L.A. Woman: Why The Doors’ 1971 Raw, Ragged and Final Triumph is Their True Masterpiece

By 1970, The Doors were teetering on the edge. The past five years had been a whirlwind: hit records, sold-out tours, obscenity trials, public breakdowns, and ever-deepening alcoholism on the part of frontman Jim Morrison. Legal troubles stemming from his infamous Miami concert arrest loomed large, and the once-charismatic singer had morphed into a heavier, more brooding figure. In that climate, the odds of producing a coherent album—let alone a great one—seemed remote.

Yet L.A. Woman, the band’s sixth studio album and the last released during Morrison’s lifetime, defied expectation. Recorded in their cramped rehearsal space on Santa Monica Boulevard, and self-produced after a dramatic falling out with their longtime producer, the record marked a return to their roots: blues-driven, live, and instinctive. “It was as if we had come full circle,” drummer John Densmore later wrote. “Once again we were a garage band.”

It wasn’t just a return—it was, arguably, the finest thing they ever made.

The Producer Who Walked Out

The L.A. Woman sessions opened under a dark cloud in November 1970. The Doors had been a band in flux for some time. Their previous album, Morrison Hotel, had been a gritty return to basics after the heavily orchestrated and critically divisive The Soft Parade (1969), but the internal mood was still uneasy. Jim Morrison, increasingly disengaged and erratic, was facing an impending obscenity trial in Florida that had weighed heavily on the group since his infamous 1969 Miami performance. Add to that a sense of creative fatigue, and the atmosphere in the studio was fragile from the outset.

Into this stepped Paul A. Rothchild, a figure who had loomed large over the band’s recorded output since their earliest Elektra sessions. Rothchild, a jazz-educated producer with a perfectionist streak, had produced every Doors studio album up to that point. He was known for his meticulous, sometimes exhausting, approach to sound and structure. Rothchild had helped sculpt the cinematic textures of Strange Days (1967), and the polish of hit singles like “Touch Me.” But by 1970, his relationship with the band, particularly Morrison, had grown strained.

When Rothchild arrived at the Doors’ West Hollywood rehearsal space, nicknamed “The Workshop”, to hear the new material they had been working on, his reaction was swift and unequivocal. The band played him a selection of rough demos and partially formed jams, including what would become “Riders on the Storm” and “Love Her Madly.” Rothchild was unimpressed. He called “Love Her Madly” lightweight and trite, dismissing it as lacking any of the band’s usual edge. “Riders on the Storm,” now widely hailed as one of the band’s most haunting and atmospheric achievements, was dismissed by Rothchild as “cocktail music”, a damning phrase that suggested it belonged in the background of a lounge rather than as part of a rock record.

Rothchild was known for being blunt, but this time his dissatisfaction had finality. “The material was bad, the attitude was bad, the performance was bad,” he later told Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman in No One Here Gets Out Alive. “I said, ‘That’s it!’ on the talkback, and cancelled the session.” In just three days, he walked away from the band he had helped bring to the forefront of American rock.

The fallout was immediate. The band and Rothchild convened for an emergency summit at a nearby Chinese restaurant, a location which became a sort of informal boardroom for tense band decisions. There, Rothchild did not soften his stance. “I think it sucks,” he told them plainly. “It’s the first time I’ve ever been bored in a recording studio in my life. I want to go to sleep.”

The situation could have spelled disaster. Losing a producer mid-session—especially one so intimately tied to the band’s sonic identity—was no small thing. But rather than demoralise them, Rothchild’s abrupt exit galvanised the Doors. For some time, the band had been chafing under his strict approach. Rothchild’s perfectionism had led to laborious, take-after-take sessions on The Soft Parade, including a single drum fill that took hours to finalise. Morrison in particular had found the previous sessions overly controlled and creatively stifling. Now, the band was free from that oversight.

Into the void stepped Bruce Botnick. Botnick had been the band’s trusted engineer from the very beginning, present for every studio album and intimately familiar with their sound. He had also worked on landmark albums for other acts, including Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and Let It Bleed by the Rolling Stones. Although he lacked Rothchild’s dominating presence, he offered something more valuable under the circumstances: flexibility.

With Rothchild gone, the Doors made the bold decision to self-produce the album in collaboration with Botnick. Rather than hiring a new outside producer, they chose autonomy. This marked a fundamental shift in their creative process. The studio, once a site of labour and precision, became a looser, more experimental space. Takes were kept even if they had minor mistakes, spontaneity was encouraged, and there was a return to the feeling of being a band playing together in real time.

The contrast between the Rothchild sessions and the L.A. Woman sessions could not have been starker. “Rothchild was gone, which is one reason why we had so much fun,” guitarist Robbie Krieger remembered in a 1994 interview with Guitar World. “The warden was gone.”

Indeed, Rothchild’s departure allowed the Doors to lean into the blues foundation that had always underpinned their music but had often been refined into something more theatrical or baroque in the studio. What emerged was not only one of their most visceral records but also arguably the one that best captured their live energy and emotional urgency.

Ironically, some of the songs Rothchild had rejected would go on to become defining tracks of the album. “Love Her Madly” was released as the album’s lead single and became a commercial hit, peaking at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. “Riders on the Storm” would become one of the band’s most enduring pieces, celebrated for its moody complexity and literary depth.

Jim Morrison recorded his vocal parts in a bathroom.

Recording at Home: The Workshop Sessions

Located at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, The Workshop was a nondescript, two-storey commercial building sandwiched between storefronts on a well-trafficked thoroughfare. From the outside, it hardly looked like the birthplace of one of rock’s most enduring albums. Inside, however, it had become a place of refuge for the band—a creative laboratory where they could rehearse without time constraints, label oversight, or the sterile atmosphere of professional studios. As drummer John Densmore later put it, “The place was steeped in our sound. Every wall had heard every mistake, every jam, every breakthrough.”

The decision to record there was born of both necessity and preference. With their long-time producer Paul Rothchild now gone, the band, along with engineer Bruce Botnick, sought an environment that allowed for spontaneity and directness. Botnick was tasked with transforming the rehearsal space into a functional recording studio—a logistical challenge he met with ingenuity and minimal gear. He installed a portable 8-track mixing console upstairs in a makeshift control room and ran lines down into the practice space below. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.

The Workshop wasn’t soundproofed. It didn’t have isolation booths or floating floors. It was cluttered and chaotic, more akin to a shared garage than a recording facility. There were guitar leads snaking across the carpet, dog-eared music magazines strewn on shelves, bottles of whiskey and beer tucked into corners, and even a pinball machine and jukebox—both still functioning and occasionally fired up between takes. The atmosphere was lived-in and loose.

For Morrison, who had grown increasingly disenchanted with the formalities of the music industry, this casual environment was a relief. Freed from the pressures of record company expectations and studio clock-watching, he was able to relax into the material. He chose to record his vocals in the adjoining bathroom, a cramped tiled room with surprisingly good acoustics. The hard surfaces created a natural echo chamber that lent depth and eeriness to his vocals. In typical Morrison fashion, he refused to record behind a closed door—instead, he removed it entirely so he could maintain visual contact with the rest of the band. His preferred microphone was a gold Electro-Voice 676-G, the same model he used onstage, and he held it in his hand while performing, reinforcing the live feel of the sessions.

The intimacy of the room, and of the process, brought the band back to basics. Recording without headphones, they played together in close physical proximity, relying on eye contact and instinct rather than cues from a mixing board. Mistakes were left in if they captured the right mood. Solos were spontaneous. Nothing was too precious.

“We were a garage band again,” Densmore recalled. “And rock and roll began in the garage.” Gone were the overdubs, the string sections, the endless tinkering. What remained was raw, direct, and honest. It was a return to the ethos that had birthed the group in the first place.

Ray Manzarek would later describe the Workshop sessions as “an exorcism” of sorts. They weren’t trying to recapture the past; they were trying to rescue themselves from artistic inertia. The tension that had dogged their recent studio experiences was gone. In its place was a sense of urgency and camaraderie. The songs came together quickly, often in just a few takes. During one particularly fruitful session, dubbed “Blues Day,” the band recorded several tracks in rapid succession: “Been Down So Long,” “Crawling King Snake,” and “Cars Hiss By My Window” all emerged from that single afternoon.

The building itself would eventually pass into other hands. Over the decades, it served various purposes—including as an office and, at one point, a bar. But its link to The Doors’ final studio album has not been forgotten. A plaque placed in the bathroom, the very space where Morrison recorded his vocals, commemorates its role in rock history.

Ultimately, the Workshop sessions gave L.A. Woman its unique sound: not overly produced, but intimate and alive, like the band had walked straight out of the Sunset Strip and into the room to play just for you. In that sense, it wasn’t just a studio—it was a sanctuary, and for a brief moment in late 1970, it gave The Doors the space to rediscover who they were.

A Return to the Blues with New Blood

At its core, L.A. Woman was The Doors returning to what had always anchored their sound: the blues. While their earlier work had drawn on a diverse palette—from Brechtian cabaret to acid rock to jazz modalism—blues had always been their common language. It was where they began, and now, facing uncertainty about their future and without their long-time producer, it was where they instinctively returned.

Unlike the layered and orchestrally adorned tracks of The Soft Parade (1969), L.A. Woman stripped away studio excess and embraced live playing and organic feel. The album’s muscular low end—something often absent in the band’s earlier work due to their lack of a live bassist—was notably bolstered by the addition of Jerry Scheff. Brought in at the suggestion of engineer-producer Bruce Botnick, Scheff had earned critical acclaim as the house bassist for Elvis Presley’s TCB Band during his Las Vegas residencies. His experience playing tight, groove-heavy arrangements night after night lent L.A. Woman the rhythmic weight it needed.

For Jim Morrison, this was not merely a matter of musicianship—it was symbolic. He had idolised Elvis since his youth, and Scheff’s presence linked Morrison directly to his musical lineage. The singer, now grizzled and introspective, was in many ways tracing his way back through America’s musical past, and Scheff served as both guide and anchor.

Scheff’s playing on L.A. Woman was deceptively understated—fluid, precise, and always in the pocket. He complemented John Densmore’s jazz-inflected drumming with a steady pulse that kept the more freewheeling elements of the band in check. This was especially true for Ray Manzarek, whose nimble right hand could sometimes threaten to overpower a track. Scheff’s foundational lines allowed Manzarek to explore more dynamic keyboard textures without the risk of losing cohesion.

In addition to Scheff, guitarist Marc Benno was brought in to enhance the band’s sonic palette. Known for his work with Leon Russell and on albums such as Asylum Choir II, Benno was a seasoned session player with a sensibility rooted in Texas blues and Southern funk. His contributions, particularly on tracks like “Been Down So Long,” “Cars Hiss By My Window,” and the slinky title track “L.A. Woman,” provided a gritty counterbalance to Robbie Krieger’s fluid lead guitar work.

Benno played with a rhythmic swagger, often employing short, percussive chord stabs reminiscent of James Brown’s backing bands. This brought a certain streetwise edge to the album, making the grooves swing without sounding polished. As a result, L.A. Woman doesn’t just recall the blues—it lives in them. This wasn’t revivalism; it was reclamation.

With Rothchild no longer policing their sessions, the Doors could finally indulge their love of feel-driven music. The result was a looser, more spontaneous album—one that didn’t need studio perfection to make its point. It was the blues refracted through Los Angeles neon: swaggering, saturated, and shot through with heat.

Unearthed Origins: “L’America” and Antonioni

Among L.A. Woman’s otherwise grounded tracks sits the angular, unyielding “L’America”—a song that feels like it belongs to a different album, and in a sense, it does. The song predates the L.A. Woman sessions by over a year and was originally recorded for inclusion in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 counterculture film Zabriskie Point.

Antonioni, already famous for Blow-Up (1966), had approached The Doors to contribute music for the soundtrack. The collaboration, at least in theory, made perfect sense: both the director and the band were fascinated by alienation, anti-establishment themes, and the disorienting landscape of post-1960s America. However, in practice, the chemistry was lacking.

When the band played “L’America” at full volume for Antonioni in the studio, it was apparently too much. Ray Manzarek later recalled that the Italian auteur was literally pinned to the wall by the sheer sonic force of the song. Flustered, Antonioni thanked them and made a hasty exit. Unsurprisingly, “L’America” did not make it into the final cut of the film.

The song itself is an outlier. Its cryptic, incantatory lyrics and lurching rhythm reflect Morrison’s interest in cut-up poetry and esoteric symbolism. Musically, it is built on a disjointed, almost mechanical groove, with Manzarek’s keyboards clattering against Densmore’s martial drums. Morrison’s delivery, more spoken than sung, feels ritualistic—as if invoking something ancient through a modern lens. The title may suggest continental idealism, but the song sounds more like a warning than a celebration.

That “L’America” found a home on L.A. Woman is telling. Amidst the bluesy warmth of tracks like “Love Her Madly” and “The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat),” it serves as a reminder that The Doors were never a one-dimensional band. They remained, to the end, fascinated by the tension between structure and chaos, between America’s myth and its reality.

The Ghosts on the Road: “Riders on the Storm”

“Riders on the Storm” is the final track on L.A. Woman and one of the last songs Jim Morrison ever recorded. A blend of noir lyricism, jazz-inflected keyboards, and ambient sound design, it encapsulates much of what made The Doors both distinctive and difficult to categorise.

The song originated as an improvisational riff on Stan Jones’ 1948 country-western tune “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky,” which the band began jamming on during rehearsal. Morrison, never far from a stack of scribbled lyrics, began adapting words he had previously penned for an abandoned screenplay based on Billy Cook, a hitchhiker-turned-serial killer who, in 1950, murdered six people, including an entire family.

Morrison had long been drawn to America’s underbelly, and “Riders on the Storm” allowed him to explore it in a subtle but deeply unsettling way. The lyric, “There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirming like a toad,” paints a surreal yet vividly menacing picture—one that evokes both literal and existential dread. At the same time, the song includes intimate lines addressed to a lover, believed to reference his tumultuous relationship with Pamela Courson, suggesting that Morrison saw death and desire as two sides of the same journey.

Musically, the track is anchored by Ray Manzarek’s hypnotic Fender Rhodes piano, which rolls like distant thunder. Bruce Botnick added real storm effects during the mixing process—rain, thunderclaps, and the low rumble of oncoming dread. It is a song that breathes, expands, and contracts like weather.

But what elevates “Riders on the Storm” to legend is Morrison’s final contribution: a whispered overdub of the song’s title during the fade-out, ghostly and ephemeral. “That’s the last thing he ever did,” Manzarek later said. It’s fitting that the final note Morrison ever recorded would be a whisper—a barely-there farewell that continues to echo.

“Love Her Madly”: Duke Ellington Meets Domestic Rows

Of all the songs on L.A. Woman, “Love Her Madly” is perhaps the most accessible. It was chosen as the album’s lead single and performed well commercially, reaching No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. With its upbeat tempo, infectious riff, and sunny tone, it offered a point of entry into an otherwise brooding album.

Yet its origins are more turbulent than its sound suggests. Guitarist Robbie Krieger wrote the song during a particularly volatile period in his relationship with his girlfriend, Lynne. The recurring arguments, punctuated by slammed doors and temporary walkouts, inspired the lyric: “Don’t ya love her as she’s walkin’ out the door?”

Though lyrically straightforward, the song’s title contains a deeper nod to musical tradition. Krieger, a lifelong jazz enthusiast, borrowed the phrase “Love Her Madly” from Duke Ellington, who famously closed his concerts by telling audiences, “We love you madly.” It was a phrase filled with warmth and reverence, and by repurposing it, Krieger tethered the song to a larger lineage of American music.

This intertextual nod was not lost on his bandmates. The Doors had always flirted with jazz elements, Densmore’s drumming, in particular, drew heavily on Max Roach and Elvin Jones and this track, with its clean structure and swing, served as a sly homage to their eclectic influences.

While “Love Her Madly” may lack the lyrical depth of “Riders on the Storm” or the existential menace of the title track, it remains a vital part of the album’s architecture. It is the morning after the storm, the flash of sunlight before the clouds close again.

A Fast and Furious Recording Process

In stark contrast to the methodical and often exhausting sessions of The Soft Parade—a record that had taken nine months to complete and saw the band frequently at odds over creative direction—the recording of L.A. Woman was swift, intuitive, and deliberately unfussy. With Paul Rothchild gone and Bruce Botnick engineering, the band finally had space to breathe. They laid down nearly all of the album’s basic tracks in a matter of six days, spread between December 1970 and January 1971. For a band that had spent the better part of two years mired in legal troubles and internal friction, the momentum came as both a surprise and a relief.

Much of this acceleration was down to a conscious shift in priorities. Rather than striving for sonic perfection or multiple takes, the Doors focused on capturing performances that felt alive. Morrison’s attention span during sessions had grown notoriously short by this point, so the band made a point of working quickly and capitalising on moments when he was lucid, focused, and engaged. When Morrison was “on,” the band moved fast to catch lightning in a bottle.

One of the most productive days of the entire L.A. Woman project became known among the band simply as “Blues Day.” On that single afternoon, the Doors ran through a string of blues-driven numbers in rapid succession: “Been Down So Long,” “Crawling King Snake,” “Cars Hiss By My Window,” and several unreleased jams. These were largely first or second takes—raw, unpolished, but bursting with energy. They mirrored the kind of spontaneous performances the band used to deliver in smoky LA clubs, before the trappings of fame and studio perfectionism set in.

John Densmore later reflected on this approach, citing an unexpected muse: Miles Davis. He recalled a live recording in which Davis had flubbed a trumpet note, yet kept the take because the overall feeling was right. “There were some mistakes,” Densmore told Modern Drummer in 2010, “but it had the feel. That’s what L.A. Woman is. Just passion. It’s in our rehearsal room, not in a fancy studio. It was the first punk album.”

The album’s sonic identity reflects that ethos. There’s grit in the vocals, crackle in the amps, and tension in the playing. What might have been viewed as technical imperfections instead became integral to the album’s character. In letting go of control, The Doors created something that felt immediate, honest, and timeless.

Cover Art as Rebellion: Morrison vs. Elektra

By late 1970, Jim Morrison was almost unrecognisable from the snake-hipped frontman who had graced the band’s early album covers. The once-svelte “Lizard King” had gained weight, grown a dense, unkempt beard, and adopted an appearance that was deliberately at odds with the sex-symbol image that Elektra Records had cultivated around him.

This physical transformation was more than a by-product of lifestyle, it was a statement. Morrison had grown deeply resentful of his status as a rock deity. He sought instead to be recognised for his poetry, not his looks, and took deliberate steps to subvert the public’s expectations. He stopped giving interviews, avoided photo shoots, and retreated from the stage with increasingly erratic behaviour.

Elektra, however, had no interest in downplaying their star’s iconography. In 1970, the label released 13, a greatest hits compilation featuring an older photo of Morrison on the cover, despite his having posed for updated promotional images. Even Absolutely Live used an earlier, glamorous image of him superimposed over a more current band shot, effectively creating a visual lie.

For L.A. Woman, Morrison insisted on reclaiming control. The cover photo, tinted amber and deliberately lo-fi, was a group shot rather than a close-up of Morrison. He crouched in the frame, making himself appear smaller, less dominant, almost an afterthought. What fans didn’t see was the bottle of Irish whiskey just outside the crop line, a quiet testament to the emotional and physical weight he carried.

“In that photo, you can see the impending demise of Jim Morrison,” Ray Manzarek later reflected. “He was sitting down because he was drunk. A psychic would have known that guy is on the way out.”

Postscript: The Last Whisper

The final mixing sessions for L.A. Woman were completed in January 1971. Shortly thereafter, Jim Morrison left Los Angeles and flew to Paris with Pamela Courson. He told friends he needed time to write, to escape the circus that surrounded him, and to recover his creative spark. He rented a flat in Le Marais and spent his days walking the city’s historic streets, reading poetry, and composing fragments in notebooks.

But the weight of the past, and of his own habits, followed him. Morrison was drinking heavily and reportedly using heroin, although the extent remains a matter of speculation. In the early hours of 3 July 1971, he was found dead in the bath of his Paris apartment. No autopsy was conducted, as it was not legally required under French law unless foul play was suspected. The official cause of death was listed as heart failure.

That same day, “Riders on the Storm” entered the US Billboard charts.

Unreleased Songs and Lost Tapes

Though L.A. Woman was ultimately released with ten tracks, several other songs and fragments were captured during the sessions. Some, like “She Smells So Nice,” remained forgotten in the Elektra tape vaults for decades. This loose, bluesy jam was rediscovered and included in the 40th-anniversary edition of the album in 2011, providing fans with a glimpse into the spontaneity of the sessions.

Another song, “Orange County Suite,” originated from an earlier piano demo Morrison recorded in 1969. Though not technically part of the L.A. Woman sessions, it was revived by the surviving members after his death and released posthumously in various compilations. Lyrically introspective and musically spare, it offers a quieter, more meditative side of Morrison that contrasts with the stormier material from 1971.

But perhaps the most enigmatic lost track is “Paris Blues.” The song, if it can be called that, survives only in fragmentary form on a heavily damaged cassette. What little remains is haunting—both musically and lyrically. The words suggest a man on the brink of reinvention or resignation:

“Once I was young, now I’m gettin’ old

Once I was warm, now I feel cold

Goin’ to the city of love, gonna start my life over again.”

Given that Morrison died in the “city of love” just months later, the lines now read like a poetic epitaph—one last effort to turn away from the wreckage, to begin anew, even as the past crept close behind.

Legacy of a Final Masterpiece

L.A. Woman is the sound of a band reconnected with their core identity, shedding artifice and laying bare their influences: Chicago blues, West Coast jazz, barroom rock, and beat poetry. For Morrison, it was the final flare of inspiration before exile and oblivion. For the rest of the band, it marked the end of the group as they had known it.

The album is imbued with urgency, but also with a sense of ease, the result of a band playing in their own space, on their own terms, without the machinery of the industry dictating pace or tone. There are imperfections. There are moments of slurred timing, unvarnished vocal takes, and rough mixes. But these are not flaws. They are features.

Decades on, L.A. Woman still stands as one of the most vital and authentic documents of its era. It is the end of the road, yes, but also a defiant final stand, filled with ghosts, thunder, and rain.

As the title track roars through the speakers, Morrison growls one last refrain: “Mr. Mojo Risin’”—an anagram of his name, shouted like an incantation. And in that moment, he isn’t fading. He’s surging.

---