L.A. Woman and Jim Morrison’s map of Los Angeles

No one knew “Riders on the Storm” was going to be the last Doors song Jim Morrison recorded. The only one who might have known was Morrison himself, when he took his post at the band’s workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, in a bathroom converted into an isolation booth. There’s something especially haunting about hearing him mumble “It’ll never be take 10 again” in the opening seconds of the final cut. It would never be “take 10” again; the Doors would never be the Doors again, Morrison would never be Morrison again. L.A. would never be Morrison’s L.A. again, and neither would his L.A. woman. 

L.A. Woman was the Doors’ sixth and final studio album, the last to be recorded and released during Morrison’s lifetime. He died in a Paris bathtub 75 days after the album’s April 19th, 1971 release. The album was an oddly fitting farewell to the city that turned him into a prophet. However, there were always other ways of seeing him.

Writer, chronicler, and quintessential L.A. girl-about-town Eve Babitz spent her teens and early twenties integrating herself into the Sunset Strip rock scene. She became entangled with Morrison before the Doors were officially official: “The Doors were embarrassing, like their name,” Babitz wrote in her 1991 Esquire essay “Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood.” “I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors of Perception… What an Ojai-geeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.” 

Babitz was always one to cut through Morrison’s carefully constructed identity, regardless of the hold he had on her in the band’s early years (there’s an important distinction, she notes, between “Morrison as a sex object and the Doors as a group”). She saw through the schtick that laid a dramatic veil over the Doors’ music; nothing was getting past this L.A. native. “The whole audience would put up with long, tortured silences and humiliation and just awful schmuck stuff Jim did during performances,” she wrote. “He could get away with it because his audience was all college kids who thought the Doors were cool because they had lyrics you could understand about stuff they learned in Psychology 101 and Art History.” 

That same sort of dissonance played out in how each of them lived in and understood L.A. itself. Babitz’s city was boundless, free, eternal, with a “Neptunian blur” that put all of its inhabitants into a trance. She belonged there and rarely left. Apart from a few months in New York, a few months in San Francisco, and a year or so in Rome, Babitz was a live-and-die-in-L.A. kind of girl, bursting with adventure and sexuality and hedonism and anything else she wanted. But Morrison’s L.A. was intense, apocalyptic; every day was Doomsday eve. In Babitz’s 1982 autofiction novel about a Doors groupie—also titled L.A. Woman—Babitz’s stand-in, Sophie, wants Morrison to see L.A. as she does: “I wanted to make L.A. look as though even a child could see that the bungalows and palm trees were only bungalows and palm trees and not out to kill the rest of the world.” That feeling of being hunted down by the city and its residents informs much of Morrison’s tone across the Doors’ L.A. Woman. 

THE ALBUM MAPS THE CITY from the start: “I live uptown / I live downtown / I live all around,” Morrison reveals on “The Changeling,” immediately situating himself within the city’s sprawl. He becomes an omnipresent figure, going everywhere and nowhere (“I’m the air you breathe / Food you eat / Friends you greet”), and he can leave whenever he wants (“But I’ve never been so broke that I couldn’t leave town”). But for all its vastness (and for all his infamy), Morrison’s L.A. had become contained by the time the Doors started recording L.A. Woman. The sessions spanned a small radius around whatever neighborhood Morrison found himself in, focusing on Hollywood as time went on. Over five years, he slowly built a cocoon around himself that was as insular as it was isolating. The deceptively upbeat “Love Her Madly” (which producer Paul Rothchild denounced as nothing but “cocktail music”) hints at the slow unraveling leading to Morrison’s own detachment: “All your love is gone / So sing a lonely song.” 

Morrison’s L.A. (much like my own some 50 years later) started at UCLA, where he met fellow artheads and haughty poets at the film school. I thought of him each time I went to a film class during undergrad, engulfed in the same world where Morrison dove deeper and deeper into his own esoteric image. Babitz, ever the realist, insists on reminding us that “being a film major in the ‘60s was hopelessly square.” The movies weren’t cool yet. Babitz also rejected UCLA as an institution, which she mentions repeatedly across her work, emphasizing how little interest she had in attending: “‘Going on’ meant UCLA, which, like Everest, was there.” 

From Westwood, Morrison’s L.A. expanded down Wilshire and toward the coast. He spent the summer of 1965 in Venice and Santa Monica, taking acid and barely eating until he eventually transformed from the unassuming student to the striking-but-troubled rock god and poetry prince he’s been regarded as since. What follows is a tale told so many times over it’s become shaded by its own mysticism: Morrison living and writing songs on the roof of 14 Westminster Avenue (now known as The Morrison Apartments) before approaching future Doors keyboardist (and fellow UCLA film alum) Ray Manzarek on the beach. Minutes after exchanging pleasantries, Morrison sang Manzarek one of his songs. 

Serendipity? Coincidence? Scheme? Premeditated plot developed after lurking in the shadows for months? Who’s to say? All that’s known is that the sun, the sand, the wind, the brisk nights and the shining moon, the boundlessness of Venice Beach informed the air of their earliest tracks. As Babitz writes, the beach was a place to reset, bask, escape: “Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible… to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.”

Everything quickly funneled its way back up Venice Boulevard, straight down La Cienega until landing at the Sunset Strip. In their infancy, the Doors did early gigs at the London Fog and eventually became the house band at the Whisky a Go Go. Babitz retells their first meeting: “There he was in a dark nightclub I’d gone one night when I was 23 and he was 22 and poetry was curling around him like smoke. He smelled like leather and alcohol and nightclubs but he looked blind like a marble statue. Outside was the Sunset Strip but inside he was living on borrowed time.” This first impression is the culmination of everything Morrison cultivated that summer in Venice. Once Babitz entered the picture, she continued shaping and building out his world, at least as far as “Jim as a sex object” was concerned: her sister, Mirandi, dressed Morrison in handmade head-to-toe leather from her namesake shop on Sunset, while Babitz took it upon herself to ensure Morrison never chopped off his wavy black hair. Babitz’s active role in creating Morrison’s image could be why she was able to see past his haze after a certain point.

Eventually, after an almost obligatory stint in Laurel Canyon, West Hollywood (specifically the triangle that is La Cienega, Santa Monica, and Sunset) became Morrison’s personal isolation booth. The city shrank in on him as he fell deeper into alcoholism, traversing the city only on foot and keeping his essentials (bed, work, party) close. The YouTube channel “Rock Essentials with Tim” mapped a walking tour a few years ago that makes Morrison’s self-imposed confinement so much clearer. Step out of the Doors Workshop and walk the 500 feet across Santa Monica onto La Cienega and you’ll arrive at the Alta Cienega Motel in under five minutes, where Morrison’s Room 32 still sits with murals and drawings scribbled across the walls and ceilings. Keep going up La Cienega and make a left onto West Holloway Drive and it won’t be long until you reach Barney’s Beanery, the neighborhood joint frequented by Morrison as well as the likes of Janis Joplin, Peter Fonda, and Dennis Hopper. Everything he needed—and everything that trapped him—was within reach. There wasn’t much reason to go anywhere else.

Morrison conflates his current and previous living quarters in “Cars Hiss By My Window,” comparing the cars on Santa Monica to the waves of Venice Beach—dreamy imagery paired with a lazy, crackly blues shuffle. The same night the Doors recorded the John Lee Hooker cover “Crawling King Snake” at the space on Santa Monica, a likely blacked-out Morrison notoriously fell while jumping from the roof to a balcony at the Chateau Marmont. It’s hard not to see that through the lens of the kind of inflated self he was inhabiting at the time, the “Crawling King Snake” (or more accurately, the Lizard King) of it all bleeding into his reality. It had gotten to the point where Morrison couldn’t get away with his antics as easily. As Babitz put it, recalling an instance of him causing a scene at record executive Ahmet Ertegun’s house: “Jim drank, got drunk, and woke up bloated and miserable and had to apologize… Jim drank and got drunk and was so uncool he had to walk home.”

THERE WAS A SHIFT in Morrison’s persona during the L.A. Woman sessions. He went from this ethereal poet, a revered and canonically misunderstood force of creative energy, to a drunk, stuffed, down-home blues singer. Babitz insisted Morrison’s “fat kid” past informed his identity, saying that when she first met him, “he had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and now suddenly a morning glory.” But by the end of 1970, the Jim Morrison of 1965 was unrecognizable. He was in legal trouble, arrested for indecent exposure and profanity while drunk on stage at a show in Miami. His wonder and lore were sanded down by his quasi-pessimistic view of both L.A. itself and the broader late-‘60s “peace and love” spirit. (“If Jim drank Scotch, he broke out in fuckups.”) Morrison positioned himself and the Doors as sort of Beach Boys’ Warios in the greater California music scene. He’d seen some shit, and he wanted to let it out. 

L.A. Woman leans even further into the rootsy blues the Doors explored on Morrison Hotel, building out pentatonic structures and an essentials-only instrumental ethos. As Babitz’s writing makes clear, at the time of L.A. Woman, Morrison himself was bogged down and exhausted, dependent on substances and less and less present, which translated into the album’s paranoid, anxious, fatigued tone. The almost honky-tonk “Been Down So Long” feels like the album’s thesis or raison d’être: Morrison, weary and dejected, finally crumbling under his pent-up frustrations, life coming down on him like the drumkit’s relentless quarter-note staccatos. The unassuming “Hyacinth House,” which refers specifically to bandmate Robby Krieger’s house in Benedict Canyon, is objectively lighter and breezier than much of the L.A. Woman tracklist. Still, Morrison’s paranoia seeps through his deep tenor. “I think that somebody’s near / I’m sure that someone is following me,” he croons, his vocal melody mirroring the reverberating guitars. As if crumbling under his own idol status, he admits: “I need someone, yeah, who doesn’t need me.” 

The calm, jazz-inflected closer “Riders on the Storm” is brooding and haunting, not only because of the thunder and lightning sounds (though they help), but because of the whispers that sit atop Morrison’s full-bodied vocals. The two together evoke the entangled feeling of dark, winding canyon roads, with surroundings visible only through headlights. It’s a club on the side of a high, high mountain, lyrics like “into this world we’re thrown like a dog without a bone” speaking to Morrison’s crestfallen woes. Any remove he insisted upon with “I need someone who doesn’t need me” on “Hyacinth House” becomes basically defunct, given the repeated “girl, you’ve gotta love your man” on “Riders on the Storm.” His defense mechanisms reveal a desire for connection rumbling underneath.

The title track sits as L.A. Woman’s centerpiece, an extended metaphor in which Morrison compares the city to a woman, the lost angel, the “woman so alone.” And Morrison, the man so alone to match. The track opens with the crackly, tuned-down first notes of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” before breaking through the idealism, debunking the American Dream in double-time. “Motel, money, murder, madness / Let’s change the mood from glad to sadness” gets at the city’s spirit in the wake of the Manson murders, the shock and fear it sent through the Canyon and Hollywood communities (Jay Sebring was the one who did Morrison’s iconic flowing hair). Morrison’s frustration at the city and how its people had changed is what gives the song its relentless tempo. At the same time, the pentatonic guitar and piano fills bounce against a steady major scale, like Morrison’s own mixed feelings about the city. His connection to L.A. itself is there, even if it’s complicated (“I see your hair is burning / Hills are filled with fire / If they say I never loved you / You know they are a liar”).

The fact that Morrison died in Paris, specifically, was less of a surprise to Babitz than his actual death. She knew he would have to leave L.A. if he was going to die. “But as long as Jim was on foot in L.A.—as long as he was signed to Elektra and in a world where if he fell, it would be into the arms of emergency rooms or girls who knew and loved him—he was, if not OK, at least not dead,” she wrote in Esquire. “There was always somebody around who would break down the door. He could never get away with killing himself in L.A.” It stood as a kind of de facto “end of the ‘60s,” where, if the Beatles breaking up, or the Manson murders, or the RFK/MLK assassinations, or the Altamont Free Concert, or the end of the Ed Sullivan Show, or Nixon’s election didn’t end the “peace and love” ‘60s for you, Morrison’s death likely did. 

He often cheated death or lived on a certain edge, and his departure knocked the wind out of his romantic, self-fashioned image. As Babitz put it: “With Jim the end was at hand every night, and dawn was never a given.” His death seemed inevitable and unbelievable all at once, the infamous, immortal Lizard King who needed to escape his insular city bubble before stepping beyond this living reality. The L.A. women kept catching him before he could fully fall. After his death, Babitz wrote, “I began running into women who kept Jim alive—as did I—because something about him began seeming great compared with everything else that was going on.”

Even (especially) after his death, Morrison’s presence in L.A. lingers far beyond the boundaries of his final, half-mile WeHo triangle. His old house in Laurel Canyon was made into a historic landmark, “Love Street,” in 2018, making the Doors the first band to be honored by the City of Los Angeles with a cultural marker recognizing one of their songs. His last apartment in West Hollywood has a plaque outside, as does the Doors Workshop on Santa Monica Boulevard. His stool at Barney’s Beanery on La Cienega, where he’s rumored to have urinated on the bar and been subsequently kicked out, also has a plaque in his honor (Babitz in L.A. Woman: “In Barney’s there was so much of him in the air”). Even at UCLA, his imprint lives in the acid-tab-covered locker in the basement of the old film school building, which incoming freshmen are still ushered past during orientation. L.A. Woman stands as Morrison’s last word on his city, returning to the sprawl that had narrowed around him, a version of L.A. he could only access once he was on his way out.

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