Not much ran smoothly for The Doors. And so it was with sessions for their sixth album, L.A. Woman. In November 1970, regular producer Paul Rothchild, unconvinced by what he was hearing in the studio, decided to quit. Enter engineer Bruce Botnick, who joined the band in their old rehearsal space, the Doors Workshop, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a back-to-basics move that mirrored the eventual tone of the album itself. Gone were the symphonic flourishes and painstaking exactitude of their most recent work, replaced instead by a freer, garage-blues sound that harked back to their beginnings.
This was most keenly expressed on the title track, the final track recorded during the album sessions. On one level, it’s a simple song about barrelling down the LA Freeway, lights a-blur and the wind at its tail. But it’s also a conflicted homage to Los Angeles as a living entity, a promised land of midnight alleys and Hollywood bungalows, peopled by the lost and lonely.
As drummer John Densmore remarked in the documentary, The Story of L.A. Woman: “The metaphor for the city as a woman is brilliant – cops in cars, never saw a woman so alone…The physicality of the town and thinking of her and how we need to take care of her. It’s my hometown.”
Musically, L.A. Woman shifts through the gears. Densmore’s tight rhythm and Ray Manzarek’s descending organ riff hurry it along, before Jim Morrison’s vocals (mimic’d after each line by Robby Krieger bluesy guitar) open the throttle. Elvis’s former bassist Jerry Scheff adds a sense of propulsion, as does rhythm guitarist Marc Benno.
Morrison’s repeated phrase – ‘City of Night, City of Night’ – takes its cue from John Rechy’s underground novel of the same name, which depicts a demi-monde of hustlers, fiends and illicit sexual trysts, partly set in Los Angeles, while further inspiration came from 1940s writer John Fante, who described Hollywood in love-hate lines like: ‘So fuck you, Los Angeles, fuck your palm trees, and your high-assed women, and your fancy streets… Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand…’
“L.A. Woman was recorded in a state of high excitement,” said Manzarek. “The Doors jumped in. We dug our teeth into that song. It was all about passion and hauling ass. It felt like we were on Route 101, on the road from Bakersfield to San Francisco. You can hear our enthusiasm. Welcome to Los Angeles!”
Hurtling through eight minutes of dark psychedelic blues, the song heads for optimum pick-up when Morrison begins to intone ‘Mr. Mojo Risin’ (an anagram of his own name) over and over. As his vocals become more frenzied – ‘Risin’!, Risin’!’ – the symbolism is obvious.
The Doors debuted L.A. Woman at the State Fair Music Hall in Dallas that December, and reprised it at The Warehouse in New Orleans the following night, the only times the four men played the song.
In Texas, a doomy 15-minute version of L.A. Woman was unveiled during a relatively triumphant show. Morrison was drunk but coherent. But Louisiana was a fiasco, and the last live show the band ever gave.
“He just lost his energy completely,” said Mazarak. “He was so dissipated. His voice got lower and lower, and he ground to a halt. He was empty. This wasn’t like when he comes to the studio wasted and can’t deliver, but then there’s always tomorrow – and by God, he will deliver. This was final.”
Morrison’s legend continues to endure, of course, not least via what Krieger calls “the quintessential Doors song,” but within three months of its parent album’s release in early 1971, Morrison was dead. The music was over.