Page 35 - Classic Rock (February 2020)

After the trials and tribulations, it’s hardly
surprising that The Doors were happy with
how the Morrison Hotel album turned out.

Billed as the Roadhouse Blues tour – a shrewd move designed to signal the Reviews of the shows were varied. “Mr Morrison has had trouble before
new, bolder, hard-assed direction The Doors were now moving in – the Felt when the police of other cities found his performances variously lewd,
Forum shows were seemingly a triumphal return to form. At least while the lascivious, indecent and profane,” began the piece in The New York Times. “But
party mood lasted. Which for Morrison was never quite long enough any more. by the standards of the Off-Broadway stage, Mr Morrison’s performance is
He now travelled with his own entourage, separate from the rest of the band, fairly tame. Saturday he kept his clothes on and made no gestures that could
and when his mood altered from set to set no one was sure any more what the offend.” The Village Voice, however, early adopters of the Morrison mystique,
cause was, although the other band members could always hazard a pretty went for the kill, describing an off-stage sighting of Morrison a few nights later
accurate guess, depending on just how fucked-up their singer was: on coke he at a John Sebastian gig at the Bitter End club as “a shadow of himself, with his
could still be a defiant presence, ready to play for longer than contracted, face grown chubby, his body showing flab, his once shoulder-length hair
making with the jokes and the moves, giving it his all, or what was left of it; on receding into his forehead”.
booze and downers he would be verging on the incoherent, “just holding on to There were six more Roadhouse Blues shows in February, all around the
the mic some nights”, Manzarek would later recall. release of Morrison Hotel, which was much better-received than its two

year’s infamous show the band Hotel, on the same day that OCTOBER 10 suddenly said: ‘You don’t have enough
played in Miami (although not she is due to record the vocal “The truth BLACK SABBATH’S PARANOID songs.’ Within a few minutes I came up
the charge of ‘lewd and for the track Buried Alive In ALBUM HITS UK NO.1 with the riff to Paranoid.”
lascivious behaviour’). “Well The Blues. It was assumed to is that Heavy metal is officially up and running
first of all, Jim did not pull it out be a heroin overdose, but Janis didn’t as Sabbath’s second album tops the UK OCTOBER 12
[in Miami],” says Doors close friend Peggy Caserta chart (it will be another 43 years before IAN GILLAN FINDS GOD
guitarist Robby Krieger. “But it was will offer the theory in her 2018 memoir overdose. they repeat the feat). But it could all have The Deep Purple frontman sings the title
bedlam, just total craziness.” that Joplin went out to the hotel lobby to I will go to my been very different, role on the original studio
buy cigarettes, then on her return tripped grave believing Tony Iommi told album of Tim Rice and
DAILY NEWS: GETTY JANIS JOPLIN CHECKS OUT in her dying of asphyxiation. “The truth is that.” band’s paymasters not Jesus Christ Superstar but
OCTOBER 4
MusicRadar, had the
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
and fell, breaking her nose which resulted
,
he won’t be tempted into
The track-marked, troubled singer is
that she didn’t overdose. I will go to my
sent them back to the
found dead at Hollywood’s Landmark
appearing in the stage
grave believing that.”
studio. “The label
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