In the end Jim didn’t go to New York to work for some film magazine and Ray didn’t go looking for a job at some big movie studio in Hollywood. Any ambitions either of them really had were instead quietly deferred while they sat around, stoned, wondering how in hell they were going to do what it was they both now had a real hankering for—becoming rock stars. Though neither of them would come right out and say it just yet.
Instead, Ray kept tooling around with Rick & the Ravens in the vague hope that they would cause enough ripples to start a wave somewhere. Jim, meanwhile, tried out his “I’m gonna start a band” rap on anyone stoned enough to listen, but nobody ever took him seriously enough to put him on the spot and say, “All right, then, let’s do it.”
That is, until that now-famous day in July 1965 when Jim was wandering along the beach in Venice and he happened to run into his know-better old college buddy, Ray. Their subsequent exchange has become a story nearly as oft told as that of the three bears. But then it beats most other rock origin stories into a leopard-skin pillbox hat. For while Elvis arriving at Sam Phillips’s Sun Studio to make a record for his mother is sweet, and the story of fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney offering to tune the guitar of sixteen-year-old John Lennon at a village fete is filled with yearning, what occurred when Jim and Ray knelt down on the sand together that hot afternoon in 1965 resulted almost immediately in the songs that formed the backbone of the Doors’ career, and in effect helped reconfigure pop and rock throughout the late sixties. The drama unfolded that quickly.
Initially, Jim and Ray had sat around chatting on the beach, catching up on all the things they’d said they were gonna do and hadn’t, checking out the chicks—including one beautiful black girl Jim impetuously called out “Hello! I love you!” to but got no reaction from—scanning the far-off horizon through stoned-red morning eyes. When Jim suddenly announced in his drowsy Southern voice, “I’ve been writing some songs.”
It was an apt moment for this kind of talk. Beatles VI had just gone to No. 1 on the US charts on July 10. A month later Help! would replace it. By Christmas Rubber Soul would be released and pop would suddenly turn into rock. The Stones were hard on their heels. “Satisfaction” was still No. 1 and the Sunset Strip was crawling with new psychedelic groups all vying for your third-eye attention. Leading the way were Los Angeles–based bands like the Byrds, now being talked of as “the American Beatles”; Love, whom you either knew and dug special, baby, or you were nowhere with, man; the Seeds, who weren’t as good as anyone else but had the grooviest-named front man in Sky Saxon; and most Hollyweird of all, the Mothers, led by some crazy cat with a Zapata mustache named Frank Zappa—can you dig it?
Ray asked Jim to sing him one of his songs but Jim demurred, getting his excuses in early, saying he didn’t really have a singing voice. Ray responded by pointing out that Bob Dylan didn’t have much of a voice either but his songs were pretty good. Jim gave him the silent treatment. Eyes down, body absolutely still. Ray kept wheedling, “Come on, man, come on, man … only me …” Just the two of them out there. Who would know? “Come on, man …”
Slowly, hesitantly, Jim began uttering the words to “Moonlight Drive.” Sitting upright on his knees, eyes closed, shy but not that shy once he got going. “Let’s swim to the moon, uh huh … Let’s climb through the tide …” Ray could instantly hear the gently prancing music that went with it, and began miming playing the piano. “Oh, man, I love it! This is incredible! Do you have anything else?” Jim started another, called “Summer’s Almost Gone” … Then another called “My Eyes Have Seen You” … Ray gave a little cry of joy. He liked the sound of that. “ ‘My Eyes Have Seen You,’ baby! Do that one for me,” he said. Jim did.
Recalling that moment in his book, Ray likened Jim’s voice on this occasion to Chet Baker’s, which was soft and high, tremulous. A million miles from the drunken yowls of Jim’s “Louie Louie” that time at the Turkey Joint West. Ray thought he even heard a little bit of London pop in there, maybe. Mixed with some hot Latin. He began to imagine being in a band playing behind Jim, doing some jazz-rock. It had never been done before. Chet Baker cool into hot Latin rock, oh yes! Ray could hear everything, even the solos. “Go, Ray,” said Jim, laughing.
And then Ray uttered the immortal line, since repeated and amplified a thousand times: “We’re gonna make a million dollars!” In his book Ray said he was joking when he said that, but one feels he doth protest too much. Ray said Jim replied, “Ray, that’s exactly what I had in mind.” And you can bet it was. The same thought that has entered every young man’s mind whenever he has thought of starting a band, then as now.
What also struck Ray was how far removed this new, drastically trimmed Jim seemed from the fatso college kid. You could really see his face for the first time, see how surprisingly handsome it actually was, without the jowly fat to get in the way, see how lean his body now was. Ray thought he looked like a young Steve McQueen. When Ray asked how Jim lost all the weight, Jim replied, “I just stopped eating.” He’d been taking so much acid and getting so high, he’d “hardly eaten anything since we graduated.”
Ray invited Jim back for something to eat. Ray and Dorothy were now living in a place above a garage, part of a typical California bungalow, overlooking the beach. One bedroom, seventy-five dollars a month. While they waited for Dorothy to come home from work they smoked a doobie and talked some more about the million-dollar group they were going to form. Ray already had it in his head that what the new band would play would be somewhere between jazz and rock, with some LSD thrown in, with Jim’s poetry, which seemed to combine all those things, overlaid. Jack Kerouac meets John Coltrane. But Jim needed a lot of cajoling into being the singer, lots of ego stroking and coaxing and assurance. Ray, a couple years older and wiser than Jim, as he saw it, didn’t mind that. He’d been through a similar trip with his younger brothers in the Ravens. This would be the same, only with much better end results.
It was then Jim offered up the name the Doors. Ray recalled that they toyed jokingly with calling the band Morrison and Manzarek, but laughed it off as “too folky.” “How about Jim & Ray?” he said, thinking, well maybe … But Jim shot that down with “Two guys from Venice.” Then Jim finally spilled and suggested the name he’d been thinking about all along. But Ray didn’t like the idea of calling the band the Doors. For all his immersion in the emerging counterculture, for all his expensive education, Ray just didn’t get it.
Jim tried to explain, saying the name was “an homage to William Blake,” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the line, “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” The same passage that Aldous Huxley lifted the title from for his book on mescaline experimentation, The Doors of Perception, and that Jim had just reduced to the Doors. Ray got all that but was still unconvinced. The Doors … it sounded kind of … dull, didn’t it? But then they got to talking about acid, what Ray would still refer to when we spoke nearly fifty years later as “the sacrament,” and how the best trips were the ones that unlocked the doors of your mind and allowed you to break on through, Ray, dig?
And that’s when Ray nodded his head sagely, exhaled a huge plume of pot smoke, and gave his consent with the two words that denoted ultimate respect back then in that acid-blasted summer of 1965: “Right on.”
By the time Dorothy came home from work that afternoon, Jim and Ray had the whole thing worked out. Or at least Ray did. Jim would move in with him and Dorothy right away—today! Far out, man. OK! According to his book, Dorothy was cool with that, though one can’t help wondering how easily the highly intelligent and well-organized Dorothy really took to the idea of having one of UCLA’s more wayward former students doing his stoned thing under her small but hard-earned roof. Perhaps she was smart enough to realize it wouldn’t last long. Strong enough to know she could always kick Jim out the moment he got too out of control. Maybe.
Jim only had one box of books left; the rest had been sent home to his parents, who were now living in San Diego. Other than an electric blanket and several pairs of socks, that’s all he moved in with. And for a while, at least according to Ray, they lived in a sort of hippie idyll. Dorothy would go off to work each morning, and Ray and Jim would spend the day together, hanging out at UCLA, in the basement practice rooms with their sound-baffled spaces, working Jim’s poems and vocal melodies into actual songs, Jim learning to sing in his still thin, high voice, Ray in his element, directing musical traffic from his keyboards. “Moonlight Drive,” “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “Summer’s Almost Gone,” “End of the Night,” “I Looked at You,” “The Crystal Ship,” another called “Go Insane” … none of it sounded like the Beatles or the Stones, or even Bob Dylan. There were major sevenths, B-flats, weird shit. Some sounding very European, balladic, and stark, some still sounding how Ray imagined the Ravens might sound if they had the benefit of some properly tripped-out lyrics, like freak out, baby, hang on! Some of it worked right away, some of it stubbornly refused to gel. But the ideas were all there. They knew they were on to something. Doors music would follow where bands like the Beatles and the Byrds were going, beyond rock ’n’ roll’s joyous puberty and full-tilt into its grievous, questioning adolescence. But where the Beatles and their disciples were aiming for was where the Doors would begin. Where rock was first visited by night things.
To pay his way, Jim would steal steaks from the market for Dorothy to cook for dinner. Jim may have “stopped eating” during his epiphanic summer metamorphosing on the roof at Dennis’s, but he had never lost his craving for meat. If things were going wrong, he would announce, “We need meat!” If there was ever something to celebrate, he would insist, “Meat! Must eat meat!” Or if things were just dragging by, well, meat was the answer to that too. He got so used to stealing choice sirloin steaks he grew bored with their taste and began “shopping” for fillet and rib eye. After all three had filled their stomachs on the juicy steaks, they would spend the rest of their evenings tripping, though Ray mainly tripped with Dorothy, while Jim tripped with whichever willing supplicant he could find to accompany him, otherwise alone. Wandering off into the night, as he had at Dennis’s place, as he would always. For Ray such occasions were “sacred”; for Jim it was just who he was now. They wrote a new song about it, called “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” taking acid and finding yourself on the other side of the rainbow—“or its opposite,” as Jim drawlingly put it.
In fact, it was this “opposite” realm that Ray now began to experience in earnest every time he tripped. Suddenly, the blissedout vistas were replaced by a hellish terrain, full of fear and paranoia, total bummers that Dorothy would have to talk him down from. Ray knew he could not keep putting himself—or Dorothy—through this ordeal. Yet he held firm to the belief that acid, when it was good, was a place of deep wisdom, of radiance and truth, and he was not prepared to cease his explorations. There had to be another way.
Discussing his problems one day with Dick Bock, the older, wiser-time dude who had signed Rick & the Ravens to Aura, Dick suggested Ray might like to try Transcendental Meditation. Transcen … what? Dick went to the shelves in his office and pulled out an album he had recently released through the larger World Pacific imprint, a two-disc recording of the lectures of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. “Listen to this,” Dick said. “It might be what you’re looking for.”
The very same Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, two years later, became the “spiritual advisor” to the Beatles, and later had them stay with him at his retreat in Rishikesh, India, for several weeks. John Lennon, in a volte-face after rumors circulated that the Maharishi had made sexual advances to Mia Farrow, another of his celebrity converts, subsequently wrote a scathing review of him in the Beatles song “Sexy Sadie.”
Ray was skeptical at first. Listening to the record back home, “I didn’t really buy into the whole TM thing when I first came across it,” he told me. “It sounded good. God and man and nature, pure contemplation. I just had no idea how you put it all together without the aid of some external force, you know?” How could something so simple lead him to the place of glorious wonderment that acid had? Most urgently, how could it remove the terror?
Ray discovered the answer after Dick told him of a new meditation class that was beginning nearby in which the teachings of the Maharishi—specifically, his form of mantra-based yogic meditation—would be passed on to willing initiates. So Ray, still searching for answers, went along, bringing Dorothy with him. He also tried to persuade Jim to come along, but Jim already had his personal mantras and didn’t feel he needed any help whatsoever crossing the great divide. In fact, he invited the terrors, he said. He found them cleansing. OK, man.
Meanwhile, over in the canyons, John Densmore was experiencing very similar forms of acid-induced heebie-jeebies as Ray—and was reaching out for the same cure. It was Robby Krieger who turned him on to the idea of Transcendental Meditation, and for much the same reasons. Robby liked to get as out there as possible, but he was no brain-dead loser who couldn’t find his way back. He still wanted to go to those places that only existed in that state but not alone, riding roughshod over whatever unknown obstacles came his way. He wanted guidance, a helping hand, a joining mind to help him see through the multicolored lights, to give him a real chance at the truth, whatever it might really turn out to be.
Robby was at UCLA by then, ostensibly to major in physics but really so he could join their unique-for-the-times Indian Music class, where he was able to study both sitar and the sarod, a fretless lute-like instrument, similar to the sitar but with a deeper, more introspective tone. He also took classes at Ravi Shankar’s own Kinnara School, where he first heard about the new Maharishi Mahesh Yogi meditation class in West Hollywood. He decided to check it out—and take his freaked-out friend John with him.
Coincidence, karma, destiny, fate, or just old-fashioned luck, however one might like to consider it, it’s curious to note that the shared factor that finally brought the four members of the Doors together—the group that would stand for transcendence, for breaking through to the other side, for flipping the bird to straight, conventional society in order to lead its children to a more enlightened, acid-singed reality, the band whose very name was a not-so-oblique reference to the benefits of LSD—was that its principal musical authors were all victims of such unutterably “bad trips” that they actively sought help.
As well as a shared interest in getting high and getting laid, Robby and John had also begun to play together in a loose conglomerate they jokingly christened the Psychedelic Rangers. John and his pal Grant on drums and piano, Robby and his pal Bill on guitars. Just like the Doors, they never did manage to find a bass player, but that didn’t really matter, as they only managed a couple of actual gigs. They would jam in one of the big rooms at Robby’s parents’ place in Pacific Palisades. Their best-known original number was titled “Paranoia” and was about having a bad acid trip, wow. Kind of folk rock, kind of rock, a sort of proto–West Coast sound without ever getting past the shambolic rehearsal stage—though they did make a “psychedelic” 8mm film of themselves, tooling around in kimonos as their raggedy demo of “Paranoia” blasted away in the foreground. But mainly they just tripped on out until John really couldn’t take it anymore and Robby promptly suggested they seek solace in the welcoming climes of the Maharishi’s meditation classes.
It was at their second follow-up class, after they’d been given their special Sanskrit words to chant by themselves, that John met Ray. John recalls somewhat typically in his book how irritated he was at first by Ray, claiming he spent most of the time complaining loudly that he was getting “No bliss!” from the sessions. “As if he expected to become Buddha overnight.” In Ray’s book, however, just as typically, he maintained that he and John bonded immediately over their shared love of John Coltrane, getting into just how great John thought Elvin Jones was and how deeply influenced Ray was by McCoy Tyner. They parted that evening agreeing they should jam sometime, man. John pointing out Robby, telling Ray, “He plays great bottleneck.”
Ray wasn’t on the lookout just then for a guitar player, though. He was still thinking of how to blend what he and Jim were doing into what his brothers were trying for in Rick & the Ravens. A good drummer, now, that was harder to find. Vince Thomas, the usual drummer in the Ravens, had only ever shown up whenever they had a gig. Rehearsing, writing, jamming, that wasn’t his scene. But this Densmore, he seemed to have a little more going for him in that regard. Cat dug Elvin Jones, man, how bad could he be? So a few weeks later Ray called John and invited him to come down to his parents’ garage, no less, where they were set up, and “have a blow.”
John went along, met Ray’s brothers, and in the corner, trying so hard not to be noticed John didn’t even realize he was there until Ray made a big deal about introducing him, sat this other kid, Jim Morrison, dressed, like any other student then, in brown cords and a T-shirt.
John set up and they rambled through “Louie Louie,” the surf bum anthem du jour, with Ray on vocals, Jim just out of shot, looking on, awkwardly. John couldn’t figure out his deal. Decided maybe he was shy simply because he was the only one in the room who didn’t actually play anything. But then Ray pulled out a sheaf of papers and told John to check out some of Jim’s lyrics, how far out they were, man. John wasn’t big into lyrics, but the first verse he read began, “You know the day destroys the night / Night divides the day … ,” the opening lines to what would soon become “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” and even hard-to-impress John got excited. John remarked on how “very percussive” the lines seemed to him. Excited, Ray said that’s right, that he felt the same and already had a bass line for them on the keyboards. They began churning it out, Rick Manzarek strumming a bare-bones rhythm while little bro Jim blew away on his harp. The band kept going, vamping away, seeing where it took them. After what seemed a long interval the boy in brown eventually tiptoed over to the mike and ever so gingerly began to sing-speak the words in that still soft, high voice of his, eyes tightly closed.
After that they jammed on some of the blues numbers the Ravens had gotten good at playing live—Muddy’s “I’m Your Doctor,” Willie Dixon’s “Hoochie Coochie Man”—and Jim began to loosen up and get into it more, his voice growing louder and stronger, his eyes starting to open just a crack. They took a break, smoked one of Jim’s tailor-made joints, then began again. It was fun. Felt good. Nothing too special, for John, but nice enough for him to agree to come back a few days later, when they did the whole thing again. Surf covers, blues, and a sprinkling of these “songs” Jim and Ray were shuffling around with. After a couple more sessions John realized it was the latter stuff that really interested him. The band really wasn’t up to much, but this stuff Ray and Jim kept coming up with, it was … different.
The only ones who weren’t entirely convinced were the younger of the Manzarek brothers, Rick and Jim, who were beginning to feel their high-times party group was being hijacked by a lot of dope-smoking freakdom that wasn’t doing anything to help get them paying gigs. In an effort to placate his brothers, and help them understand just how special what they had going now with Densmore and Morrison was, Ray talked Dick Bock into giving more than three hours of recording time he’d earmarked for the next Ravens single to a special session to record the best of the original material the band was now coming up with.
The result was six tracks that have since gone down in legend as the original Doors demo, though in fact they were recorded with the idea of getting a deal for Rick & the Ravens, and comprised Jim Morrison on vocals, Ray Manzarek on keyboards and backing vocals, brothers Rick on guitar and Jim on harmonica, John Densmore on drums, and Patricia “Pat” Hansen (née Sullivan) from another local bar band, Patty and the Esquires, on bass guitar.
Playing the tape back at Ray’s Ocean Drive pad later that night, Jim was delighted to hear his voice recorded for the first time, impressed less by the fact it was so good, which it wasn’t, but that it didn’t sound that bad, which it didn’t. Ray was equally delighted at the sheer quality of the material. As was John, whose only reservation was that you couldn’t hear the drums as well as he’d envisioned. The only ones who were less than thrilled with the outcome were the two younger Manzarek brothers and bassist Hansen, who found it all much too pretentious.
When you listen to the original recording now, with its galloping piano, feeble vocals, and overeager harmonica, although all six tracks—the jaunty, nursery rhyme-ish “Hello, I Love You,” the tiptoeing “Summer’s Almost Gone,” cobwebby “End of the Night,” spaced-out “Moonlight Drive,” do-the-monkey “My Eyes Have Seen You,” and the aptly titled “Go Insane”—would later resurface, albeit in far superior form, on subsequent Doors albums, with “Hello, I Love You” actually becoming a million-selling No. 1 single, it’s not hard to understand why the demo tape was rejected by every record company executive the band played it to. Why some even felt hostile toward it, throwing the band out of their offices in disgust.
In 1965 the American pop business was still run by major record labels based almost exclusively in New York. Los Angeles was still considered an outpost at best, with only Columbia and Warner Bros. of the majors really having a substantial base on the West Coast. In order to capture the imagination of their East Coast overlords, most A&R execs in L.A. were looking for Top 40 certs. As Kim Fowley, the maverick producer and purveyor in the sixties of novelty hits such as “Alley Oop”—credited to a made-up group, the Hollywood Argyles—would say, “Art for art’s sake, hit singles for fuck’s sake.” And while L.A. acts like the Byrds were scoring contracts, they only did so because they brought with them guaranteed hits. New L.A.-based, album-oriented acts like Buffalo Springfield, Love, and the Mothers were all still a year away from signing their own deals. For now, with their suddenly inopportune moniker—whatever they were supposed to be, these songs did not sound like they were meant to be played by a group called Rick & the Ravens—and clearly drug-hipped band members, Ray and Jim were practically laughed out of the room. Capitol, RCA, Decca, Dunhill, Reprise, Liberty … most of these execs didn’t even get past the first couple tracks—a decision they would soon come to regret, perhaps, but then isn’t that the story of the entire entertainment business in Hollywood? One man’s meat being another’s eat shit.
By October 1965, with his disillusioned brothers now playing the told-you-so card—as far as Rick and Jim were concerned, this new, Morrison-focused configuration of the Ravens had ruined whatever slim chance they’d ever had of making it—Ray and Jim and John suddenly found themselves alone with their unwanted demo tape. Jim, of course, was loudly defiant, yelling at one executive who had simply flicked through the tape, grunting, “Can’t use it, can’t use it,” that that was OK. “We don’t wanna be used by anybody!”
They were left in a quandary, though. Even Pat Hansen couldn’t see the point in continuing and went back to her own band, where she married the singer, Chuck. With not much to hang on to, it was Jim who suggested dropping the Ravens as a name—after all, Rick had gone and was definitely not coming back, he had made that clear—and replacing it with the Doors. John hardly needed the idea explained to him. What concerned him more was where they were going to find good new players for the band.
Enter their knight in frizzy hair: Robby Krieger.
Robby had been staying away from acid, though he still smoked copious amounts of dope, attending TM classes and playing guitar in another small-time college outfit named the Clouds. All the while, “John was telling me about … this wild and crazy guy, Jim Morrison, who was going to be the lead singer even though he couldn’t sing at the time.” When it turned out John’s band needed a new guitar player, Robby didn’t need too much persuading to come along and meet the “crazy guy.”
With his sleepy face, far-off green eyes, and flyaway tea-colored hair, Robby appeared inscrutable to the others. Until they got to know him, they assumed he was either permanently stoned or simply disconnected from what the rest of them were feeling. In fact, the opposite was true. Robby was so into the music, he would become the musical éminence grise of the Doors, the secret X factor who would provide them with their biggest hit and become the main musical touchstone to Jim Morrison’s most out-there lyrical endeavors. He was a boy who had been born with the L.A. sun in his eyes and the sounds of the breaking waves forever in his head. He was a floater, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know where he was going or where he wanted to be. The kind of guy who would get on well with all the other members of the Doors while never quite becoming the best friend of any of them. Not even Jim, who now drifted apart from the avuncular attentions of Ray and more toward the less demanding, less loquacious, and nonjudgmental company of Robby, who never seemed to get freaked out about anything, or didn’t feel the need to show it off so much, anyway.
Speaking to Guitar World magazine some thirty years later, Robby remembered thinking Jim seemed “pretty normal. I didn’t really get a sense that there was anything unusual about him until the end of our first rehearsal. Initially, everything was cool. Then this guy came looking for Jim. Something had gone wrong with a dope deal, and Jim just went nuts. Absolutely bananas! I thought, Jesus Christ, this guy’s not normal.”
Robby’s first impression of Ray was equally insightful. “He was a major character,” he recalled. “But Jim kind of kept him in his place. Jim was so out there that Ray’s personality was overwhelmed—which, oddly enough, created a good balance.” But then Jim had that effect on everybody, Robby laughingly admitted. “I couldn’t hold a candle to Jim and Ray. But I had already gone through acid and I was onto meditation—so I had already mellowed out.”
Unable to use the family garage anymore—that was still his brothers’ haven—Ray persuaded his old college sidekick Hank Olguin to let them come over to his parents’ place in Santa Monica and use their piano—as luck would have it, another of those big carved wooden uprights Ray had learned on back in Chicago.
According to Ray, the first song the nascent lineup attempted together was “Moonlight Drive”—though Robby now insists it was a newer number Ray and Jim and John had been jamming around with called “Indian Summer.” Whichever it was, one thing they all remember is that before they started Jim pulled out a “big bomber”—a family-size version of one of his expertly rolled joints he loved to impress with—and insisted they all smoke it. That it would provide them all with “some ammunition.” Ray and Robby got stuck into the joint, no problem. John hesitated, then seemed to mentally shrug and say what the hell. Then started coughing. Jim smiled, “groovy,” and Ray counted in the song.
Things seemed OK as they began to shuffle forward into the first couple songs. Robby could certainly play guitar better than Rick. The turning point came, though, running through the chords of “Moonlight Drive” for the first time. At the song’s end, Robby, now super-stoned, pulled something from his guitar case and placed it on the ring finger of his left hand—the broken neck of a green beer bottle to use, literally, as a bottleneck for the guitar. The sound that began snaking out of his guitar made them all instantly freak—especially Jim, who wanted Robby to do the ring finger bottleneck thing on every song. “Every song?” Robby sniggered, stoned and grooving. “Yeah, man! Get it on!” cried Jim. So they did.
It didn’t matter that they didn’t have a bass player. With Ray handling the basic rhythm on his 1960 Fender Rhodes piano bass—ostensibly with the idea of making do until they could find a real bassist to replace Pat—both Robby and John realized early on that this other way of finding the rhythm had unforeseen advantages.
As John recalled for me in 2012, Pat “was a good [bass] player but she made us sound like the Stones! Like a white blues band, like a regular thing. And then we just stumbled onto this keyboard bass, and so that was it for us. We knew it’d make us different, and I knew it would leave more space for me to play freer. Although my responsibility was compounded because usually bass players and drummers have to work together getting down the groove and I had to do it alone. And when Ray did a solo with his right hand he’d get excited, like any soloist does, then his left hand would speed up. But, you know, I was up for it let me tell you … I didn’t want to rein it in. I wanted it to go out further on the edge!”
Talking to Guitar World in 2005, Robby concurred, insisting that the Doors’ sound “was largely a result of the fact that Ray had to play really simple bass lines, which gave the music a hypnotic feel. And not having a bass player affected my guitar playing a lot. It made me play more bass notes to fill out the bottom. Not having a rhythm player also made me play differently to fill out the sound. And then, of course, I played lead, so I always felt like three players simultaneously.”
That afternoon they also worked their way steadily through “End of the Night”—Jim’s Céline-inspired paean to night crawling—“Summer’s Almost Gone,” “Indian Summer,” and “My Eyes Have Seen You.” Some worked instantly, others didn’t seem to work at all. They would have to keep trying, and they did. “We are gonna go all the way with this,” declared Ray, during another joint break. “I can feel it.”
They all could. All the way to Venice Beach and back. Get it on …