Doors- L.A. Woman 55th- the late Ray Manzarek

L.A. Woman  by The Doors is one of the greatest albums ever made by an American band (Top 10 Billboard, US sales over three million), one of the first great albums to usher in the Seventies decade, the last album ever by the incomparable Jim Morrison, and a personal “desert island disc” for me that never ages. Doors co-founder/keyboardist the late Ray Manzarek told me how they made L.A. Woman amidst multiple challenges fifty-five years ago.

By the time that L.A. Woman  by The Doors was released in April 1971, the Flower Power idealism of 1967’s Summer of Love into which The Doors had released their #1 debut “Light My Fire” had run headlong into Richard Nixon’s America. The Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock Festival, and Americans on the Moon headlines alternated almost daily with assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King jr, Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, the slaughter of four students at Kent State University by National Guard troops, and the escalation of the agonizing war in Viet Nam. At the time of recording the sessions for L.A. Woman, The Doors were kryptonite to concert promoters nationwide. They were afraid to book the band because of a notorious charge of public lewdness against Jim Morrison stemming from a particularly drunken performance a year earlier in Miami. The threat of an eventual arrest and trial in Florida three thousand miles away from the Doors’ home base made it hard to focus when they first convened in the studio with long time producer Paul Rothschild, and when the distractions forced him to quit, drastic measures were taken to salvage the LA Woman project. Jim Morrison ( l ) with Texan  guitar player Marc Benno at The Doors’ workshop, February 1971.

How from such adverse conditions emerged some of the most iconic rock songs of the last half century (Rolling Stone ranked LA Woman #364 all time), including “Love Her Madly”,”The Changeling”,”The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)”,”Been Down So Long”, The Doors’ cover of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake”,”Riders on the Storm”, and the title song “L.A. Woman” is the subject of my colorful, dramatic interview with the late Doors co-founder  Ray Manzarek. –Redbeard