The Doors at Work in San Francisco

A definitive collection of the group's recordings at the Matrix in March 1967 scrubs away the iconography of Jim Morrison and the Doors

Welcome music lovers to another edition of ‘Listening Sessions’!

For this edition’s essay, my focus is a three-CD set that came out a few months ago collecting the recordings made of the Doors during a March 1967 run at The Matrix in San Francisco. It is a fascinating set for two reasons: one, it captures them playing live before their legendary debut album took off and the release of their second single, the chart-topping ‘Light My Fire,’ and two, it puts the focus on the Doors as a working group.

I hope you will enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Up next will be the first of two essays on the sounds of the season (for those less inclined to Christmas music, regular programming will resume here in January) with a look at jazz singer Gregory Porter’s new album, Christmas Wish.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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In March 1967, the Doors were a band with a single and an album that few knew about. Their fortunes would of course change dramatically with the release of ‘Light My Fire,’ a song that, even in its truncated form as a single, was an arresting blend of swirling psychedelia and sophisticated pop. At its full seven-minute length that closed the first side of their debut on Elektra, the serpentine solos by keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger, ‘Light My Fire’ gave an added modal-jazz edge to the song.

The Doors were far from the only band taking inspiration outside of the parameters of pop and rock but arguably no band formed in the wake of the Beatles’ explosion were as big as they. Part of their rocket-like ascent can be attributed to the charismatic danger of front man Jim Morrison even as a contemporary of his, David Crosby, dismissed him as a “dweeb.” Back in 1968, Jon Landau, then a budding music journalist and critic, sensed the performative and calculated quality behind Morrison’s image when reviewing Elvis Presley’s 1968 TV special on NBC. He wrote that Presley “moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made [Morrison] green with envy.”

The iconography attached to Morrison—good or bad, depending on your thoughts about on the Doors—such as his coronation as the Lizard King and his eventually membership in the ill-fated 27 Club, tends to obscure that the music of the Doors was a triumph of the collective, conjuring a calliope of sound that leavened the often-dark visions of Morrison. It bears noting that the Doors were an organ trio, that small-group configuration that is one of jazz’s truly minimalist set-ups. Most identified with wailing or gut-bucket blues, the primary popularizer of the organ trio was Jimmy Smith, often a superman on the Hammond B-3. By the mid sixties, the organ trio could tease out a subtler form of expression, especially on a series of albums that teamed Larry Young, a player who could summon up the fury of Smith but who could also play lines of deep harmonic sophistication that straddled the line between in-the-pocket and avant-garde, with guitarist Grant Green and drummer Elvin Jones.

The vast range of expression that Young, Green and Jones specialized in seems a good entry point to consider the similar elasticity of sound of Manzarek, Krieger and drummer John Densmore, who frequently cites Jones as his primary musical influence. They aimed neither at the head nor the heart but at the body, teasing out movement, a corporeal engagement with the music that could be lecherous or sensual or primal or exceedingly literate when it was pretty but most often, it was elemental. It helps to explain why the Doors never had the emotional pull that their labelmates Love had even as it was that band’s front man, Arthur Lee, who alerted Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra, to them, as he endeavoured to break the label out of its folk-music bubble. While Love and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band helped pave the way for Holzman to realize his ambition, it was the Doors who made it come true.

But, as mentioned earlier, the Doors’ ascent didn’t happen overnight. There was a lull during the first six months of 1967 in which they had made a name for themselves in California and nowhere else.

A new release, Live at the Matrix 1967: The Original Masters, definitively collects the recordings made of their run at the Matrix, a small San Francisco club co-owned by Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane, in March 1967 that allows us to hear in length the Doors as a working band, playing set after set of band originals and covers.

Documents like this are almost axiomatically fascinating. The recorded evidence part of the tale of destiny that would soon propel an artist to the stature that always underlines the listening of these kind of recordings in hindsight but remain the closest things that we have to fixing an artist at that particular moment of time when they were a young upstart. The first volume of Joni Mitchell’s indispensable Archives series, covering 1963 to 1967, documents her journey from Joan Mitchell to the moments before she would sign a record contract with Reprise, is one such example. Another is Evenings at the Village Gate, a recording of the John Coltrane Quartet with Eric Dolphy from the summer of 1961, a chance to pop in on the day-to-day process of Coltrane defining his identify as a performer and, by extension, how it would apply to the group under his leadership.

That’s the perspective with which to hear the Doors’ collection. While their Elektra debut, awaiting its proper moment with the zeitgeist, expertly showcased the most exciting and dynamic songs in their repertoire and began daringly with Densmore laying down a bossa-nova beat on the decidedly non-bossa nova ‘Break on Through (To the Other Side); and ended with the macabre raga of ‘The End,’ the Matrix material is part of the grunt work that was required to make sure the toil of what remains one of the most electric debuts albums ever recorded would pay off.

And on the recording, we are dropped in starting not with a selection from the debut but with an extended improvisation around Milt Jackson’s iconic line, ‘Bags’ Groove.’ It is not the only instrumental included—there are also interludes centred on Miles Davis’ ‘All Blues’ and Gershwin’s ‘Summertime.’ All three are curiousities, more background music than anything else really and all featuring, more or less, the same looping vamp but are also essential to understanding the widening ears of many who may have been in the audience (in the album’s liner notes written by Joel Selvin, there is the delicious tidbit that during the Human Be-In on January 14, 1967 in Golden Gate Park, which the Doors took in as spectators, jazz flutist Charles Lloyd sat in with Jefferson Airplane during their performance). That being said, one’s ears may never get wide enough to appreciate Manzerak singing lead on a piece like Willie Dixon’s ‘Close to You.’ Far better, of course, is when Morrison takes the lead on blues and soul numbers like Allen Toussaint’s ‘Get Out of My Life Woman’ and John Lee Hooker’s ‘Crawling King Snake,’ to be eventually recorded by the Doors for L.A. Woman.

Manzerak as a vocalist is best employed when adding heft to Morrison’s lead on a driving version of ‘Moonlight Drive,’ the first song that they collaborated on, and their ecstatic cover of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria.’

The band favours the cream of the crop from their debut album, avoiding the lax segment on the second side of ‘I Looked at You,’ ‘End of the Night’ and ‘Take it As it Comes.’ ‘Light My Life’ is taken at a languid clip and it’s only about a minute in that the group finally digs into the famous opening with Manzerak’s psychedelic prelude that resolves in the thudding full-band blast that sets that stage for Morrison to take over.

To hear him on these recordings is to hear the singer and not the showman. Morrison was a signer who, like Arthur Lee, had two sides. He could snarl and strut, but was also a delicate, direct balladeer, if unsentimental and detached, as on the beginning of ‘I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind.’ He repeats the song title at the beginning with zero affectation or rhythm as if a singer from the Renaissance era before the song turns into the kind of kaleidoscopic beat that was de rigueur but also formulaic for the Doors. The Matrix recording has a bevy of songs that use the same stylistic twist: ‘My Eyes Have Seen You,’ ‘Summer’s Almost Gone,’ ‘Unhappy Girl,’ the aforementioned ‘I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind’ and ‘People Are Strange’ (here, the formula is powerfully transcended).

Surrounding there are some of the jewels of what keeps the Doors timeless. There’s the bawdy ‘Soul Kitchen’ with an extended solo by Krieger. Their left-field cover of Kurt Weill’s ‘Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)’ is included twice; the second version switches genders so that Morrison is asking “show me the way to the next little boy.” A 14-minute exploration of ‘The End’ is relatively sedate compared to the epochal studio version. An excerpt from a second performance of the middle-section monologue has Morrison ripping away the shackles that required him on record to obscure, as he entered his parent’s bedroom, what he was to do to his mother after committing patricide. ‘Back Door Man’ has grit and the lascivious glee as Morrison sings “you men eat your dinner / eat your pork and beans / I eat more chicken / than any man ever seen.”

Again, it’s the overall experience of listening that counts here. More pointedly, it’s the opportunity to hear the music as it was played—the selective excising of what was performed in previous versions of the Matrix material is now at an absolute minimum, allowing the listener to hear everything, warts and all. That’s exciting and makes Live at the Matrix 1967: The Original Masters essential for any Doors fan as well as anyone fascinated by San Francisco during the Summer of Love. It’s also not available on streaming services (though earlier releases that includes some of this music are). That’s exciting too. Ultimately, Live at the Matrix 1967: The Original Masters is about the Doors unvarnished and experiencing that means grabbing the chance to support the supremacy of physical product. That’s a win-win if ever there was such a thing.