After Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman saw The Doors at the Whisky in May 1966, it took until July before he was able to sign the group that would change the course of Elektra. Within a month, they were in Sunset Sound recording one of the great debut albums of all time.
But first, Jac Holzman had to convince Paul Rothchild to produce the band. Rothchild was enamored with The Paupers, a Canadian group who would eventually sign to Verve/Forecast. Despite the backing of impresario Albert Grossman, they flopped miserably. Rothchild was still on parole, and it took some convincing to get permission for him to leave the New Jersey area to work in sinful California. Holzman had to guarantee Rothchild’s good behavior to his parole officer before he could leave for California.
“Rothchild rehearsed The Doors for two solid weeks,” recalls Holzman, “running the material so as to make it second nature when the band got into the studio. They could lay down just a few takes and not drain their enthusiasm or energy. You take the song to 80 percent of where it has to be, and the extra 20 percent comes from the excitement and pressure of recording. When the album was completed, I took the tapes home and listened to them through headphones. I grinned the whole way through. Neither I nor anyone else had heard its like before.”
Rothchild knew exactly how to capture their unconventional sound. “I didn’t want a Doors record to sound like any other. If you have something special, the best you can do is to keep it as pure as possible.”
Engineer Bruce Botnick says: “We nailed the sound on the first day. And after that, no one touched a knob, an amplifier, or a microphone. It was all recorded live. Even tape delays on the voice were done in the moment.”
The band’s work in the clubs had given them enough prepared material for two albums. Guitarist Robby Krieger knew his band was ready. “All they had to do in the studio was turn on the tape recorder. We knew those songs so well: we’d been playing them three sets a night for a year at least. That album came naturally. What else would open the album but ‘Break On Through’? What else would close but ‘The End’?”
“The joy of that first album comes from the whole point of putting a rock & roll band together, which is to make a record,” said keyboard player Ray Manzarek. “To actually be in a recording studio for that first time is an existential moment. It only happens once in your life, and if that doesn’t energise you nothing will. You’ve got a beat Southern gothic French symbolist poet who joins with a classical jazz-blues keyboard player, a jazz marching-band drummer, and a bottleneck American-folk-blues flamenco guitarist. Take those four disparate types and play Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Willie Dixon, plus our own songs. The Doors combines all those elements.”
The Doors was a devastating debut with a new, dramatic sound and confrontational, controversial lyrics about sex and death, all of which introduced America’s first adult rock band. There were outstanding songs, knife-edge drama, and inspired performances from all four members of the band.
“One day, Jim said, ‘We don’t have enough material, so why don’t you guys write something?’” Krieger recalls. “I went home, and the first thing I came up with was ‘Light My Fire’. It’s been downhill ever since…
“Jim admired songs rooted in universal subjects. So I figured I would write about the base elements. I loved the Stones’ ‘Play With Fire’, so I chose to write about fire, using folk-rock chords. There was a version of ‘Hey Joe’ by The Leaves and I was drawn to the chord sequence. On the solo I wanted my guitar to sound like Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’.”
Krieger also wrote the songs ‘You’re Lost Little Girl’ and ‘Love Me Two Times’ for the first two albums, and these marked him out as the only regular songwriter in the group apart from Jim Morrison.
Holzman discovered immediately that they were instinctively smart about issues that had broken up other groups. “All monies from performing, writing, and publishing were split equally,” he says, “and all copyrights were listed in the name of the entire band. When it came to their visual image, The Doors knew what needed to be done — they put their personal egos aside and Jim up front. During the photo shoot for the first album cover they said to Bill Harvey, ‘Let’s make Jim a little bit bigger.’ They knew he was the draw.”
Holzman had committed to releasing the album in November 1966, but he was afraid it might get lost during the Christmas holidays. He convinced the band to wait, releasing The Doors on January 4, 1967 and having pledged to release no other album that month and focus exclusively on The Doors. It was a strategy he would come to repeat. “I knew this album would catapult Elektra to another level,” says Holzman. “The record seethed with incredible power and internal strength, all powered by a conventional line-up of musicians. It did not sound of its time: it was a timeless sound.”
Holzman backed his faith with the first-ever billboard on the Strip to launch a pop album and a band. The billboard simply said ‘Break On Through With An Electrifying Album’ and featured the jacket photo, with Jim Morrison’s head floating above Sunset Strip. “Because no one had even used a billboard to promote music before,” says Holzman, “people in music knew we were serious. The DJs, who still picked what they played, were driving to and from their station offices and were impressed by it. When I took that billboard I reserved it for a year in advance. All new Elektra artists wanted to be on the billboard.”
The Doors upped the ante on everything, says Holzman, and their debut record was better than their live performance. “You only have to listen to the Matrix tapes done after The Doors was released,” he says, referring to tapes of two renowned shows recorded at San Francisco’s intimate Matrix club in March 1967. “Rothchild and Botnick vested time, care, and experience into that first album. It was lovingly nursed into existence.”
Holzman knew Elektra must address AM radio for The Doors. “In the past, we had released singles with the hope that they would be played and become a calling-card for the album. The impetus given to alternative music by FM radio, starting in the mid 60s, was introducing new acts and selling records. We had very large Doors sales just on the strength of FM in Los Angeles.”
To give them a national push, Holzman relied on Steve Harris, who knew how to talk to DJs and how to work with program directors. Holzman spoke firmly to local distributors throughout the country, tying their future distribution of Elektra to their success with AM radio. He advised them: “We must have your local radio support to launch this band.” It was ‘Break On Through’ that conveyed the essence of the first album. The title was a statement in itself and it was the obvious introductory single.
Holzman says the philosophy was simple. He knew they were going to lose the first single and wanted to see what the ‘consensus’ single was — and that would most likely come from what was played on FM. “When we were convinced that it was ‘Light My Fire’ and that we could cut it to the required length for AM radio, we went with it. Suddenly, the album was selling 250,000 a month and the single even more. We couldn’t press them fast enough. That blew our sandals off.”
At first, the band couldn’t believe the severity of Rothchild’s radio edit of ‘Light My Fire’. He had simply removed all the solos. Ray Manzarek seethed. “Robby and I looked at each other and we both hated it. Then Paul said to just imagine you’re a kid in Minneapolis, Minnesota, you are 17 years old, and you’ve never heard of The Doors. You love rock & roll — and this comes on the radio. We thought about that, and Morrison presciently says, well, if you hear it on the radio like this, and you like it, and go out and buy the album, then you get the bonus of a seven-minute ‘Light My Fire’ that you never expected. And we all said, ‘Call New York and tell Jac it’s a go!’”
‘Light My Fire’ is a tour de force. The song spirals out of Manzarek’s flowing organ line into a perfectly timed and executed guitar solo from Robby Krieger. All this, plus hooks and choruses. It was a pop hit that defined the year, as much as Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ or even Sgt Pepper. ‘Light My Fire’ topped the chart for the first three weeks in July 1967, selling over one million copies. Elektra was 16 years old, and this was its first Number One single.
“After ‘Light My Fire’,” said Manzarek, “everything just exploded, two years from the day that Jim and I sat on the beach and he sang ‘Moonlight Drive’. That was the middle of July 1965, and in mid-July 1967 The Doors were the number one band in America.
“When we hit, we were ready,” Manzarek confirmed. “‘The End’ was originally three minutes long, a farewell to Jim’s UCLA girlfriend, but we had so much time, and we chose to experiment and stretch it. We were playing an Indian modal style, and it just went on and on, and Jim improvised — like a jazz band. I don’t want to be in a band that plays the same songs the same damn way every night. And no jazz group had a singer who could do what Jim did. Wasn’t that amazing? We had Jim Morrison, a poetic improviser with words.”
Holzman says The Doors were the result of natural selection: they found each other. “Robby’s guitar-playing looked so deceptively simple. Mike Bloomfield would eke out an E-minor chord and go into an orgasm on stage with the sheer bravado of his own technique. Robby would be spinning incredible riffs, and he might be watching an insect on the ceiling, or perhaps considering that in six months time he might buy another pair of jeans. There was a very special Brechtian feel you got from Ray Manzarek. Whenever Ray played I saw two colours: earth brown and purple. So you have the uniqueness of Ray’s keyboard platform supporting equally precise, and liquid guitar lines from Robby, given structural integrity by John’s very inventive staccato drumming.”
Bruce Botnick adds a cooler perspective to the oft-told tale of the beginnings of The Doors. “Jim wasn’t a musician. Zip. As has been told through the ages, he sat on the beach and sang some songs, quietly, to Ray. When Ray said let’s start a band, Jim didn’t really understand what that meant. This wasn’t his world.” It would become his world, and eventually it swallowed him. But from day one, The Doors were utterly distinctive, and they still are.
Bruce Botnick has the longest and closest relationship with the group, and he pinpoints what was so different about them. There were no peace-and-love vibes and nothing beyond their improvisation to link them to the acid-rock movement in San Francisco that built around groups such as the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service. In Los Angeles, they were far removed from The Byrds or The Mamas & The Papas.
“Melodically, they were very strong, and lyrically they were amazing,” says Botnick. “The Doors paid no attention to any prevailing sound, although the folk-rock style was dominant in L.A. Robby has that flamenco background, and Butterfield and blues music were an influence on him. But they had none of the identifiable 60s crutches, no electric 12-string guitars, harpsichords, nor even a bass player. That really set them apart.”
That, and Jim Morrison’s talent for poetry, his lived-in voice, and his brooding, towering presence.
“Jim was a huge Elvis fan,” explains Botnick, “and an even bigger Sinatra fan. When I first met Jim and showed him where he was going to sing in the vocal booth at Sunset Sound, I had a Telfunken U-47 microphone up, and he froze. He looked at it and he said ‘Frank Sinatra’. And I said right. On Sinatra’s Swinging Session there’s pictures of a U-47 with a Capitol logo on, and that’s when I knew he was a Sinatra fan. Jim had this enormous vocal range and could go from a whisper to a scream, from zero to sixty in two seconds. He could croon and then scream. I’d marvel — how do you do that?”
Paul Rothchild, too, realized that Morrison was blessed with a magnificent vocal instrument. “His was one of the greatest voices I’ve ever had the delight to work with,” said the producer. “He talked about being a crooner, admiring Sinatra’s phrasing enormously, and he could do a mean Elvis. But he was really an accidental musician.”
Excerpted from Becoming Elektra: The True Story Of Jac Holzman’s Visionary Record Label by Mick Houghton, published by Jawbone Press. Available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine retailers.
Top photo: Michael Ochs Archives // Getty Images
