T
he Doors begantheir epochal gig at the Whisky a Go Go, at 8901 Sunset Boulevard, on Monday, May 23, 1966. Coheadlining were Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (with a young Ry Cooder on guitar) and the hot new group, Buffalo Springfield.For the next three and a half months, the Doors got an education in Classic Rockology by opening for some of the best groups in pop music.
In the process they would turn into a fire-breathing rock band, land a recording contract with one of the better labels in the industry, and be-gin to build a notorious reputation as a noirish, artistically valid band fronted by a potential superstar and godhead-in-waiting.
It was slow going at first, and the Whisky’s reputation as a squares-only mob operation didn’t help. In Hollywood the Trip, the Ash Grove, and the Troubadour were considered hip clubs, while the Whisky had an uncool vibe, out-of-town owners, Mafia-grade bouncers, and a swinger clientele in jackets, ties, and beehive hairdos. Besides, in 1966 the whole go-go/discotheque thing was so 1964.
When the Doors first appeared at the Whisky, some people mistook Ray Manzarek for John Sebastian, whose cheerful pop tunes with the Lovin’ Spoonful (“Do You Believe in Magic?”) were holding their own on the radio with new Beatles songs like “Penny Lane.” Jim Morrison was visibly nervous in his first few shows. Some of the Whisky’s swingers thought Jim’s piercing screams and his Beat poetry shtick were hokey and pretentious, and that he embarrassed himself and the club.
But Captain Beefheart—the painter Don van Vliet—liked the Doors, and so did his patron Frank Zappa. If any L.A. band had a claim to artis-tic integrity, it was the Mothers of Invention, composed of actual musi-cians and led by Zappa, who lived in Laurel Canyon with his wife and extended hippie family. The Mothers’ first album, No Commercial Poten-tial, was released that summer as a savagely antipop satire. Though in-trinsically cynical, Zappa connected with what Jim Morrison was trying to do. Zappa actively talked up the Doors and even discussed signing them to the record label he was planning.
The other band on the bill was Buffalo Springfield, only a few months old and still unknown beyond the Strip. But this band’s meteoric career quickly eclipsed the Doors’. Neil Young and Stephen Stills were recog-nized as superstars early on, and the band was signed to Atlantic Rec-ords. (Jim Morrison particularly loved “Mr. Soul,” buckskin-clad Neil Young’s long-form, trance-rocking guitar groove.) By July, less than ten months old, Buffalo Springfield would open for the Aftermath-era Rolling Stones at the Hollywood Bowl. A few months later, they became the offi-cial voice of the Strip when Stills’s “For What It’s Worth” hit the charts and the radio, alerting a national audience to the brutal police suppres-sion of the Sunset Strip riots that would cause much bitterness that fall.
On the last weekend in May, the Doors opened for Love, about to re-lease the superb single “Little Red Book” on Elektra Records. It was the first time Arthur Lee had seen Jim Morrison, and he was impressed. Lee invited Jim up to his house in the Hollywood Hills, which Jim began us-ing as one of his hideaways. The next time he spoke to Elektra’s presi-dent, Arthur Lee told Jac Holzman about this new band, the Doors, that was going to be the biggest thing on the Strip one day.
B
ut the Doors settled in quickly,with Jim performing in a t-shirt and white Lee Rider jeans, singing with his back to the au-dience for twenty minutes at a stretch and banging a woodblock with a drumstick in the instrumental passages. The Doors played two basic hour-long sets per night. Starting around nine o’clock, when hardly any-one was in the club, they opened with “Break On Through,” Jim closing his eyes as he emphasized the cunt in “I found an island in your heart, country in your eyes.” Then, varying the set lists on different nights, theyprogressed through “Take It as It Comes,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Twentieth Century Fox” (beloved of Vito Paulekas’ writhing harem of long-haired, barely dressed dancing girls), “I Looked at You,” “Close to You” (with Ray singing), “Money,” “Little Red Rooster” (a showcase for Robby’s slide guitar), “Unhappy Girl,” and “When the Music’s Over.”
While the headliners performed and the house was cleared for the next show, the Doors had something to eat and got stoned. Jim would sit with Pamela; if she wasn’t around, he flirted and made dates with other girls after the show. Pam once walked in while Jim had his hand up Suzy Creamcheese’s miniskirt, and her friends had to drag Suzy away before a wild-eyed Pamela could stab her with a pair of scissors.
Jim often performed the Doors’ second set with his eyes shut tight, as if he were in a shamanic trance. “The Alabama Song” often came first, with Jim singing in a decadent Lotte Lenya accent—“Ah-la-bah-mah.”
Then “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “Summer’s Almost Gone,” and a long, jazz-inflected “Light My Fire.” Vito’s dancers hated “Crystal Ship,” which was so slow they couldn’t move to it. Then the Doors tore into “Gloria,”
with Jim’s gutter-mouthed improvisations about getting a schoolgirl to go down on him. “Hey, little girl, howdja like to suck my mama?”
Jim’s dirty mouth irritated Elmer Valentine and Phil Tanzini, the Whisky’s manager, and instigated a constantly fluctuating current of stress between the band and the club. Sometimes, in the middle of a song, Jim would look over at Valentine and yell, “FUCK YOU, ELMER!”
Or he’d started cursing a blue streak just to annoy Tanzini, who threat-ened to fire the band if Morrison kept it up. But Jim found he could get away with being outrageous because Valentine saw the Doors bringing in customers. (Jim also used Valentine’s house above Sunset as a place to hide when he didn’t want Pamela or the band to find him.)
“Gloria” ended in a big jam, so the band slowed down for “The End of the Night.” The finale, “Soul Kitchen,” indicating that the clock said it was time to go, now, ended the set on a rousing note. The encore was always
“The End,” then still a good-bye love song with a flamenco guitar inter-lude, over which Jim extemporized stream-of-consciousness imagery or recited verse he had memorized. The uptempo “ride the snake” section, with Jim chanting “Fuck fuck fuck” into the microphone, gave the dancers such an extended workout that some of the Whisky’s headlining bands were reluctant to follow the Doors as the summer of 1966 progressed.
Soon word began to filter out that the Doors, this new band at the Whisky, had to be seen to be believed. A new generation of kids—high schoolers from Beverly Hills, the Valley, Orange County—began jam-ming the intersection of Sunset and Clark on weekend evenings, spilling into the street, blocking traffic, trying to get in to see the Doors. Some nights Jim would seem very shy, even fearful, onstage—especially if he was tripping. But after two weeks at the Whisky, he started to turn around and connect with the audience.
“It took me a while,” Jim told Rolling Stone in 1971, “to realize that this thing—performing rock and roll songs—was really about a theater trip. That’s when I understood what was going on.”
O
n June 2, Van Morrison arrived at the Whisky with his band, Them, for a two week engagement. Them was a tough R & B band from Belfast who’d had hit records in Britain and America with“Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night.” The Doors watched stinko-drunk Van Morrison doing berserk white Irish soul routines as Them slammed through long versions of “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “Boom Boom” and
“Mystic Eyes.” The Whisky hadn’t seen a rock and roll passion this crazed before. Van worked the microphone stand like a madman, swing-ing it aloft and sswing-ingswing-ing into it upside down before smashswing-ing it on the stage in a frenzy of Virgo anger and R & B conviction.
The two Morrisons, Van and Jim, hit it off, got drunk together a cou-ple of times, wondered if they were related. Each band liked the other, so on Them’s last night, June 18, after the last set, the Doors set up their gear alongside Them and both bands jammed Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour.” After half an hour, they waded into “Gloria,” with Van and Jim trading verses and singing the G-L-O-R-I-A chorus together.
Union rules prohibited the club from recording the show, so the historic jam was lost, but photographs show Jim (in black) and Van (in a shaggy hairdo) singing rapturously as the two drummers burned away behind them.
This proved to be Them’s only American tour, with the Doors also opening for the group on two subsequent L.A. area dates. After Them returned to England, Van Morrison left the band and moved to Boston,
then on to Woodstock, and eventually to California. For years, he told in-terviewers that one of the highlights of his brilliant career was the night Them jammed with the Doors at the Whisky.
H
alfway through July, word about Jim Morrison’s carnal séances at the Whisky began to spread via Sunset Strip’s jungle telegraph. The Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, published a positive review, describing Jim as “a gaunt, hollow Ariel from hell . . . screaming terraced flights of poetry and music.” Then the all-powerful Los Angeles Times weighed in when the Doors opened for the Turtles at the Whisky on Saturday, July 16. The Turtles had hit the national charts with a folk-rock version of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me Babe.” Critic Pete Johnson de-voted his last paragraph to the opening act:Sharing the bill are the Doors, a hungry-looking quartet with an interesting original sound, but with what is probably the worst stage appearance of any rock and roll group in captivity. The lead singer emotes with his eyes closed, the electric pianist hunches over his instrument as if reading mysteries from the keyboard, the guitarist drifts around the stage randomly, and the drummer seems lost in a separate world.
Jim took this review to heart. He began closing his eyes in the dress-ing room, enclosdress-ing himself in a private reverie from which he would emerge to emote onstage. For a while, the other guys in the band took turns leading Jim downstairs to perform, as if he were blind.