The Doors Press Conference
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2:11:83.
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The conference was chaired by Robin Denselow, at that time,
presenter of BBC-2's "Eight Days A Week".
Denselow: Well, hello and welcome to the I.C.A. Doors extravaganza. My name is Robin Denselow. These are The Doors ... On drums - John Densmore; guitar - Robbie Krieger and keyboards - Ray Manzarek ... who are here to promote some exciting new Doors artefacts ... a new live album of recently discovered Doors tracks, "Alive She Cried" and yet another book on The Doors with lots of pictures - "The Doors" by Danny Sugerman, who of course, worked on the best seller, "No One Gets Out Of Here" ... "No One Here Gets Out Alive".
Ray: ... "No One Here Gets Out Alive".
Denselow: I was very close.
Ray: "No One Here" ... No one in this room is gonna get out alive. However, we'll all have lunch later.
Denselow: Let's start with the album now on release. Why has it taken so long for these tracks to suddenly get discovered at this time? ... Ray?
Ray: Yes, exactly right ... um,we knew we had these tracks. We knew we had some live material in the can. These are some out-takes and bits and pieces that were accumulated over the years 1968, 1969, 1970 but the tapes ... somehow a stack of tapes mysteriously got lost in mis-filing. It was sort of like "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". You know, the last scene in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". They take that box and they just stick it somewhere at the end of everything and it's just in the middle ... Well, that's how our tapes were. They were mis-labelled and they were in some storage facility in Los Angeles and we'd been looking for them for a long time. We knew they existed; we didn't know where they were. We hired a private investigator (laughter from audience) ... he wasn't able to find them. I think he was the wrong fellow. It was a French detective.
Robbie: Clouseau ... (laughter).
Ray: Probably that's why he couldn't find them - but finally, a fellow who works for us offered a small reward to various storage facilities and said, "If you can find these tapes, there's some money in it for you" - and a day later, there they were ... the tapes popped up.
Denselow: So, they were just sitting around in a warehouse, were they?
Ray: They were mis-labelled and mis-filed and an enterprising young man said, "I found a stack of tapes, they're not labelled properly and we don't know what they are, so why don't you come down and listen to them and take a few with you and see what they are" ... and eureka! That was it. We said: "There they are, the mysterious missing tapes". So we went into the studio and started listening to them with Paul Rothchild, our producer and culled out what we considered to be the best takes, the best songs on the tapes, along with Danish TV footage. We did a TV show in Denmark the same time we did The Roundhouse here; after we did The Roundhouse with Jefferson Airplane.
Denselow: Back in '68 ?
Ray: You were there; we were there. was anyone else at The Roundhouse? Raise your hand anybody ... oooh ... okay ... good ... good.
Robbie: Nobody's that old.
John: They weren't born ...
Denselow: Is it just a mysterious co-incidence that the book and the album came out at the same time? Was this part of a cunning Doors marketing strategy?
Ray: A cunning Doors plot to manipulate the media ... No, unfortunately it was not planned. It was so beautifully timed that I wish we had planned it but it's pure serendipity. The book was actually supposed to be released in the summer. We had a June release in mind and for one reason or another it just staggered on and was finally released now ... So,it makes a nice package ... what you want to know about The Doors is in the live album and the book.
Denselow: Let's take the album first, with some songs that you haven't recorded before. "Gloria" for instance which apparently was a common warm-up number. Robbie, was this something you'd always played to warm-up, back in the early days?
Robbie: Yeah, we played "Gloria", like when we played bars, you know we'd have to do a lot of sets and we didn't have that many songs so we'd play songs like "Gloria", some Wilson Pickett type songs and stuff like that.
Denselow: This was when? Sort of '67?
Robbie: Late '66 before we really made an album or anything and then ... so what happened was we were doing a show in L.A. at the Aquarius Theater at our soundcheck. We were gonna record the show you know, so at the soundcheck we ended up doing "Gloria" and that's where this cut came from.
Denselow: You knew Van Morrison quite well, didn't you? Jim Morrison and Van Morrison used to get appallingly drunk together according to many accounts.
Robbie: Well, we played the Whiskey-A-Go-Go with Them when Van Morrison was still with Them, and one night at, I think it was the last night of the gig, we all got pretty soused and we ended up all getting on stage together and playing "Gloria". It's too bad nobody taped it.
Denselow: What about the other things here? There's a blues. Willie Dixon's "Little Red Rooster" with John Sebastian playing harmonica. Where was that from, John ...?
John: New York ... Felt Forum.
Denselow: So, that was fairly late on, then?
John: Yeah, we always loved the blues and finally got to put one down.
Denselow: And what about the rest of the stuff on here? This is what, mostly European sessions ... ?
Ray: Los Angeles. Tracks recorded in L.A., New York City, Detroit, Boston and the Danish TV show, which hopefully we'll see a clip from later on. "Love Me Two Times" was recorded live and we cut it together with some stills and scenes from "The Illustrated History of The Doors" and you will see Jim Morrison in a never before seen clip.
Denselow: Wonderful ... and there's some ... for Doors rarities there's a "Texas Radio And The Big Beat" recorded in ... '68 ... two, three years before it was actually put on record. Is that right?
ROBBIE: That's right. The "Texas Radio..." that's on "L.A. Woman" was quite different from this one and this here was the first time I think that we ever did "Texas Radio ..." on stage and it evolved quite a bit.
Denselow: Were lots of songs like that? You used to have them in the set and sort of play around with them and eventually they'd pop up on record.
Ray: When we first started playing "The End" it was three minutes; four minutes long. Jim saw it as a simple little goodbye love song. It was a love song and he was saying goodbye to his lover ... "we'll never meet again" and playing at The London Fog in L.A. We had to play four sets a night so we had to stretch out ... we had to do something to fill the time. We had a repertoire of maybe ten, twelve songs so we had to do something to fill in four sets so "The End" somehow just expanded itself to the 11 minute song it finally became.
Denselow: What was the longest version you ever played? It must go a lot over ...
Ray/Robbie: Twenty minutes.
Denselow: Right, so anything else about the album of special note before ...
Ray: Marvellous album ... "Light My Fire". The longest version of "Light My Fire" - 10 minutes; 9 minutes and 51 seconds worth of music. Jim does "The Graveyard Poem" in there ...
Denselow: Let's ... First, have we any questions about the album?
Q: Is "Love Me Two Times" live on the album 'cuase there's no cheering or is it taken from the soundcheck?
Robbie: Those are from a TV show.
Ray: Yeah, it's live from TV. They were filming it and recording it at the same time.
Robbie: It's ten o'clock in the morning. No people there. It's quite odd really.
Denselow: This is what, just after you'd done the The Roundhouse. Did you enjoy The Roundhouse? I mean ... I remember at the time it was a very, very, quiet show. I mean, Jim Morrison said afterwards he was delighted it was so quiet and everyone was being well behaved and listening so intently but after hearing stories about what had been happening in The States, to see all the audience sitting there well behaved on The Roundhouse floor under television lights. I was a little disappointed at the time so I remember.
John: Yeah, I heard that comment. I think we played great. It was a great night but everyone just sort of stared as oppossed to "Aargh!!".
Ray: Well, we'd heard a lot about you wild people over here and we thought we were coming to a hotbed of primitive ecstacy and we were actually quite surprised ... "Wait a minute, this is the crazy English audience we've been hearing about in California" ... and everyone was very reserved and very proper and very correct but it was a great show.
Denselow: You played very well, certainly ...
Ray: Psychedelic West Coast comes to London with The Doors and The Jefferson Airplane.
Denselow: There were rumours about rows going on backstage about who was going on first. Is That true?
Ray: There were, yes. "We're gonna go on first" ... "No you're gonna go" ... "We're the headliners" ... "We're biggest" ... "No, we're bigger" ... "We're bigger than you are" ... "Our record is higher in the charts" ... "No,ours is" ... "ours came out first". So, you know, we tossed it around back and forth.
Denselow: So, how was it decided?
John: We opened one night, they opened the next.
Robbie: We always had a kind of running battle with The Jeffesron Airplane because we were both California groups and it was a kinda rivalry.
John: Where are they now?
Ray: Hey, Jefferson Airplane is now the Starship ... very big. Very big on MTV. MTV ... hopefully you'll be getting a television music channel out here soon. It's a lot of fun in Los Angeles. Music videos just run all day and all night. Four o'clock, five o'clock A.M., if you want to turn something on. There it is ... music ... rock and roll ... and we get to see Kajagoogoo (laughter), Duran Duran, Boy George. The Eurythmics are great. Annie Lennox is terrific ... Um, lots of heavy metal being played in Los Angeles at the moment. Heavy metal seems to be very big in The States. Is heavy metal as big ...?
Denselow: It stays pretty big, yes.
Ray: Is Def Leppard ...
Denselow: Not as big as in The States but they'll come back one day and attempt it. To totally change the subject: do you enjoy the "English Invasion" so called in America, because you've just been producing a band called "X", who have a line in one of their songs, "Will the last American band to be played on the radio, please bring the flag". Is that the way you feel about it?
Ray: Well, actually it's a little tough. We're of course, enamoured of your accent, that's what it is. This is the mother country speaking the mother tongue, so anything you do is okay with us. The bands have been really good, though. I've enjoyed what's been coming over. It's very exciting. MTV has been really exciting and although Spandau Ballet is not my favourite group, I enjoy seeing the videos ... you know. Just keep sending them on.
Denselow: Right, let's turn to the mighty book ... lots of pictures and clips from various people's cuttings books and things like that, which makes something of a good companion volume to the Hopkins book. Let's talk a little bit about the very early days of The Doors. Ray, you started that off first by meeting Jim and inviting him to join a band when he was doing ...
Ray: Well, Jim was at the film school at U.C.L.A. We were both going to be film makers and ... early to mid sixties when the "nouvelle vague" exploded ... and the cinema just really became a marvellous artform and we went to U.C.L.A. to study film ... and right in the middle of doing it; along comes The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and the first British invasion as we called it. Merseybeat and everything else and of course, we were enamoured of the whole thing, long-haired guys coming out of art school from London.
"Hey, wait a minute, we're just like those people. Those guys are just like us. We're just like them and we graduated U.C.L.A. Jim was going to New York City and I said, "Well,I just got to California a couple of years ago, I'm gonna stay out here and enjoy the sun and try to get a job or something. God knows whay I'm going to do with my life; school is finished" ... and I said, "If I'm ever in New York, I'll look you up" and he said "okay man, see you later".
About a month and a half later, I'm on the beach. Middle of July sometime, in California. Sitting on the beach thinking what I'm going to do with my life and who comes walking down the beach but the shaman himself. This transformation ... Jim transformed himself. He went inside of a cocoon and came out absolutely gorgeous. He'd lost maybe thirty pounds. He was living on a friend's rooftop ingesting massive quantities of a certain psychedelic substance and didn't eat ... was living off his baby fat and he was approximately 165, 170 pounds at U.C.L.A. and then went down to maybe 135. Six feet tall, lean, hard ... his hair had grown. He looked like David, he looked like Michelangelo's David. I said, "God, you look great man, what you been doing?" He said, "Nothing, I haven't been eating" and he said, "I've been writing some songs" ... songs, aaahh.
He knew I was a musician and had played in some bands ... The Turkey Joint West with Rick And The Ravens and various gigs around town ... and Jim would come down every once in a while and get up on stage and sing Louie Louie and he said, "Here's my song" ... (quotes from "Moonlight Drive") and it blew me away; incredible! ... amazing! Amazing words. Then he did a couple of other songs. He had "A Little Game" and I forget what the rest of the songs were that he had at that particular time and I said, "That's amazing". Just wonderful lyrics. The best lyrics I've ever heard for rock and roll songs. "Why don't we get a band together?" He said, "That's exactly what I want to do". I said, "Well,what do we call the band?" and he said, "We're gonna call it The Doors". I said, "What the ... wait a minute ... you mean like in your head?" and he said, "That's it, The Doors". I said, "Oh ... great name ... like doors opening and closing" and he said, "Right, that's it".
And at the time, I was involved in the Maharishi's meditations, seeking to find enlightenment through non-L.S.D. sources, after taking acid and getting the shit scared out of me. You know, seeing God and then being thrust into the pit of Hell and realising I couldn't take this drug anymore. If I was gonna find God, I had to do it some other way because ... I got a glimpse of the whole thing, but then L.S.D. gives you both sides of it - Heaven and Hell. And in the Maharishi's meditation class, you took a series of six lectures before you were given your magic word - your mantra ... and who should be in that class but these two guys. It's amazing! I walked up to John ... somebody pointed out that he was a drummer ... Take it from there ...
John: And he said, "Let's form a rock and roll band" but he said, "The time's not right yet. I'll call you in a few months" ... That's odd, we could play next week ... He called me in a few months and we were playing with Ray's brothers but they sort of dropped out. Jim, I think was maybe too much for them.
Ray: I think Morrison was just too much.
John: And so, I brought Robbie round ... who played his bottleneck and Ray went crazy.
Denselow: What did you think of Morrison when you first met him? Was he a sort of startling character?
John: He was shy. He sort of stood in the corner of the garage. We played in the garage ... uh, kinda sung to the corner.
Denselow: Could he sing in the early days?
Robbie: Not really, no. First gig we had was at a party some friends of my parents threw. All I remember was that Jim got so drunk, he swallowed a quarter.
John: On purpose; he went, "See this" ... (makes swallowing movement) and they're big too. It's bigger than a twenty (pence).
Denselow: And he kept singing?
Robbie: This was after the singing.
Denselow: You started off from there ... and then playing dodgy L.A. clubs like The London Fog and other such legendary sleazy dives.
Robbie: I'm gonna read ... [Manzarek: our first review]. This is my favourite. It's The Doors at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. We're the house band. It says ...
Robbie goes on to quote from Pete Johnson's review in Los Angeles Times.
Denselow: How much of that was true?
Ray: Correct ... absolutely correct.
John: I remember when we read that, you know. It was supposedly negative but the description ... it was great. I'd like to see that.
Denselow: What was your aim as a band when you first started ... Morrison talked an awful lot later about the grand things of taking audiences where they hadn't been before. Using music in completely different ways ... all this sort of stuff. Was that actually verbalised between you?
Robbie: Naw ... we just wanted to have a good time, you know ... tour the country and be the American rock and roll band.
John: Yeah ... I think the choice of not to have a bass player was kind of ... we wanted to be different that way.
Denselow: Was that deliberate or just because you couldn't find somebody that fitted in?
John: Well, we auditioned bass players, a girl in fact ... but we sounded like The Rolling Stones ... sort of blues. So, we opted for a keyboard bass.
Ray: Well, fortunately that instrument came along. Up until I saw that thing in existence ... we thought we'd have to have a bass player. As John said, we did sound a lot like The Animals ... but wait a minute ... The Rolling Stones already exist and The Animals already exist ... There's no point us sounding like they sound and all of a sudden, there it was - that sweet little piano bass. It was about that big and it was like a third of a Fender Rhodes piano and it was all tuned an octave lower ... and I thought, "Okay, I can do that. You know I'll play the left hand, I can play boogie woogie piano, anyway, so I'll just do that ... right hand plays the organ" and that was our sound, like magic ... boom ... there it was.
Robbie: Plus it left a lot of room for me to fool around , you know, without the bass.
Denselow: But there was no definite idea of what you were going to do as a band as per Jim Morrison's idead of what the band should be about. Was that a gulf between you and him as to the aims of the whole band that you wanted to be an ordinary band and he wanted to something rather strange or rather different with it?
Robbie: No, I think in the beginning, Jim didn't have those kind of ideas, you know, he just wanted to have some fun and be in a rock and roll band but I think as soon as the songs started to develop, then his ideas started developing more than we ll as a group started to recognise what our purpose would be as The Doors.
Denselow: All that stuff about dealing with the sexual neurosis of a crowd.
Robbie: Yeah, all that stuff ... good stuff.
Ray: Right, remember the sixties. there were dreams in the sixties. We all thought we could change the world. Make it a fairer place if not a better place because certainly the trees grow whether you love them or not ... but we were gonna make it a fairer place for brother and sister. There was a lot of that in the sixties. Don't forget it by the way ... don't forget it. Give your other brother a fair shake, you know. That's what it was all about ... and musically, we were trying to immerse ourselves in this void.
This was a psychedelic time. The people on the stage here were all quote,unquote "acid heads". Jim Morrison had taken L.S.D. ... by ingesting that chemical, you get in contact with forces beyond yourself; your own ego ... and needs and wants, don't mean that much any more. I think we tried to do that in the music. To just give ourselves to the music. It was an unspoken thing ... we never really talked ... People have asked, "well did you guys talk about it and decide what you were going to do?" It was an unspoken thing. We didn't really discuss what we were gonna do. Jim had the words at the beginning, although later on, Robbie wrote a lot of the songs too.
Robbie wrote "Light My Fire" and Robbie would instigate a lot of the songs but we all just automatically knew the purpose of the music ... the purpose of a band playing together. It was this relationship between four men. I hate to say this but it was making love to each other ... We had this experience where psychologically, psychically, we merged our selves into this thing that was Doors music and the first time we played. When Robbie joined the band or came down to audition as it were ... and the first time we all played together we played "Moonlight Drive", passed around a joint, got a little high ... and Robbie put that bottleneck on his finger and just went across the strings and it was like Kundulini was uncoiling up and down my spine. Jim was ecstatic. Jim said, "We're gonna have that guitar on every single song" (laughter). Robbie said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. I play a lot of ways, I don't just play bottleneck". Jim was completely in love with the bottleneck ... and then we played "Moonlight Drive" and it was one of the great experiences of my life.
I'd played music for a long time ... studying piano since I was seven, eight years old; played with a lot of bands; a lot of people. I never had that thing happen where individuals disappear and just the music came together. It really locked in. After playing one song together, the four of us ... we all sort of looked at each other and we knew, without speaking, without saying anything ... it was all in the psychic contact between the eyeballs. We all knew we had it. We knew that this was strong; that this was powerful; that this was going to go out into the world and we're still here talking about it to you, you know. It must have ... I think it worked.
Denselow: What about writing the songs? Were they rehearsed a great deal first? A lot of them are very, very precise, very carefully done ... listening to them now. I mean the pauses, the silences that made a great deal of difference to The Doors' music. It's very, very different to anything that's happened before or after in many ways .. a sudden long silence with a complete change of pace. Was that something tat happened spontaneously or something that you knew was going to happen at certain times? How did that work?
John: We rehearsed every day for eight months about and then we got our first gig and then, four months after that, we got a record contract.
Robbie: But the thing is most of the songs evolved when we played them offstage and those pauses and things like that, came about as an effect of dramatic ... You know, wanting to be dramatic on stage. You know, you can rehearse songs as much as you want in a garage or whatever, but once you get them onstage ... that's where they really get worked out.
Denselow: What about the whole drama side and the rock theatre but? I remember Morrison throwing himself on the ground and writhing around in "The Unknown Soldier" at The Roundhouse which, at the time was a very unexpected thing for people to do. That wasn't the sort of David Bowie rock theatre that came later. Was that something he personally evolved? Was that something you talked about at all or he just did it?
Robbie: He just did it, we never talked about it.
John: He just slammed himself on the ground. I looked over the drums ...
Ray: Waow! ... Jim are you all right? A lot of people thought he got electrocuted (laughs). I dropped the amplifier top to make a load gunshot and people swore he was electrocuted. Certain places we played, people would come up to the stage. Like ... help him! help him! The man is dead!
Uh, Jim on stage would become another person. Jim had that quality in him. Perhaps you know the story from "An American Prayer" of the dead Indians on the highway. When he was five years old and he was with his mother and father driving on the Arizona desert at dawn, they came across this carload of Indian workers ... American Indians and the car had overturned and the Indians were scattered on the highway bleeding to death ... and he told me this story long before we put it on record and he said, "The soul of one of those Indians jumped into my body and he's still in there". I thought to myself, "I believe it ... I don't believe it". It's another Morrison story ... it's bullshit, or it's absolutely the truth and I've never been able to decide which.
I think perhaps, after seeing him on stage as he progressed through his career, I think it was perhaps the truth because Jim became possessed. He became another person. He went outside of himself. He became a shaman. Shamanistic ecstacies took over. Dionysus was on stage, dancing wildly, madly. He was capable of anything on stage and would do anything as we all know by Miami, Newhaven. The man was actually arrested on stage for going too far. I don't think any performer has actually been arrested on stage for talking. Not for doing anything, just for talking to the people. Just talking to the police, he was arrested at Newhaven.
Denselow: Was this because he didn't want to be treated just as a great rock star? Which was the way he was being treated. He wanted to be seen as something even more than that ... and that's what led to the whole Miami incident.
Ray: It was much simpler. He wanted to be thought of as a poet. We got together to make poetry and rock and roll. The same way the beatniks made poetry and jazz in the fifties, we were gonna make poetry and rock and roll. Jim was a poet. That's what he was ... that's what he was for all of us. He was a poet. He was the lyricist of the band ... the lead singer ... and a poet.
We didn't care about the fact he could be an entertainer ... the fact that whatever he did on stage really didn't matter as long as the poetry was there ... as long as he was with us ... and we were with him in the music; and it all happened together. And when he became Jim Morrison, The Lizard King; psychedelic acid rock; the kings of psychedelic rock; kings of orgasmic rock. He said, "Wait a minute, that's not me, that's some overblown thing that the press has put together. I'm a poet"... and he was rejecting, I think in Miami, exactly Robin ... I think he was rejecting that whole public image the press had created and he was trying to be the poet. That's why he went to Paris.
Denselow: He'd been to see a revolutionary theatre troupe, The Living Theater, the night before which had allegedly affected him. Is that correct?
Robbie: It's possible.
Denselow: Tell me what it was like being on stage at Miami. What actually happened? ... Robbie for a change.
Robbie: Well, all I remember was it was this giant place and it was totally oversold and there were millions of people in there and it was very hot. You know how Miami gets when there's no air-conditioning ... and Jim was late. He missed his plane and by the time he got there, he was totally out of it and drunk. So, we finally get on stage and we did a couple of songs and Jim was missing the cues. He couldn't even remember the words. It was horrible, you know ... but pretty soon, everything just started going crazy. There was a cop on stage ... Jim was throwing the cop's hat in the audience and the cop was throwing Jim's hat in the audience and finally the audience started to come up on the stage and I thought the whole thing was going to collapse ... so, I think John and I ean up the stairs to get out of there.
John: I remember being hit with a can of paint. Someone threw paint which splattered all over us.
Robbie: Anyway, it was totally nuts, you know and then we were up on top on the balcony and I remember looking down and Jim had somehow gotten thrown out into the audience and it was like a mass of Babylon or something. There's just a snake of people kinda hanging on to Jim and he was going through the audience. It looked like a big snake ... a whirlpool of people.
Denselow: What was he trying to do?
Robbie: I don't know, he was just having fun. He loved to invite the audience up on stage ... everybody get down, you know.
John: I remember jumping off the stage and I landed on the soundboard. It was real chaotic.
Robbie: Anyway, after that, Jim somehow made it up to the dressing room and the cops were up there and we were all joking around and having beers and pretty soon everyone went home.
John: And we paid the cop for his hat, yeah.
Robbie: Then about a week later, we get the news that there's a warrant out for Jim's arrest and we couldn't figure out what ...
Denselow: This was obscenity and exposing himself ... all sorts of stuff like that.
Ray: Simulation of oral copulation.
Denselow: From your priviledged position on stage, I mean ... the eternal question ... Did he flash or did he not flash?
Ray: I didn't see it.
John: Well, as you said at the trial, "No judge, I didn't see Mr. Morrison's organ ... I play organ" (laughter).
Ray: And the judge went, "Order in the court, order in the court". I don't think it ever really happened. I think it was a mass hypnosis. I think the audience had a vision of Lourdes (laughter). It wasn't a catholic audience and they were ready. They were ready for the devil. They saw snakes. They saw serpents. They saw the devil ... psychedelic ... you know ... all that Jim ... was culminated in Miami. The acid rock, orgasmic rock, The Lizard King. Miami is a place of swamps. Lizards abound in Miami or in Florida, so they're well aware of that sort of primeval, primordial sense of lizard.
You know, we're all lizards i
