The Doors
Description
The Doors remain one of the most original acts in the history of Rock and Roll. However, their actual music is sometimes overshadowed by the cult of Jim Morrison. Those with long memories will recall a point in the 1980s when he went from lead singer of an old band to a signifier of cool known as 'Morrison.' His image appeared everywhere on t-shirts, posters, and in the film The Lost Boys, adorning a wall in Keifer Sutherland's vampire cave. A biopic in the 1990s attempted something like realism but managed only to dramatize the legend of the 'Lizard King'. Meanwhile, outside of a few high rotation tracks on 'classic' rock stations, most of their work took a back seat to Jim's ever-growing status as a cultural icon. This book dusts off the vinyl and puts on the headphones for a sustained reappraisal of the band's musical career. Hidden gems, deep cuts, overrated top ten hits and an enigmatic series of album closers are all subjected to late night interrogations. Let's head to Venice Beach circa 1965, pick up a Fender bass organ on the way, take a face from the ancient gallery and walk on down the hall!
Tony Thompson is a Canadian writer based in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Summer of Monsters (Walker Books, 2014) a novel about Mary Shelley's early life, and Shakespeare: The Most Famous Man in London, (Black Dog Books, 2009). His articles on books, music, and education have appeared in The Age, The Australian, The Daily Review Australia, toppermost.co.uk, and Eureka St. He is a well-regarded speaker and has been a regular guest at the Melbourne Writers Festival and other literary events throughout Australia. He plays blues harmonica with great enthusiasm.
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This is the Beginning
The ur-Doors were a frat rock outfit called Rick & The Ravens. The band included two brothers, originally from Chicago, who had moved to Redondo Beach. They were Rick and Jim Manzcarek (Ray later dropped the c from his surname) on organ and guitar. They were often joined by their older brother, who called himself Screaming Ray Daniels when he played the piano and sang with them. He was a graduate film student at UCLA who already had a degree in economics. The band played frat houses, student pubs, bar mitzvahs, and beach parties. Their set was designed to get people dancing and they covered anything with a beat.
Rick & The Ravens recorded three singles which, if not for the fact that the band morphed into one of the most popular rock and roll acts of all time, would be fodder for the folks who compile compilation albums of West Coast garage music. The singles aren't terrible, just not terribly promising. They were all recorded in the first half of 1965.
'Soul Train'/ 'Geraldine' (Aura Records 4511)
Soul Train is a rewrite of Gary US Bonds' 1960 single, 'New Orleans'. Ray does pretty well as a growling lead singer and if you could squint with your ears, you might be able to find a scrap of his more familiar organ work in The Doors. It's a pretty good approximation of Gary US Bonds' frat rock style but not remarkable or unique in any sense. 'Geraldine' is more of the same. You can imagine jugs of beer and a lot of slightly sozzled students on the dancefloor. The single is nicely arranged and, by the standards of the time, well-produced.
'Henrietta'/ 'Just For You' (Aura Records 4506)
The party continues with Henrietta. Ray's singing is better on this one and it might be the pick of the bunch. It's a Lucille-style shouter that doesn't turn any new ground but has enough fire to keep you listening. The flip side is similar fare.
'Big Bucket T'/ 'Rampage' (Posae Records 101)
Big Bucket T is driven by a honking sax and Ray's blues piano lines. The car in question is described in detail and there are some automotive sound effects. Again, nothing wrong with it but Rick & The Ravens weren't going to wrestle pop music back from the UK invaders in 1965. The B-side, 'Rampage' is an agreeable instrumental with crowd noises to give it a live sound.
Rick & The Ravens' main gig was a bar on Santa Monica Blvd called the Turkey Joint West, where the crowd was mostly made up of Ray's film school buddies. One night, a drunken student kept hollering out for 'Louie Louie'. The band was starting to find it annoying, but Ray knew the drunk and invited him up to sing the song. Jim Morrison made his rock and roll debut that night.
Later, in the summer of 1965, after they had both graduated from UCLA, Ray and Jim happened to run into each other on Venice Beach. This meeting is one of the most famous stories in rock and roll. Ray Manzarek is probably responsible for the more mythic proportions of the tale as it stands, but it remains one of those moments like Keith and Mick on the train or John and Paul at the church fete. The two recent graduates knew each other quite well by this point, but Ray thought Jim had moved to New York and was surprised to see his friend wandering, shirtless and starry-eyed, down the beach. The younger man had lost weight and was living on the roof of a nearby apartment building (now the Morrison Apartments at 14 Westminster Ave, Venice, CA). He was also writing songs. Cajoled by Ray into singing one of them, he came out with 'Moonlight Drive'. Now go back and listen to 'Geraldine' by Rick & The Ravens. Yes, Ray was astonished. Nowadays, Ray or Jim would have recorded the entire episode on an iPhone and put it on Instagram, but we will have to use our imaginations to recapture how the song sounded that day.
Rick & The Ravens were out of contract with a small label called Aura Records, but Ray convinced Rick Bock, the owner of World Pacific Records (which owned Aura), to let them make a demo tape of Jim's songs. With his brothers, a bass player named Patty Sullivan, and his new Transcendental Meditation friend John Densmore on drums, he and Jim committed to tape a group of songs, all of which sound a million miles away from the party rock of Rick & The Ravens. The session took place in September of 1965 at the legendary World Pacific Studios in a neighbourhood called Beverly Grove near West Hollywood. If you want to make a pilgrimage, the studio is now called Arch Angel and is owned by Neil Diamond. Rick & The Ravens recorded six songs that day: 'Moonlight Drive', 'Hello, I Love You', 'Summer's Almost Gone', 'My Eyes Have Seen You, 'End Of The Night' and 'Go Insane'.
These are important recordings in The Doors story. You can hear them, along with the Rick & The Ravens singles, on YouTube, but they are all available on The Doors 1997 Box Set collection. Most bands have a fuller pre-flight catalogue. Led Zeppelin fans, for example, can pick through The Yardbirds' Little Games or Robert Plant's various pre-Zep efforts. A group like The Band might seem to have arrived out of nowhere in 1968 but had been making recordings both as a backing band and as Levon And The Hawks for almost ten years when that first album appeared. These six songs are it for The Doors, along with a live recording that I will get to soon.
Something of Rick & The Ravens remains in this version of 'Hello I Love You'. Anyone who believes the chord progression was a rip off of The Kinks' 'All Day and All of the Night' should listen to this demo. Ray is drawing on the same '50s RnB ideas that underpinned much of the frat rock of the period. The Kinks were probably drawing on a similar source. 'Moonlight Drive' gets the RnB treatment as well. With Ray's brother Jim on harmonica where Robby's slide guitar will one day appear, it could be an Excello Records B-side, except, of course, for the lyrics.
'End Of The Night' is creepy and surprisingly similar in arrangement to the version that would appear on the band's first album eighteen months later. It's more garage than frat and Jim finds his real voice on the second 'realms of bliss...' section where he begins to belt the lyrics. He sounds like he is experimenting with a more Dylanesque delivery up until then. Keeping in mind that he had, save for one drunken version of 'Louie Louie', never sung on stage or been in a band, he does exceptionally well on 'End Of The Night' to deliver the lyrics so convincingly.
This version of 'Summer's Almost Gone' almost beats the later album version for atmosphere and groove. It's missing Robby's slide guitar, but Jim's voice is less mannered and the emotion of the song is perhaps more obvious. As will be noted, I think this song is underrated but, of all of these demos, this is the one that I go back to most often. The better-known version is majestic and dark but loses some of the whimsy heard here.
The other two songs on the demo are 'My Eyes Have Seen You' and 'Go Insane'. If The Doors had stopped after this session, I suspect that both of these would have been highly sought after garage punk recordings. 'Go Insane' which reappears in the 'Celebration Of The Lizard' suite, is verging on novelty in the tradition of 'They're Coming To Take Me Away'. 'My Eyes Have Seen You' is a blueprint for the later versions but with the harmonica in the mix and the pounding piano chords, it is well into Nuggets territory.
I'm always surprised when these demos are dismissed as juvenilia or as unrepresentative of The Doors' later work. What is surprising, particularly with Rick & The Ravens' three singles in mind, is how far along The Doors were at this stage. Robby was not yet in the picture and this is only two months after the famous beach meeting. It's amazing that they resemble the band at all. Only one of these songs, 'End Of The Night', appeared on their first album. The others, except for 'Go Insane', all turned up on Strange Days. If you are curious about the development of the band's sound, this is the place to start.
So, what happened between the beach and the studio? There is no question that Jim's lyrics had a profound effect on Ray. They seemed to have provided permission to stretch out musically. The summer of 1965 saw the release of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album. With 'Like A Rolling Stone' on the radio, it's easy to imagine Ray and Jim thinking that more sophisticated lyrics required a richer musical setting. Ray Manzarek doesn't mention the 1965 Watts Riots in his memoir, but the darkness in Jim's lyrics and the minor chords creeping into Ray's arrangements almost seem to evoke a different LA from the hopeful sounds of early sixties California bands like The Beach Boys.
The demo did not grab any of the record company people that they played it for in the fall of 1965. Unlike, say, a group of kids in Nebraska, The Doors were able to get around to record companies in person. Not that it did them any good. Lou Adler, who was finding great success with Jim's old high school classmate, Ellen Cohen, now known as Mama Cass, listened to the recordings and said that he couldn't use them. 'We don't want to be used anyway,' said Jim Morrison. I'm sure they were all...
