Page 30 - Classic Rock (February 2020)

THE DOORS
By the end of the 60s, Morrison’s
behaviour was in danger of
closing The Doors for good.
and costumes, but Bowie is crushed by
the early reaction. “We thought we were
kind of smart,” he said, “but nobody even
looked at the stage.” Bonham is keen to continue with the
name: “Just think what our album covers
FEBRUARY 28 could have looked like!”
LED ZEPPELIN’S BALLOON
IS BURST MARCH 19
For one night only, Led Zeppelin are billed
as The Nobs in Copenhagen, after Danish
heiress Eva Von Zeppelin – already The low-key ceremony at
enraged by the flaming airship depicted
on the debut album’s sleeve – threatens
30 CLASSICROCKMAGAZINE.COM
the right thing for them to do, because I knew [Miami] was gonna blow over
eventually and they would go out on the [road] again.”
First, though, Holzman suggested, they should play two special high-
visibility shows in LA, from which they would extrapolate a live album
– a kind of feel-good bridging exercise to get the people and the press back on
side again, and show the promoters what they’d been missing during the still
ongoing ban. “Which became the backbones of Absolutely Live.”
For two nights, July 21 and 22, The Doors would take over the Aquarius
Theatre on Sunset Boulevard, where the stage musical Hair was then playing,
and put tickets on sale for just two dollars a pop.
“That was an incredible performance,” says Holzman. “See, I wanted them
in front of a friendly audience again. Because they had been really shaken, and
I thought they would get their sea legs back more quickly if they were in front
of a friendly audience. And the only way I could guarantee that was to produce
the concerts ourselves.”
In the weeks that followed the Aquarius shows, the band got to play three
more concerts – in San Francisco, in Eugene, Oregon, and Seattle Pop – where
they appeared on the same bill as Led Zeppelin. But any hopes of this being
the start of a return to touring in the US were quickly dashed when projected
shows in Toledo, Philadelphia, San Diego and New York were ‘rescheduled’.
“They were being blacklisted in large
auditoria around the country, and
they said: ‘What are we gonna do?’
I said: ‘Time to make another record.’”
Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman
Meanwhile, work in the studio on the projected live album wasn’t going
any smoother. Doors producer Paul Rothchild, now heavily into cocaine and
at his most tunnel-visioned, was insisting the group come in and overdub the
many dozens of parts he had identified as inadequate, either because of
malfunctioning equipment or simply because he thought the band should
have played better.
According to Treanor: “Everybody was a victim. It wasn’t one of them, all
four had to get their dibs in there. But it was during that session that Paul
introduced the cocaine. I was appalled. I got out of there…”
The Absolutely Live album was eventually released almost a year later, several
months after Morrison Hotel, and in completely revamped form.
Meanwhile, The Doors played their final show of 1969 on November 1 at
the aptly named Ice Palace in Las Vegas, a large, anonymous
hockey arena in Nevada, where the audience had little
or no interest in hearing anything from The Soft
Parade and only really came alive when drummer
Densmore cracked open the start of Light My Fire.
Morrison, though, sleepwalked through the
show. A week later he was obliged to turn himself
in to the Dade Count Public Safety Dept in Miami,
where he was officially arrested, gave The Doors’
office in LA as his home address and entered a not-
guilty plea. The presiding judge, Judge Murray Goodman,
set the bond at $5,000 and 20 minutes later Morrison was free GETTY
legal action if the band use her family born Mary Angela Barnett a work permit, APRIL 10
name on home turf. Jimmy Page shrugs and has not a sniff of romance. “David PAUL McCARTNEY BREAKS UP
off the incident as “absurd”, but John had told me before we married: ‘I don’t THE BEATLES
love you,’” the actress and model said, “We had John Lennon and George Harrison have
“and we had enjoyed an open relationship a threesome previously quit – and rejoined – before
from the start. We had Macca’s self-penned Q&A to promote his
a threesome on the on the first solo album cites the band’s “personal
night before our night before differences, business differences, musical
DAVID BOWIE wedding.” For his own differences… I have a better time with my
MARRIES ANGIE part, Bowie will later our wedding.” family.” Although he never explicitly DAVID BOWIE & ANGIE BOWIE: GETTY
describe their coupling called time on the band, the Daily Mirror
Bromley Registry Office is as “like living with swiftly whips up a story that becomes
chiefly to secure Cyprus- a blowtorch”. a self-fulfilling prophecy (“Paul Quits