The Doors Release First Track in 40 Years
Fans of The Doors rejoice! We're in for a treat in 2012, declared The Year of the Doors. For starters, there's some brand new Doors music! Forty years after the band's classic—and final—album dropped in 1971, Rhino Records is releasing a two-disc reissue of L.A. Woman that includes, among other gems, the never-before-heard original, "She Smells So Nice."
Producer Bruce Botnick unearthed the track while reviewing the album's session tapes for the reissue project, L.A. Woman 40th Anniversary Edition, set for release on January 24. The snappy blues number, which the band premiered on their Facebook page earlier this month, is the first "new" Doors song to be released with the original lineup—late singer Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore—in four decades. Although the recording is a bit rough, and Morrison's feral vocals somewhat muffled in spots, "She Smells So Nice" captures the raw energy of The Doors at the height of their creative powers.
In an interview with ARTISTdirect.com, Manzarek dished on the story behind the new tune. "It came out of the blue, man! We were jamming and putting it together. It's instantaneous creation and spontaneous generation right then and there," he says. "We had no memory of it until we started listening to the outtakes for L.A. Woman. All of a sudden, we were like, 'Eureka, what is this?' It's virtually as brand new for us as it is for the listener."
L.A. Woman was The Doors' sixth album and ultimately, their last. By far the band's most blues-oriented record, it included several cuts that rate among The Doors' finest and most disturbing work. Released in April 1971, L.A. Woman paid homage to the city of Los Angeles—from it's rollicking title track that celebrates both the glamour and seediness of the town, to the brooding, jazzy, cinematic "Riders on the Storm," which, Manzarek reveals, Morrison sang locked in a downstairs bathroom of The Doors Workshop, the band's small West Hollywood rehearsal studio. The dark, haunting number evokes "the image of a lonely stretch of desert highway," he says, "and there's a young man hitchhiking. He's coming into or going out of Los Angeles. Either way, there's rain on the desert. It's a very unusual sight. Way off in the distance, there's the glow of the lights of Los Angeles, but that person on the road is mad." Immediately upon completion of L.A. Woman, Jim Morrison fled Los Angeles for Paris. He never returned.
In addition to the newly discovered track, the remastered L.A. Woman 40th Anniversary Edition also features eight previously unreleased alternate versions of "L.A. Woman," "Love Her Madly," "Riders on the Storm," and more. Bonus tracks include "(You Need Meat) Don't Go No Further" by Willie Dixon and Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)," as well as the Jim Morrison composition, "Orange County Suite," on which he played piano.
According to Manzarek, "There are background vocals by Jim, piano parts of mine that weren't used, and guitar stingers and solos by Robby that never made the original recordings, that can now be heard for the first time."
"It's pretty cool," Robby Krieger tells Billboard.com. "We found a lot of outtakes and separate takes of most of the songs, which are going to be on the set, as well as remastering the original album. I pretty much totally forgot about these other takes; when you're recording you kind of just throw them away in your mind. But it's interesting because you can see how different songs developed and changed from one take to the next. 'L.A. Woman,' the song, is quite different from what it started out as."
The studio chatter between band members and Botnick is especially cool, transporting listeners back some forty years. One segment in particular captures a fascinating moment of inspiration when Morrison suggests they add the now-iconic thunderstorm sound effects to the beginning of "Riders on the Storm."
In conjunction with the L.A. Woman reissue, a making-of documentary is also being released that same day. Mr. Mojo Risin': The Story of L.A. Woman (Eagle Rock Entertainment DVD/Blu-ray) is told through new interviews with the surviving band members as well as Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, original manager Bill Siddons, engineer/co-producer Bruce Botnick and others. The high-def video also features live and studio performances as well as rare archival photos.
Mr. Mojo Risin' (an anagram of Morrison's name that was made famous during the bridge of "L.A. Woman") will have a one-time special screening on January 20 at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, California, and will include a host of surprise guests, among them, Jac Holzman and Los Angeles rock radio veteran Jim Ladd, who will present the film and take questions about the group's final album and legacy afterwards at a public Q&A session.
Rhino is also expected to release L.A. Woman: The Workshop Sessions in March. The double LP will feature all of the previously unrelated material found on the CD collection on three sides of vinyl, with the fourth side featuring a laser etching of the original "Electric Woman" art originally included with the L.A.Woman album.
The Year of The Doors is expected to be marked by other special releases to honor the band, including rumored box sets dedicated to their early career residencies at the Matrix in San Francisco and the London Fog in Los Angeles. But Krieger doesn't expect more outtake-laden album treatments like the group is doing for L.A. Woman. "I wish we could, but very few outtakes exist," he says. "It's really a catastrophe; Elektra, being a small label, they took a lot of our masters, our 8-track and 16-track tapes, and bulk-erased them so they could use them for other bands to record on. So very few outtakes remain. The stuff on L.A. Woman was just an amazing find."
