L.A. Woman (Alternate Version)

You are locked into The Zoo, the station that still treats album rock like a living language, and the cut on the board is “L.A. Woman (Alternate Version)” by The Doors, pulled from the sessions that became their sixth and final studio album, L.A. Woman. This is not the seven-minute single the radio programmers eventually sanded down for the charts. This is the band in the room, still hunting the groove, still arguing with the arrangement by playing it, still letting Jim Morrison find the city in his own voice before anybody decided what the record was supposed to be. If you want the deep catalog and the long versions instead of the playlist version of rock and roll, you are already home at The Zoo.

The Doors formed in Los Angeles in 1965, when keyboardist Ray Manzarek ran into Morrison on the beach at Venice and heard a few lines of what would become “Moonlight Drive.” Manzarek had been studying film at UCLA. Morrison had been writing poetry there and not doing much else. Guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore came out of the Meditation Center scene and a band called the Psychedelic Rangers. They took the name from Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which Huxley had borrowed from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Elektra signed them in 1966. The debut arrived in January 1967, “Light My Fire” went to number one, and inside of a year they were the strangest hit band in America, a jazz-blues-poetry quartet with no bass player of their own and a singer who treated the stage like a séance.

By the end of 1970 the spell was cracked. Morrison’s Miami obscenity trial was still hanging over the band. The Soft Parade and Morrison Hotel had pulled them back toward the blues after the orchestral detour, but longtime producer Paul A. Rothchild heard the new material at Sunset Sound, called “Riders on the Storm” cocktail jazz, and walked. Engineer Bruce Botnick stayed. The band co-produced. They hauled an eight-track machine, a mixing board, and a pile of microphones into the Doors Workshop at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, the rehearsal room they already knew, and they cut the album mostly live over six days spread across December 1970 and January 1971. Elvis Presley’s bassist Jerry Scheff sat in. Rhythm guitarist Marc Benno, out of Leon Russell’s circle, sat in. Morrison sang into his stage microphone in the bathroom, because the tile gave him the room sound he wanted and because that was where he kept going anyway.

The title track was the hard one. Botnick later said they did not get “L.A. Woman” all at once, which is why the fiftieth-anniversary tapes break the song into parts. The alternate version is one of those Workshop passes, the band woodshedding a complicated blues so it would sound uncomplicated. Krieger’s slide and the second guitar from Benno lock into a highway pulse. Manzarek’s electric piano and organ sketch the neon. Densmore plays it like a soul drummer who has been listening to jazz. Scheff supplies the bottom the Doors had always borrowed from Manzarek’s left hand. Morrison is not yet performing the finished myth. He is driving it, testing the phrasing, letting the vamp open up until the letters fall into place.

Those letters are the piece of trivia every Zoo listener should carry. “Mr. Mojo Risin’” is an anagram of “Jim Morrison.” He worked it out on a scrap of paper in the Workshop and showed the band. In the Delta blues they were mining for this record, a mojo is a conjure bag, a flannel sack of roots and charms. Morrison took the word the way a lot of rock singers took it, as heat, and he built the back half of the song into a chant that speeds up until it tips over. On the released master that climb is famous. On the alternate take you hear them finding the ramp, hearing how fast the phrase can go before the pocket breaks. Ray Manzarek always described the song as a freeway ride, into Los Angeles or out the 405 toward San Francisco, a beatnik behind the wheel in the lineage of Kerouac and Cassady. Morrison lifted the “city of night” image from John Rechy’s 1963 novel of the same name and turned it into a portrait of the city as a woman, a lover, and a trap.

They played the song live only once, at State Fair Music Hall in Dallas on December 11, 1970, while the album was still being made. The record came out on April 19, 1971. “Love Her Madly” was the single. “Riders on the Storm” followed, with rain mixed in later at Poppi Studios and Morrison whispering the title on the fade. The title track took longer to become a standard, but Krieger has called it the quintessential Doors song. Morrison left for Paris after the sessions. He died there on July 3, 1971, at twenty-seven. The Workshop album was the last studio work released in his lifetime. The other three carried on for two more records, then closed the book. Manzarek died in 2013. Krieger and Densmore are still out there with the catalog.

What the alternate version gives you, on a station that still plays the album cut, is the sound of a band that had lost its producer, lost the fancy room, and found the record anyway. No orchestra. No concept. Four men who had been together since Venice, plus two hired guns who understood the blues, cutting a song about their own city in a room the size of a living room. The official home for the catalog, the reissues, and whatever Robby and John are doing with the tapes is thedoors.com. The band’s own pages are on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the session notes, the set lists, and the long memory, the fan archive at Mild Equator still does the work. The Zoo will be here with the rest of the side when this one rides out.