THE STORY OF A SONG: The Doors : Riders On The Storm (1971)

(written by Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Robby Krieger, & Ray Manzarek)

Although lead singer and songwriter Jim Morrison’s hard-partying lifestyle was exacting a toll, he and the Doors, nonetheless, produced some of their finest work on what would become their final album together. Love Her Madly was the smash leadoff single; its follow-up, Riders On the Storm, was one of the Lizard King’s most haunting creations. The fact that it was the last song he ever recorded—and that his bandmates would never see him again after he left the studio—only added to its poignancy. It’s a brooding, atmospheric rock ballad with an aura of dark foreboding. Paul Evans and Charles R. Cross write of the album: “Morrison’s voice is a ghost of its former glory— doom, heartbreak, and frustration sound in his every note. Difficult and sad, the record has some of the power of Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night: It’s a straining for catharsis.”

L.A. Woman was recorded almost entirely live in the studio in less than two weeks. Having lost their regular producer Paul Rothchild, who decided to produce Janis Joplin’s Pearl instead, the Doors coproduced the LP themselves with their longtime engineer Bruce Botnick, who had been with them since the beginning. Most of the album was recorded in the band’s rehearsal room, with Morrison’s mike set up in the bathroom. Eric Olsen and Dawn Darling remark that the track’s “evocative cocoon of cool menace” is established by the opening bassline slowed down from the surf-rock classic Pipeline, overlaid with Ray Manzarek’s Fender Rhodes electric piano. Robbie Krieger’s reverbed surf guitar “adds to the misty atmosphere and underpins the rhythm.” Immediately after completion of the album, Morrison fled to Paris, hoping that there he could escape his self-destructive L.A. lifestyle. But two months after the album hit the charts, he was dead of heart failure at age twenty-seven. 

Riders On The Storm debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 the day of his death, July 3, 1971 (reached #14).