Roadhouse Blues

The Zoo Crew has got the turntable warmed up and the needle dropped on a cut that still smells like beer, sawdust, and a long night that refuses to end. "Roadhouse Blues," the opening track from The Doors' 1970 album Morrison Hotel, is the kind of bar-band blues that makes a room lean forward. If you are riding along with the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, this is the one that feels like the lights just got dimmer and somebody finally told the truth.

Before the band even counted it off, Jim Morrison set the scene out loud in the studio. On a take that later turned up with the fiftieth-anniversary Morrison Hotel set, he talked the other three through it like a short film. An old roadhouse, down South or out in the Midwest, maybe on the way to Bakersfield. A '57 Chevy. A six-pack. A few joints. The radio on. Not too fast, not too slow. Guitarist Robby Krieger later told Rolling Stone he could not remember Morrison doing that kind of scene-setting before. Krieger also said the real roadhouse was closer than the lyric let on: a bar a little east of the Troubadour, across the way from the studio, where Morrison spent time with his drinking buddies. City block or not, the place looked like it belonged out in the desert. That was the picture in his head when he sang it.

The session itself had the loose luck of a good night on the road. The band had decided they wanted a blues, which Krieger said was Morrison's favorite thing right then. Regular session bassist Ray Neapolitan got stuck in traffic. Blues guitarist Lonnie Mack, who was working as an Elektra A&R man after a stretch away from the business, happened to be in the building and sat in on bass. John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful walked into the same orbit and offered harmonica. Contract issues kept his name off the original sleeve, so he was listed as G. Puglese. Sebastian has said the track was cut live, Morrison in an isolation booth, everybody else in the room, Paul Rothchild running the date. Sebastian was locked on Mack's bass line. Once that lick sat right, the path of the song was charted. Ray Manzarek moved off the Wurlitzer and onto a tack piano, the kind of honky-tonk box that puts grit under the chords. Krieger played every guitar part. Morrison can be heard hollering "do it, Robby, do it!" right as the solo starts.

There is a smaller story behind the most quoted line. Alice Cooper has told it more than once, including on his Planet Rock radio show. He and Morrison were sitting around drinking. Cooper mentioned that he had woken up that morning and got himself a beer. Morrison wrote it down while they talked. Next thing Cooper heard was that line coming back out of the song. He has said he thought, I just said that a second ago. Morrison was also deep in a stretch where the takes did not always behave. On the first day, November 4, 1969, he flubbed lines and kept circling a phrase about money beating soul. The second day, with Mack on bass, the track settled. Rothchild still pushed for plenty of passes. Some of those extras later showed up on the 2006 reissue. A later studio meeting of the song put Morrison's vocal next to John Lee Hooker on the 2000 tribute set Stoned Immaculate.

Krieger has called the song one of his personal favorites, and not because it is complicated. In a Guitar World talk he said the little lick is what turns a basic blues into a song, and that this is about as clean an example as you can get of what made the band work. He and Morrison were both sunk into Howlin' Wolf, Hooker, and Muddy Waters around the Morrison Hotel period. Morrison would jump onstage at the Whisky or the Troubadour with whoever was up there. Krieger joked that Morrison would not always bother to learn the full words of those old blues, do one verse, then drift into his own lines. On "Roadhouse Blues" that habit landed in the right room. The record did not climb the singles chart the way "Light My Fire" had, but it became the live closer and the radio staple, the one that still sounds like a band that had decided to get back to the floorboards after the orchestral stretch of The Soft Parade.

The four of them did not arrive at that floor by accident. The start of The Doors sits on a beach in Venice in July 1965. Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek already knew each other from the UCLA film school. Manzarek ran into him on the sand, asked what he had been doing, and Morrison said he had been writing songs. Manzarek asked to hear one. Morrison sang "Moonlight Drive," lines about swimming to the moon and climbing through the tide. Manzarek's version of that afternoon is simple. He heard those words and knew that was the band. Morrison later put it his own way: he had been taking notes at a rock and roll concert going on in his head.

Manzarek was already playing keyboards with his brothers Rick and Jim in a combo called Rick and the Ravens, working bars like the Turkey Joint West and covering "Louie Louie" and Chicago blues for a college crowd. Morrison sat in, lost his voice on that first public pass, and stayed. Drummer John Densmore, who had been playing with a group called the Psychedelic Rangers and knew Manzarek from meditation classes, came in that summer. In September 1965 the Ravens cut a demo at World Pacific Jazz Studios: early passes at "Moonlight Drive," "Hello, I Love You," "Summer's Almost Gone," and a few others, lyrics by Morrison. The brothers and the bass player did not stick with the new songs. Guitarist Robby Krieger, another face from the meditation center and from Densmore's Rangers, stepped in with bottleneck and a harder edge. They never hired another bass player. Manzarek covered the low end on a Fender Rhodes piano bass. In October 1965 Morrison named the band. He took it from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which itself borrowed a line from William Blake: if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite. A residency at the London Fog on the Strip knocked the set into shape. By the summer of 1966 they were on the Whisky a Go Go stage, and the long run had started.

That beach meeting is still the root of the later barroom blues. A film student with a notebook full of lines, a keyboard player who heard a song in them, a drummer and a guitarist who knew how to leave space. By the time they cut Morrison Hotel they had already been through the hit singles, the bans, and the bigger productions. "Roadhouse Blues" was the sound of them parking the Chevy, walking in, and playing like the night was still young. The official home for the catalog, the session stories, and the Morrison Hotel history is The Doors. Their official pages keep the same trail warm: Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing boots, posters, and old set lists gather in the public group The Doors fan club - Liquid Night. Let it ride, let it roll. The back door is open and the band is already in the groove.