The record
At a glance
- Artist
- The Doors
- Released
- 19 April 1971
- Album
- Sixth studio album with Jim Morrison
- Original tracks
- Ten
- Label
- Elektra
- Production
- The Doors and Bruce Botnick
Why it matters
A final Morrison album that resets the working method
L.A. Woman is the final Doors studio album released during Jim Morrison’s lifetime, but its value is not dependent on accidental farewell symbolism. It succeeds because the band changed its production method at a moment of internal difficulty.
After Paul A. Rothchild withdrew, the Doors and Bruce Botnick produced the album themselves. Recording in the group’s Workshop replaced the established Sunset Sound routine with a familiar rehearsal space and a more performance-led process.
Jerry Scheff’s bass and Marc Benno’s rhythm guitar create a six-player floor capable of sustaining blues forms and long jams. Manzarek and Krieger can range more freely because every harmonic and rhythmic function no longer rests on the quartet.
The title track and Riders on the Storm give the album two very different long forms. One accelerates through Los Angeles as physical motion; the other maintains suspended space through electric piano, rain and a restrained narrative.
Love Her Madly provides concise songwriting, while Crawling King Snake and the looser blues-derived performances place the group inside a tradition it had used since its club residencies. The record joins retrospective roots to an unfamiliar future.
Late 1970-early 1971
After Rothchild, back inside the rehearsal room
By late 1970, the Doors had completed five studio albums with producer Paul A. Rothchild. Touring pressure, Morrison’s legal problems and changing group relationships formed the difficult background to a sixth.
Rothchild heard early rehearsals in November and chose not to produce the project. His departure occurred before the principal album recording, so he should not be credited as producer of the issued LP.
The band turned to Bruce Botnick, engineer of the previous albums, as co-producer. They installed recording equipment at their office and rehearsal room at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard rather than returning to Sunset Sound.
Elvis Presley bassist Jerry Scheff and guitarist Marc Benno joined the sessions. Their presence encouraged largely live ensemble takes and gave the music a settled low end plus a second guitar voice.
Morrison recorded vocals in the Workshop bathroom, using its tiled space as a makeshift booth. Botnick worked from an upstairs control area with a portable console.
Morrison left for Paris after the album was completed. Elektra released L.A. Woman on 19 April; he died there on 3 July, making it the last studio album issued during his life.
Six-player recording unit
The quartet joined by Scheff’s bass and Benno’s rhythm guitar
Morrison’s lower, rougher vocal surface fits the room and repertoire. He can push the blues tracks physically, speak through The WASP and sustain the near-whispered double voice of Riders on the Storm.
Manzarek divides his keyboard identity carefully. Hammond organ drives The Changeling, piano supports blues language and Fender Rhodes gives Riders on the Storm its floating harmonic weather.
Krieger alternates between concise composition and open ensemble playing. Love Her Madly depends on exact song architecture; the title track and blues performances allow guitar phrases to develop inside a moving band.
Densmore’s drumming stays responsive despite the record’s heavier low end. Ride cymbal, shuffle implication, funk accents and quiet storm pulse distinguish songs that could otherwise collapse into one blues-rock category.
Scheff does more than replace keyboard bass. His sustained lines, melodic movement and firm attack reorganise the ensemble from below, especially on Love Her Madly and the two long closing-scale works.
Benno gives Krieger a second guitar surface to play against. The resulting weave helps the Workshop performances sound full without the orchestral overdubbing used on The Soft Parade.
The Doors Workshop
Live room bleed, blues weight and cinematic weather
The Workshop sound begins with proximity. Instruments share a performance environment, and the largely live approach lets small rhythmic negotiations survive instead of editing every part into separate perfection.
Scheff’s electric bass is both weight and motion. It anchors blues repetition while freeing Manzarek’s left hand for organ, piano and electric-piano voicings with more internal detail.
Benno and Krieger avoid becoming an undifferentiated guitar wall. Rhythm figures, slide-like colour, lead responses and held chords occupy separate functions inside the six-person arrangements.
Botnick uses the unusual space creatively. Morrison’s bathroom vocal, the upstairs control position and the rehearsal-room floor become a coherent record rather than an imitation of a commercial studio.
The album’s two sides have distinct trajectories. Side one grows from funk-inflected opening to the eight-minute title track; side two moves through older and stranger material before Riders on the Storm dissolves into recorded weather.
Rain and thunder on the closer are obvious effects, but the underlying performance is remarkably restrained. Electric piano, bass, brushed or lightly articulated drums and whispered vocal layers make atmosphere depend on ensemble balance.
Track guide
Ten pieces across city, room, road and storm
The Changeling
Hammond organ, Scheff’s bass and Densmore’s firm groove open the album with a funk-inflected physicality. Morrison’s changing-self lyric is delivered as declaration rather than confession, and the gospel-like break widens the vocal arrangement without softening its attack. Krieger and Benno divide guitar space around the keyboards, making the new six-player unit audible immediately. As an opener, The Changeling announces both continuity and reset: Morrison still works through dramatic identity, but the band now sounds rooted in a live room rather than an elaborate studio construction.
Love Her Madly
Krieger’s compact song places a memorable descending keyboard figure, precise guitar rhythm and Scheff’s resonant bass around Morrison’s controlled lead. Densmore keeps the verses light enough for the chorus to expand, and the middle section alters the harmonic light without disrupting pop proportion. Elektra selected it as the first single; it reached number 11 in May 1971. Its commercial clarity is not separate from the Workshop method. The arrangement works because six musicians leave each other room instead of treating accessibility as a demand for extra polish.
Been Down So Long
The band turns a familiar blues phrase into a heavy, forward-moving ensemble performance. Morrison pushes against confinement in a rough vocal register, while Scheff and Densmore create an elastic floor beneath guitar responses and piano punctuation. The title echoes a line associated with Richard Fariña’s novel, but the track functions through accumulated blues language rather than literary adaptation. After Love Her Madly’s exact construction, it loosens the album deliberately. Repetition becomes an opportunity for instrumental conversation, not evidence that the song lacks individual design.
Cars Hiss by My Window
A slower blues setting reduces the room to voice, guitar, bass, keyboards and a pulse that barely needs to announce itself. The lyric observes traffic, interior space and absence without turning those elements into a conventional city narrative. Morrison closes with a vocal imitation of lead guitar, blurring singer and instrument inside an otherwise restrained arrangement. The Workshop’s intimacy is essential: small noises and spaces feel structural. Positioned before L.A. Woman, the song hears the city from a room before the title track enters it at speed.
L.A. Woman
The side-one closer builds from an engine-like guitar entrance into an eight-minute drive sustained by Scheff’s bass, Densmore’s cymbal motion, Manzarek’s keyboards and the two-guitar field. Morrison’s city images accumulate rather than following one route, and the Mr. Mojo Risin’ section uses an anagram of his name as a rhythmic transformation. Tempo, texture and vocal persona change without stopping the forward journey. The song gives the album its broadest public setting, converting Los Angeles from backdrop into a force that accelerates and destabilises the band.
L’America
Originally recorded in connection with Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point project and not used in the film, L’America enters this album as an older, darker construction. A lurching rhythm, abrasive guitar and ominous keyboard colour resist the open road energy that ended side one. Morrison’s imagined destination remains unstable, closer to projection than documentary geography. Its archival origin does not make it a bonus or afterthought: placement at the start of side two turns the album away from familiar Los Angeles and toward a sequence of enclosed, uncanny spaces.
Hyacinth House
Krieger’s song is quieter than Love Her Madly and carries a more private sense of social exhaustion. Organ and piano colour the harmonic movement while the rhythm section avoids heavy blues emphasis. Morrison sings of needing a new friend and a place outside the surrounding game, but the album’s later history should not turn every line into a literal farewell note. The arrangement earns its intimacy through proportion. Between the mass of L’America and Crawling King Snake, it temporarily removes performance swagger and lets vulnerability occupy the centre.
Crawling King Snake
The group revisits John Lee Hooker’s blues repertoire with a slow, spacious arrangement built around Scheff’s bass, Densmore’s measured beat and interlocking guitars. Morrison inhabits the repeated central image without imitating Hooker’s exact vocal identity. Manzarek adds keyboard weight selectively, leaving the groove enough air to feel dangerous rather than merely loud. The track reconnects L.A. Woman to the covers the Doors played in their club years, but the six-person recording unit gives that history a new balance. Tradition becomes a present-tense ensemble practice.
The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)
Morrison’s spoken and sung text rides a compact rhythmic framework shaped by bass, drums, guitar and keyboard replies. The voice moves between broadcaster, poet and blues performer, while the band avoids illustrating every verbal image. Earlier forms of the text existed before this recording, but the album version belongs to the Workshop’s direct sound. Its placement before Riders on the Storm is crucial: radio language and beat are made physical, then the closer disperses speech into rain, whisper and electric-piano space.
Riders on the Storm
Rain and thunder establish an exterior world, but the musical centre is Manzarek’s Fender Rhodes pattern, Scheff’s mobile bass and Densmore’s restrained pulse. Krieger’s guitar enters as colour rather than riff, while Morrison’s lead is shadowed by a whispered double. The narrative moves from elemental condition to a dangerous figure and then intimate instruction without resolving those layers into one plot. As the final track on the final Doors album released during Morrison’s lifetime, it acquired unavoidable farewell meaning; the performance itself remains controlled, open and forward-looking.
No single city plot
Los Angeles motion, departure and changing selves
L.A. Woman is not a continuous tour through one day or one narrator’s biography. Los Angeles, interior rooms, imagined destinations, roads and weather form recurring environments around ten separate songs.
Change and departure appear repeatedly, but with different agency: The Changeling embraces transformation, Love Her Madly watches someone leave and Hyacinth House seeks escape from a social setting. Blues language connects Been Down So Long, Cars Hiss by My Window and Crawling King Snake while each uses space, voice and ensemble rhythm differently.
The city is both literal and projected. The title track gathers names and motion; L’America invents an elsewhere; Riders on the Storm turns travel into a condition of existence.
Later knowledge of Morrison’s death intensifies the final sequence, but responsible listening separates that retrospective weight from claims that the album was designed as a planned goodbye.
Elektra EKS-75011
A transparent window around four altered faces
Carl Cossick created the concept and design, while Wendell Hamick handled photography and visual-effects work. The original sleeve used a die-cut window and transparent material over the band portrait, with the yellow inner layer contributing colour through the front.
All four members share the image, but the portrait does not restore the youthful visual confidence of the debut. Faces, hair and body language register five years of change.
Cossick’s associated Electric Woman image extended the release campaign beyond a simple band photograph, while the unusual physical sleeve made the album object dependent on layers and transparency.
April-July 1971
Released before Paris became a final departure
Elektra released L.A. Woman on 19 April 1971 with ten tracks across two LP sides.
It was the sixth Doors studio album with Morrison and the first of those six not produced by Paul A. Rothchild.
Love Her Madly appeared as the first single in March and reached number 11 on the United States chart during May. Riders on the Storm followed as a single, while the full album preserved its seven-minute scale and closing position.
Morrison’s death on 3 July changed the context almost immediately. The record had already been completed, packaged and released, so its production cannot accurately be described as a posthumous assembly.
Final album with Morrison
An endpoint that sounds like another beginning
L.A. Woman is widely valued as a recovery of ensemble immediacy after the larger arrangements and difficult sessions associated with The Soft Parade period.
The title track, Love Her Madly and Riders on the Storm became three of the band’s most durable recordings while representing very different structures. Scheff and Benno show how added musicians could strengthen the Doors without turning them into an orchestra or replacing the identity of Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore.
The surviving trio continued with Other Voices and Full Circle, but L.A. Woman remains the endpoint of the six-album Elektra studio sequence featuring Morrison.
The extensive anniversary session releases make the Workshop process unusually audible. False starts, dialogue and developing arrangements reveal a working band rather than a mythically predetermined final statement.
Album and sessions
The original ten tracks and the exposed sessions
Begin with the original ten-track stereo sequence before entering the extensive Workshop outtakes.
Keep L.A. Woman at the end of side one and Riders on the Storm at the end of side two; their parallel scale is part of the LP design.
The Hyacinth House home demo predates the album sessions, and the Sunset Sound Riders version documents an alternate attempt. Neither replaces the issued Workshop master.
She Smells So Nice and the session jams illuminate repertoire and mood but are not hidden eleventh tracks from the 1971 LP. A strong mastering should retain Scheff’s bass articulation, the shared-room guitar texture and the quiet weather detail of Riders without compressing its gradual atmosphere.
A listening path
Hear the room, the added players and the sequence’s weather
- Hear The Changeling as an introduction to the six-player unit, identifying bass, both guitars, organ and drums.
- Compare the exact construction of Love Her Madly with the conversational repetition of Been Down So Long.
- Play Cars Hiss by My Window and L.A. Woman as interior and exterior perspectives on city motion.
- Follow Manzarek’s changing keyboard roles from Hammond through piano to the Fender Rhodes centre of Riders on the Storm.
- Only then enter the 50th-anniversary sessions, using false starts and alternates to test how the final arrangements were chosen.
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- L.A. Woman official discography — The Doors
- L.A. Woman track by track — Rhino Records
- L.A. Woman 50th Anniversary — Official Doors store and archive
- L.A. Woman anniversary overview — Rhino Records
- L.A. Woman session history — Official Doors archive
- L.A. Woman original release record — MusicBrainz institutional database
- Love Her Madly chart history — Rhino Records
- L.A. Woman tracks and credits — AllMusic