Chapter 29
A producer tears his hair ... A storm rider walks away ... LA Woman, this is the end
JAC: When I gave the Doors back their publishing and paid the audit without contest, Elektra received in return an additional album at a royalty of ten percent. Paul Rothchild was slated to produce, as usual. I hadn't heard any of the tunes, but Bill Siddons thought the band was ready. I was praying it would be simple and go down easy, because I was sure Jim wouldn't make it through interminable sessions like "Soft Parade" and "Morrison Hotel." But "Morrison Hotel" had gone gold in two days, and the chance for one more album was enormously attractive. I'd deal with the future of the group after that.
BILL SIDDONS: Paul was a very exacting and professional producer, very demanding, didn't take any bullshit from anybody and was capable of provoking Jim into performing. But he was also a dictator, and his personality was so strong that it had begun to cause problems. And now they wanted to be in control of their own destiny.
"Morrison Hotel" was the record that killed them. Paul made a record that was a great bunch of songs, but so well produced and so perfect that I didn't feel them anymore. When I heard those songs live, they were a completely different experience, and I felt Paul lost what he was there to do. I was the guy that lived the live end of the business. They wouldn't go on stage without me being there. That was the part I lived, and then we'd get these records that I thought was a different band. It just wasn't what I thought the Doors to be, and I think it was because of Paul's mania for detail. Where I'd hear it and go, "Yeah, great!" he'd hear it and go, "Oh, no, the harmonic sibilance there was causing this to"—Who cares? Paul cared because he heard and understood. He was brilliant and totally knew the recording process, but took it to a point of refinement that lost the soul, and when I didn't hear the soul I knew he was the wrong guy.
ROBBY KRIEGER: Paul was the King of Slow. Not slow, but take after take. And we thought by that time we had earned the right to be able to pick our takes. Not to have to do eight million takes to make sure we got the perfect take.
BILL SIDDONS: The band developed all the songs. It was a real difficult process at that point, because there was a lot of distrust, a lot of arguing over who wrote what.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: Two months of rehearsals—boring as hell.
JAC: Paul heard all the songs and thought it might take another year, which I knew was both an exaggeration and an impossibility. You could sense that Jim was getting terminally itchy and the boys were on edge also.
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I had just finished the Janis Joplin album, completed after she died, which was a labor of love. I was very proud of it. And here I'm confronted by the Doors, and they're turning out shit. Two good songs, 'LA Woman' and 'Riders on the Storm,' and the rest is lounge music. Two weeks into production, I quit.
BRUCE BOTNICK: We were in the studio and the band was playing and he turned to me and put his head in his hand and he said, "I can't do this anymore."
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I quit because I had grown tired of dragging the Doors from one album to another, especially dragging an unwilling Jim through being a performer, and he had virtually dried up. It had been getting harder and harder, and more expensive, and less fun. Purely because of Jim. Two out of three times Jim would either not want to work or would go out into the studio drunk. He would intentionally disrupt things, pull things off course. Never fruitfully. Most of the energies were spent trying to get Jim coordinated with the group.
ROBBY KRIEGER: It was a question of how far out he would go. The further out he went, the more we would have to bend in his direction to keep it all together.
JAC: The band itself was never less than solidly consistent. The variable was Jim. Poor Rothchild tore his hair, what he had left of it, and did a hundred takes, and finally he just couldn't go to the well anymore. He was exhausted, and so were the Doors.
BRUCE BOTNICK: We went off to a restaurant down the street, and in the meantime Paul called Jac, and then he told the guys he couldn't do it, and we went back to the studio and he had gone home. And I know what he felt like. He was a free man.
JAC: There was no point in forcing an issue that couldn't be forced. I talked it over with Bruce and Bill Siddons and suggested that they and the group sort it out and I would support any reasonable idea they came up with. I had come to respect Bill's judgment highly, and I was certain that when it came to records that would be in the bins for years to come, the band wasn't about to slack off.
BRUCE BOTNICK: The boys said to me, "What are we gonna do?" I said, "We can make this album together."
We sat down and figured it out. I didn't want to go back into the Elektra studio. I thought, "Let's go to Sunset Sound and see if we can get some of the old magic back." But things had changed a lot there, it wasn't the same anymore. I said, "Where do you feel most comfortable?" They said, "Our rehearsal hall." I said, "That's what I think too. Why don't I get the console and the eight-track that came down from Paxton. We've got all this gear, I'll take it across the street and build a control room."
And Jac said, "Fine." He didn't question it for a second. Here's the major act on the label, and he's trusting it to a twenty-three-year-old kid.
JAC: I wasn't a bit worried about Bruce. He had contributed brilliantly to every note the Doors had recorded. Robby's point about the band making its own choices was fair. They had more than earned the right.
BRUCE BOTNICK: It came together without much rehearsal, like a day or two. They felt, like I felt, free as well. Paul felt he was free, and we were now free of him. No reflection on Paul—it's just that, you do it long enough, and under that control, and now it was like school's out, and we just had a ball.
BILL SIDDONS: One day at rehearsal Jim drank thirty-six beers.
ADAM HOLZMAN: I went to some of the rehearsals. I was a little hippie at that point, wearing a headband. Jim was nice to me, he'd say, "Hi, how are you doing?" One day he showed up late, and he gave each of the guys in the band a dollar because he was late.
BRUCE BOTNICK: We recorded it live, really wanted to get back to the basics.
JAC: I never felt that returning to eight-track from sixteen-track was a step backward. You pick the tool you need to do the job, and eight-track was more than sufficient for an organic location recording, which is what this was. Fewer tracks meant fewer mikes and less problems with microphone phasing, always a consideration in ad hoc studios. The result was a return to the original Doors sound, before all the distractions of fame and fortune got in the way.
I purposefully stayed away from the sessions except for one evening. I walked across to the Doors office and rehearsal space and saw the desks pushed off to the side, heavy mover's quilts nailed to the walls, the windows covered, and Bruce, a floor above in Bill Siddons' office, with console, speaker and tape recorder, the bare minimum of everything. There was a lot of running up and down because Bruce was out of sight of the band, which probably was a plus. There were no visual clues. It was so spartan and so right.
JOHN DENSMORE: I think "LA Woman" is kind of like the first punk album. It's really raw and there are mistakes. But the concept was to just go for it—try to get in tune, but if the passion is there and you hit a few wrong notes, that's alright. Garages are where this music started, you know, let's not get too pristine.
BRUCE BOTNICK: We recorded the entire album and mixed it in ten days, and I remember the day we were supposed to start mixing it was the LA quake.
I finished the album and took it to play for Jac at Elektra with the Doors—without Morrison, who would never appear—and Jac sat there and wept.
JAC: I had been worried about the material because of Paul's negative comments, but the album knocked me out, song after song.
BILL SIDDONS: Jac listened to the whole album, and then said that 'Love Her Madly' is a Top-5 record, and 'Riders On The Storm' will get more FM airplay than any Doors LP cut, and song by song he ran down exactly what happened. The Doors said, "Wait a minute. We think "The Changeling" is the single. That's what we want out, because that's the most credible musically." Jac sat there and looked at them like they were nuts and said, "It's not a hit. "Love Her Madly" is a hit." And they said, "No." The meeting ended and he hadn't swayed them at all. It took about two weeks to get them to go with the obvious hit.
"LA Woman" EKS-75011
JAC: I wasn't sure there'd be another album ever, so I had Bill Harvey create a collector's cover. The Doors' faces were printed on clear film. The backing color of the inner sleeve could be changed and would affect the mood of the package. This is the first album on which Jim is bearded. His photo is on the right, no bigger, no smaller than the others, just another guy in the band.
RAY MANZAREK: "LA Woman" was the final record on our extended contract. At that point we were free to re-sign with Elektra, sign with another company, continue the band, break the band up, whatever we felt like doing. We were free and clear. And Jim had finished his obligations, as he felt, to the Doors. He said, "Hey, you guys, I've got to take a break. I need some time off. This rock and roll is getting to me. I need to get away and find out who I am." We all said, "Where are you going ?" Jim said, "Paris." What could be better? What better place for a poet, an artist, an American poet to go, than to Paris?
PAUL ROTHCHILD: I'd love to know whether Jim actually was searching for his medium, as so many people of great talent have done in the past. I think that perhaps rock was just the convenient medium, the popular one for art. To break through in our time, rock seemed to be the one. I think ultimately if he hadn't succeeded in rock he would have gone in a direction not unlike a Sam Shepard, where he would have been a playwright, an actor, a director. In another time Jim might have been a traveling troubadour, someone who went from town to town with a poem and a little bit of shtick, to entertain people.
But he was a haunted man. He was cursed by his own brilliance. He definitely had that poet's curse. He rode with madness. That was what chased him his whole life. He both explored it and fled from it.
About two weeks before he left for France—I hadn't seen him in six months—I was at the front desk filling out some paperwork. I heard the door open. I turned around and saw this large man entering. I didn't recognize him, turned back, finished my paperwork. Then I was tapped on the shoulder, and I turned around and this large person, who looked like Orson Welles' younger son, said, "Hi, Paul." I looked at him and I said to myself, "Holy fuck, this is Jim!" He had a huge beard, and was generally unrecognizable as a sex object. He had killed that part for sure.
DIANE GARDINER: By the time he went to Paris he looked like the old man from the mountain—not old, perhaps, but the middle-aged man from the mountain.
RUSS MILLER: We were having dinner. Jim was very quiet that night, saying goodbye to everyone. Jac was there, the other Doors, Bruce Botnick, Fred Myrow. Fred told me that Jim said he was never coming back.
JAC: There was a poignancy to that evening. Elektra had planned an office-warming party for six o'clock on Wednesday, March 3, 1971 to show off the expanded offices and our new Studio A. Jim had dropped by around seven-thirty, "to see," as he said, "what I helped pay for," and then we all went to dinner down the street at the Blue Boar. Jim, who was always fairly quiet in groups, was unusually so that evening, half there and half somewhere else. I could feel finality hanging in the air.
As we left the restaurant, we all said our goodbyes to him. We had enjoyed a lifetime together in the concentrated, blazing arc of rock and roll. Jim and I hugged each other, and then he turned somewhat awkwardly and walked away. I watched and wondered if I would ever see him again.
