Riders on the Storm (Alternate Version)

The Zoo Crew has the rain on the windshield and the road stretching out in front of the board tonight, and the record on the turntable is “Riders on the Storm (Alternate Version)” by The Doors, pulled from the sessions that became the album L.A. Woman. If you have only ever heard the finished single, this cut is the one that still has the workshop dust on it. The four of them are still talking between takes. Jim Morrison drifts into the theme from Rawhide like he is auditioning for a dusty television western, then tells the room he does not follow orders, he is just a dumb singer, and he will come in when he feels like it. Somebody jokes about sending out to Arizona for some good thunder. Then they mark a take and the song starts walking. That is the version the Zoo Freaks are riding with on THE ZOO right now.

The finished track is the last song all four Doors recorded together, and the whispered second vocal is the last thing Morrison put on tape before he left for Paris. Ray Manzarek later called that whisper an ephemeral overdub, a voice fading into the weather. On the alternate you can hear why the idea showed up late. The band had already gotten the body of the song down at their own two-story workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, after longtime producer Paul Rothchild walked out. Rothchild had listened to an early run at this one and labeled it cocktail music. Robby Krieger has said the real reason Rothchild split was heavier than that. He had just finished Janis Joplin’s Pearl, she died, and he did not want to be the producer who finished an album and then lost the singer. Whatever the cause, The Doors and engineer Bruce Botnick took the reins, Jerry Scheff came in on bass, and they cut the album like a garage band that had somehow learned jazz.

The song itself started as a jam on “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” that old cowboy legend Stan Jones wrote and Vaughn Monroe made famous. Krieger was playing it with a twang, Manzarek heard a left-hand bass line and a rainy piano figure, and Morrison already had a story about a hitchhiker. The killer on the road is Billy Cook, the spree killer who murdered six people, including a family, while hitching toward California in 1950. Morrison had turned that into a screenplay idea, and the verse landed here. The title nods at a line from Hart Crane’s “Praise for an Urn,” and the love-your-man section pulls from the long, rough weather of his life with Pamela Courson. Manzarek’s keyboard took the gallop out of the cowboy tune and left a highway at night. John Densmore did not play a straight rock beat. He laid eighth notes across the kick, the ride, and the snare at once, which is why the song feels like tires on wet asphalt instead of a stomp.

The rain and thunder were not on the workshop tapes. Those came later, at Poppi Studios, while Botnick mixed. He had Elektra sound-effects recordings of storms, pressed the button, and the thunder happened to land where the solos needed it. Densmore has said they felt like they were playing God, cueing a clap after a guitar line. The alternate version sits before that polish, closer to the room, closer to Morrison joking and then leaning into the lyric like he means every mile of it. The single went out in June 1971. It entered the Billboard chart the week ending July 3, 1971, the same week Morrison died in Paris. The band had told him it would be the next single. He said that was great, and that he would be back.

None of that weather would have existed if two film students had not run into each other on Venice Beach in July 1965. Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek already knew each other from UCLA. Morrison had been living rough around the canals, writing on rooftops, and he told Manzarek he had been taking notes at a rock and roll concert going on in his head. Manzarek asked to hear something. Morrison sang “Moonlight Drive.” Manzarek said they ought to get a band together and make a million dollars. He already had a foothold. His brothers Rick and Jim had a group called Rick and the Ravens, and Ray had been on keyboards with them since his Chicago days. Morrison sat in, sang “Louie Louie” until he lost his voice, and stayed.

Drumming came through a meditation class. Manzarek met John Densmore there. Densmore had been playing with a band called the Psychedelic Rangers, and he brought in guitarist Robby Krieger from the same circle. In September 1965 they cut a demo at World Pacific, early passes at “Moonlight Drive,” “Hello, I Love You,” and “Summer’s Almost Gone.” The Manzarek brothers and the bassist dropped away. Morrison named what was left The Doors, from a line in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which Huxley had taken from William Blake. If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite. That was the job description.

They became the house band at the Whisky a Go Go in the summer of 1966, on a tip and a shove from Arthur Lee of Love. Jac Holzman of Elektra came down, watched them, and signed the band. They were fired from the Whisky not long after for playing “The End,” with its Oedipal recitation, a little too clearly for a Sunset Strip room. The first album arrived in 1967. An edited “Light My Fire” went to number one. Five years later they were back in a rehearsal room, producing themselves, closing L.A. Woman with a song about being thrown into the world like a dog without a bone. The alternate take lets you sit in that room before the storm effects and the whisper got laid on top.

The band’s own house is still open at the official Doors website, where the L.A. Woman stories and the Riders on the Storm session history are kept with the rest of the catalog. The day-to-day talk lives on the official Facebook page, the official Instagram, and the official X account. Fans still gather and trade pictures, boots, and road stories in the Doors fan club group Liquid Night. Put the alternate on, leave the window cracked, and let the workshop take roll. The Zoo Crew will be here when the thunder comes back around.