L.A. Woman

You are riding with The Zoo, the listener-supported rock station that still treats an album side like it matters, and the cut coming up is the one that put Los Angeles on the map as a character instead of a backdrop. “L.A. Woman,” the title track from The Doors’ 1971 album of the same name, is seven minutes and forty-nine seconds of freeway blues, motel neon, and a band that had finally stopped arguing with the clock. Elektra shipped the record on April 19, 1971. It was the last studio album Jim Morrison would finish. He was gone in Paris a little over two months later, on July 3. The song never played a regular Doors set in the city it describes. Robby Krieger has said he wishes it had. What you hear is the workshop take, not a road version polished for the Whisky.

The Doors formed in Venice in 1965 when film student Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, both out of UCLA, ran into each other on the beach and Morrison sang the words to “Moonlight Drive.” Drummer John Densmore came in from the jazz side. Guitarist Robby Krieger, the youngest, wrote a lot of the hits and played with a fingerstyle attack that never sounded like anybody else on the Sunset Strip. They took the name from Aldous Huxley’s essay on mescaline, The Doors of Perception, which itself borrowed a line from William Blake. Elektra signed them in 1966. The debut arrived in January 1967 and “Light My Fire” turned a Los Angeles bar band into a national problem. Morrison’s arrests, the Miami incident in 1969, the long instrumental stretches, the refusal to smile for the trade papers: all of it fed the myth. By late 1970 the myth was heavy. Morrison’s beard was full, his voice had dropped into a baritone, and the band wanted out of the high-rent studios.

Producer Paul Rothchild walked. He had shepherded the first five albums and, by most accounts, heard the new material as lounge blues and said so. Engineer Bruce Botnick stayed and co-produced with the band. They set up in their own rehearsal room, the Doors Workshop at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, a former antique store they already owned. No clock running on Sunset Sound. Basics for the album, aside from the earlier “L’America,” came together across about six days in December 1970 and January 1971. Session bassist Jerry Scheff, fresh from Elvis Presley’s band, played on nearly everything. Rhythm guitarist Marc Benno sat in and thickened the blues. Morrison, the story goes, sang a good share of his leads in the bathroom because the tile gave him natural slapback, a beer in one hand and the lyric sheet in the other. Krieger has said most of the words to “L.A. Woman” were made up in the room. That was new. Usually Morrison or Krieger walked in with a finished idea.

The track opens on a rolling electric piano figure from Manzarek and a guitar line that feels like lane changes. Morrison comes in low: just got into town about an hour ago. Fans argued for years over a mumbled alternate, something about a downer. A handwritten lyric sheet that later sold at auction settles it in favor of the town line. From there the city is a woman, and the woman is the city. Freeways, topless bars, cops in cars, motel money murder madness, a change of mood from glad to sadness. The geography is real. Sunset through to the coast highway, the kind of drive Manzarek later compared to Kerouac and Ginsberg hauling west. Nobody in the band claimed it was a love letter. It is a portrait with the lights left on and the door unlocked.

Then the center section. Morrison starts chanting “Mr. Mojo Risin’,” over and over, while Densmore drags the tempo down and crawls it back up. After the take, Morrison wrote the phrase on a board and shuffled the letters. It is an anagram of Jim Morrison. Densmore knew mojo as a blues word for sexual power and built the dynamics like a slow climb. The band never underlined the trick on the jacket. Listeners found it. LA Weekly later called the song the best ever written about Los Angeles. That is a civic argument as much as a musical one, and it has held up because the record does not flatter the town. It drives through it.

The album around it is the blues record people forget The Doors always had in them. “Love Her Madly,” Krieger’s song, took its title from a Duke Ellington catchphrase and became the first Top 40 single since “Touch Me.” “Riders on the Storm” grew out of a jam on the cowboy standard “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” with a verse tied to Morrison’s notes on spree killer Billy Cook. “The Changeling,” “Been Down So Long,” “Cars Hiss By My Window,” “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)”: a workshop album, loose on purpose, Scheff locking the low end so Manzarek could stay on keys instead of left-hand bass. Rothchild’s exit looks, in hindsight, like the right accident. The Doors sound older here, less arranged, closer to the bar band that started on the beach.

Morrison left for Paris in March 1971, before the album was even in stores. He talked about writing, about getting out from under the singer job. The official story of his death is heart failure in a bathtub. The band continued as a trio for two more albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, then stopped. Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore spent decades arguing in public and in court about the name, the image, and who got to say what. Manzarek died in 2013. Krieger and Densmore still turn up on anniversary projects and one-off recordings. The catalog never went quiet. “L.A. Woman” is the piece that keeps getting licensed when a director needs Los Angeles to feel like a lived-in street instead of a postcard.

On The Zoo we play it the long way, bathroom vocal and all, because the edit misses the point. This is album rock the way the format was built: a band in its own room, a singer writing the city as he sings it, a rhythm section that knows when to idle and when to floor it. If you want the rest of the side, the deep cuts, and the station that still runs without commercials, you are already in the right place. Pull up The Zoo at https://thezoorocks.com/ and keep the dial where the album sides live.

The band’s own door is still open. The official site sits at https://thedoors.com/. Their Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/thedoors. Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/thedoors/. On X they post as https://x.com/TheDoors. For the long-running fan archive that has tracked sessions, set lists, and press since the early web, Mild Equator is still up at https://www.mildequator.com/. Put “L.A. Woman” on, roll the windows down, and let Mr. Mojo Risin’ spell itself. The Zoo will be here when the side ends.