Even if Jim Morrison hadn’t accidentally triggered the self-destruct sequence, there was a decent chance that L.A. Woman would have been his swan song anyway.
“Hey, man, how ya doin’?” said the voice I knew only too well, the whiskeyed voice that struck terror in me.
“Hi, Jim,” I replied tentatively, thinking that he was the last person in the world I wanted to talk to. “How is it over there?” I added.
“How’s France?” “Okay. Not bad,” Jim said noncomittally. “How’s LA Woman doing?” He didn’t sound loaded. Too early in the morning? Wait a minute, I thought. It’s early evening there.
“Great! It’s really doing great,” I said enthusiastically. “‘Love Her Madly’ is a hit and everyone really likes the album.” What I was not going to tell him was that we had already started rehearsing. Without him. We’d done it before, but this time I had an eye for going on without him. As hard as it was to admit it, I couldn’t bear the thought of going through another recording session with the rock-’n’-roll world’s Dr. Jekyll.
“Yeah, everything’s great.” I wondered if he could pick up the subtext. “Well, maybe we should do another one?” “Sure, Jim, good idea.” Bad idea, I thought as I fumbled with the receiver and cleared my throat uncomfortably. I hope I never find myself cooped up in a recording studio with you again. It’s nice that you want to rock ‘n’ roll again, especially with us, but I think it’s for the wrong reasons. You never did anything because you thought it was going to sell. But maybe you’ve realized that the four of us are a great team. You must not be writing the Great American Novel over there as you had hoped to. Probably drinking the Great American Novel. “When do you think you might come back?” I asked him, while hoping it wouldn’t be for a long time because I wanted to take him up on his suggestion that Ray, Robby, and I should do some instrumental. Betrayal? Of Jim—or the fans? Of ourselves? Fuck it! It’s a relief to play without Morrison.
Densmore, John (2009). Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors. Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I’m not sure that Robby Krieger or Ray Manzarek would have agreed to dump Morrison if he had made himself available; after all, they had written the songs for the follow-up album under the assumption that Jim would return from Paris to provide the vocals. Alas, Densmore’s wish for a Morrison-free environment came true and the trio soldiered on without their iconic lead singer, releasing two albums under the Doors moniker.
Bad idea. They should have rebranded and launched their post-Morrison careers under a new name. As far as most of the listening public was concerned, Jim Morrison was the Doors. Other Voices and Full Circle are decent efforts and I have no complaints regarding the musicianship, but when I see “Doors” I naturally expect to hear Jim Morrison; the absence of his distinctive baritone and poetic talent is painfully noticeable. While some bands have successfully switched out their lead singers (Genesis, AC/DC, etc.), Jim Morrison was far more than a frontman—he was not only a fabulous lead singer but also an exceptionally talented lyricist and the ultimate iconic rock ‘n’ roll bad boy. The Doors minus Morrison is an unthinkable equation, like imagining Jethro Tull without Ian Anderson. Imfuckingpossible.
I fully understand Densmore’s desire to rid himself of the fluctuations in Morrison’s behavior. In the Riordan-Prochnicky book Break on Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, producer Paul A. Rothchild recalled, “Jim really was two very distinct and different people. A Jekyll and Hyde. When he was sober, he was Jekyll, the most erudite, balanced, friendly kind of guy . . . He was Mr. America. When he would start to drink, he’d be okay at first, then, suddenly, he would turn into a maniac. Turn into Hyde.” Though L. A. Woman producer and engineer Bruce Botnick described Morrison as a guy who was “easy to work with and spent long hours in the studio with little consumption of alcohol,” Densmore had suffered through the maddening inconsistency of Mr. Hyde long enough to discount that brief period when Jim was Mr. America.
The Doors had worked with Rothchild on a few songs for the new album before the producer left in a huff in part because he thought “Love Her Madly” was absolute crapola. He turned the reins over to Botnick, who helped the band transform their private rehearsal space into something resembling a studio and fully supported their desire to get back to the basics and limit the number of takes. It may seem weird to some folks that Morrison recorded his vocals while standing in the bathroom doorway, but there was no room for an isolation booth, and hey, there’s a reason why many people love to sing in the shower—bathroom acoustics are great! The sound and vibes were strengthened by the decision to bring in Marc Benno in the role of rhythm guitarist on four songs and Elvis alumnus Jerry Scheff on bass. Scheff made a huge contribution by tightening the rhythm section, adding some fabulous counterpoints and making Elvis aficionado Jim Morrison a very happy guy.
Contemporary reviews of L.A. Woman were generally positive, particularly those critics who appreciated the album’s many blues-based tracks. Densmore wasn’t particularly happy with that emphasis, which intensified his desire to move on from Morrison: “He can’t come back, I thought. He would just want to play the blues, the slow, soulful, monotonous blues, which is great for a singer like him, but boring for a drummer like me.” I can sympathize with his perspective, but the truth is the Doors were short on original material and wanted to get the album done quickly. Resorting to the simplicity of blues scales was the obvious solution.
In an interview with ArtistDirect.com Ray Manzarek attempted to spin L.A. Woman as a concept album. “We didn’t approach the album with one vision. But after we started working on the songs, we realized that they’re talking about L.A. They’re about men, women, boys, girls, love, loss, lovers-lost, and lovers-found in Los Angeles.” By my count, only four (and possibly five) deal with life in early 1970s La La Land, and though some of the other songs might capture how the Doors felt about life in L.A., those feelings are not unique to Los Angeles. While I think Manzarek’s view is a bit of a stretch, I think it’s fair to say that those four or five songs form the dominant theme of the album: the love-hate relationship that many people experience when they attempt to get their heads around the dynamic, multi-faceted, unique phenomenon ironically known as the City of Angels.
*****
Side One
“The Changeling”: According to the 40th Anniversary booklet, Morrison gave one of those motivational speeches often celebrated in American football lore just before the first take: “I hate to spook anybody, but this is my favorite number. Play your ass off, boy.”
Searching for a point of comparison, I found a series of football motivational moments on (what else?) Art of Manliness.com (look it up yourself, because I have no desire to forge a link). The motivational speech I found most alarming (and ridiculous) featured a coach reading from a creed he had written that peaked on the line, “I will rip the heart out of my enemy and leave it bleeding on the ground because he cannot stop me.”
Fuck, dude—was your team playing the Klingons? Sorry, coach, but my parents told me to make love not war so I’ll give the Manliness Motivation Award to the guy who passed away with thirty-seven paternity suits on ice.
I don’t know if Jim’s stirring speech motivated anyone, but the band certainly kicks ass in a tight and spirited funk-rock performance. Though the song doesn’t qualify as a blues number, the chord pattern emphasizes the flatted third in the A minor scale—A7, A7#9, Am, F—with a key change to Bbm near the middle. The most exciting part of the song comes in the 16-bar instrumental passage where Robby serves double duty to create a scene of dueling guitars marked by contrasting tones in an inventive exploration within and beyond the Bbm scale. Simultaneously, Jerry Scheff ramps up the intensity with a superbly executed series of rising and falling bass riffs.
Yes, the band was on fire, but initially I was puzzled as to why this was Morrison’s favorite number. The vocal isn’t particularly challenging and the lyrics are on the skimpy side. He describes himself as a changeling, but his transformative abstractions (“The air you breathe/The food you eat/Friends you greet in the sullen street”) certainly pale in comparison to Constable Odo’s transformative ability, who could turn himself into a bird, a rock or a mobile bit of goo who could slip under doors and wreak havoc on the Cardassians and I promise to avoid references to Star Trek from this point forward.
The conundrum vanished after I read a piece in LAWeekly featuring two interpretations from band members. Ray Manzarek: “The lyrics are prophetic. ‘I’ve lived uptown. I’ve lived downtown, but I’ve never been so broke that I couldn’t leave town.’ He’d lived on the beach and in the hills. He’d had money and been broke. He’d had his L.A. adventure, and he was out.” John Densmore: “Jim had changed. You look at him when I met him, and he looked like Michelangelo’s statue of David. When he left, he was overweight with a beard. That was a conscious reaction against the Mick Jagger sex-symbol image.” Morrison was savoring his upcoming escape from the incessant demands and expectations heaped upon rock stars and couldn’t wait to get on “the midnight train” and leave the intense vibes of La La Land behind him.
“Love Her Madly”: Paul Rothchild’s dismissal of the album’s hit single as “cocktail music” can be filed under the heading “Stuff and Nonsense.” While Easy Listening stations of the era might have added Jose Feliciano’s version of “Light My Fire” to the rotation, there’s no way in hell they would have played anything by the Doors, given Jim Morrison’s “unsavory” reputation. I hereby invoke the Wikipedia page on Easy Listening to buttress my argument:
Easy listening (including mood music) is a popular music genre and radio format that was most popular during the 1950s to 1970s. It is related to middle-of-the-road (MOR) music and encompasses instrumental recordings of standards, hit songs, non-rock vocals and instrumental covers of selected popular rock songs. It mostly concentrates on music that pre-dates the rock and roll era, characteristically on music from the 1940s and 1950s . . .
Jackie Gleason, a master at this genre, whose first ten albums went gold, expressed the goal of producing “musical wallpaper that should never be intrusive, but conducive”.
I will now provide aural evidence courtesy of Mr. Gleason which will smash Mr. Rothchild’s assertion to smithereens. THIS IS COCKTAIL MUSIC:
Mr. Rothchild’s objections to the song may have had something to do with the fact that Jim Morrison was a huge fan of Frank Sinatra. “Botnick has recalled that when he first met the Doors in Sunset Sound Studios he showed them the condenser microphone, which Morrison would then use when recording his vocals for their debut album. Morrison was particularly excited about this microphone (the Telefunken U47) as it was the same model that Sinatra had used for some of his recording sessions.” Jim’s performance of “Love Her Madly” reflects Sinatra’s clear articulation and excellent sense of phrasing but he still manages to imbue his vocals with plenty of rock ‘n’ roll mojo, reminiscent of his other favorite singer, Elvis Presley. My heart goes all-aflutter when Jim drops down low on the line, “Don’t you love her as she’s walking out the door,” the kind of move mastered by both Sinatra and Presley. If Rothchild equated Sinatra with “cocktail music,” then he confirmed his status as a superficial listener and a fucking idiot.
Note: Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore all thought that Rothchild attached the cocktail music label to “Riders on the Storm,” an accusation the producer vehemently denied, probably because admitting that error would have moved him up a notch to super fucking idiot.
The song’s backstory is almost worthy of a mini-series. At the time of its composition (September 1970), Jim Morrison was on trial in Miami for asking the audience if they wanted him to pull out his weenie and allegedly following up on that threat. This left his bandmates with little to do except sit on their hands, but Robbie Krieger used the time to fiddle around with a 12-string guitar while musing over troubles with his girlfriend Lynn, who had a nasty habit of punctuating the end of a quarrel by storming out the door.
Lynn had been Morrison’s girlfriend for a while before gravitating to the guitarist and incredibly, Morrison tried to win her back after Lynn and Robbie had started living together. What a pal!
Lynn told Morrison to piss off, continued her sometimes bumpy relationship with Robbie and whaddya know—the pair exchanged vows in December 1970, shortly after the L.A. Woman sessions. The happy couple recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
Aww!
The lyrics to “Love Her Madly” capture the ups and downs of what was once a tumultuous relationship . . . with one exception: “Seven horses seem to be on the march.” The inspiration for that line came from Morrison, according to Songfacts: “Jim always told me: ‘Put in something that makes the listener confused,'” said Krieger. “It didn’t mean much—seven horses were like a lucky omen. Jim liked horse racing from his Florida days. The bit about ‘seem to be on the mark’ simply fitted the military rhythm.”
That “military rhythm” is applied only to the closing line of the bridge; for the most part, “Love Her Madly” features solid forward movement with a rising chord pattern in verse lines five and six that strengthens the song’s momentum, while the break to half-time in the “All your love” mini-bridge provides a welcome contrast and makes the return to straight time all the more exciting. Jerry Scheff continues to assert his presence with a nifty run in the intro and solid rhythmic counterpoints in the mini-bridge. All these rhythmic delights make “Love Her Madly” a fabulous dance number for adventurous and flexible dancers who like to shake their fannies (in the verses) and grind away (in the mini-bridge).
Cocktail music my ass.
“Been Down So Long”: Except for a few nifty licks from Krieger, our first blues number is something of a disappointment, filled largely with trite lyrics and bereft of surprises. Morrison manages to deliver a spirited and heartfelt vocal, but the we’ve-heard-it-all-before lyrics dampen the impact. Not surprisingly, the third verse hints that he is in desperate need of a blow job but the woman in question seems ambivalent about getting down on her knees to fulfill his desires . . . which I suppose would cause a severe case of the blues in a guy as horny as Morrison, so there’s that.
“Cars Hiss by My Window”: This second blues number was composed in the studio, which turned out to be a blessing instead of a curse. The slow loping rhythm syncs well with Robby’s lead guitar, mimicking the shuffle style of Jimmy Reed while respecting Reed’s approach to chording: keep it simple, stupid! In his memoir Life (mostly enjoyable except for the pharmaceutical-heavy chapters), Keith Richards described Jimmy’s chording as “(a) the laziest, sloppiest single thing you can do in that situation, and (b) one of the most brilliant musician inventions of all time.” Krieger’s touch is restrained and marvelous, resulting in several sweet licks that dispel the notion that you have to be a guitar hero with your fingers flying all over the fretboard to prove you know your stuff.
Morrison pretty much made up the lyrics on the spot and followed the wisdom of the best improv performers: sing about what you know. Ray Manzarek recalled that “Jim said it was about living in Venice [Beach], in a hot room, with a hot girlfriend, and an open window, and a bad time (Songfacts). The lyrics are L.A.-specific, introducing the dominant theme and making for a nice lead-in to the deeper exploration of the city in “L.A. Woman.”
The basic lyrical structure consists of two repeated lines devoted to L.A. environmental features followed by a couplet expressing Morrison’s frustration about not getting laid. The first two repeated lines deal with the perpetual presence of automobile (“The cars hiss by my window/Like the waves down on the beach” and “Headlight through my window/Shinin’ on the wall”) while the third set deals with a historical irritant (“Windows started tremblin’/With a sonic boom”). The first set is the most insightful of the three, describing the tension between human activity and natural beauty that mars the L.A. experience. An alternate take includes a fourth verse about a dog crawling out Jim’s window, but it’s a nothingburger that never should have seen the light of day.
The best part comes during the fade when Morrison uses his voice to cook up a pretty decent imitation of a wailing blues guitar, ending his impromptu performance with a touch of wah-wah before turning himself into a meowing cat. I love that passage for two reasons—it’s nice to hear Jim Morrison having some fun and it’s pretty obvious that the sound emanates from the bathroom.
“L.A. Woman”:
In the interest of disclosing personal experiences that might skew my interpretation . . .
Of the many songs written about or referencing L.A., this is the song that moves me the most. The triggers come in the form of shifting tempos, mixing manic, relentless speed with moments of utter exhaustion . . . and three bits of verse:
Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light
Or just another lost angel, city of night . . .Never saw a woman
So alone, so alone . . .Let’s change the mood from glad to sadness
During my late teens and twenties, I lived in Claremont, a pleasant college town on the fringes of the L.A. metro area, where I earned my B.A. I spent my days dutifully attending classes and studying for exams, but I spent many nights and weekends in the core partying and fucking my brains out. Driven by my hyperactive libido and an aching desire to expand my knowledge of the erotic arts, I must have fucked something close to a hundred men and women of varying ethnic backgrounds over that four-year period. Most of the “relationships” were one-or-two-night stands; none lasted longer than a month. About halfway through my journey, I began to feel a yearning for a long-term relationship but never came close to finding “the one”. On the scoreboard I was “a lucky little lady” but in truth was “just another lost angel” in the “city of night,” and wound up with a nasty case of clinical depression in my senior year.
Oddly enough, I love this song and think it’s one of the coolest things the Doors ever did.
As several critics have noted, the “L.A. Woman” is not one of Morrison’s conquests but a symbol of the city itself. Human reactions to Los Angeles fall into three categories: some love the place, others hate it with a passion and many oscillate between love and hate. David Bowie called it “the most vile piss pot in the world” and argued that “the fucking place should be wiped off the face of the earth.” I grew up in San Francisco and you can’t consider yourself a true San Franciscan unless you hate everything about L.A. (especially the Dodgers), but my experience there moved me to a love-hate state of mind similar to the feelings Morrison expresses in the song. The dynamic is similar to a relationship with an unruly and ephemeral love partner, much like the relationship depicted in “Love Her Madly” or in L.A. native Bob Welch’s “Sentimental Lady”—“You are here and warm/But I could look away and you’d be gone.”
Morrison was writing about the L.A. of the early 1970s, a place of darkness and light, the glamorous and the gruesome, a magnet for musicians and their followers who drenched themselves in an environment that prioritized sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and the double-edged freedom of the automobile (still running on leaded gasoline). There was and probably will always be a touch of the noir about Los Angeles, imbuing the city with a delicious sense of danger that makes it all the more alluring. “L.A. Woman” captures the zeitgeist of the city during that period in word, sound and rhythm (and eventually on film, thanks to Ray Manzarek).
Krieger kicks things off with an eerie, dissonant, metallic low-string riff that morphs into the sound of an accelerating engine fading into the distance, followed by a dissonant chord in the left channel that cues a mysterious upward run on the keyboard and the entry of the bass in deep background. Densmore picks up the rhythmic pattern from the bass on the cymbal bell which in turn cues a second bass pattern that gives the rhythm a healthy pulse. Densmore then shifts to the kit, further intensifying the feel of (in Manzarek’s words) “driving madly down the LA freeway—either heading into LA or going out on the 405 up to San Francisco. You’re a beatnik on the road, like Kerouac and Neal Cassady, barreling down the freeway as fast as you can go.” I love how Krieger and Mark Benno respond to the speed with contrasting laid-back riffs, beautifully capturing the curious combination of intensity and chill at the heart of the L.A. experience. Exceptionally well-designed and brilliantly executed, the intro to “L.A. Woman” is a marvelous piece of music that hooks the listener from the get-go.
Morrison matches the rising ferocity with his typical potency, ramping up the mojo in a commanding performance. I love how Jim and Robby engage in a vocal-instrumental call-and-response in the verses, making this chick want to scream with delight after every line. I also love the brilliant compositional move to truncate the fifth line of each verse and insert a brief pause before the chord change from E7 to D, a dramatic move that strengthens the power of the succeding lines.
Well, I just got into town about an hour ago
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows
Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light
Or just another lost angel . . . city of night
City of night, city of night, city of night, woo, come on!
Morrison borrowed the phrase “city of night” from the book of the same name by John Rechy, a gay fiction classic set in various locales across the USA, including and especially Los Angeles. The Wikipedia article on the book was written by someone who seems to be more than a little squeamish about homosexuality: “Throughout the novel, the unnamed narrator has trysts with various peculiar characters, including another hustler, an older man, an S&M enthusiast and a bed-ridden old man. All of these relationships range in the extent of their emotional and sexual nature, as well as in their peculiarity.” The author’s webpage features a more accurate take: “This is a novel about America. It is a novel about loneliness, about love and the ceaseless, furtive search for love.” I neither know nor care whether Jim Morrison was a switch-hitter or not, but I do know he had an affinity for the outcasts in American society because he was an outcast himself. I interpret his use of the phrase as a kind of wake-up call to those who either refuse to accept the existence of outcasts or couldn’t care less about their plight.
The second verse addresses the emptiness of life in the L.A. suburbs (“Drive through your suburbs/Into your blues”) followed by Ray Manzarek’s rather cheery and melodic piano solo. The band then lowers the volume a bit while shifting out of drive and into a Latin beat at the same speed. Set to a simple E-D chord pattern, Morrison sings about one of the “woman’s” native vulnerabilities while still maintaining his love for the old broad:
I see your hair is burnin’
Hills are filled with fire
If they say I never loved you
You know they are a liar
If Morrison had only waited a few months he might have mentioned earthquakes as well. Beneath all the action, the near-perpetual sunshine and the glamorous façade lies a very fragile environment. After that passage, the band kicks into high gear, with Densmore powering the ride with genuine enthusiasm. Morrison uses the opportunity to punch a few more holes in the L.A. façade, extending the pause before the chord change to emphasize the sense of loneliness that is part and parcel of the scene:
Drivin’ down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman . . . . . .
So alone, so alone
So alone, so alone
That verse hits me in the gut every time.
The next shift involves a gradual slowdown with Densmore leading the way with a dominant performance on the kit. The guitarists respond by introducing more blue notes in their phrases, reinforcing the loneliness theme of the preceding verse. When we finally hit rock bottom, Morrison enters singing the phrase “Mr. Mojo Risin’,'” which works out to be an anagram of his name. Densmore told LAWeekly about his plan of attack: “I knew that mojo was a sexual term from the blues, and that gave me the idea to go slow and dark with the tempo. It also gave me the idea to slowly speed it up like an orgasm. The difficulty is that it’s a seven-minute song, and at the end, I was trying to approximate the same tempo I did seven minutes earlier. I overshot it. It’s faster at the end. But you know, sometimes you get excited when you have sex.” I think we can cut Densmore a break here, as the band dutifully followed his lead and were probably caught up in the excitement as well. After all, the entire segment is an aural representation of Morrison getting a boner and those very useful appendages don’t reach full length all at once. In the faster passages, Morrison changes the verb from “risin'” to “ridin'” which tells us he was either having a waking wet dream or was banging some broad in the bathroom.
Kreiger certainly had no problem with the extra burst of speed, building a bridge to the reprise of the first verse with nimble phrases of unfettered rock guitar. Morrison sure sounds like he had a hell of an orgasm before tackling the bridge, as the tone in his husky voice sounds like that tingly feeling continued far beyond ejaculation. Contrary to Densmore’s claim, the song actually clocks in at eight minutes and though it calls up some unpleasant memories, I hate it when it fades out.
“L.A Woman” reflects both reality and legend. Speeding on an L.A. freeway? At 4 a.m., maybe. I always thought L.A.’s horrendous traffic began sometime in the ’50s, but a study published by the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy dispelled that notion in the study’s title: “A Century of Fighting Traffic Congestion in Los Angeles 1920-2020.” Los Angeles is as mythical as it is real, and that’s part of the fun . . . and sometimes the not-so-fun.
I have one more “oddly enough” before I flip the disc to side two. After listening intently to “L.A. Woman” more than a few times, I felt a fleeting urge to go back and pay the Angelenos a visit. Of course, that won’t happen in my lifetime because Americans will always cling to their guns but I felt the need to mention it to emphasize that “L.A. Woman” must be one helluva song to ignite that deeply latent desire.
Side Two
“L’America”: This leftover from the Morrison Hotel sessions was designed for the soundtrack of the Michelangelo Antonioni film Zabriskie Point, but Antonioni decided to go with Pink Floyd. Good call! The song is a stew of incompatible parts and weird lyrics. As much as I hate to say it, I might have settled for another blues number instead of this turkey.
“Hyacinth House”: Boy, oh, boy has this song been over-interpreted or what? “Hyacinth House” has nothing to do with Hyacinth of Greek mythology—there are no connections to the multi-tasking Greek god Apollo, no mention of an accidental death and no one’s blood is transformed into a flower. Robby Krieger just happened to live in a house with hyacinths growing in his garden and Morrison used to hang out there.
As for the references to Chopin’s Polonaise in Ab major, yes, you could say that Ray Manzarek borrowed one of Chopin’s riffs, but the melodic line in question also appears in “Cheek to Cheek” when Fred Astaire sings the lines, “I’m in heaven.”
These examples of interpretive inflation only serve to divert attention from the true meaning of the song, best captured by John Densmore: “He was re-examining, but not with regret. Toward the end, Jim said, ‘Probably next time, I’d be a little solitary, Zen gardener working in his garden.’ I don’t interpret that as a regret, but he had a hunch.” The motivation behind Jim’s desire for solitude involved various forms of unsatisfactory relationships—people who demand too much, people who are too damn needy, people who invade his privacy and people who pay scant attention to his needs:
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t bother me
I need a brand new friend who doesn’t trouble me
I need someone, yeah who doesn’t need meI see the bathroom is clear
I think that somebody’s near
I’m sure that someone is following me, oh yeahWhy did you throw the jack of hearts away?
Why did you throw the jack of hearts away?
It was the only card in the deck that I had left to playAnd I’ll say it again, I need a brand new friend
The card game metaphor is a brilliant bit of poetic insight. When you’re playing a game involving two sets of partners, you might send silent messages to your partner regarding your needs, but those messages are always ambiguous and can easily be misinterpreted. Winning often depends on having a partner with an intuitive grasp of your tendencies and who can anticipate your needs without resorting to spoken language. Finding that kind of deep connection is quite difficult, and in Jim Morrison’s case, it would have been near-impossible because of his celebrity status—likely another reason behind his desire to escape from L.A.
The music is simple and breezy with a touch of melancholy. The two guitarists match subtlety with dexterity, filling the empty spaces with sweet counterpoints. Jerry Scheff continues his hot streak with just the right kind of run at the right moment while Densmore moves the piece forward with some lively drum patterns. And despite some critical opinions that describe the song as “one of the strangest songs the Doors have recorded” and Morrison’s vocals as “lethargic and flaccid,” I would respond that the song is only strange to those who don’t bother to listen carefully and that Morrison’s emotionally flat vocals are in perfect sync with lyric and mood.
“Crawling King Snake”: Yawn. Compared to either the John Lee Hooker version or the female take by Etta James, this rendition really does qualify as flaccid. Pure album filler.
“The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)”: The best thing about this spoken word performance of early Morrison poetry is that I know that it will be over in four minutes and sixteen seconds and “Riders on the Storm” awaits me.
“Riders on the Storm”: Jim Morrison’s final contribution to music is one of the most compelling mood songs ever recorded and contains some of his most insightful poetry. If you listen to the studio chatter that precedes the song proper, you’ll hear Morrison interrupting the count-in and asking the band members, “Hey wait a minute—are we serious now?” It was obvious that the song held great meaning for him and he worked hard to get it right.
The mood’s origins came from tinkering with the old country tune “Ghost Riders In The Sky,” but the origin bears little resemblance to the original. Country stylings were replaced with jazz and blues influences, the tempo slowed and the volume lowered. The primary influences of the “Ghost Riders in the Sky” arrive in the title and lyrics (Morrison wrote them while the boys were jamming), not the music.
With due respect to Robby Krieger, the sounds that created the mood came largely from Manzarek’s Rhodes piano, Jerry Scheff’s bass (playing the left-hand piano part to give Manzarek more room to riff), the endless rain and thunder and the last-minute decision to have Morrison double-track his vocals with whispered lyrics. The whispers are more prominent in the fade, but if you listen closely you can hear them throughout the song. The mood falls somewhere between eerieness and mystery, evoking feelings of anxiety, unease and a sense of danger. The arrangement holds you in rapt attention and never lets up.
The opening verse refers to some of Martin Heidegger’s philosophical meanderings, but if you haven’t taken the time to read Heidegger, lucky you! The guy was a Nazi who wrote like shit and his reasoning is extraordinarily difficult to follow. I managed to find another philosopher who had the patience to slog through “Being in Time” and translate the muck into easy-to-understand English. Before we go there, let’s take a look at the verse in question:
Riders on the storm
Into this house, we’re born
Into this world, we’re thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm
The main message is we are thrown into the world without preparation (Heidegger’s concept of “thrownness”). The “dog without a bone” reference is not from Heidegger but from philosopher Ernst Bloch who thought Heidegger was full of crap because “thrownness” denies the human being the right to have hope. If you’ve ever wondered, “How did I wind up with these loser parents?” or “How in the hell did I wind up in this dump?” you are struggling with the concept of thrownness. Fortunately, Heidegger’s view of life isn’t as bleak as it seems. In a piece for The Guardian, Simon Critchley put it all together for us in one well-written paragraph:
So, the human being is not just a being defined by being thrown into the world. It is also one who can throw off that thrown condition in a movement where it seizes hold of its possibilities, where it acts in a concrete situation. This movement is what Heidegger calls projection (Entwurf) and it is the very experience of what Heidegger will call, later in Being and Time, freedom. Freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept. It is the experience of the human being demonstrating its potential through acting in the world. To act in such a way is to be authentic.
So if you’re pissed off about living in Buttfuck, Wyoming and your parents are abusive drunks, GET OFF YOUR ASS A DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. We can interpret Jim’s move to Paris as doing something about the malaise he felt in Los Angeles.
The second verse deals with one of the unpleasant variables that might interfere with your desire to reach your potential: bad guys. If you remember the film The Hitchhiker (featuring William Talman as the murderous bastard a few years before he switched sides and played Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason), then you’re familiar with the second-hand source material (there was a real killer named Billy “Cockeyed” Cook who preyed on hitchhikers and inspired the movie).
There’s a killer on the road
His brain is squirmin’ like a toad
Take a long holiday
Let your children play
If you give this man a ride
Sweet family will die
Killer on the road, yeah
“His brain is squirmin’ like a toad” is one helluva descriptive simile.
The third verse may seem sexist, but this hardcore feminist has a different take. What I hear is a man admitting that he is incomplete without a woman’s love and attempting to extend that fundamental truth to all men:
Girl, you gotta love your man
Girl, you gotta love your man
Take him by the hand
Make him understand
The world on you depends
Our life will never end
Gotta love your man, yeah
Men in many human cultures are raised to be tough, aggressive and independent. The love provided by a woman allows a man to express his vulnerabilities without necessarily sacrificing his masculinity; a woman’s native emotional intelligence can sense when a man needs support and understanding. Guys! Most straight and bisexual women don’t want to emasculate you! We love a good hard one! Just stop turning away and brooding—talk to us instead of using us as punching bags to relieve your frustrations.
When this brilliant and strangely beautiful song fades into nothingness, I always sigh and think, “He had so much more to give.”
*****
In the end, L.A. Woman is an album of unfulfilled promise. The Doors had reconnected with their essence and felt more confident in their abilities—and after listening to the album several times, I get the feeling that the next album (assuming a fully engaged Jim Morrison and more time to compose new songs) would have been a fantastic piece of work. There is a lot to admire in L.A. Woman and it would have been great to hear the band progress to an even higher level.
If only, if only, if only . . .