How Jim Morrison’s Final Sessions With The Doors Produced An L.A. Classic Out Of Chaos
- by Randall Roberts
During the period in late 1970 and early ’71 when Jim Morrison and his bandmates in the Doors were recording their sixth and final studio album, “L.A. Woman,” at their West Hollywood rehearsal space, the singer was drowning in a booze-fueled bender: drunk nearly every night but sober by morning and ambling across Santa Monica Boulevard for the day’s session.
“When he got too drunk, he would become kind of an a—,” recalls Doors guitarist Robby Krieger of Morrison during the “L.A. Woman” sessions, on the phone from his home in Benedict Canyon. “It got harder and harder to be close with him. He’d have his drinking buddies, and we were always trying to keep them from being together.”
Krieger’s new memoir, Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar With the Doors, doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to Morrison’s dark side, nor does it minimize his creative light.
