THE DOORS' "MORRISON HOTEL" LP: RECORDING SESSIONS AND JAIL

 

The Doors had just overcome, with no small effort, the most difficult year for the band's balance and very existence.

From the fall of 1968, that is, from the return to California after the European tour, until the summer of 1969, in fact, artistic and personal disagreements between Jim Morrison and the rest of the lineup had threatened the continuation of the extraordinary musical adventure that had begun only three years earlier.

The more relaxed atmosphere surrounding the quartet in October-November 1969 favored a return to the recording studio as an auspicious seal on the adversity recently experienced.

Some problems, however, persisted and demanded an urgent solution.

Chief among them was the lack of sufficient available material for the completion of the group's fifth album.

Hand in hand with the progress of the recording studio work, which took place mostly in November '69, it soon became clear that the available songs required substantial supplementation in order to cover the minute length required for an LP.

The newly composed tunes, added to those developed during the sessions themselves, would suffice for approximately one side of the record being prepared.

To this set of compositions belonged "Peace Frog", "Blue Sunday", "Ship Of Fools", "Land Ho!", "The Spy", and "Maggie M'Gill".

With some tour dates in support of the album already established, the tyranny of time and the crazy rhythms of the record market then tightened with pressing greed around the four musicians.

In addition, some original compositions, already almost fully arranged, were shelved due to inexplicable artistic or commercial logic: particularly disappointingly, "L’America", "Universal Mind" and "Someday Soon" were excluded.

The solution chosen to succeed in finishing what would shortly thereafter become the 33 rpm "Morrison Hotel", was therefore to draw on the past.

The path taken backwards to unearth still unused The Doors pieces initially turned to two tracks rehearsed in the spring of that same year, during the recordings of "The Soft Parade" (the band's album released in July 1969, only four months before the "Morrison Hotel" sessions).

Among the tracks ousted from "The Soft Parade" were recovered "Roadhouse Blues", which had remained at the demo stage with the vocal line sung temporarily by keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and "Queen of The Highway".

The hunt for useful songs to fill the still missing minutes continued, delving into the spring of 1968 and finding out "Waiting For The Sun", a composition that, as attested by its title, came from the recordings of The Doors' third LP.

The leap back in time that followed was both the last and the most resounding: the quartet and their producer Paul Rothchild considered what was produced as far back as 1966, that is, before the group's superlative vinyl debut saw the light of day ("The Doors", released in January 1967).

From this period, the first half of '66, two songs attributable to Jim Morrison were taken: "You Make Me Real" and the splendid "Indian Summer" (both of which underwent some changes before to enter the “Morrison Hotel track list).

The outcome of this operation aimed at sifting through the band's recent past turned "Morrison Hotel" into a combination of four different musical genres (rock-blues, blues, rock and psychedelic rock).

Furthermore, despite its overall high quality, the album is made even more heterogeneous by the varied years of origin of the tunes it contains.

The market will give a relatively positive verdict (fourth spot in the U.S. and twelfth in England) while, from the critics' point of view, the LP stands out for its numerous cues of great beauty and rare originality (above all "Peace Frog," "Ship Of Fools" and "Indian Summer").

In addition to the scarcity of new tracks, in the midst of the recording sessions for "Morrison Hotel", an insidious and reckless setback involved singer Jim Morrison.

On November 11, 1969, he decided to take a short break to see the Rolling Stones perform in concert in Phoenix, Arizona.

A more than tempting trip (who wouldn't go to that live show?!), which was, however, completely disrupted by an impulsive gamble that soon translated into an annoying twist concerning his personal life.

A two-hour plane ride separated Los Angeles, where The Doors lived, from Phoenix, where the concert was being held. One hundred and twenty minutes that were fatally decisive.

After getting badly drunk with some friends before boarding, the frontman disturbed other passengers and staff profusely during the flight, earning himself an arrest for public drunkenness and assault once the plane landed in Phoenix. All this was aggravated in no small part by the circumstance of being on a commercial flight.

Of course, this also caused the inability for him to hear the Rolling Stones live in one of the best years of their career (this was the same tour that less than a month later would take them to the tragically historic Altamont Free Concert in California).

Morrison would immediately get out of jail on bail (no mug shot was released after this arrest), but the trial that followed would drag on for months, adding to the legal issues that were already weighing on him after the Miami concert on March 1, 1969.

In the spring of 1970, the most serious charges would be somewhat dropped: a fine solved the case in a positive way.

By that time the "Morrison Hotel" LP had recently been released (in February 1970) and The Doors were in the midst of a U.S. tour in support of the album itself.

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