#364 - The Doors - L.A. Woman (1971)

MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:

Released on April 19, 1971 on Elektra Records and produced by the group and Bruce Botnick this is the sixth studio album by the Los Angeles, Rock, Blues, Psychedelic, Jazz Band.

As we did their second album, “Strange Days” with Harland Williams that had a solid early bio you can go back and listen to that so let me just catch you up to this album.

Just a refresher, The Doors were Ray Manzarek on keys, John Densmore on drums, Robby Krieger on guitar, and Jim Morrison on vocals.

By late 1968 Jim was fed up with being the Lizard King and just wanted to be taken seriously as a poet and even tried quitting the band.

He stuck around but continued to break on through the boundaries which reached a head at a concert in Miami in 1969 when he reportedly flashed his penis to the crowd. This resulted in his arrest, conviction, and sentencing for charges including lewd and lascivious behavior, profanity, and public drunkenness

So by 1970 although they were 5 successful studio albums into their career that event saw them hit a huge roadblock when promoters kept canceling their shows and many radio stations black-listed them.

That low point carried over into beginning this record.

They only had a few incomplete songs and after early sessions with Paul Rothchild, the producer of all the rest of their albums, he just didn’t feel that most of the songs were up to his or their standards and was especially fed up with Jim who would often not show up.

According to Rothchild, “The material was bad, the attitude was bad, the performance was bad.”

And he told them straight out, “Look, I think it sucks. I don’t think the world wants to hear it. It’s the first time I’ve ever been bored in a recording studio in my life. I want to go to sleep.”

Side note: Rothchild had also just worked with Janis Joplin who had died a few months before which likely affected the direction he saw Jim going.

So he suggested the engineer of all their records, Bruce Botnick step in to co-produce with the band.

The idea was to capture the band quickly with very few overdubs and return to their live, bluesy roots.

But instead of continuing to record at a fancy studio they switched to their messy and crowded rehearsal and management space on Santa Monica Boulevard near La Cienega.

In fact Jim sang a bunch of these vocals on a stage mic in the tiled bathroom for acoustics.

Although Ray played a keyboard bass live they always recorded with a hired bass player. For this album they got Jerry Scheff from Elvis Presley’s TCB Band and many other hits as well as rhythm guitarist Marc Benno who had recent success with Leon Russell as The Asylum Choir.

The album was recorded in six days and mixed in an additional week by which point Jim had already taken a break from the band to go to Paris with his girlfriend Pamela and figure some stuff out.

Although the band had hoped to tour augmented by Jerry and Marc when he returned that never happened.

Less than three months after “L.A. Woman”’s release Jim Morrison died mysteriously in a bath tub in Paris.

The three remaining Doors put out two more albums with them trading vocals and one album with them playing under Morrison’s poetry.

John Densmore rarely participated in later reunions due to his tinnitus but Robby and Ray continued to play together periodically until Manzarek’s death from cancer in 2013.

The Doors became the first American band to have eight consecutive gold records, have sold over 100 million records worldwide, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.