![]() We were comfortable there, plus there were two titty bars next door. “We adapted our rehearsal room, bringing in a portable board, a kind of forerunner of today’s ProTools set-up. It was a shock and, at first, it was suggested that I produce the record, but then we decided that we would all produce it with Bruce. He’d just made an LP with Janis Joplin, and possibly he thought The Doors were going downhill and there were better pastures for him. He was bored and said, ‘“Riders On The Storm” was like cocktail music.’ I didn’t know what to make of that. “As normal, we played the songs to Paul Rothchild and he just didn’t dig it. It’s not something a bass player would come up with – it has more of a jazzy melody to it. When we recorded it, Jerry Scheff, the bass player, just played what Ray was playing with his left hand and that’s why it’s so distinctive. Robby Krieger (guitars): “We were playing ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky’ and Jim was fooling around and came up with ‘Ghost Riders On The Storm’. I love the sound of The Doors – I can become an outsider now and think to myself, that is one tight motherfucking band.” Jim had a great mind and when we were starting out, he said that in that year we had a great visitation of energy and that year for us lasted from 1966 until 1971. Every Doors song has its own spirituality, its own existential moment. Fast, hard and rocking, but cool and dark, too. Viewing it from the outside, you can put a neat little bow on it and see it as our last performance, but for us we were just playing our butts off. How prophetic is that? A whisper fading away into eternity, where he is now. “It was the last song recorded by The Doors and the whisper voice is the last singing that Jim ever did in the studio, in the background on the ride out. It gives the song a different perspective. The last verse: ‘Your world on him depends/Our life will never end/You gotta love your man.’ It becomes a very spiritual song you won’t still occupy this body, but the essential life will never end, and love is the answer to all things. ![]() Interestingly, Jim was pulled in two directions – he didn’t want to complete the song just about a killer hitchhiker. In essence, it was a very filmic song about a serial killer – way ahead of his time in 1970. ![]() Serial killers are all the rage now, but in America they go back to Billy The Kid. Jim already had the story about a killer hitchhiker on the road. I proposed the bassline and piano part the jazzy style was my idea. Ray Manzarek (keyboards): “Robby and Jim were playing, jamming something out of ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky’. Today, Densmore is pragmatic about what might have been: “Either Jim would be a drunk playing blues in a club, or a vibrant, creative artist, clean and sober like Eric Clapton.” As it was, released shortly after the singer’s death, “Riders On The Storm” would become his haunted, mesmerising swansong. In the weeks before Morrison died on July 3, 1971, he intimated to John Densmore that he would soon be ready to record again. LA Woman was released in June and it quelled any doubts that The Doors were a spent force. They began mixing the following March but, even before completion, Morrison had re-located to Paris. The decision to record in their own two-storey workshop rather than a hired studio also re-energised the band, and they wrapped the entire LP in five days. The Doors then elected to produce the album themselves, with help from regular engineer Bruce Botnick. The band fell out with their long-term producer, Paul Rothchild, who quit two weeks in, unwilling to go another six rounds with an increasingly drunken, unpredictable singer. ![]() The LA Woman sessions began badly in November 1970. The final track on the final Doors album, its irrepressibly maudlin lyric would serve as their singer’s sultry, rain-washed epitaph. But LA Woman was the LP that pulled them back from the brink, breaking new ground with its mesmerising seven-minute epic, “Riders On The Storm”. Jim Morrison was charged with indecent exposure in Miami in September, then apparently suffered a breakdown at the band’s last ever show in New Orleans. Their tour at the end of 1970 had been disastrous. By the time The Doors came to make their sixth and final studio album, LA Woman, they were close to collapse. ![]()
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