THE DOORS' "CARS HISS BY MY WINDOW": A JIM MORRISON'S BLUES

The turmoil caused by the controversial and historic Miami concert  (March 1, 1969), forced The Doors to rethink their artistic future.

The cancellation of the tour that was about to begin in that city and a three-and-a-half-month break, which started with a vacation in Jamaica, helped the four musicians calm down.

The summer of '69 was therefore a period of musical exploration for the Californian group, aimed at identifying a new creative direction and punctuated by sporadic concerts.

Around the time of the LP “The Soft Parade” release, the quartet performed at the Aquarius Theatre in Los Angeles (on July 21, 1969). The show was designed to relaunch the band's public image and gather material for a live album.

The following day, July 22, the musicians held a long jam session inside the theater’s premises. During this session, Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore engaged in relaxed instrumental and poetic improvisations, interspersed with playful, rambling dialogues.

The resulting tape allows us to date the first audio recording of “Cars Hiss By My Window” right in this setting.

Here the song makes a brief appearance in its early stage, lasting a few engaging seconds, as part of an extended and loose blues improvisation.

Although incomplete and barely hinted at, the tune's structure is already fully outlined in a linear sequence of verse-verse-chorus.

This vividly demonstrates Morrison’s enduring interest in the blues genre, specifically the "Chicago blues" style.

Over the next few months, however, the band lost interest in developing the song further, only returning to it in December 1970 during the recording of the album L.A. Woman (released shortly afterwards in April 1971).

The composition was finalized in this context, throughout a day dedicated to trying out blues-related sound solutions, including "Been Down So Long", "Crawling King Snake" and others.

Various alternative versions of "Cars Hiss By My Window" exist, all of them belonging to the album sessions and essentially adhering to the one chosen as the official track.

At the beginning of one of them, Morrison reveals the source of inspiration behind the song's arrangement in a rather colorful way.

The singer announces the tune's temporary name in a joking yet formal manner: "This is called... The Bastard Son Of Jimmy And Mama Reed, take one".

This alludes to the well-known Blues and Rhythm And Blues artist Jimmy Reed, who was a leading figure in these musical forms in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Reed was also an early and notable influence on bands such as The Rolling Stones and The Animals.

From this starting point, The Doors created a sound that owed much to the aforementioned Chicago Blues, whose rhythm is slowed down considerably in order to emphasize the tune’s melancholic, indolent atmosphere and highlight the contrast with the pressing episode that follows, the title track, "L.A. Woman".

The song's official version, which is over four minutes long (here’s the link), is permeated by softly muffled electric vibrations that float over typical blues chords repeated by the electric bass and the electric rhythm guitar. These instruments are played by session musicians Jerry Scheff and Mark Benno, respectively.

This subtle and ethereal accompaniment flows lazily along, driven by Densmore's constant, quietly incisive percussive pattern, played with brushes on the snare drum.

In this way, the music evocatively joins the lyrics, which are based on the recurring blues theme of a love made difficult, if not impossible, by rejection.

Written by Morrison, the words describe this circumstance from the protagonist's perspective. The scene takes place at night inside a motel room near a beach (most likely Venice Beach in Los Angeles).

The dark, suffused colors drawn by the rhythm section blend with the images conjured up by Morrison, achieving a communicative effectiveness rarely seen in 1960s and 1970s blues.

Morrison's intense and deep singing stands out as the element around which the composition revolves. The frontman's tone is rooted in the tradition of the authentic Chicago Blues, carefully avoiding concessions to the Rock or Rock Blues genres popular in the early '70s.

He approaches the verses with a relaxed vocal style, immersed in a dark calm, placing himself at the crossroads between solemn resentment for the abandonment he is suffering and painful grief for his own fate.

In this song, Morrison sings while contemplating a new artistic and musical style, one that better suited his personality at the end of 1970. Standing motionless in front of the microphone he displays a subdued yet mysterious demeanor: in one hand he holds California sand, in the other he holds the address of a Chicago blues club.

"Cars Hiss By My Window" is adorned by Robby Krieger's electric guitar, which outlines an evanescent yet deeply expressive riff. The latter is conveyed through mournful and oscillating notes that sound like a sad commentary on the track's quiet pace.

Krieger also performs a solo where he gently whispers the blues idiom, by smoothing out its defining edges with a light fingerpicking style. In this way, his six strings eloquently sympathize with the romantic misadventures narrated in the lyrics.

Another solo closes the track, the only instance in The Doors’ discography where a solo is entrusted to Morrison’s imaginative vocals: for about thirty seconds, the singer imitates the sound of the blues harmonica.

Ray Manzarek's absence from the recording does not diminish the charm of "Cars Hiss By My Window": a song where the simplicity of the musical construction sheds light on the gloomy yet compelling emotions that only the Blues can evoke.

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