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Nearly 60 years ago, in January 1967, the release of The Doors’ first album marked a major inflection point between rock ‘n roll and psychedelia. Recorded at the legendary Sunset Sound Recorders with producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick, the album more or less captures The Doors’ live sound with the polish of a professional studio. But on top of that solid foundation is a layer of psychedelic mystique thanks to Morrison’s sultry vocals and darkly poetic lyrics, extended instrumental sections by the band, a few unusual song structures, and a generous helping of reverb.
From an engineering point of view, The Doors provides a fascinating look at the state of music production between the tried-and-true studio methods of the early 1960s and the far-out experimentation of the hippie era to come. At the same time that The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Doors and their team were finding their own ways to push musical and technological boundaries in the studio.
Using the same tools available to The Beatles—four-track tape, Sel-Sync overdubbing, echo chambers, plate reverbs, and drugs—The Doors created a timeless record that simultaneously captured the raw energy of American rock and blew mainstream audiences away with bold new sounds, deep psychedelic concepts, and overt sexuality that got them banned from multiple stages. Here’s how it happened.
By the time The Doors walked into Sunset Sound to make their first LP, they had already been a band for a year and a half and written about 30 songs together. It all started when Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek met in UCLA’s film department, then bumped into each other on Venice Beach and got to talking about making music together.
After hearing Morrison sing a few bars of a song he’d written (“Moonlight Drive”), Manzarek invited the singer to play with him and his brothers, who had a band called Rick & the Ravens. Manzarek recruited drummer John Densmore, whom he knew from meditation classes, along with bassist Patty Sullivan, and the group recorded a six-song demo in 1965. Not long after those sessions, the lineup was reduced to Morrison, Manzarek, and Densmore. Guitarist Robby Krieger replaced Ray’s brother Rick, and the lineup of The Doors was solidified.
While the group auditioned numerous bass players, nobody seemed to suit their sound. As Manzarek recalled in an episode of the Classic Albums documentary series, “We auditioned one bass player and we sounded like the Rolling Stones. Then, we auditioned another bass player and we sounded like the Animals.” Ultimately, Manzarek discovered the Fender Rhodes Piano Bass, and his left hand became The Doors’ official bass player.
In early 1966, The Doors landed a residency at a West Hollywood club called London Fog, where they cut their teeth and gained confidence as performers. In short order, they graduated to a gig as the house band at the legendary Whisky a Go Go, where they were discovered by Elektra Records president Jac Holzman and producer Paul Rothchild (Love; Paul Butterfield; Crosby, Stills, and Nash). Not long after Holzman offered the band a recording contract with Rothchild as producer, Morrison’s onstage profanity got them fired from The Whisky, but the wheels were already in motion.
As a producer, Rothchild strove to create a more comfortable and creative environment than the “clinical” feel of typical 1960s studios. “The common concept for recording studios—which is not mine—is that recording studios are hospitals where musicians go to have their music operated on,” he said in an interview after the album’s release. “I like to get away from that as completely as possible and try to convert the atmosphere and the emotion of the studio into one which is more warm: ‘Let’s sit around the living room and play music for a while.’”
Rothchild elaborated on his approach in a 1981 interview with BAM magazine. “With the Doors, we tried to strike a very fine line between being very fresh and original and being documentary—making the record sound like it really happened live, which it did, for the most part,” he said. “At the same time, we wanted it to sound new. I didn't want it to sound gimmicky by using things that sounded really trendy. For instance, everybody was using wah-wah pedals because Hendrix had just hit and guitar players were blown away by what he did with wah-wah. I PROHIBITED Robbie Krieger from using wah-wah.”
Critically, Rothchild acknowledged the importance of having a great engineer at the console. “The engineers are the most important factor in any studio,” he said. “Just as an artist will look for a creative producer, a producer will look for a creative engineer. That’s vital.” In fact, Rothchild described Sunset Sound as “The best studio in the country right now, mainly because of Bruce Botnick, who’s twenty-three years old and one of the grooviest engineers I can conceive of: extraordinarily creative and very pleasant to work with.”
Though younger than most of the band members, Botnick was already an experienced engineer with notable credits including the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and Love’s first two albums. “In any good relationship between artist, producer, and engineer, there is a meeting of the minds, and a lot of it is unspoken,” Botnick said in a 1997 interview. “It's an understanding and there's a chemistry there. The six of us made those records. There was nobody that said, ‘You're the producer, or you're the engineer.’ It was a team effort.”
“Once you know you’ve got a good engineer to work with,” Rothchild said, “you must be sure that the tools that he has available are excellent.” Excellent is putting it modestly—Sunset Sound was considered one of the finest recording studios in the country, alongside legendary facilities like Gold Star Studios and United Western Recorders. Originally opened in 1958 to record soundtracks for Disney films, the studio’s superb acoustics and state-of-the-art equipment made it a popular destination for rock and pop acts throughout the 1960s.
Built in a former auto garage, Sunset Sound’s live room featured a sloping floor that was originally designed for drainage but also offered acoustical benefits such as scattering sound reflections and preventing standing waves. The studio was also one of the first to feature a soundproofed vocal isolation booth, which allowed Morrison to record his lead vocals live with the band—a huge part of the record’s sound.
One of Sunset Sound’s defining features was its echo chamber, a small but highly reverberant room that was isolated from the main structure and equipped with an Altec Lansing A7 “Voice of the Theatre” full-range loudspeaker. Used extensively on Morrison’s vocals, as well as drum tracks and other instruments, the chamber’s long reverb time and characteristic tone are another essential component to the sound of the record.
The control room was equipped with a custom 14-input tube console built by Alan Emig, a former Columbia engineer who had recorded Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and later built Elektra Studios. For processing, the studio featured an arsenal of outboard equipment. “There was no onboard EQ,” Botnick recalled. “Everything was plugged in: banks of Pultec and Langevin equalizers, Fairchild equalizers, Fairchild limiters, Universal Audio tube limiters; things like that.”
The initial tracks were laid down on an Ampex 200 three-track tape recorder, with Densmore’s drums and Manzarek’s piano bass mixed together on one track, Krieger’s guitar and Manzarek’s other keyboards on another, and the third track reserved for Morrison’s vocals. “The lead vocalist is always on a track by himself so that you have absolute flexibility,” Botnick explained in a 1967 interview with Crawdaddy. “[...] you’ve got to have absolute flexibility, especially over your lead singer, and if—you’re lucky—as many other elements as you can.”
After basic tracking, additional parts were recorded on an Ampex 300 half-inch machine which Botnick had upgraded with four-track heads and Sel-Sync capability for overdubbing. The fourth track was used for adding bass guitar on about half the songs, double-tracking Morrison’s vocals on tracks like “Soul Kitchen” and “I Looked at You”, and adding additional instruments such as the Marxophone heard on “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar).”
Drums
John Densmore played a Ludwig drum kit on the record, and many pictures from the time show the front head of the kick drum removed for a snappier sound. Although there are no pictures showing the drums mic’d up, Rothchild did specify one mic in particular: the Altec 633-C “salt shaker mic,” which he described as both “The world’s cheapest microphone,” and “The greatest bass drum mic in the world.”
Most of Densmore’s drumming is straight-ahead and carries the songs so well that you hardly notice it, but he wasn’t afraid to throw in a few surprises to keep things interesting. For example, he kicks off the record with a Brazilian-style bossa nova groove on “Break on Through” and uses brushes for a softer sound on “End of the Night”.
Guitars
Robby Krieger recorded with his trusty 1964 Gibson SG Special equipped with a Vibrola vibrato system (which he used to great effect on “End of the Night”). Although he played through a Magnatone Custom amp on stage, Krieger used a rented Fender Twin Reverb in the studio. Prohibited by Rothchild from using “gimmicky” effects like wah-wah, he changed up his tone with varying degrees of overdrive and reverb, from the searing fuzz of “Break on Through” to the clean and spacey tones of “End of the Night” and “The End.”
The inspiration for the verse riff on “Break on Through” came from one of Krieger’s biggest inspirations, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (also produced by Rothchild). “I got the idea for the riff from the Paul Butterfield song ‘Shake Your Money-Maker,’ which was one of my favorites,” he says in the Classic Albums documentary. “We just changed the beat around.”
Keyboards and Bass
Harmonically, Ray Manzarek’s keyboards are a huge component of The Doors’ signature sound. His Vox Continental transistor organ provides a variety of tones all over the album, ranging from full-throated gospel and blues sounds to silky background chords drenched in tremolo. The liner notes also credit Manzarek with “piano,” including the gritty electric piano on the opening track, the purer tones on “End of the Night”, and the more acoustic-sounding piano on “Back Door Man”.
Although Mazarek’s Fender Rhodes Piano Bass provided most of the basslines on the record, Rothchild deemed it too “mushy” for certain songs and hired Wrecking Crew bass player Larry Knechtel to overdub bass guitar on about half the record. “This was a time before Moog synthesizers, and Rothchild felt (correctly) that Ray’s lines needed more sonic punch from a string plucked in addition to a keyboard,” Densmore explained in a 2015 Facebook post.
Vocals
The Doors wouldn’t be The Doors without Jim Morrison’s distinct vocal style, and The Doors wouldn’t be The Doors without the particular way those vocals were recorded. A fan of Frank Sinatra, Morrison was thrilled when he found out he’d be singing into a Neumann/Telefunken U 47—Sinatra’s vocal mic of choice. But, unlike Ol’ Blue Eyes, Morrison could pivot from sultry crooning to tortured screaming as if flipping a switch.
Thanks to Sunset Sound’s vocal booth, Morrison was able to record live with the rest of the band, allowing him to respond to their playing in a natural way. Having limited tracks to work with, Rothchild and Botnick made the decision to send the vocals through the studio’s echo chamber during every take, mixing the return with the dry vocal and committing the blend to tape. The amount of echo varies between songs, with the more psychedelic numbers absolutely drenched in thick, sumptuous reverb.
Because the four-track workflow of the mid-1960s required making key decisions such as balancing instruments and dialing in the vocal reverb during the recording stage, mixing was a relatively straightforward process. And, because the players were so good, barely any edits were necessary. In fact, only "Light My Fire" and “The End” feature two takes spliced together.
Although stereo sound was available at the time—and the studio was even equipped with a state-or-the-art three-channel monitor system—Rothchild made the decision to mix the record in mono because the majority of homes in America had mono phonographs and stereo FM radio had yet to become widely adopted.
“We didn't hit stereo radio with pop music until the late '60s and early ’70s,” Botnick recalled. “Also, we used to listen in mono a lot. Even though I had three speakers, I was always listening in mono; because in three-track, the thought wasn't for making stereo records, it was for splitting up the elements for later mixing.”
Sunset Sound’s famous echo chamber saw even more use in the mixing phase, supplemented by plate and spring reverbs. In fact, you can hear some kind of reverb on every song—just listen to the massive drum hit that kicks off “Light My Fire,” the tambourine on “The End,” the organ on “Soul Kitchen,” or the Marxophone on “Alabama Song.” Even some of the already reverbed vocal tracks were treated with additional plate reverb to enhance the psychedelic vibe of the record.
After five weeks of mixing, the master was finally cut in October 1966. Initially, the release of The Doors was planned for November, but the label pushed it back to January 4, 1967 to ensure better sales after the holiday season. The album charted at #2 on the Billboard 200 that year, kept from the top spot only by another, equally legendary record: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The Doors’ first record launched the band to stardom almost overnight, cementing their status as icons of the hippie era and an inextricable part of the soundtrack to the Summer of Love. After “breaking on through” the public consciousness, the group went on to record eight more albums’ worth of material over the next four years—a turbulent period that ended with Morrison’s death in 1971.
But as brief as it was, the fire they lit burned bright and ushered in an era of psychedelic rock that allowed artists like The Electric Prunes, Jefferson Airplane, and Pink Floyd to push the boundaries even further. Considering the limits of studio technology and the conservative social norms of its time, The Doors remains an impressive feat nearly six decades after its release.
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