When The Doors entered Elektra Sound Recorders on 4 November 1969, they weren’t just starting work on their fifth album Morrison Hotel. They were also trying to resuscitate their career.
The band had a rough year behind them which had been dominated by non-musical issues. Vocalist Jim Morrison had racked up several charges against him and was released on bail awaiting trials most of the year. The backlash was immediate. Tours were cancelled, bad press mounted, and things were looking a bit uncertain for the band.
Amid all this, they were recording their fourth album The Soft Parade. The album took an unheard-of nine months to make and included brass and string arrangements. The new musical styles on the album was a bone of contention within the group, and it didn’t help that fatigue had set in. The album is certainly not without its merits, but it was still their least successful album to date both critically and commercially.
The group agreed to record a new album with more of a back-to-basics approach. They wanted to go back to being a unified The Doors, playing the type of music they once did, and just have fun again. The band returned to the studio just four months after the release of The Soft Parade, ready to re-embrace their roots. The resulting album Morrison Hotel was largely seen as a return to form for the band.
Crucially, the album brought back a unified band feeling. “[Morrison Hotel] was a great album to record,” keyboardist Ray Manzarek remembered in his memoir Light My Fire: My Life With The Doors. The songs flew more naturally, and it contained more of the sounds people associated with them, as well as a few bluesy numbers that sat well within the band’s repertoire.
With the album finished, the band met with photographer Henry Diltz and designer Gary Burden to make plans for the cover art. Diltz and Burden had just done the album cover of CSN’s debut album, and based on that alone, The Doors were keen to use them as well.
The process was slow going as first, as the band had no name for the album, nor did they have any ideas. They were all scratching their heads about what to do when Manzarek casually mentioned that he and his wife had been driving around downtown L.A., and had spotted a funky old hotel with a huge Morrison Hotel logo on the window. That sounded great and gave them something to focus on.
Diltz, Burden, Manzarek and Morrison quickly went down there to scout out the location in advance. The Morrison Hotel was located on South Hope Street in Downtown Los Angeles, and while the place itself was less than impressive (Diltz later described it as “an old fleabag place for derelicts to sleep it off”), the window setting itself was found to be more than suitable.
A week later, on 17 December 1969, the band and photographer all showed up, intending to photograph the band using the window setting. They were ready to go. Things would not be as easy as that, though.
As they marched into the empty lobby, the front desk clerk of the hotel interfered. He sternly told them that he could not allow them to take any photographs without the owner’s permission. As the owner – by all accounts a well-known shady character – was nowhere to be found, this effectively barred them from entering and doing what they had planned.
Rather than giving up, they decided to try to take some pictures outside, in front of the window and around the place instead, as they couldn’t be stopped from doing that. Several photos exist of the band in that setting.
As they stood in front of the window, Diltz noticed a big white light go on in the lobby. He looked closer and found that it was the elevator light. The clerk had left the front desk and gone up in the elevator! The band was told to rush inside, where they all struck casual poses inside the window.
They had not worked out who should be where in advance. They just naturally fell into place exactly the way we see on the photo. Morrison took the centre spot, and the rest of them draped around him naturally.
Diltz was perfectly placed outside, wasting no time in quickly shooting an entire roll of film. And that was it!
To celebrate their successful subterfuge, everyone went for a drink at a nearby dive bar on 300 East 5th Street called the Hard Rock Café. Finding the name striking, Diltz shot even more pictures of the band there. One of those shots ended up as the album’s back cover.
Both location names resurfaced on the album when it was released on 9 February 1970. In addition to appearing on the front and back covers, “Hard Rock Cafe” was listed as the title of side one, while “Morrison Hotel” was the title of side two, as well as the title of the album itself.
Some time after the album’s release, two young men in London, Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett, were struck by the name of the bar on the back cover. They called Diltz asking if they could use the Hard Rock Café name for a restaurant they were planning to open. Diltz said sure, and just like that the name of a long-closed dive bar came to be more associated with a high-end hamburger chain whose walls feature pricey rock and roll memorabilia. “Now every time I go into a Hard Rock Café, whatever city I’m in, I always feel like I should get a free hamburger,” Diltz later joked.
What about the original Hard Rock Café on 5th Street? It would benefit from the Doors association, but got its biggest claim to fame when Michael Jackson used it as a location for the bar scenes in the Beat It music video. It eventually went out of business, but the building still exists and now houses the Green Apple Market.
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