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s the Doors’ sessions progressed, “Soul Kitchen” got its organ intro, secret alphabets, and neon grooves. The slow shuffle of“Crystal Ship” was balanced with a tender piano interlude. “Alabama Song” became a cross between an oom-pah beer garden band and a de-cadent Weimar carousel. The zitherlike carnival music on the track was overdubbed by Ray on a Marxaphone, a sort of autoharp often used on the Disney sessions. Jim also changed the lyrics of the song by dropping the sarcastic verse that began “Show us the way to the next little dollar.”
“Back Door Man” was the hardest rock on the record, and would be-come a critical Doors performance piece: the sonic cushion over which Jim ranted, improvised, and declaimed onstage for the next four years.
Everything about the recording meshed with the rough-trade sexuality of Jim’s stage demeanor: the primal tom-tom rhythm, the no-limits blues style, the grunts and vocal cries that ended in an ear-piercing scream. It was the most elementally evil of Doors songs, and carried sinister echoes of illicit, down-and-dirty sex that stayed forever with anyone who heard it. Jim reconfigured his version of “Back Door Man,” using only two of the five verses written in 1952 (as “Back Door Friend”) by Willie Dixon, the in-house arranger and bassist at Chess Records in Chicago. Howlin’
Wolf later cut “Back Door Man,” which was later covered by John Ham-mond Jr., whose version was brought to the Doors by Robby. Jim Morri-son supplied his own twist, with lubricious insinuating rants and a mocking, contemptuous sneer in the song’s chicken-eating narrative. Jim Morrison, the song implied with an evil grin, was the guy who was going to put a giant pair of horns on America’s young men by fucking their girlfriends up the ass.
Productionwise, Paul Rothchild deliberately distanced Jim from the analog immediacy of the band’s music. The voice of the Doors sounded far away from the listener when “Break On Through” exploded out of the speakers, giving the vocals a mythic, haunting quality. To bring this great, epochal rock song into play, John Densmore turned to Brazilian rhythm, slightly rocking up the brushy drum intro to the bossa classic
“Desafinado” as recorded by Stan Getz two years earlier. They speeded up the number halfway through, so by the time Jim got into the intense
counting of week-to-week, day-to-day, and hour-to-hour, the number was an urgent telegram. Soon “Break On Through” (in slightly censored form) would take its place as one of the greatest album openers in the history of rock.
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im went a little mad when they tried to cut “The End.” The first night he had taken LSD and they failed to get a magical version of the Doors’ dramatic show closer. On the second night, Jim had disap-peared before the session started, and someone found him in Blessed Sacrament, the big Catholic church just across Sunset. Jim brought back a prayer book and started tearing out pages one by one, mumbling to himself. Bruce Botnick turned up the monitor in the control booth, and heard Jim chanting: “Kill the father, fuck the mother.” He assumed that this was part of “The End,” which he hadn’t heard before they recorded it. He noticed that occasionally Jim referred to some handwritten lyrics that were jammed into the back pocket of his dungarees.On the second night, Rothchild recalled, “We were in the middle of recording ‘The End.’ The lights had been dimmed and candles were burning right next to Jim, whose back was to the control room. The only other illumination came from the lights on the VU meters. The studio was very dark. We had it kind of choreographed. Sometimes Jim was leading the band. Or when the band was full-out cranking, we couldn’t have Jim in the room, so we had him in the vocal booth, and he’d be run-ning back and forth between the booth and the [vocal] mike Bruce had set up out there.
“It was totally hypnotic. There were four other people in the control room at the time. When the take was over, we realized that the tape was still running. Bruce, the engineer, was completely immersed in this take—we all were. We all felt like the Muse had visited the studio that time, and all of us were the audience. The machines knew what to do!”
In the cataclysmic raga and white-noise band section that followed the song’s primal scene, Jim scatted out percussive kills and fucks like a talking drum; these were mixed way down and suppressed on the al-bum, but were transcendent in the studio—the Doors in full cry, immor-talizing themselves in their moment.
Rothchild: “We were halfway through and I got chills, top to bottom.
I said, ‘Bruce, do you know what’s happening out there? This is history, right at this moment. This is why we came here. This is it.’ At the end of the take I was as drained as anyone in the room.”
It was a moment that neither Rothchild nor Botnick ever forgot.
Then Rothchild asked for another take.
It didn’t happen. Jim was in a full-blown manic episode now, al-though no one recognized the situation. “He was on this Oedipus com-plex trip,” Robby Krieger said later. “ ‘Fuck the mother, kill the father.’
He would just rant on like that, for hours. When we finally got him in to record [‘The End’], he did it great. Then we decided he was too high to continue the session, so we closed up and left.”
The night was young, though, and the moon was full in Scorpio. Two hours later, peaking on acid and alcohol, Jim the human fly vaulted over the chain-link fence surrounding Sunset Sound and broke into the stu-dio. Storming into the room where they had just finished “The End,” Jim sat down, took off his boots, and lit a joint. He looked around awhile, and then grabbed a big copper fire extinguisher off the wall and let fly, soaking the studio, the equipment and the instruments—even the harpsi-chord!—with chemical foam.
Paul Rothchild jumped the wall and dragged him out of there. But Jim had left his boots behind.
The next morning, Bruce Botnick got a phone call from an apoplec-tic Tutti Camaratta. “Get down here! What the hell is going on?”
Jim’s boots were found, covered in foam, although he claimed to have no memory of the incident. In fact, he just laughed when asked about it. To John Densmore, Jim avowed incredulity. “Did I do that?”
Jac Holzman mollified Tutti with a check, and someone cleaned up the mess Jim had made. Camaratta suggested to Holzman, a valued client, that the five thousand dollars he was spending to record the Doors was a waste of Elektra’s good money. Holzman thanked him for his sage advice, and tried not to worry. (As of this writing, the Doors’
album sales, in all formats, is above fifty million units and climbing.)
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few months later,as The Doors was released, Rothchild de-ployed his vintage 1967 hip-speak to explain just what “The End”was really about. He was Elektra’s village explainer, and his remarks
were published in the early rock journal Crawdaddy, which was partially subsidized by Elektra.
Rothchild: “At one point during the recording session [Jim] was very emotionally moved, and he was wondering, and he was tear-ful . . . and he shouted in the studio: ‘DOES ANYONE UNDERSTAND ME?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ Right there we got into a long discussion about just what does this mean—kill the father, fuck the mother—
which Jim kept saying over and over—and essentially it boils down to just this:
“ ‘Kill the father’ means kill all of those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself. They are not of your own. They are alien concepts which are not yours. They must die. Those are the things that must die. The psychedelic revolution.
“ ‘Fuck the mother’ is very basic. And it means, get back to the essence. What is the reality? Fuck the mother is, very basically, Mother:
mother-birth, real, very real, you can touch it, you can grab it, you can feel it. It’s nature, it’s real, it can’t lie to you.
“So what he says at the end of the Oedipus section, which is essentially the same thing as the classic [Oedipus Rex] says: kill the alien concepts, get back to reality, which is precisely what the song is about. The End. The end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts. Get to reality, get to your own reality, get to your own in-touch-with-yourself situation.”