always so much. This is just drenched in that sixties shit. I hate, dude, I'm sorry.

00:06:16
Speaker 2: You know, one of the guys I like most about researching this is Paul Rothchild, the producer of their records, because he was absolutely not buying into Morrison's bullshit, and he has my favorite take on Morrison and that you know, this is a guy who spent hours putting up with Morrison's. 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 Jekyl 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. And that's kind of like, you know, people talk about him in this like Dionissa and archetype of like, you know, this guy who like the path was William Blake, the pathonology is paved, is paved.

00:07:06
Speaker 1: With the excess leads to the Palace of wisdom.

00:07:09
Speaker 2: Yeah whatever, whatever that horses is that people use an excuse to drink like blats and say slurs like I'm sorry. Alcohol is not a transcendent drug. It is an isolating and I mean three beers and Thin Lizzie with the Boys is a transcendent alcohol experience. But like pounding your way through wild turkey and like schlitz while expounding on being a lizard, that's can stupid. Like Jim Morrison was a beer guy trapped in an LSD world. You know, he's like Bob, He's basically Bob Seeker.

00:07:51
Speaker 3: Strip away, if you strip away all the mythologizing, you have a guy who is like a great blues showder whose delusions of everything else were just was like completely fed into by the circumstances of the times and his handsomeness.

00:08:05
Speaker 1: Well all right, well I'll take it more personal. I mean, I was a kid who got very into the doors as like a tween, and you know, bought all the memoirs from the respective members, did your moo rise, watched all the documentaries and the Oliver Stone movie, learned to play their songs on guitar from tab sites and I poured all over the poetry, which at the time, as like a twelve year old, I thought was deep and cool in moody in a mysterious way. And then I had that moment in adulthood when I thought, wait, is this is this embarrassing? And I remember this moment actually first occurred to me at my first job at VH one because there was an opportunity to interview John Densmore, the drummer, and nobody else wanted to do it, and I was so excited. I mean, I kind of like had checked out of the doors since college and late high school. Things that were smart, well yeah, but still like they a lot to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then like, while prepping for this interview, all of my gen X coworkers were making fun of me, and it kind of slowly started to dawn on me as I was revisiting the doors are the doors lamb? Is? Is Jim Morrison pretentious and awful? Yes? And the answer is sure, But the song's rip they do, and that that is the journey. That's the journey. But that's my thing though that's not him. Oh no, but it's partially him. Ah that roar.

00:09:31
Speaker 2: Yeah again, he has a great voice, but like, yes, that's him. Everything that's interesting and has held up about the doors is not Jim. All of those influences you just mentioned as like pitching that we're not him. Like what does he has he ever actually talked about what his musical influences are, aside from like he likes Frank Sinatra, which you can kind of hear in his voice, and he likes you know, all these other guys like likes Elvis. I mean, I sorry, I'm talking about my ass. I'm sure he did it some point, or though maybe he didn't dean to even name influences. But like the rest of the guys who were like, no, I like old soul records. John Dinsmore was like I like Charles Mingus, you know, like I like Flamenco guitar and all of this, all of that goes into him. But then like again, man, you just get a guy who didn't write any songs, who's he.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: Had literary inflo he had he wrote, you mean, he wrote all he wrote, like most of the best songs or a lot of the songs I know Robert Kreeger wrote most of them. Well, he couldn't play an instrument. He couldn't play a single chord, so he made up melodies to remember his own lyrics, and then he would sing them to the band and the band would kind of tease out chord progressions again.

00:10:42
Speaker 2: I mean this, yeah, dude, it goes back to like, do you believe in songwriting by committee or do you believe it? It's like an autorific yeah right, Like I personally, I think unless you're there in a fly on the wall like watching these songwriting sessions, I do not credit Jim Morrison as being like responsible for a lion's share of this music. I just don't if you subscribe to the theory that all songs are is a chord progression and a melody, sure, and lyrics, you know, sure. But like I it just greats on me that the cover of this album is his huge, stupid moody face and then like the guys actually sweating it out behind him as like tiny figures in the back.

00:11:23
Speaker 1: I'm just one of the out of focus guys.

00:11:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I said. The Doors movie was like when we got like free show time for signing up on for Internet, Like my sophomore year of college.

00:11:35
Speaker 1: It was just like playing.

00:11:37
Speaker 2: It would play once a day, and so it just became a ritual to just kind of like flick on showtime and see if the Doors was playing, so you can laugh at maou Komer, I'm a I'm I'm tacking on.

00:11:47
Speaker 1: I'm becoming a.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: Large mammle mammle, yes, yes, patting his gut.

00:11:53
Speaker 1: I just want to sing the blues fan, get fat, do nothing, go nowhere, just slig Jimbo, you ain't got much choice?

00:12:01
Speaker 2: What is wrong as being a large mammal, a big beast like a tank field?

00:12:08
Speaker 1: That movie I think did a grave disservice? Did Jim Morrison did it though? Or did it just show the Emperor had no clothes?

00:12:17
Speaker 2: Oh look, I want to go on record as saying I like the Doors.

00:12:24
Speaker 1: I like their recorded output.

00:12:26
Speaker 2: Jim Morrison has like one of the foundational voices in rock. Their songs slap, they are recorded well. Raymond Zarek is like just an innovator for the whole playing keyboard, bassed thing and beyond, and like the other guys are tremendous musicians. But when you have the dominant personality in your band as such a self important boob. That's what I'm gonna focus on.

00:12:56
Speaker 1: I think for me, it was just so shocking because it was like suddenly here that like Jimmy Hendrix was lame or something like. It was something that just was so shocking to me as an adult to be like, oh my.

00:13:06
Speaker 2: God, well I have news about Jimmy Hendricks's lyrics too. Well they are dumb. They're about turning into Murman. Although that song Whips, you know, that song is so funny because like it's so meandering and boring and there's like three parts when you're like, oh, this is about to kick the fuck in, like classic Hendrick stuff, and then it just goes back to being meandering and boring. Uh that's nineteen eighty three. Uh a merman I should turn to be. I think, yes, some ellipses in there, if anyone's keeping track at home.

00:13:40
Speaker 1: You know, and the thing is like, man, you get this, I get this with everything.

00:13:44
Speaker 2: I was a Charles Wakowski fan, all right, Like I also, you know, I was deeply invested in Sublime for like a year and a half.

00:13:52
Speaker 1: Interesting, Well, you did have dreads as a kid.

00:13:54
Speaker 2: Yes, that didn't have anything to do with it though I I I think I just thought they were like genly they were like genuinely dangerous and like had like tears of the clown aspect where I could listen to like just bad fish and be like, wow, he was sad, but also he could party, you know, And then I was like, no, this is frat boy and some people are still super into Sublime and that's fine and.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Well and good.

00:14:24
Speaker 2: Everyone's experience of transcending their teen stupidity is different, and that's fine, and we can celebrate that. But like, again, the way that he has been enshrined is that we was such a necessary corrective for him to also be taken down, you know, Like I wonder how.

00:14:42
Speaker 1: The Door's reputation would have would have evolved had Jim lived. Would we all have would we all have come to this conclusion a lot earlier because he would have put out a poetry record.

00:14:53
Speaker 2: They would have gotten into synths, and like the late seventies would have been one of the most tragic things to watch for them in terms of fashion. God forbid, they've lived into the eighties. When you get into like the Keith and Mick like shiny shirt or Bob Dylan like Empire burlesque fashion era. That would have been a majestic train wreck. And that's the other thing about Morrison everyone loves is he died tragic and still kind of sexy.

00:15:22
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean it's the Rolling Stone cover like ten years after his death. He's hot, he's sexy, he's dead. Yeah. Anyway, well hot, damn. We got a lot to talk about. Here we go. Let's dive in from the time Jim Morrison dropped acid and destroyed the recording studio to the time his dad started the Vietnam War, only partially getting to.

00:15:44
Speaker 2: When he eats more Chicken than any man ever.

00:15:46
Speaker 1: Seen, to the corporate training film that would yield their first recordings, the historic first use of billboards and Moog synths, and of course, a heaping helping of daddy issues. Here's everything you didn't know about the Thor's debut.

00:16:11
Speaker 2: You should just punch it. Why is there no Jamorrison soundboard?

00:16:14
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, well I would Lee Roth.

00:16:17
Speaker 2: Yeah, I forgot my favorite Jim Morrison adlet or not Adlin.

00:16:23
Speaker 1: But intro is the petition the Lord with Prayer part you can not petition. That's so cool. I remember back there in Seminary school. Yeah, yeah, that was so good. There was a person there who put thought the proposition that you can petition the Lord with prayer.

00:16:45
Speaker 2: Petition the Lord with prayer, you canna pratisann with rare.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: What is that from? I mean, what is that?

00:16:58
Speaker 2: I'm trying to figure it out, man, I mean, I mean my bed is that it was something that like he heard on like AM radio.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: Going through the South and some like religious station. Yeah, because you do hear that? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah. According to the well worn myth of the Doors, the band formed on Venice Beach in the summer of nineteen sixty five when ray Man Xeric bumped into his former UCLA Film School classmate Jim Morrison, sitting on the sand and staring lootlely out of the Pacific, just a few months after graduation. It's a great image, but that's not an accurate summation of their musical beginnings. Throughout college. Ray Man Zak fronted Rick and the Ravens, a Santa Monica bar band specializing in surf and blues. Assuming the persona of screaming Ray Daniels, the bearded blue shouter wo that should have gone back to the drawing board, Ray and two of his brothers spent early nineteen sixty five playing regular weekend gigs at the Turkey Joint West, he dive for quote swinging young people located just blocks from the beach. As Ray would later recall, we didn't know what we were doing. We were just having fun. It's like us. They were often visited by Ray's UCLA film school classmates, including the young Jim Morrison, who had actually featured the one of raised student films, which is sweet. This actually early footage of them from like nineteen sixty four, a full year two years before they'd even conceived of the doors. Jim, unfortunately, when he'd go visit Ray's band at the Turkey Joint West, he was already displaying a penchant for booze. As Ray Manzeric wrote in his memoir Light My Fire, when Jim got loose, he would shout out song titles at the band, mainly Louis Louie. We could always hear him barking from the back of the room, and one night Ray decided to dude teach his drunken friend the lesson leaning into the mic screaming. Ray invited Jim onto the stage to help him sing a special version of the Kingsman Classic, and though jub had never sung for an audience, he did not back down. As Ray continued, Jim let out a blood curdling war whoop and the Turkey joint West went Diane Eyson. The place exploded. He was good and he loved it. He hopped around and sang himself hoarse. That was Jim's first on stage singing experience.

00:19:14
Speaker 2: Really really set the tone with him being a drunken heckler.

00:19:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is crazy, I think, is it anyone here.

00:19:22
Speaker 2: Gets out alive where someone talks about him like having some kind of weird genetic quirk that made alcohol hit harder for him somebody.

00:19:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember reading that or hearing that in interviews that they would describe it as like an allergy. And I don't know if that was just a way of phrasing alcoholism in a in a unique way or what.

00:19:43
Speaker 2: But y Yeah, but no, people, I mean I've heard that like three drink thing from a few different people where they were like, he would not he did not take He was not like a put away heroic. I mean he could put away heroic amounts, but it did not take a heroic amount for him to get drunk.

00:19:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, or to just become a different person, was it? I mean, I guess we're splitting hairs here, but I mean that was more what it came down to.

00:20:06
Speaker 2: Uh, Jim, Like I said at the Top Man the Ultimate Sixties himbo, I'm hard pressed to find another, is there. That's a genuine question. Ah, more handsome counterculture icon.

00:20:22
Speaker 1: I mean, what would you think about Mick Jagger?

00:20:25
Speaker 2: I think Mick Jagger is too uh his sexuality and presentation is too androgynous.

00:20:32
Speaker 1: True, Okay, that's a good I'll accept that. Yeah, yeah, I got no one Yeah, so tweeted Yeah at Ultimate Sixties himbo.

00:20:42
Speaker 2: Yeah so like the sixties himbo non parrella. One of the funniest things in I think again it's no one here gets out alive. Is Manzuric talking about how into weightlifting they were together.

00:20:52
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they were just like well because Raybezeric's wife or girlfriend like actually had a job and then they would just spend the day on Venice Beach, like doing the monkey bars endlessly. Yeah, while like she went off to be like a computer programmer or something to actually like get money for food. Yeah, yeah.

00:21:11
Speaker 2: God, how many sixties bands were like born upon the backs of women, hardworking women?

00:21:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, like all of them, probably many of them. Yeah.

00:21:22
Speaker 2: So you have a favorite Morrison line reading that I believe you'd like to share with us.

00:21:27
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:21:27
Speaker 1: No, I'll defend them to the death, purely for the reading of his line, you men eat your dinner, you eat your pork and beans. I ate more chicken any man ever seen from back door Man.

00:21:36
Speaker 2: That's a slight you're forgetting, he says, I eat. Oh, excuse me, yes, which is what edges it into buffoon territory.

00:21:45
Speaker 1: Oh, I think it whips. I think that that song, it's one of my favorite songs on the light back.

00:21:49
Speaker 2: Door Man Savage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, But it's the fact that he's doing a black voice.

00:21:58
Speaker 1: One of them. More.

00:21:58
Speaker 2: Of all the endlessly and entertaining Morrison anecdotes out there, one of the most illustrative, I think is his own recollection of what he described himself as the most formative memory of his life, and in his telling, a toddler aged Morrison in his family drove past a grisly car accident involving some Native American people. Jim fixated this and referenced it in multiple songs and spoken word poetries. He's described it as seeing Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death and positive that maybe one or two of those Native American souls took up residence in his body, which is just a hilarious turn of phrase, like maybe one, maybe two. I have no way of knowing how many Native American souls are in me.

00:22:42
Speaker 1: Some could have snuck in one and a half possibly maybe one in a toddlers, really no way to tell, no.

00:22:49
Speaker 2: So but like his family is like, yeah, I don't know, that didn't really happen that way, Like I think his dad was, like Jim really fixated it on on it, but I don't call it being like a horrifying accident. And same with his sister. You know, the bare bones facts of his childhood that he was a military brad. He bounced around all over the place, per no one here gets out alive. He was like a bright kid. Supposedly he had an IQ of one hundred and forty nine. IQ measurements are a specious science, but per my googling, that puts him in range of such luminaries as Matt Damon and James Woods.

00:23:27
Speaker 1: So IQ tests basically like the lie detectors of intelligence measurement.

00:23:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again like having read stuff doesn't imply comprehensive you understand it? Yes, But like wheneveryone talks about him like being obsessed with antonin Arteau's like Theater of Cruelty. It's just funny that he like read these groundbreaking works of French surrealism. It was like, get drunk and whip your dick out.

00:23:57
Speaker 1: Wasn't that from a fish called Wanda? Jamie Lee Curtis is saying to Kevin Klein's character, like gorilla can read Sartra, doesn't mean he understands it. Yeah.

00:24:08
Speaker 2: Morrison was the proverbial grill in that.

00:24:12
Speaker 1: Now.

00:24:12
Speaker 2: I mean he there was apparently evidence of the men he would become as early as his teen years. At one point, he was riding the bus and reduced an older woman sitting next to him to tears by repeatedly demanding what do you think of elephants? So that's cool that he did that to an old lady on public transportation.

00:24:37
Speaker 1: He was mostly very well read.

00:24:39
Speaker 2: I did find one great anecdote from his high school English teacher, who was like he was literally checking or dispatching someone to the Library of Congress because he suspected that Jim was making up books and doing book reports on them because they were all like weird sixteenth and seventeenth like demonology and witchcraft texts. And the guy was like, I think these may not be actual books.

00:25:04
Speaker 1: But they were. But they all to his credit, they always were. God love him. I interviewed Jim's sister Anne a few years ago when they were putting out a compilation book of some of Jim's early writings and notebooks, and she told me some really funny stories. I guess. Once their mother gave Jim some money to buy a new shirt, and Jim went to Goodwill and bought the cheapest one he could find and spent the rest on books, which honestly was a move I probably would have done as a tween fourteen or now. Another time, Jim excused himself from class, telling his teacher that he needed to have surgery on a quite obviously non existent brain tumor. Instead, he went home and spent the rest of the day reading. I don't know why I find this as amusing as I do. On a family car trip, Jim insisted they make a pilgrimage to the North Carolina home that once belonged to the twenty century novelist Thomas Wolfe, and no one else wanted to go, so his dad took him alone. That's cute. And Jim's sister told me how Jim would make a habit of whenever he learned a new word, he would write a whole paragraph around it just to get the language of it, which is a good hack. Actually it is a very good It's a good hack, very good habit. He would later destroy all of these early notebooks, or most of them anyway, and he fit of artistic self consciousness. But one of these high school verses would later surface as the very evocative spoken word piece Horse Latitudes on The Door's sophomore record nineteen sixty seven Strange Days, a phrase I have always admittedly loved, course slat. I mean, the best part was, I guess. He debuted this piece to his mother's bridge club when he was in high school, and his sister told me he was like, yeah, I think they just had their mouths open, and then he ran to his room giggling. So imagine a teenage Jim Morison reading Horse Latitudes of his mother's suburban bridge club, and then reacting to their confusion.

00:27:05
Speaker 2: And running away like a little child. Yes, yes, a giggling little boy. I can't imagine Jim Morrison giggling.

00:27:13
Speaker 1: No, no, very much. No, I don't know.

00:27:19
Speaker 2: But most germane to this episode is his fixation on the range of philosophers that moody teens get exposed to. Nietzsche obviously a big one, the range of French existentialists, their references to Journey A Long Day's Journey into Night and one of the most turgid existentialist texts I've ever forced myself through, And of course the aforementioned Theater of Cruelty pioneer antonin Artaux anton In Whatever. Morrison, having transferred to UCLA from Florida State Tallahassee, he took a class on Our Toe and remained deeply the men's influence as far as his approach to live performance and some of the student films that he made while at UCLA before he graduated with his degree in film. Have you seen Jim Morrison's short films? Leave one of them is out there?

00:28:13
Speaker 1: Oh? I think the only one that's out there is almost like visual poetry. I think it's just like a jumble of images. I don't think I've made it through that one, and then I think the rest were burned. If I recall, I think that was sort of like the process that the college followed was that they just burned all the student films that didn't make it to like a certain level in like competitions or something good for them. Yeah. Well, after graduating UCLA in May of nineteen sixty five, Jim had plans to move to New York City, and so it took Ray and Zerk by surprise when he ran into Jim on Venice Beach a few months after graduation. Apparently it was forty days and forty nights after graduation. You say that Ray highlighted the biblical significance of this to Terry Gross in an interview in nineteen eighty eight. I didn't know that.

00:29:03
Speaker 2: I do say that.

00:29:04
Speaker 1: I did say so, forty days of forty nights after graduation, he ran into his friend Jim, who he thought had moved to New York, on Denis Beach and he told Terry Gross. I said, Jim, what have you been up to? And Jim said, well, been living up on Dennis Jacob's roof, consuming a bit of LSD and writing songs. I mean a bit a bit of LSD.

00:29:26
Speaker 2: Yes, a bit seems like an under cell. Manserik said that Jim's died at the time was LSD and canned beans, and another line in that no one here gets out alive for first to him swallowing LSD like beer nuts, which he was probably also swallowing Jesus. So.

00:29:45
Speaker 1: During this meeting on the beach, Ray convinced a very shy Jim Morrison to sing him one of his songs that he was working on. Ray would say he sat down on the beach, dug his hands into the sand, and the sands started streaming out in a little rivu. He kind of closed his eyes and began to sing in a chet baker, haunted whisper kind of voice. Yeah, yeah, a lizard. He began my joke. He began to sing Moonlight Drive. And when I heard that first stanza, let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide, penetrate the evening, that the city sleeps to hide, I thought, ooh, spooky, cool man. He probably didn't say it like that. He probably said.

00:30:44
Speaker 2: It has he heard other poetry that was good. I prefer the version of the Oliver Stone movie where he's like, Jim, We're going to start a band and make a million dollars.

00:30:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's another version of that too. Yeah. See. He has commented in many interviews about how he noticed how handsome he just looked in them. I guess he'd lost a lot of weight after graduation, four or five pounds. He said.

00:31:09
Speaker 2: This isn't the terry gross thing. He was like the fact that Jim attracted, as he says, the little girls, which is the mind.

00:31:16
Speaker 1: I know that's a blues idiom, but like that's gross.

00:31:21
Speaker 2: The fact that Jim attracted the little girls was something that I knew he was going to do when I saw him at one hundred and thirty five pounds on the beach, which is like near emaciated. Actually, unless Jim was he like five to seven. He does have short.

00:31:32
Speaker 1: Eye energy, he does. I think he's tall on that though, he's probably like five to ten. I do love though, that it was one light drive that kick this whole thing off. I mean, to me, that is the quintessential Doors song. It's bluesy, it's nocturnal, and it's just dripping with doom dromanticism. That's one of my favorite songs of their.

00:31:52
Speaker 2: Is I still like break on Through? That's like so so proto punk?

00:31:57
Speaker 1: Oh totally yeah. So according to legends, and Jim decided to start a band right then and there on the beach, but that's not one true. In truth, they already had a band, Rick and the Ravens, Ray's college bar band. This was admittedly not an ideal vehicle for Jim Morrison's proto psychedelic lyrics, but they were there, and they were a band, and they were actually a fairly legit one, more than like history would have you believe. Rick and the Ravens had previously released three promo singles, covers of Soul Train, Big Bucketee, and Henrietta on a label called Aural Records.

00:32:34
Speaker 2: Those demos kind of actually whip like. They sound like a band in Brooklyn that we would have seen or played with. It's also really interesting hearing ray Man Xeric's voice, because he sounds people assume that that's Jim singing on those early things, so it's like immediately apparent having heard the two how much Jim then learning to sing took his cues from Ray.

00:32:58
Speaker 5: Yeah, people, you knew meana now, so low down you budda, welcome alown, rein out people, I'm on tig you around.

00:33:19
Speaker 4: And now come on, every body, let's take a little chill.

00:33:32
Speaker 2: Unfortunately it didn't help.

00:33:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, no. These singles tanked, and by the late summer of nineteen sixty five, Rick and the Ravens were in Ray's estimation, going nowhere. Nothing was happening, no record sales, no gigs. Descent descended on the Ravens tremendous sentence. The rhythm section had departed, and the remaining members were not especially receptive to Jim's mysterious poetry, which they viewed as the height of pretension. What is a horse latitude? All right, we're out of here. Ray was depressed and he did what a lot of depressed people do in the runout of options. He enrolled in a transcendental meditation class.

00:34:16
Speaker 2: Another thing, another key point to this story that I love.

00:34:19
Speaker 1: Yes, but this was two years before the Beatles. This was he was an early adopter of transcendental meditation, which I think is cool. Instead of finding enlightenment, Ray cross paths with a drummer named John Densmore, who was welcomed into the evolving lineup of Rick and the Ravens and Densmore I love this. He would remember Ray from class before Ray introduced himself as being like kind of a heckler. Ray would angrily raise his hand and complain, no bliss, no bliss because he the meditation wasn't working for him yet, just screaming like he'd been ripped off, trying to get his money back. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I love that so much. This is why he's the best. With a new drummer and Jim songs, this rapidly evolving version of Rick and the Ravens recorded a demo disc consisting of six original tracks Moonlight Drive, My Eyes Have Seen You, Summer's Almost Gone, Hello, I Love You, Go, Insane, and End of the Night. And these demos they're interesting. They sound almost timid compared to what was to come in the whole you know, bombastic sound that we associate with the Doors. Labels agreed because the demo failed to attract any kind of attention, and Rick and the Ravens fractured for good, leaving behind only Ray, Jim and John Densmore. And desperate to rebuild the ranks, Ray recruited another acquaintance from the meditation class, a guitarist named Robbie Krieger, who coincidentally had gone to school with Bob Weir and saw him perform in the proto grateful dead group Leatherman Creeze Uptown jug Champions. Did you know that I did not?

00:35:52
Speaker 2: No, No, I did know that that was one of the abortive dead lineups, which is a truly truly horrific name in the an of music.

00:36:02
Speaker 1: Yes, Robbie Krieger had played briefly with John Densmore in a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and this new group would also draw inspiration from mind expansion, taking a cue from the William Blake line by way of Elvis Huxley, they called themselves the Doors, and they held their first rehearsal at a friend's garage behind a Santa Monica bus depot, and confirming my suspicion that this is in fact the definitive Doors song, Moonlight Drive was the first number they played. I guess. Robbie Kreeger brought out a bottleneck, like an literal neck from a glass bottle that he broke and no one in the band had ever heard bottleneck guitar before, and it totally blew their minds. And that was the moment that they coalesced. Raymnzeric would tell Gibson dot Com. I knew instantly we found it that indefinable transcended something that Kerouac refers to. We all looked at each other and went, man, what have we just done? Oh my, are we allowed to do that on this planet? That was it Moonlight Drive. At that point everybody knew. We all just sort of noded our heads and that was it. That was the birth of the doors right there.

00:37:15
Speaker 2: Yeah. I talk about this a little later, but I'll just skip it when I get to that. Robbie Kreeger, by his own admission, was not like a particularly agile slide player, and this is tough in the era of you know, Dwayne Ulman, but I find his use of slide really interesting in Moonlight Mile.

00:37:34
Speaker 1: It sounds like a theoman.

00:37:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, because as anyone, just anyone who picks up a guitar slide before they discover that it is like a deeply unnatural way to play an instrument and is like so ungodly frustrating. The coolest thing you can do with it is just go woo whooo. But he does it in another tune. Yeah, he does it in the end of the night, and he does it. What's really interesting about it is that he does what you're actually not supposed to do when you play slide, which is like waver around, like if you because a slide is straight, you have to keep it straight and position it straight on the neck to have it in tune. And what he does is sort of hit those chords and tilt it a little bit in either direction, which is kind of like a pedal steel thing, and it gets this wavering, sort of ambiguously pitched effect that almost sounds like a Hawaiian steel guitar. It's just really refreshing to see some guy from this era who's not like trying to be Elmore James or whomever Whomstever.

00:38:52
Speaker 4: Let's swell to the loop, Let's flow.

00:38:57
Speaker 1: To the tip.

00:39:01
Speaker 2: The Nayson Doors began practicing in the sun room of a beach house that Ray had rented in Venice. He somehow got the group to contribute to his rent by passing it off as their rehearsal space that he just happened to live in but it was right on the sand and certainly stimulated their creativity. Thanks God, why did you make me say that? Things got off to a good start when they secured a contract with Columbia Records based on the strength of their Aura Records demo, but nothing ever came of the signing. Hit making producers like Terry Melcher aka The Guy who Pissed Off, Charlie Manson and future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston all passed on it, and by the early spring of nineteen sixty six, the band was unceremoniously dropped without representation or money. They took a job with the production company Parthenon Pictures providing incidental music for a Ford for the Ford Motor Company's customer service training video titled Love Thy Customer, Madly ha. It was not called that the Doors piled into a cramped screening room at Los Angeles's Rampart Studios, where they viewed the twenty five minute clip on a small monitor and composed a soundtrack largely on the spot, jamming live as the scenes flickered past. Myles Davis doing the same for Lacentiere, Poor the Gallows.

00:40:20
Speaker 1: This was not I didn't know that. Sorry, was that too much of a deep cut? No?

00:40:25
Speaker 2: Yeah, Myles did this for a French movie that came out called Stairway. Do they translates to Stairway to the Gallows or something Elevator to the Gallows he did in fifty eight. It was a French crime, French crime thriller, and it's really tremendous trumpet playing. You know that video of that somebody like the one of the original mashups of the Miles trumpet over LCD sound system.

00:40:52
Speaker 1: Oh you yes, Yes? For New York I Love You.

00:40:55
Speaker 2: Yes, That trumpet solo is from the Elevator to the Gallows on track. It's superlative. But supposedly he recorded doing the same thing. It's just like watching the film and just playing free trumpet to it.

00:41:12
Speaker 4: New York, I Love You, But You're freaking me out. There's a ton of the twist, but we're fresh out of shine, like a de holl that you hear through you what New York, I Love You, but You're freaking me out?

00:41:42
Speaker 2: Anyway, that was not relevant. I apologize fragments of what would later become. I looked at you Build me a woman and the soft parade can be heard in the finished product, and for this they earned the princely sum of two hundred dollars.

00:41:57
Speaker 1: Believe to be lost for decades of Thy Customer.

00:42:03
Speaker 2: Was discovered in the UCLA film vaults in two thousand and two and released on the twenty fourteen Doors Rarities DVD R DASH Evolution Revolution That's fucking stupid. However, the original soundtrack session tapes have yet to be located.

00:42:23
Speaker 1: Bomber our evolution cost that's is that.

00:42:27
Speaker 2: Dinsmore or like making those making those calls.

00:42:30
Speaker 1: Or it's almost seems like like a rave But he died before the DVD came out, so.

00:42:38
Speaker 2: Well.

00:42:38
Speaker 1: Aside from this two hundred dollars windfall, the group survived in large part thanks to their residency at the London fog a decidedly down at the Heels Dive on the Sunset Strip. They played their nightly between nine pm and two am from February to May nineteen sixty six, sharing a bill with Ron Delane, the Go Go Dancer or the Exotic Dancer, I've seen both. She would sometimes complain about the music she was expected to go go to, which is hilarious rather surelish like well imagine trying to go go to like the End. I could do it. There's a skill issue. It's it's like the steweze, sexy party music, and then it's like, all of a sudden, it's the end. Yeah. As Robbie Krieger told me in twenty sixteen, by this time we'd gone through about twenty or thirty different clubs have been rejected. We learned the ropes and we said, listen, man, we could fill this place up. And we did. The first night we got all our friends to come from UCLA and it was packed. So this guy hired us. Of course, the next day nobody came. It was two people, but we slowly built it up and this would essentially be the Doors. Say it with me now Hamburg years to put it in beetle terms, this is where the Doors hone their skills, both musical and theatrical at the London Fog. The experience gave the fundamentally very shy and reticent Jim Morrison confidence to perform. For the first few weeks, he would actually sing with his back to the audience facing the band. They performed like they were in like a little circle, like in the rehearsal room, an often absent crowd, gave them the freedom to experiment and bowling them to introduced daring original compositions alongside covers of early rock and R and B standards by people like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Big Joe Williams. Unlike their bar band contemporaries, however, the Doors brought jazz sensibilities to their set, exploding each song and exploring every individual section with lengthy instrumental solos in improvisational lyrical passages. And that's where you get stuff like the End and Light My Fire, both of which clocked in it over seven minutes. Later that summer, the Doors would graduate from the London Fog to the much more famous Whisky of Go Go, which is located just a few doors down but light years away socially and culturally, and the Whiskeys, where the Door's reputation began to take off in a big way and they earned serious recognition for their industry peers. My favorite story from this period is when Van Morrison and them did a residency at the Whiskey and the Doors were their support act, and on their last night in town, the two Morrisons share the stage and did a twenty minute version of Gloria, which The Doors would later cover on record, and it's great.

00:45:17
Speaker 2: They also decided that they were related, if I'm remember incorrectly, and proceeded to get just like House together. But people were talking about how Jim got a lot of his stage moves actually from Van Morrison, which makes sense. But the funniest thing that I read in that quote, which I don't have at hand, was like Jim absorbed much of Van stage presence, the theatricality, the height, you know, and an aura of surly menace. I was like, imagine finding all five foot four of little elfin Van Morrison menacing.

00:45:55
Speaker 1: Doing the kick from the Last Walls. Yeah, yeah, oh.

00:45:59
Speaker 2: Man again Paul Rothschild quote for the Ages. He recalled to the Bay Area music magazine BAM in nineteen eighty one that the first time he saw the Doors, the group was playing at the Whiskey on the same bill with Love I believe. I meant Electra Records founder Jack Holsman and his then wife Nina, and we saw the first set. I thought to myself, my god, Jack and Nina have lost their mind. These guys suck. I caught a horrible show.

00:46:25
Speaker 1: Well, in his defense, Jack Holtzman, the founder of Electro Records, who had eventually signed them to the record deal, had to see them, I think four times before he was suitably convinced that they had anything of value. What an era, What a tremendous time. So happy for them. The Doors would ultimately get fired from the Whiskey in August nineteen sixty six after Jim did an especially graphic, obscenity laden version of the end, which got the club owner bent out of shaw.

00:46:58
Speaker 2: He used to like rub his he like grubbed his crotch all over the mic stand and would like visibly become too messent on stage, right like.

00:47:06
Speaker 1: That was one of his bits that I don't know. I haven't heard that I read.

00:47:10
Speaker 2: I read no one here gets out alive in like fits and starts on a couch in somebody else's home. It was somebody else's copy, So my facts may not be correct, but I remember that sticking out to me as a gross and weird thing.

00:47:27
Speaker 1: May I ask, why were you reading no one here gets out alive in fits and starts on somebody else's couch in somebody else's house.

00:47:36
Speaker 2: I mean, you know you ever get bored in when you're in college and you don't really have anything to do, but you're smoking a lot of weeds, so you're sitting on couches a lot and just reach for whatever's at hand. It is an entertaining book, although I should mention that since I've been citing it so much, it is like widely debunked and upon these days.

00:47:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, very much so yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, I guess Jim one night debuted the version of the End that we all now know and love, with the whole edible section in the middle. But he did that for the first time on stage at the Whiskey A go go with the whole you know father, I want to kill you mother, et cetera. And the funniest part was Ray knew where he was going with it fairly quickly, and he was like, oh man, oh this is this is not going to end well. And it didn't. They were fired, but luckily less than two weeks before this firing, Electro Records had signed them, and their acrimonious dismissal from the Whiskey didn't matter. Yeah, didn't matter at all. And with that they hit the studio just down the road at sunset sound to be precise, which is great. Everything in the early Doors story just seems to take place with them like a ten block radius. What an era.

00:48:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, I sn't a lot, but like those bold stuff you know to do in a live setting.

00:48:54
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, and an arrow when Lenny Bruce was getting hauled off for using probably less offense of words in a lot of cases. Yeah, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. So let's kick off the recording section with a bit of studio session nerdery. Instead of a bassist, the Doors famously relied on raymn Xeric's left hand to hold down the low end with the Fender Rhodes piano keyboard bass. This role originally fell to him at a necessity, he said, we auditioned quite a few bass players. We auditioned one bass player and we sounded like the rolling Stones. Then we auditioned another bass player, and we sounded like the animals. Feeling like they'd come across as imitators, they decided to just do without a bassist. As John Densmore wrote in his memoir, adding a bass made it sound like every other rock and roll band. We were determined to do almost anything to sound different, and this absence of a bass became a crucial element of the Doors Live sounds. But producer Paul Rothschild, who oversaw sessions for the debut album, felt that the recordings needed a stronger bass attack than the occasionally mushy Fender Rhodes piano bass could provide. To assist, he quietly hired Larry Nektel of the ubiquitous gang of La session players known as the Wrecking Crew to stick in the sound. You know. The Wrecking Crew is a whole documentary about them. They played on some phenomenal number of number one hit songs during this era. Beach Boys, Pet Sounds, Phil Spector's Stuff, Mama's and the Papas, The Birds, Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Blah Blah blah blah, list goes on, Beak goes on, and the list goes on. Nektel, at this point had already appeared on hits by The Beach Boys, Elvis, and the Birds. He only dubbed six of the Doors eleven tracks, Soul Kitchen, twenty Century, Fox Light, My Fire, I Looked at You and take it as it comes. Is that six I don't know how tweeted.

00:50:58
Speaker 2: Us if you're keeping of any of this, h yeah, I think Kreeker said he did the rest.

00:51:03
Speaker 1: But you know, that's one of those. It's one of those.

00:51:05
Speaker 2: It's one of those things that people have just like constantly.

00:51:08
Speaker 1: No base in the doors, like no base in the doors, no base in the doors. Did you know the doors don't have a bass player in ray Manzur. He just covered all the parts of his left hand.

00:51:17
Speaker 2: Now in the studio, they had a real basis on all of it. But it is cool, it's extremely cool. I mean that the if it weren't for him, I feel like that keyboard probably would have faded out of existence because it.

00:51:29
Speaker 1: Was a real outlier.

00:51:30
Speaker 2: I mean it was basically just the base register of a of a like full size keyboard.

00:51:37
Speaker 1: It's weird, and he was.

00:51:39
Speaker 2: He found it via some other band, I believe, like it was on stage as part of some other bands equipment.

00:51:46
Speaker 1: It was the Seeds. I think it was the Seeds and early proto psych bands. I'm almost certain it was the Seeds.

00:51:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, so uh yeah, it's great. I mean, you know, it goes a long way too. Because like he, you know, when you're doing so much active stuff with your right hand is I'm sure, I don't know why I'm explaining this to you, but like you, obviously you get into more of a I'm going to play the same repetitive pattern with my left so I don't have to think as much, and that's what gives it that like droney cyclical trance like quality.

00:52:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I always think of, for some reason, the one that really comes to mind, although I think they also had a bass player thicking this up too. His writers on the storm Doom Doom Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom doom doom.

00:52:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the one that Elvis's bass players on, Jerry Osborne I think, no, no, she had to later.

00:52:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's got a word name, yeah, Jerry Chef something like that. Yeah.

00:52:42
Speaker 2: Writers, that's one of my all time least favorite couplets too. The uh there's a killer on the road. His brain is squirming like a toad. Okay, man who's.

00:52:55
Speaker 1: Lows were lower Lou Reed's or Jim Morrison.

00:52:58
Speaker 2: Lose absolutely, I'm sorry, although men of equal self regard, I would vent I would say I you know, I'm gonna say Lou's worse because Jim never for all of his poetic it was never like I studied with Delmore Schwartz, like one of the greatest unknown literary blah blah blah blah. He wasn't up his own as much. He didn't have the high lutin pretensions that Lou did. Having studied with Delmore Schwartz of Syracuse University like that was something.

00:53:29
Speaker 1: To be proud of.

00:53:31
Speaker 2: At least Jim was just like off the dome like Toad Road Strode mode.

00:53:40
Speaker 1: You know, hit, We're done.

00:53:41
Speaker 2: I'm not doing another take, as Lou was like, oh yeah, well, this just belongs in the proud lineage of you know, pre prebeat literary icon. Delmore Schwartz, a guy who no one would ever know about if it weren't for me saying his name is the third sentence and all the interviews Delmo Schwartz out here catching strays in this podcast about The Doors Sorry the estate of Delmo Shortz.

00:54:09
Speaker 1: So the session based player Larry Nechtell is not credited or was not credited at the time at least for his work on The Door's debut, and it was actually many years before the extent of his contributions was known, and some have criticized the Doors over the years for seemingly airbrushing this guy out of the band's story, but John Densmore clarified this in a twenty fifteen Facebook post. He said Larry Nektel wasn't credited because he duplicated Rai's left hand bass lines exactly. He didn't record with us on the tracks he overdubbed. Later. This was a time before Moog synthesizers and Paul Rothschild. The producer felt correctly, the raised lines needed some more sonic punch from a string plucked in addition to a keyboard. And there's the Classic Albums documentary where they're kind of going track by track and they play raised keyboard base part and the actual bass part individually and they're identical, and then they play them both together at the same time and you can't tell them apart. So yeah, it really does. And also more of a.

00:55:11
Speaker 2: Maintenance thing do They didn't They didn't credit session players on like any of this. I mean, that's the whole thing with Motown Band is that everyone everyone flipped over the Motown Band and they were never listed.

00:55:22
Speaker 1: Uh. Yeah, I mean I think it's comes down to the attack.

00:55:26
Speaker 2: Of the keyboard because roads they work because they the hammers rather than hitting strings hit metallic times, and signals from that are picked up from uh like a pickup basically. But because of that, their attack can get a little indistinct. I mean, you don't really think of roads as being a particularly like punchy percussive instrument. But yeah, I mean you can hear the you can hear the blend. I guess better if you're listening invested indoors live bootlegs, which I I'm sure there are people out there who are, he said politely.

00:56:05
Speaker 1: I love this though. Apparently ray Man Zeric's keyboard bass was paid for by guitarist Robbie Kreeger's dad, who kind of had a lot of money, and he said he would only do it if the band promised to pay him back, and he drew up this whole legal document, but of course he didn't care. And Robbie's dad was like the cutest doors fan, Like he said, he used to love picking up hitchhikers just to be able to like brag to them that he was Robbie Creeker's dad. It's just like the sweetest thing and then he murdered them. Yeah.

00:56:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, Robbie Creeker's dad was the Zodiac killer.

00:56:40
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:56:42
Speaker 2: But you know, one of the things I love about raymin Zerk is that, despite having this live setup, the whole range of his influences on keyboard show up. I mean they have tac piano and stuff alongside the roads, alongside the vox organ.

00:56:55
Speaker 1: I just love his work in the studio.

00:56:57
Speaker 2: Man. And this is also a guy who was like producer X, you know, the pioneering La punk band X. Like he was really a consummate investigator of sounds and music in a way that not a lot of guys of his.

00:57:13
Speaker 1: Stature would be.

00:57:15
Speaker 2: Alabama song also features a marxophone, which is a kind of zither that I didn't know existed, But he also played that, which is cool. I was doing some digging around the keyboard forums trying to find some other defining parts of his style, and one guy was like, oh, everything's harmonized in thirds, Like all of his voicings are almost always harmonized in thirds, which is interesting because a lot of jazz at that point was chordal voicings like the classic you know, Miles Davis harmony is a lot of chordal voicings, and Keith Jarrett used a lot of thirdless voicings actually around that time, a lot of Suss chords on piano. So it's interesting that it would have sounded different from a lot of the prevailing influences that Manserk was probably picking up on. And I think some of that comes from me. He was like a he like studied a lot of Bach when he was a kid.

00:58:07
Speaker 1: Right.

00:58:07
Speaker 2: As far as the two and three part inventions and the counterpoint.

00:58:11
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely that was a big I think the intro to let My Fire I think was based on Uh. I think he said it's a version. It's like, yeah, circle of fifths.

00:58:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like just going around the circle of fifths in like classic Bach counterpoint.

00:58:25
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:58:26
Speaker 2: I just love the Again, certain parts of that movie are so burned into my brain that when they are does the writing Light my Fire beat, it's Kevin Dillon being like little chat chaw beat should do that justice? Or does a little Bosanova beat should do that justice?

00:58:44
Speaker 1: Well. When the Doors convened in Sunset Sound to record their debut in August of nineteen sixty six. Moonlight Drive seemed like a very appropriate starting point because again that was the song that Jim first sang to Ray during their famous beach meeting, and it was the first song that the foursome ever played together, And so they did try to do a version of this for their debut s Rabbi Krieger told me in twenty sixteen, but we went to record the first album, The first one we did was Moonlight Drive, but they were inhibited by this unfamiliar studio setting and not unable to capture the magic of their first rehearsal. He said it sounded too mysterious and kind of dark. So we arranged it for the second album, nineteen sixty seven Strange Days, and made it a little more wild. This original version of Moonlight Drive, which Kreeger dubs quote the very first recording we ever did as the Doors, was shelved and lost for a time before surfacing on a box set in nineteen ninety seven. Should we punched that in here.

00:59:46
Speaker 4: Littim to the Please Climb through the Time.

00:59:54
Speaker 5: Panel Train, the Evening Plan, the City Sleeves to.

01:00:02
Speaker 1: The second song they worked on, I think that same day, the first day of the sessions was Indian Summer, which also failed to make the cut. I don't really know that one. It wasn't that we thought they weren't good enough for the first album, but we had to pick and choose. Robbie said, a lot of good ones didn't make it. A re recorded version would be included on nineteen seventy's Morrison Hotel. Answered my own question there. You may have noticed that the period between Jim and Ray's meeting on the Venice Beach, assembling with the rest of the band members, earning and losing a Columbia Records contract, getting a Sunset Strip residency, and then getting another better sunset strip residency at the hottest club on the planet, the Whisky of Go Go, and also getting a contract with Electra Records, and going into the studio and recording their debut all took place within about twelve months. It's weird, yeah't very weird.

01:00:51
Speaker 2: Oh do we get into the Laurel Canyon thing?

01:00:52
Speaker 1: Now? Oh take us there.

01:00:54
Speaker 2: Well, that timeline, this compressed chronology is very funny because you know, one of this this text that we constantly referred to on this show, weird echoes in the Canyon by David McGowan puts Jim Morrison as one of these alleged military industrial plants who destabilized. The whole thrust of the book. If you haven't already heard us talk about it six to seven times, is that much of the hippie movement in the what would come to be defined as the Hippie movement was spurred on by a startlingly concentrated amount of the sons and daughters of the American military industrial complex congregating in LA and the posit The what he what McCowan presupposes is that this was a deliberate move to start focusing on and all these vacuous, idiotic hippie platitudes to defang the very legitimate labor and anti war movements that the government was concerned about at the time. And he puts he has takes Jim Morris in his sights, which is hilarious because he's like strange, how a film student who didn't play an instrument suddenly showed up with, like, I don't know, three dozen songs ready, and then all of those, a huge chunk of those songs became hits. And then he became this mystical figure ahead of the counterculture movement who was resolutely apolitical. Isn't that weird?

01:02:25
Speaker 1: Maybe was he a political I mean he had the Unknown Soldier and five to.

01:02:29
Speaker 2: One, and I guess that's true. I guess I don't really pause. I don't really think Jim Morrison was out there making like statements about socialism.

01:02:38
Speaker 1: He was trying to piss off his dad. It was an admiral in the Navies. We'll talk about, yes.

01:02:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I mean, you know, it is funny a film student coming out here with you know, four dozens of some of the most iconic movements and landing a major record label contract and international stardom within twelve months of trying.

01:03:02
Speaker 1: So the streak of good luck would continue to follow the doors. When Robbie Kreeger, the guitar is sat down to write his very first song ever, yeah, and came up with Light My Fire, which would become the number one song during the Summer of Love. Also, he don't even playing electric guitar for like a year before that at that point.

01:03:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like mostly flamenco Yeah, yeahjust goggles.

01:03:27
Speaker 1: That's why he's a mostly fingerstyle player. It's true, It's very true, he told me in twenty twenty one. Before that, I was really a music snob. Oh those rock guys, they're boring. Folk music's the thing, and flamenco and fancy stuff like that. At the time, there was just early Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. They had some cool stuff, but to me, it was corny. Until Bob Dylan started doing electric music in nineteen sixty five, I had no thoughts of doing that. Then one day I saw Chuck Berry play. The only reason I went to see him play was that it was billed as a blues festival. They had Big Mama Thornton and the Chambers brothers on that bill. Well, then here comes Chuck Berry and he just blew everybody away. He had Johnny Johnson on piano, he was duck walking and all that. So the very next day I went out and got an electric guitar. I wanted one like his. He had a red Gibson Ees three three five, but I couldn't afford that. So I went into the store and said, give me a red guitar that was an SG Special, Gibson SG Special. It sounded pretty good. For one hundred and eighty bucks. I used it on the two first stores albums and then it got stolen.

01:04:29
Speaker 2: It's one hundred and eighty bucks in sixty six moneing today.

01:04:33
Speaker 1: It's probably like about fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred.

01:04:36
Speaker 2: Oh okay, those is still what they kind of I knew sg's are probably open at the two to three grand range.

01:04:42
Speaker 1: But yeah, tell us about the SG.

01:04:45
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, Well, so he's interesting because he plays a model of SG that has a P nineties, which are single coil pickups, which are usually a sound that is more associated with the strat or telecaster. A lot of people think of the Gibson less Paul Litt humbucker model, which is like the big meat potatoes like rock tone. But Pete Townsend was another guy who played an SG with P nineties and gives it a little bit more arier, kind of more biting tone than some of the darker Humbucker sounds. And you know, Kreeger's og Doors guitar was stolen and has literally never been recovered. As of January twenty twenty four, he was still broadcasting pleased to people to check the serial numbers on their vintage Gibson's to make sure they hadn't bought his stolen guitar, which is so so sad.

01:05:36
Speaker 4: I know.

01:05:37
Speaker 1: I know earlier this year they found Paul McCartney's first Hofner bass. It was in somebody's attic and like some London suburb, so hopefully maybe you know it's not to I remember when I interviewed him, he was talking about how they had found the serial number and they were going to share it on all the doors, you know, social accounts and everything and try to get a campaign going. It's not too late. So yeah, everybody, if you're listening, you have a vintage Gibson SG check and I'm sure there's websites that have Robbie Kreeger's guitar serial number checking the check back to him.

01:06:10
Speaker 2: You know, you know he needs it.

01:06:12
Speaker 1: He's one of those. Even if it's not his, just send it to him. Many send your SG to Robbie Kreeger.

01:06:19
Speaker 4: Why not?

01:06:20
Speaker 1: How many sgs would he have to receive before the prank registers as hostile? How many? Yeah?

01:06:26
Speaker 2: Like, how many pizzas can you order to Robbie Creeker? How many sgs can we send to Robbie Kreeger?

01:06:31
Speaker 1: Yeah?

01:06:32
Speaker 2: They also put out a signature model that's like probably with more like a better more modern tich construction and everything than something that was he bought from a pawn shop and you know whenever, but I digress.

01:06:45
Speaker 1: Yes, So initially Jim Morrison was the one who wrote all the songs, but very briefly into their tenure as a club band, they realized that they had a very short set list they needed to bulk up. As Robbie told Reverb in twenty sixteen, we realized we didn't have enough originals. So Jim said, why don't you write some? Why do I have to do all the work. So I said, Okay, what should I write about? And he goes, write about something universal, write about something that will last, not just about today. So I decided to write about either air, earth, fire or water. And one of Robbie's favorite Rolling Stone songs was play with Fire. So we went with fire and Robbie he labored over the song for several days, determined to conjure up something more than a standard rock progression. He said, up until then, the Doors are doing three chord type songs that were pretty simple, like I Looked at You or End of the Night. I wanted to write something more adventurous. I decided I was going to put every chord I knew into this song, and I did. There are about fourteen different chords in there. For melody, he looked to Hey Joe, which was then a recent hit for the LA band The Leaves. This was before Jimi Hendrix's version with a verse in chorus under his belt. He brought the work in progress before his bandmates, and the song at this point was very folky, leading drummer John Den's to derisively compare it to a Sonny and Share song Oh oh yeah yeah. But Jim saw its potential and offered to contribute some extra lyrics. Kriiger recalled in the Classic Albums documentary, Jim came up with the second verse about the funeral pyre. I said, Jim, why is it always about death? Why do you always have to do that? And he said, no, man, it'll be perfect. You have the love part and then you got the death part. And he was right.

01:08:27
Speaker 2: A stirring analysis.

01:08:29
Speaker 1: Yes, and Raymond's Eric added the cartwheeling introduction, which, as you noted, was inspired by Box two and three part inventions.

01:08:37
Speaker 2: The corp progression to this song is actually kind of insane. The intro moves in fifths, it goes G to D and then it goes to a minor third and then goes up in fourths to there and then a half step up. That is a truly wild thing. There are still people debating it on Reddit music Theory on the music Theory subreddit, of which.

01:08:58
Speaker 1: Key it actually belongs to.

01:09:00
Speaker 2: So good on him for his first song.

01:09:03
Speaker 1: I mean, it's probably something that he wouldn't have done if he was a more experienced songwriter. It's such a weird move to make. It's one of those things of like not knowing what you aren't allowed to do. And also he's a big Flamenco fan and does have kind of a like Spanish tinged sound to it. So you've got ray Manzeric's Bach inspired intro, you've got the baseline borrowed from Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill I don't know if I totally hear, and you've got John Densmore's Latin rhythm on the drums. When it was released the following year, the song was credited jointly to the Doors because they all contributed to it much as probably what the band, the band, the band should have done, right.

01:09:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a smart move. I mean that was Morrison's idea, right, it.

01:09:50
Speaker 1: Was Jim's idea, I guess I When I read Robbie, he reiterated just how much Jim was into preserving the democracy of the band, which is something to be said for him. Apparently there was some theater who billed them as Jim Morrison and the Doors on the Marquee, and Jim, upon arrival, demanded that they go up there and change it. And I think the only reason that they changed the way they credited songs from you know, the Doors to individual songwriters. I think it was on the Soft Parade, which is their fourth album, I believe so like three years into their career, because one of Robbie's songs had a song with the line that was something like pick up your guns and follow me, and Jim didn't want to sound like he was advocating violence, so Robbie refused to change the lyrics. So the compromise was, Okay, we're gonna let everybody know that these are your words and not mine.

01:10:46
Speaker 2: Robbie, I need you to understand, I have a bottle of whiskey in one hand, my dick in the other. That leaves no room for a gun do you understand, Robbie, it takes him aside.

01:10:59
Speaker 1: Armor on his shoulder.

01:11:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, good effort, though I also found it interesting this is one of those classic A Mastered at the wrong speed songs. Bruce Botnik is the guy who took over producing The Doors from Paul Rothschaud when Paul Rothschald quit in agony at some point midway through. I want to say Morrison Hotel, but it might have been Softwared.

01:11:22
Speaker 1: I think it was La Woman. I think they were starting to record La Woman, or not even starting record, just playing him the songs that they brought, and I think it was lover Madly. They played him like an early version of that, and he thought it was like cocktail music and was like, you guys are totally uninspired, like Jim is completely out to lunch, Like no, this is like if this is the best you can do, you guys got to like just produce yourselves. I'm out of here. So I think that was what it was.

01:11:46
Speaker 2: Well, so the guy who came in was a guy named Bruce Botnik, and it took apparently until two thousand and six for and I find this hilarious. A Brigham Young University professor.

01:11:55
Speaker 1: That's right.

01:11:56
Speaker 2: The Mormon place who wrote in to Bruce Botnik and was like, hey man, all the live footage and stuff shows them playing this in a or like photos and live footage, but this song is actually closer to a flat, which is a mastering error when it's been mastered at the wrong speed, and he corrected it for the two thousand and six remasters. Yeah, it makes sense too. I know guitarist or pianist is gonna maybe piano player, but no guitarist is gonna write a song in a flat if they can help it, because all of the open strings are just discordant like color notes. Then the only reason guitar is playing flat key is to humor hoorns. Another funny Paul Rothschild guitar quote concerned banning, literally banning a piece of equipment from the studio. Everybody was using wall wall pedals because Hendrix said just hit and guitar players were blown away by what he did with I prohibited.

01:13:01
Speaker 1: Robbie Krieger from using wah wah.

01:13:03
Speaker 2: When he asked me why, I said, because I want people to still be listening to Doors records in twenty years. If you sound like everyone else nobody's going to notice you now we're in the future.

01:13:12
Speaker 1: Damn. He was right to say it. Speaking of Doors songs that borrowed from other songs, as we did earlier break on Through to the other Side, the album's opener owes a large debt to a Paul Butterfield Blues Band song, and also Ray Charles what I'd Say, which I didn't realize until very recently. Robbie Krieger, as we mentioned earlier, spent his early years emulating Flamenco masters like Mario Escudo, Carlos Montoya and Sabikas. I don't know how you say that one, I don't know, before moving into the blues. From there, he discovered the raw Chicago sound of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bolstered by the searing twin guitars of Mike Bloomfield and Elden Bishop. When the Doors began raging the Jim Morrison composition break on Through, Rigger found the familiar line falling out of his guitar. He said, I got the idea for the riff from the Paul Butterfield song Shake Your Money Maker, which is one of my favorites. This is him talking in the Classic Albums documentary we just changed the beat around The Butterfield version of the song, which was first recorded by Elmore James in nineteen sixty one, was a track off their self titled nineteen sixty five debut, produced by Future Doors collaborator aforementioned Paul roth Child. In the same Classic Albums documentary, ray Manzeric also demonstrates how he borrowed the keyboard bassline from Ray Charles what I'd say, as well as elements of his organs Ray Charles, but I'm playing the other inside. We'd steal from anybody, especially black people.

01:15:24
Speaker 2: Commercial break engineer Bruce Botanik told Sound on Sound that the band's first album was recorded and mixed in just four and a half days.

01:15:33
Speaker 1: That's crazy. That is That is insane.

01:15:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the second took a relatively long two and a half weeks, also crazy. He contended that the band came into Sunset with like two and a half records worth of material from their live set, that basically they were ready to record. Another hilarious detail from that Sound on Sound interview is that botanic didn't like using pop filters, which are the screens placed in front of a mic to keep the plosives in words from overcoming the other phonemes and vocal performance. But he had to start once Morrison got into his serious drinking era, hearing that Morrison's high ABV slobber would damage the in nerds of the very expensive Telefunken U forty seven that Morrison demanded they use for his vocals because it was the one that Frank Sinatra used.

01:16:22
Speaker 1: Ires other around. I heard that he came into the studio, saw the microphone and got really excited because he recognized it from Frank Sinatra album covers. I didn't hear that he demanded it.

01:16:32
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean, yeah, whatever, six and one half does any the other?

01:16:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:16:38
Speaker 2: So then Botnik made his own pop filters by gluing Ladies stockings over wireframes, and then he claimed that when they were freshly assembled, Jim would get an additional buzz off of the fresh paint fumes.

01:16:54
Speaker 1: It's kind of like for the Beatles rooftop concert. They say, oh is it John? Is it like the Beatles? They sent Alan Parsons to get Ladies stockings in the hosiery to cover the mics to try to act as wind screens. Sorry, you already got.

01:17:09
Speaker 2: That was why I already got your Hamburg Club thing in that's right, that's right, you did, Star Club, whatever.

01:17:13
Speaker 1: Cavern Club.

01:17:14
Speaker 2: Who gives a one fact that I think is actually quite overlooked when you're talking about the Doors, is that they are the first rock band to have a recorded use of a Mogue synthesizer in the studio. A Strange Days recorded a year after this debut, which is what we're talking about. But this was at a point in history when Wendy Carlos was about to actually introduce the wider world to the possibilities of mog since with Switched On Boch which became a huge hit in nineteen sixty eight. But prior to that, synthesizers were just like completely alien to people and just almost science fiction when you started talking about the way they actually work. You can generate sound signals from just pure electricity and blah blah blah.

01:17:53
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:17:54
Speaker 2: So, one of the earliest Mogue models was owned by a guy named Paul Beaver who is a a session keyboardist in la and he originally bought it with another guy that they had to literally go in on this purchase because this thing was so crazy they wanted to use it in film scoring, and it actually didn't find many people were keen on using it in that, so they just hauled it out to the Monterey Pop Festival in June of nineteen sixty seven and put it on display there, which is when a lot of visiting musicians came around and started being like, Oh.

01:18:24
Speaker 1: What's this that you have. Mickey Dolans from the Monkeys was one of them. I think he was one of the first, like two or three musicians in that scene to buy a Mogue synth.

01:18:35
Speaker 2: So for the title track of Strange Days, Botnick said, we created an envelope where we would feed Jim's track, the vocal track, into the Mogue so that he could play any note on the Mogue keyboard and his voice would be processed through all of those electronic signals that comprise the synth sound.

01:18:51
Speaker 1: And he said he added.

01:18:52
Speaker 2: Tape delay and fed the whole thing through a tape loop all by hand, which you can't just do with plugins. I could do it to your vocal track as we were doing this right now, but I won't.

01:19:05
Speaker 1: It's also on I forget which track where they did a backwards I think it was a piano solo. I'm prettyure it's a piano, so I might have a guitar solo. And they just had to like write it out backwards and play it backwards, but to keep it in time with the track, they had to like have the track playing in his headphones. It was something crazy that like messed with his head. Sounds about right, Yeah, it's hard. Yeah.

01:19:29
Speaker 2: Soul Kitchen was apparently based on a real restaurant, Olivia's, in Venice Beach, UCLA. Students often packed the place because I guess, cheap, good food, open late, and Morrison of course took advantage of this and just hung out there until like the wee hours of the morning. John Densmore described the diner Olivia's in his nineteen ninety one book Riders on the Storm as a small soul food restaurant at the corner of Ocean Park in Maine, but that it belonged in Biloxi, Mississippi, and resembled an Amtrak dining car that got stranded on the beach. Wonderfully evocative, mister Dinsmore. The only note I have about the Crystal Ship was this weird bit of apocrypha that in nineteen ninety one, decades after Morrison had died in the song and the song had been out, a guy named Justin Clayton wrote into the La Times positing that the song was about meth, with Crystal being slain for that drug. John Dinsmore apparently saw this and was incensed enough to write in with his own letter to the editor saying that it was not about drugs. They knew that crystal was a slang, but it was not. Jim wrote the Crystal Ship for Mary Warbelow Warbello, a girlfriend.

01:20:38
Speaker 1: With whom he was breaking up. I think he wrote the end for her too. Also, was crystal meth around in the sixties, like, I don't think so. Just do a quick check there, crystal meth. Glad this is my work. Laptop methamphetamine was discovered in eighteen ninety three.

01:20:55
Speaker 2: Methamphetamine hydro chloride is crystal meth, all right. I've put enough effort towards this side. Don't care anymore. Twentieth Century Fox a song that I hate shoes Uh done, Dune.

01:21:09
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on twentieth century Fox? I don't mind it. It's a mid sixties white guys doing R and B song.

01:21:16
Speaker 2: Sure, Anyway, Paul Rotchard had the band walk on wooden planks in the studio to get those clunky down.

01:21:23
Speaker 1: Beat bing wow.

01:21:26
Speaker 2: He says, it's small. It sounds like a small army. I'd just done a Flamenco record where I'd used a similar idea, because Flamenco dance and guitar are so the heels and the dancing is such an part of it. So he probably had them double the he probably, I'm assuming he had the Flamenco the dance part of it isolated in a separate room from the guitar, maybe on an additional level of boards to get that sound. It's interesting Alabama song, who gives a shit?

01:21:58
Speaker 1: I do? I like that song. I do too.

01:22:01
Speaker 2: It's just it's such an outlier, man, it is so weird, Like why did you horn?

01:22:08
Speaker 1: I don't know, man, I just hate all that German boom.

01:22:11
Speaker 2: But everyone's better men than better men than ray Man Zerek have tried exclusively mean Tom Waits, it's not gonna happen. But it's bertel Brect and Curtville Vielville Rise and fall of the City of Mahogany.

01:22:29
Speaker 1: What is that? Jordan tell us a Mahogony. I don't know the I don't know the plot, but these are the same men who brought you Mack the Knife from three Penny Opera.

01:22:37
Speaker 2: Now that's a song.

01:22:38
Speaker 1: That's a song.

01:22:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, I would kill to hear Jim Morrison do Mack the Knife. End of the Night is, as I mentioned earlier, references the Louis Ferdinand Selene's absolute chore of an existentialist tome, Journey to the End of the Night, as well as William Blake's poem Auguries of Innocence, which is specifically with the line and uh, some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. I gotta look up writers on the Storm lyrics. I think there's another one in there that I really hate. What's your favorite doors Clunker, Jim Clunker?

01:23:15
Speaker 1: Uh, you know what it is.

01:23:17
Speaker 2: It's the rhyme structure of this. It's a A B B B B A riders on the storm, riders on the storm, and to this house. We're born into this world worth thrown like a dog without a bone, an actor out on loan. Actually, it's not even that rhyme structure. He doesn't adhere to that. Keep going on. I like the slant rhyme between born and thrown, but bone bone loan is unforgivable?

01:23:46
Speaker 1: What is he rhyme toad with again a road?

01:23:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, and also loan that's which again that's fine, that's rhymes with thrones and I slant slant rhyme for that rhmes when you force a rhyme with a homophone. That was like my big move instead of doing rhyming. You know, sounds so sing song when you do it. But like if you use your kind of rock and roll license to just force songs, force lyrics and sounds that don't rhyme on paper, but do when song or in your mouth? Is that what a slat rhym is?

01:24:20
Speaker 1: Yes, that is a slant rhym. I'm glad.

01:24:23
Speaker 2: I still remember that from reading about John Berryman in freshman year. So stupid, girl, you gotta love your man, Take him by the hand, make him understand the world on you depends. Our life will never end. Got to love your man unforgivable. I'm so sorry. There's also like four the three other songs on this record that no one knows anything about or can tullu sorry.

01:24:48
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, of course this brings us all to the doors, preeminent showstop or the end and extended ten minute drone jam seance that blurred the lines between music and theater. The piece was a it tore to force for Jim, who delivered a lengthy mid song poem inspired by the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. Performing the song nightly on stage was difficult, but summoning the dneis and energy inside a sterile hospital like recording studio was a whole other proposition altogether. Producer Paul Rothschild and engineer Bruce Botnik did their best to set the vibes. As Rothschild remembers in Stephen Davis's Jim Morrison life death legend, the lights had been dimmed and the candles were burning right next to Jim, whose back was to the control room. The only other illumination came from the lights on the vu meters. The studio was very dark. Morrison did his own mood setting by taking a tab of LSD. At first it was a performance enhancer, let's be honest, but then during playback it became apparent that Jim was, by Robber Krieger's estimation too high to continue the session. So three of the doors decided to continue work the following day. Jim had other ideas. Krieger would remember, he trashed the studio after we did the end. Jim was on a lot of acid and when we finished recording, he didn't want to go home. The rest of us left, but he snuck back into the studio and got pissed off that there was no one else around, so he sprayed the place down with a foaming fire extinguisher. What a fucking dickhead, boorish, fratty thing to do. And Junior Bruce bought and elaborated on this episode. In Mick Wall's Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre, Jim had got across the street to the Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic church, and he had an epiphany over there. He came back to the studio and the gate was locked. He climbed over the gate got in, but he couldn't get into the control room that was locked. But the studio was open and the red lights were on, and these red lights apparently registered as fire. To Jim's acid addled brain, he thought it was on fire bought, and that continued. So he grabbed a fire extinguisher and knocked over the ashtrays that were full of sand, and tried to put out the fire. Ramon Zak recalled the story slightly differently in his memoir Light My Fire. He claims that Morrison began ranting about a fire while being driven home from the studio by his girlfriend, Pamela Corson. He was so persistent that Coruson reluctantly returned to the studio and Morrison immediately bounded over the fence. He took the fire extinguisher and hosed the whole place down, Man Xeric continued, not in the control room, thank god, just the area where the band was. Just blasted the whole place, man, just to cool it down. Much of the band's equipment was ruined, including a full size harpsichord the image of an acid addle. Jim Morrison sprang a fire extinguisher on a harpsichord. He's pretty good. The following day, however, a single boot obviously belonging to Morrison was found in a chain link fence outside the studio, and everybody put two and two together.

01:27:56
Speaker 2: He showed up like with lonely wearing one boot and was like, oh, there's my boot.

01:28:01
Speaker 1: Out of dolt Ray van Zara continued, the studio people just absolutely freaked. Paul Rothschild said, don't worry. Don't worry. Elector will pay for it. No reason to call the police. He knew right away who did it. We all knew what happened. The only one who claimed ignorance was predictably, Jim himself. John Densmow recalls him saying, over breakfast the next day, I did that. Come on really? Electra Records head Jack Holtzman immediately cut a very large check to the studio's owner. He would say. I rushed over and said, I agree, it's out of control. All pay for the damages. The incident was smoothed over, but Robbie felt at the moment marked a turning point in Jim's psyche. I thought, Jim felt, well, I can get away with that. I can get away with anything. Narrator voice. He could not. For a time he did though, yes, yes, very much so.

01:28:54
Speaker 2: But specifically he would later fail it taking bath and public commuty.

01:29:04
Speaker 1: Parisian bath, taking a fool in harpsichord man, I know I know.

01:29:12
Speaker 2: What a bore, which was the song that he made.

01:29:15
Speaker 1: Pam gave him blowies while he was doing. I don't know if it was pant. I guess it must have been Pam. I think it was your your lost little girl.

01:29:25
Speaker 2: It is in the movie, right, it's it's adorable little Meg Ryan who has to get near an in character Val Kilmer's presumably stanky, leather paint swaddled crotch. Can you imagine Val Kilmer in character is Jim Morrison? What a fucking nightmare?

01:29:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is true. He's very brave. Yes. Weren't they in Top Gun together? Yeah? Meg Ryan though she was in Top Guns. She's like a small old top Gun didn't Maybe she's America sweetheart. Yeah, she was the wife of of Goose Bread. Oh yeah, here's who dies right right? Yeah. Electra Records chief Jack Holtzman would similarly marvel at Jim's ability to steer himself out of a death spiral until he would not steer himself out of a death spiral. He would test every boundary crash his car drunk into a police cruiser and see if you could get out of it. And he could. And during my interview with Robbi Kreeger, he often spoke of Jim's masochistic streak. He recalled seeing Jim getting worked over by a couple of navy guys in a phone booth. When I say worked over, I mean beat up. And Robbie has this absolute photographic image of Jim's face smashed up against the glass of this phone booth. But he's got a big grint, and it's just always stuck with Robbie as like this, this guy's a little different. And he also said that he used to flip quarters into his mouth and swallow them as a way to impress girls.

01:30:55
Speaker 2: I know it smelled crazy around him. Can you imagine with that guy's mouth was like just pickled first of all, but like permanently reeking of like cheap weed. I assume he didn't brush his teeth. He was above such earth bound prosaic concerns. And he's wearing the skin he wore like skin tight leather pants for like three years straight.

01:31:20
Speaker 1: Right, that's true, my god, mine?

01:31:24
Speaker 2: And they and deodorant wasn't even like widely a thing at this point.

01:31:27
Speaker 1: My god, about that.

01:31:30
Speaker 2: But it wasn't right like mass market deodorants started with like that's I think about.

01:31:35
Speaker 1: No.

01:31:36
Speaker 2: No, before then it was like a powder. Uh Okay, I was wrong about that. It was aerosol era. It would have been aerosolted.

01:31:45
Speaker 1: Oh yeah.

01:31:46
Speaker 2: But also how charitable of us to assume he was even taking that effort, not just being like, my musk is a beautiful and natural thing and everyone deserves to huff it. Oh good Lord, I can taste it. I can taste what he smelled like.

01:32:06
Speaker 1: Like hot dimes, just the old nickels and ash and wild turkey, yeah and petruly, oh god, naturally of.

01:32:20
Speaker 2: Course, and yeah, stale, sweaty leather. How could anyone bear.

01:32:27
Speaker 1: To have sex with him?

01:32:28
Speaker 2: I mean, I guess they all smelled various degrees of back then his hair too, like I assume he never washed his hair, and all food like probably stuck in his beard when he was into the phat Erah. Oh God, As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after.

01:32:50
Speaker 1: These messages, Higel, do you want to talk about Jim Morrison's dat issues. I'd love to.

01:33:07
Speaker 2: The infamous father. Father, Yes, son, I want to kill you.

01:33:13
Speaker 1: He sounds like an NPR host, So you do it like that.

01:33:16
Speaker 2: It's just it's like the rhythm of that. So yeah, father, yes, son, I want to kill you, like really jumping, jumping, and jumping ahead there with the answer no dramatic pause whatsoever, no time to waste uh. The passage from the end was inspired by Oedipus, but the theme had a personal resonance for Morrison. Or so the story goes Jim's complex relationship with his authoritarian parents without defining feature of his life, inspiring both his finest music and his finest drinking. On the rare occasions that Morrison spoke of his childhood, he described it with phrases like an open sore. His father, George Stephen Morrison, was a high ranking career naval officer. He gave his son the middle name Douglas, after General Douglas MacArthur, in hopes that the boy would follow in his footsteps. Narrator voice again, he would not. The family moved off, and Morrison's father was frequently absent on tours of duty. When he was home, he had little patience for disobedience. Morrison's younger brother, Andy, tells author Jerry Hopkins that he, Jim, and sister Anne rarely received physical discipline, but admits that they were routinely subjected to the military punishment known as dressing down, where someone just says something mean to you for a long time. But children, they never would have lived through Jim Morrison never would have lived through Twitter. He would have been chased off in a day. What's up, tweeter, Twitter world, this is the Mojo King And then immediately, like forty thousand people would have been like, dumb ass, dip go kill yourself. Yes, anyway, I guess their dad yelled at them like, oh, that's.

01:34:52
Speaker 1: Never happened to anyone before.

01:34:55
Speaker 2: Morrison's dad, though, was actually a big deal. After surviving Roarl Harbor, he served as an instructor for classified nuclear weapons programs in the southwest of the United States before being promoted to Rear Admiral, who was a familiar face around Cape Canaveral, the Pentagon, and the Naval golf course. In nineteen sixty four, aboard the USS Bonhomme Rechchad, which means a good Man Richard aircraft carrier, nicknamed the bony Dick by Jim Morrison. That's not even medium bunny. Admiral Rear Admiral Morrison commanded American naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, a military clash widely credited as both being fabricated and the impetus of the Vietnam War. So yes, counterculture himbo legend Jim Morrison's dad was a navy dick who started possibly fabricated and started Vietnam. Life is fun I can't believe it's so funny that they were like, oh, he never touched us, but he would be mean verbally and.

01:36:02
Speaker 1: He started Vietnam.

01:36:03
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I mean, but that's that's aside from the parenting.

01:36:08
Speaker 1: Psychological abuse of this era of.

01:36:12
Speaker 2: Parenting that's like practically words of love, right, the fact that he was paying attention to them enough to insult them. It's an era when nuns would like.

01:36:22
Speaker 1: Beat you up.

01:36:23
Speaker 2: Yes, that is true, and little Jim was unbearably warped by daddy not being there and saying mean things when he.

01:36:31
Speaker 1: Was am my, I pocket here, I mean, I'm I think it was just a consequence of the of the generation gap. Sure, I just don't think they were going to ever see out of eye with one another, because we'll talk about talk about this turning point that occurred in their relationship in nineteen sixty four.

01:36:49
Speaker 2: Oh yes, another deeply traumatic moment in young upper middle class gym's upbringing. The Morrison children visited their father on the Bony Dick. Morrison sister and told Jordan, my mom said Jim had to cut his hair before he went aboard. Morrison complied, but it apparently wasn't short enough for his father, who sent him to the ship's barber for a more military cut. This was apparently humiliating for a twenty year old budding beatnik bore and Ann said to Jordan, I think that was the last time he cut his hair for quite a long time. This is actually unforgivable, though, I take back all this. After learning of his son's desire to become a rock singer, the elder Morrison wrote him a letter urging him to quote give up any idea of singing or any connection with the music group, because I've what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction.

01:37:40
Speaker 1: Murdered, but also not incorrect at the time.

01:37:47
Speaker 2: If he was twenty, what evidence do we have that Jim Morrison would have been like was a musical child?

01:37:54
Speaker 1: None? I mean that I know of. Yeah, seems like a.

01:37:57
Speaker 2: Eminently reasonable response if you're weird bookish kid tells you he's going to be a musician and you're like, no, you're bad at that. I just it's just so funny to me man, one of the most legendary recorded daddy issue tantrums of all time. And it just boils down to he was mean to me and cut my hair once and didn't support me when I wanted, with no training or prior experience, to become a musician. People talk about our generation needing handholding, but Jesus Christ pitching a marty what do you call it?

01:38:33
Speaker 1: The British pitching a marred.

01:38:36
Speaker 2: Because someone cut expression, getting strappy because someone cut your hair?

01:38:43
Speaker 3: What?

01:38:45
Speaker 2: What's your catapoint? What do you have to say if your defend Jim Morrison Smiley, you're the nice guy. You're the nice guy, right, do it?

01:38:54
Speaker 3: Do it?

01:38:56
Speaker 1: It's hard to not be accepted for who you are from the the people that are supposed to give you unconditional love, is my is my take.

01:39:05
Speaker 2: That's that's a lovely and true sentiment. But we're not talking about him wanting to be trans or gay. If you came to your dad as like someone who was like a pudgy little reader who and I did right, But you weren't causing old women to cry on public buses. I don't know, Man, seems eminently reasonable to me.

01:39:29
Speaker 1: Okay, my parents didn't.

01:39:30
Speaker 2: Tell me that and as many words, but they were like, well, don't major in it. Make sure you have a fallback. Like sorry, you know Jim that your dad said. It's slightly meaner. But to be like, I will never speak to you again because of a haircut and a lack of support. Like, okay, Man, to be a nom thing, I can understand.

01:39:52
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know he was started Vietnam.

01:39:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know why.

01:39:57
Speaker 2: I'm going to bat for Rear Admiral Douglas Morris, for Steven whatever his name was, Like, I think it's I just think it's funny, man, this groundbreaking. Once in a generation, Ed'll pool ran and it's like he wasn't nice to me. Well, no, he didn't tell me I could do anything.

01:40:15
Speaker 1: In my life. Jim. Never, I don't to my knowledge, never went on record. There could have been some kind of huge private blowout. Also the fact that he started Vietnam might have done it, you know, I mean thinking about families that have ripped apart now for people who are voting in a way that they don't Oh, that's true.

01:40:34
Speaker 2: I mean, but again, was Jim Morrison like seriously politically invested I.

01:40:41
Speaker 1: That I don't know that. I don't know.

01:40:44
Speaker 2: You don't think someone was maybe like Jim do like an anti war thing. He's like, oh fine, not top of mind for him.

01:40:51
Speaker 1: I have to assume.

01:40:55
Speaker 2: He's like doodling a snake in the margins and they're like, say something about war being bad. All right, you can cut all this out. I'm just riffic on the absurdity of Jam Morrison's entire being. I don't know, it's fun for me. I'm just amusing myself. Yeah, dad, his sister told him that their dad was a musician.

01:41:21
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, but he didn't like rock and roll.

01:41:23
Speaker 4: But still, man, if.

01:41:25
Speaker 2: You like Little Rebellious teen is like, I'm going to become a musician and you're already a musician, and you're like, you have displayed no aptitude or interest in this until now. I don't think it's gonna work. That seems eminently reasonable.

01:41:39
Speaker 1: Would that have seemed eminently reasonable to you as a twenty year old with a new dream?

01:41:45
Speaker 2: H No, But I sucked it up and did what they wanted anyway, and just lived with a chip on my shoulder like the rest of us. Damn didn't make it the entire well, I did make it the entire crux of my being. There goes another one star review.

01:42:01
Speaker 1: I will edit this generously. Thank you so. Regardless of what went down, Jim effectively severed all contact with his father after he told him he didn't think it any talent as a musician, and they reportedly never saw each other again. I think they I think I read that they spoke on the phone once. Sounds reasonable, but making this even more tragic, Apparently Admiral Morrison understood why his son was staying away. He admitted privately in a nineteen seventy letter, his reluctance to communicate with me again is to me quite understandable. That is the most mid century male response to that. Yes, yes, it is. Yes. When Elected Records approached the doors to write press biographies for the debut album, Jim refused to name his parents and siblings, instead just writing deceased.

01:42:51
Speaker 2: And isn't the Oliver Stone like portrays as it being like a gotcha moment where some journalist is like, I found your family.

01:42:57
Speaker 4: Yeah.

01:42:57
Speaker 1: I don't know if that was played up for dramatic effect or not. I don't think that was totally how it went down. But for a time, even Jim's close friends thought he was an orphan. It was easy to lie back then. Well, yeah, that's true. His split from his family was so total that a didn't even realize he was in a band. Jim's brother Andy, only found out when a classmate showed him the Doors album cover and pointed out that he kind of looked like the lead singer. A friend of mine brought me the album. He said, I've been listening to Light My Fire for months, and I didn't know. That's how we found out. We hadn't seen Jim or heard from him in two years. I played the album for my parents the day I got it, the day after my friend told me about it. Dad knows music. He plays piano and clarinet. Dad likes strong melodies. He hates electric guitars. He likes the old ballads. He doesn't like rock. He listened to the album and afterwards he didn't say a thing, not a thing. Jim's mother, Clara, made attempts to contact Jim through Electra Records, but Jim did not answer. He barred her from visiting him backstage during a gig in Washington, d C. But he did give her a front row seat for the concert.

01:44:05
Speaker 2: Oh, which one is it? Which one is it?

01:44:08
Speaker 1: Which one? What?

01:44:10
Speaker 2: You're not going to talk to her, but your makers sit front row? Or you rub your wang all over Mike's stand and talk about pork in her.

01:44:17
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Those in attendance at that gig said that the edible section of the end packed a strong punch that night, So uh yeah, yeah. I guess maybe the moral of the story here is you don't really want to get into Jim Morrison's head. Throughout the band's travels, Jim Morrison managed to keep in touch with his younger brother Andy, who was just nineteen in nineteen sixty seven, and he would say, I told him that Mom felt really bad that he refused to see her. He told me that if he called once, they'd expect calls every month or so. He said, either you break it or you're part of the family. There's no halfway point. Either you talk all the time or.

01:44:54
Speaker 4: Not at all.

01:44:56
Speaker 1: So Jim went with the not at all option. Admiral Morrison declined to speak publicly about his son until the very end of his life. He would say, we looked back on him with great delight. This is taped just before his death in two thousand and eight. I had a feeling that he felt we just as soon not be associated with his career. He knew I didn't think that rock music was the best goal for him. Maybe he was trying to protect us. John Densmore proposed another reason than his memoir. Personally, I think the opposite is true, that Jim did it to proclaim independence and cut the umbilical cord once and for all.

01:45:31
Speaker 2: Can I give you a Jim Morrison story I just found, Yeah please. The Doors were on their way to play a show at the University of Michigan in nineteen sixty seven, which is a well documented debacle, but apparently on their way. On the drive, the rest of the band wanted to stop and get ice cream, which Jim said was for babies and demanded whiskey instead. The band got ice cream and Jim got whiskey, and something about the band eating ice cream put him in a really foul mood. He pounded the rest of the whiskey and got faced. He was too drunk to go on, didn't come out on stage. The band went off stage for like a half an hour. They come back out and Jim just wanders the stage, making weird noises and occasionally yelling into the microphone. Jim started then hurling things at the audience and then just sat down on stage and Ray Manzar carried him off stage. Is this your shaman people?

01:46:29
Speaker 1: Is this your king?

01:46:30
Speaker 2: Is this your king? Your lizard king? Is this your lizard king? That's actually like probably a Door's lyric somewhere, like scrapped in the notebooks.

01:46:39
Speaker 1: Ice cream is for babies, so Doors biographers would characterize this estrangement between the Morrisons as a clash between the generations, a clash between the rebellious rocker and his disciplinarian father. But Jim's sister Anne spoke to me a few years ago and offered a different take. She maintains that the reality of the relationship was more nuanced. She told me, I used to get upset because people would assume that all admirals and generals were mean and tough. But my dad was sweet. He was funny and articulate, and he never was very angry. He just wasn't like that, but he did expect manners. We were brought up with yes sir, no sir, yes ma'am, and he and Jim certainly didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things, so they clashed a little, but not horribly. And when Jim's dad was restationed to England as Commander in Chief of the US Naval Forces in Europe, his younger sister Anne went along too, and much like their brother Andy, for years she didn't know what became of Jim. I would worry about him, she told me. I thought, what is going to happen to him? He doesn't like to work. All he likes to do is All he likes to do is write and read and have experiences. Same I asked my girlfriend in college what happens to fifty year old beat Nicks? They become podcasters? Because I didn't know how he could survive. And then one day in nineteen sixty seven, she received a package from her mother. It was a copy of The Door's debut album, and it took her a moment to realize that the handsome guy staring back at her on the cover was her brother. It was a complete surprise. She said, I had no idea Jim was in the Doors. I was hearing Light My Fire in London, but I didn't have any relationship to it that My mother sent me that album. That's always been my favorite Doors cover, that album cover, because it was such a shock to see it. That was such an amazing moment, And once the surprise wore off, she put the record on the turntable and immediately fell for the music. I didn't take any time to love all of it, she said. It's fabulous. She even enjoyed the end, which would have raised eyebrows as a immediate family member. Yeah, but Anne rejects the notion that this song was literally directed at his family and a comment on their strained family ties. She told me, I have to dispel that notion. It just makes me crazy when I hear people say, Oh, were your parents upset about the end? That was awful? Tell them no, No, that was just an Oedipus story redone in song. It was amazing. I didn't take it as against our parents like some people did. People were just in a panic about it. But no, I didn't see it that way at all. And Jim's sister, Anne, moved back to California with her husband an infant shortly after discovering that her brother was a rock star, and hearing that the Doors were due to fly into Los Angeles, she decided to surprise Jim at the airport. She told me, we went and met him, my husband and my little son. Jim looked at me and said, you don't happen to be my sister?

01:49:32
Speaker 4: Do you?

01:49:34
Speaker 1: Who? Among us? No? Higu, you have a younger sister as do I? Yeah? Yeah? Have you ever had to ask them if they happened to be your sister? I mean they both they both have kids and they both are married. Yeah.

01:49:48
Speaker 2: Well, you know, once again, total total ocean of salt, because I've never been as deranged as Jim Morrison was for as long, maybe in short bursts, never as long. Yes, yes, maybe he was genuinely confused.

01:50:04
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe, I mean perhaps. So began a joyful reunion between the Morrison siblings, and I love this. His sister dropped in on a Doors session, and I guess she brought her little son, and he made up a song on the spot about the little boy. And she visited the home that Jim shared with his girlfriend, Pam Corson, and they all cooked a Thanksgiving meal together. We'd see him but not often. Anne told me we were all in our twenties. I was pregnant. People were just busy with their own lives. You didn't know that soon it would be the last time. There just wasn't an urgency, which was the sad thing. I didn't never see him perform I wish I had, And she found out of by her brother's death from a radio report. It's too bad, she told me. Jim's girlfriend Pam called my dad after Jim died and said they talked about Jim reconnecting. It's only been five or six years. That's really not very long in terms of most lives. In the decades that followed was be kind of hinted at earlier. Admiral Morrison realized the enormous mark that his son had made in the world of art. He visited his son's grave at Pierre Lachet Cemetery in Paris, and when he knew headstone was placed on the grave, Admiral Morrison wrote an epitaph in Greek which translates to true to his own spirit, which I think he's a beautiful message between father and son, especially a father and son that didn't see out of eye and told me, that just really encapsulates what my dad figured out. Finally, everyone didn't think he got it, and that he really didn't understand, but he got Jim. I love this and Jim's sister worked as a middle school teacher, and as part of her lessons, she would play her brother's spoken word piece Horse Latitudes, which he had written as a high school student. I wanted to show the class that music is poetry, she told me. I made it dramatic and turned it up pretty loud. I just love the tone and sound of Jim's voice. Great voice, It makes words liquid. He makes it flow so beautifully. And though she didn't really broadcast the fact that she was the sister of Rock Royalty, eventually we would get out around the school, she said. I worked at the same school for almost thirty years, so everyone ended up knowing. It's all been fun for me. Someone asked me of having a famous sibling rule in my life. For me, it was just a joy to see Jim grow and do what he did, except for the tragedy at the end.

01:52:23
Speaker 2: Do you know the Barney's Beanery in West Hollywood put up a plaque commemorating where Jim Morrison pissed on their bar.

01:52:29
Speaker 1: No recently, because I would remember that I've been to the Barney's Beanery.

01:52:34
Speaker 2: Maybe they wanted Maybe they wanted to in the nineties he has where Janis had her last drink, and Howski and all those other Yeah. The woman that he married speculated he had twenty paternity suits against it pending when he died.

01:52:48
Speaker 1: Oh, that's not a real marriage, though, that didn't claim first No, first of all, No, that's like a myth.

01:52:56
Speaker 2: First of all, that's not cast dispersions on the fine tradition of Celtic handfasting ceremonies. Jordan, who are you to say it's not a real marriage? Don't speak for them anyway, The pissing thing's funny.

01:53:13
Speaker 1: Well, as we dosched on earlier, sessions for The Door's debut went fairly quickly. Raymond Zeric would describe it as essentially the Doors live at the whiskey of Go Go, but in a recording studio, and the record was completed by the end of the summer of nineteen sixty six, probably exactly around fifty eight years ago right now. Still Electric Records president Jack Holdsman decided to hold the record's release until the following January of nineteen sixty seven to avoid the crush of albums earmarked for the Christmas market. And if the Doors were disappointed by this delay, they were happy with Holtzman's ingenious promotional scheme, a massive billboard looming over the Sunset Strip. Up to this point, billboards had been used to promote films, and food, and cigarettes and all sorts of products, but this was the first time a rock band would appear on one. The ad proclaimed break on Through with an electrifying new album, complete with Joel Brodsky's striking image of the group that graced the album's back cover. Located next to the Chateau Marmal, a short distance from the club scene where the Doors had performed just a few months earlier, this prime location cost a whopping twelve hundred dollars a month, or about eleven thousand dollars today. The venture was, according to Jack Holtzman, a calling card for the artist, but it was a very large calling card. He believed the ad would catch the attention of Los Angeles DJs on their way to work and peaque their interest, and he was right, giving birth to a whole new field of artists promotion all throughout the seventies and eighties. That whole segment of Sunset Strip was just a wash with rock billboards. I mean, hot people sell again.

01:54:48
Speaker 2: It cannot be underestimated the degree to which Jim Morrison was a prime slab of beef.

01:54:54
Speaker 1: H this jawline, that.

01:54:57
Speaker 2: Hair, he's like, if the bejis weren't genetically deficient, I'd take that back about the beg's. But he actually does look like Robin, who's the handsome GiB Barry, Yeah, he does look like Barry GiB, Yeah he does.

01:55:11
Speaker 1: Yeah. But the billboard was not the biggest promotional tool that the Doors would have at their disposal. And when I say promotional tool.

01:55:21
Speaker 2: I'm talking about his wang.

01:55:24
Speaker 1: Now.

01:55:24
Speaker 2: The Doors September seventeenth, nineteen sixty seven appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show infamously resulted in a lifetime ban after Morrison disobeyed the CBS Standards and Practices Department and saying the original scandalous lyric to light my fire, girl, we couldn't get much higher, defying Standards and practice suggestion that he changed it to girl, we couldn't get much better.

01:55:47
Speaker 1: That's terrible, is it?

01:55:49
Speaker 3: Is?

01:55:49
Speaker 1: It? Worse than ribing higher with fire and pyre, yeah and desire. It's pretty terrible. Okay, okay, okay.

01:55:58
Speaker 2: Producers and network executives were in fury, and a stone faced Sullivan denied Morris in the traditional post performance handshake, instead cutting straight to a commercial for Pure in a dog chow Savage. The band was obviously unbothered by this. Densmore, recalling the classic album's documentary, they said, you'll never do this show again, and we said, well, we just did it. We only wanted to do it once. Cheers, a classic case of over explaining the joke. I definitely prefer the version where Jim Morrison goes, hey man, we just did the Ed Sullivan show. Print the legend. Baby, it's pretty good. Yeah, it's better than some of his lyrics. He was quite quippy, as we'll find out later. I was just reading by how when a fan requested light my fire at a concert, he immediately shot back, your mother, Uh, just a one hundred and forty nine IQ, folks. An earlier attempted censorship had been more successful. Break on through to the other side. The opening track of the Doors of the album seemed like an obvious choice for the band's first single, but Rothschild was concerned that the songs Shit Hot Refrain would limit its airplay potential. Densmore told Forbes in twenty fifteen, he said, you know we're not going to be able to get this played, so we really should cut that out. We reluctantly agreed. The offending line was edited down to a repeated she get, followed by Morrison's guttural whale Great Moments and recorded history. That performance on that song is given electricity. It's like proto punk is basically, I mean, it sounds like or like Sue Is. It sounds like early Suicide, like that Oh Wow that it locked in groove, and like the almost too fast mechanical drumming Oh Mortal song. Though lyrically meaningless, the abrupt passage became a familiar part of the song You Write. When Bruce Botnik restored the Missing High as part of a Night ten ninety nine remaster of the album, some purists were outraged.

01:58:04
Speaker 1: It's just him just going she goat. It just makes no sense. Yeah, bab so good.

01:58:12
Speaker 2: Another hilarious Doors on TV moment on Christmas Eve of nineteen sixty seven. Yes, on Christmas Eve in nineteen sixty seven, the Doors performed light My Fire and Moonlight Drive for the Jonathan Winters Show. Two days later, they were playing the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and they stopped in the middle of back Norman to wheel a TV out on stage so they could watch their pre taped performance when it aired.

01:58:37
Speaker 1: I like that. I like that a lot.

01:58:40
Speaker 2: This is something a bit absurdist about it, you know.

01:58:42
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, but it's like it's kind of the most like cute sort of Doors store.

01:58:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's innocent in a way that not much is.

01:58:53
Speaker 1: Yeah. There was, however, a bit of self censorship that the band engaged in themselves. That's a terrible sense, since.

01:59:01
Speaker 2: The band indulged in one bit of self censorship much more pointedly.

01:59:06
Speaker 1: Yes, the Doors minus Jim Morrison had agreed to license light My Fire for a Buick ad, and when Jim found out, he threatened to smash of Buick on stage during every Door's concert. Not subtle but effective. This all went down after the band's nineteen sixty eight European tour concluded in Sweden in September. Morrison decided to stay in London with his girlfriend and work on his poetry under the guidance of writer Michael McClure, a very famous poet. It seemed like a very good plan, except that none of his bandmates knew that this was going to happen. This caused a problem when representatives from Buwick contacted the Doors and offered them seventy five grand, which is like almost a million dollars today, to license light My Fire for an ad campaign featuring the memorable, if not terribly creative slogan come on Buick, light my Fire.

02:00:00
Speaker 2: An adman made seventy billion dollars into day money for that.

02:00:05
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, Brad and Eric later told Patricia Butler and Jerry Hopkins in their book Angels Dance and Angels Die The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison. I thought it was an interesting idea. The car they wanted to use it for was the Opal, which is a small, little ecologically correct car, a little four cylinder, two seater automobile they worked on with the German Opal company. It's a cool car. It wasn't obviously a big Buick or anything like that. However, I have seen claims that the vehicle in question was the less than eco friendly Grand Sports GS four five to five, which is a big honk in Buick. Oh, you're positing they did this out of ecological concerns. Yeah, the Doors had always vowed to split both profits and decisions equally. But Jim was in Communicato, they had no idea where he was, and Buick needed an answer, and the Door's manager, Bill Siddons said, Jim Town, that didn't show any of us the respect to tell us he was leaving or how long he would be gone, and when he was coming home, he just disappeared. So Buick came up offered us a bunch of money, unheard of money at the time to do something with a song that Robbie wrote, and all of us kind of went, well, gee, we'd really like to have Jim's vote here, but it's a lot of money, and it's really big and could be important, so let's go. The incredibly named lawyer Max Fink held Jim Morrison's power of attorney, so they signed the deal with the other Doors. Why would you change your name, dude? I know, Max think great. No, I'm short for maximum Thanks sawing on a hair dryer, Simpsons. Ah. When Jim returned home and heard what had been done in his name. He was furious. This was months after the fact. I guess if the tour ended in September. He didn't come back until November. Jim told us he couldn't trust us anymore. John Densmore told Rolling Stone in twenty thirteen, we'd agreed that we would never use our music in any commercial, but the money Buick offered us had been hard to refuse. Jim accused us of making a deal with the devil and said he would smash a Buick with a sledgehammer on stage if you'd let them use the song and change the lyrics. One apocryphal story said that Jim angrily rammed thirteen Buicks parked on the Sunset Strip, totaling his own Porsche in the process. I don't know if that's true, but it seems self destructive and stupid enough that I do want to believe in it. Yeah, I prefer to print a legend. Yes, yes, yes, yes, sure or not. Jim expressed his frustration to the band's management and demanded that the contract be rescinded. An elaborate radio, television and print campaign was already underway, including a billboard within sight of the Door's offices, which must have really chapped Jim's ass, let me tell you. But ultimately this came to nothing. In the end, Buick scrapped the ad campaign. They claimed they merely decided to go with a different idea, but perhaps a few choice words from Jim may have set them in a different creative direction. Whatever the case, the Buick incident irreparably damaged the brotherhood of the Doors. The band's manager, Bill Siddens, would say that was the end of the dream. That was the end of the era of Jim's relationship with the other members of the band. From then on, it was business. That was the day Jim said, I don't have partners anymore, I have associates. And this kind of stuff would continue long after Jim's death. Throughout the two thousands, the surviving members of The Doors were basically split into two camps, with raymon Zeric and Robbi Krieger on one side, who felt free to tour with a new singer in Ian as that's right for the cult.

02:03:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, supposedly they were. Manzark offered the lead singer job to Iggy Pop, who was like an early he stated more and was like an early influence on him.

02:04:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think he was like basically too shy almost he was like, yeah, I can't step into these shoes. Yeah. He would also become famous for whipping his dick out. Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, among many other things. On the other side was John Densmore, who kind of positioned himself as like the guardian of Jim's legacy, trying to protect it from craven commercialization, which is weird because on one hand that all the stuff that he stands for seems like the right thing to do from a creative standpoint and just like a friendship standpoint, but also he was like the member of the band that Jim was apparently the least connected to, and like ray Manzeric claimed that at some point Jim wanted to fire John and that they weren't that close. I don't really understand what John Densmore would have to gain by not accepting huge checks for ad campaigns in the twenty tens from like Cadillac, so it seems to be sincere. I don't know, I interviewed him. He actually published a book about this whole feud called The Doors Unhinged in twenty thirteen and yeah, I don't really understand it. But then following Raymnzeric's death in twenty thirteen as well kind of belatedly buried the hatchet. And as far as I know, things between John Densboy and Robbi Kreeger are the only two surviving Doors members are relatively good. Well, that's good.

02:05:28
Speaker 2: I'm happy that they all. I'm happy they all collect checks, split in songwriting royalties. Four way has really worked out for them. Obviously the album was a hit. This is really the genius of the Doors place in time is that they represented a still consumable but darker side of psychedelia that the Velvet Underground were too genuinely weird and alvant garde to get across into the mainstream, you know, like amplified viola drones are a hard cell, but like even sus lyrical content, spooky lyrical content you can get away with with improbable bone structure. Do you know that Andy Warhol claimed that Morrison stole the leather pants thing from Gerard Nlonga.

02:06:17
Speaker 1: No, but yeah that I could see that.

02:06:20
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's all the exploding plastic inevitable in La all right, Both the Doors album and Light My Fire have been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. The album was selected in twenty fifteen My Beloved Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Recording Registry, and it sold over thirteen million copies worldwide. It's also firmly lodged in Rolling Stones five hundred Greatest Albums of All Time list, although in twenty twenty it was demoted to the eighty six slot. From forty two, the band's follow up, Strange Days, hit the charts and then kind of dropped off, but it wasn't really given time or space to grow because Morrison embarked on I don't know two straight years.

02:07:01
Speaker 1: Of public self sabotage.

02:07:04
Speaker 2: December of nineteen sixty seven is when in the famous New Haven incident took place. A police officer happened upon Morrison and a lady friend and not recognizing the Jordan was lead singer of the band. A police officer stumbled upon Morrison and a lady friend and not realizing who Morrison was, told them to leave. Morrison quipped eat it, and the cop took out his mace and said last chance, to which Morrison shot back, last chance to eat it. Medium funny the pair or just Morrison who cares, were duly maced. Morrison recovered, and then when he went on stage, began improvising about the incident in the midst of a song, calling the police like a little blue man.

02:07:45
Speaker 1: A little blue man and a little blue hat.

02:07:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, devastating.

02:07:53
Speaker 1: Cab it wasn't.

02:07:54
Speaker 2: This sparked a confrontation between Morrison and the assembled police, resulting in him claiming the record of becoming the first musician are on stage. The rest of the crowd devolved into a minor riot. This began the long downward slide of Morrison physically, probably also mentally psychologically, as well as the doors image from an Interesting Band, It is something of a traveling counterculture side show. As Morrison got drunker and fatter and more provocative, recording became exponentially more difficult, and in March of nineteen sixty nine, a wasted Morrison showed up an hour late to show in Miami and became increasingly confrontational with the crowd, culminating in a moment of widely debated sexually tinged theatrics that got him arrested. The police charged him with like exposing himself, right, that's the bit, but everyone so many people, nobody saw it and there's no photos of it. Yeah, so whatever the case was. Morrison received a genuous posthumus pardon from the state of Florida in twenty ten, so that's settled. Morrison was already threatening to quit the band before they recorded The Soft Parade, and Manzark convinced him to stay, but his drinking was well and truly out of control, and recording of their next album, nineteen seventies Morriston Hotel, was interrupted when Morrison was got wasted on a flight to go see the Rolling Stones and became abusive or just acted like Jim Morrison to a stewardess, and he was brought up on what could have been fell any charges because you cannot mess with the sky workers. This was late. This is kind of a weird kerfuffle. So supposedly Morrison was traveling with a guy named Tom Baker, not the doctor Who guy, and in court the stewardess she admitted that she couldn't tell she might have gotten Morrison confused with Tom Baker. However, some people believe that this is because Morrison shaved his beard and cut his hair right before she went into court. So then she was like, now I can't tell the two guys apart anyway, that's all hilarious. Morrison Hotel was actually a fairly big hit for the band, and a live album that Paul Rothschild was cobbled together with about two thousand edits duly followed. Unfortunately, by this point, the band was also facing something of an unofficial band in multiple major American cities because of the reputation, which made touring difficult. The last Doors show took place on December twelfth, nineteen seventy, and when midway through the set, Morrison began smashing the microphone stands bass into the stage until he broke through the floorboards before sitting down and refusing to finish the set. I love it as his move, just sit down, like people who get I mean, you know, I don't know, man, Am I softening towards Jim Morrison? Like he had a problem right and yeah yeah, And nobody was like hey man, or everyone was.

02:10:44
Speaker 1: Like yeah no. There were they were a lot of band meetings when they were like, you know, we should we take some time off or yeah no they're they I mean no, they didn't have the vocabulary or the understanding sure of what was going on with him rating on the sixties. Yeah, but I think that, as you say, graying on the sixties curve, they tried to have primitive interventions.

02:11:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he was the lizard King and his mojo rose and subsumed them. Despite all of that, and Morrison's increased focus on his poetry, now I can really focus on my poetry. The band had been working on another back to their roots album, La Woman, famously memorialized in the Oliver Stone Moment in the Morrison in the moment where Morrison is laying down vocals from a toilet, which I love so dearly La Woman slapso.

02:11:41
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that's like maybe my favorite Thores album because.

02:11:44
Speaker 2: That's when they have the Belvis Presley, the TCB guys on Basic Yah Yeah, yeah, yeah, Lover Madley another Kreeker composition, and Writers on the Storm became classic rock staples. But while mixing the album in March of nineteen seventy one, Morrison took a leave of absence from the band. He moved to Paris with his perennially put upon partner, Pamela Corson, and he took a fateful bath in July of nineteen seventy one and was never heard from again. Unless I was expecting you to do a full sidebar here on Morrison conspiracy deaths, that was I think largely put out there by no one here comes out alive, right, that he had faked his own death or something.

02:12:23
Speaker 1: Raymn Eric also would kind of stoke those rumors, much to the annoyance of his bandmates. Yeah, I don't buy that, but there.

02:12:33
Speaker 2: Is like weird conspiracy layers to it, right, like an international drug trafficking ring and this, that and the other.

02:12:39
Speaker 1: There was a theory and I actually did an article on it for the fiftieth anniversary of his death that I remember reading that that he died of a hair and overdose by this like jet setting French count like drug dealer to the stars who just like basically got careless and didn't test his product and didn't like cut it with any degree of regularity. So people would, you know, use things that were way more pure impotent than they were expecting and died because of it. And supposedly there were some theories that say that was, you know, the same dealer that killed Janice Joplin, that killed right, that killed Jim. And also I think one of the Getty Airs wives, Talitha Tabitha Getty, I forget her name, and I forget There was this whole rash of deaths in the high society heroin using circles in a very short period that they think was linked to this one guy, Count because he was.

02:13:39
Speaker 2: Bringing in like unusually strong like black tar heroin or something like that, right, like.

02:13:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, what was his name? His name was Count Jean de Brutel and he later died in nineteen seventy two at the age of just twenty two, which is crazy. Yeah, but there are all sorts of myths that, as you said, he was, it's just this careless. It's it's the Great gats Beef. He's careless people, careless people. Yeah, you know, I've softened to Jim Morrison during the course of this episode. I got all my bile out. Oh tell me more.

02:14:14
Speaker 2: Well, you know, asign from all the people that he did hurt and the ways in which he behaved like an enormous bore twenty four to seven, the equipment that he wrecked.

02:14:25
Speaker 1: Did he really hurt anyone?

02:14:28
Speaker 2: Yes, so many people? Probably, No, I mean, I don't know man, it's it's it is just funny. It's a it's such a such a classic narrative of.

02:14:39
Speaker 1: Like, yeah, it's the original narrative.

02:14:42
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, really really, I mean I'm sure there was some like silent film star or somebody who had a similar one, but yeah, just being young and hot gets you so far, and then that same lifestyle makes you a weird and grouchy and fat, and uh, then the right ends.

02:14:59
Speaker 1: He rode the snake.

02:15:01
Speaker 2: If we were truly making a proper tribute to Jim Morrison, I would be housed by now and making fart noises into a mic, with which Paul Rothschild said, he said, there'll never be a Doors outtake album because there's his hours of him trying to coax vocal performances from Jim.

02:15:20
Speaker 1: Morrison and Jim just being like.

02:15:26
Speaker 2: Which is so damn funny to me, Like I'm begging for those two inch tapes hours of a drunken Jim Morrison making body noises. Anyway, but unfortunately we are cold, sober, and I am not speaking into a ten thousand dollars microphone. But alas, regardless, we have ridden this particular snake to this particular end.

02:15:48
Speaker 1: Of time.

02:15:50
Speaker 2: Father, mother, I want to let you know that through therapy, I've come to accept you as loving but still ultimately human and therefore flawed figures who raised me to the best of your abilities, and.

02:16:02
Speaker 1: I love you.

02:16:03
Speaker 2: Jim Morrison should have gone to therapy and probably rehab.

02:16:09
Speaker 1: I'd like to second that, But I'd also like to end by sharing a quote from John Densmore during an interview for the Classic Albums documentary. Self destruction and creativity are not always in the same package. And I want kids to understand that Picasso lived to be ninety and he was a genius. In Jim's case, they came together creativity and self destruction.

02:16:33
Speaker 2: It's gonna happen to us. Let me do this podcast when we're ninety, because we're geniuses. But I don't drink as much as I used to. Uh sorry, I ruined your kicker?

02:16:49
Speaker 1: Does you always enhance my kickers?

02:16:53
Speaker 2: This has been too much information. I eagerly await the one star reviews boomers. I'm not getting paid for this shit anymore. Give a loosen your ponytails and come at me.

02:17:04
Speaker 1: What did loosen your ponytails from? Ah?

02:17:07
Speaker 2: That is like a a diss, like that I was like in my head from like somebody yelling at Young Winter about like loosen your ponytails and stop being obsessed with Moby Grape.

02:17:20
Speaker 1: No, don't do that, because Jordan puts a lot of effort.

02:17:22
Speaker 2: Into this and and he's always weighed down by my awful, awful attitude. I like guys, I like the doors. Okay, make me say it again. They just have a hilarious archetypal buffoon as their lead singer, who is endlessly amusing and not as good as he thought he was. Just fade, just bored, fade this as right into iHeart and like, get my personal email and just send me your hate mail. I'm used to it. Don't one star this show. Jordan is too good and too pure for that. Howard Stern's penis Jimmy Buffett sucks. Good night, folks, Beta keep the less Ops tied it over.

02:18:10
Speaker 1: For a while. Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

02:18:20
Speaker 2: The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

02:18:23
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

02:18:26
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex.

02:18:30
Speaker 1: Heigel with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.