This album features seven alternative versions of songs from the Doors' 1971 album 'LA Woman', plus a never-before-heard song 'She Smells So Nice', which captures the band joyfully barreling through a full-throttle original before segueing into the blues standard 'Rock Me'. As the song closes, Jim Morrison can be heard chanting 'Mr. Mojo Risin' (an anagram of his name that was made famous during the bridge of 'L.A. Woman'). The track was recently discovered by producer Bruce Botnick while reviewing the L.A. Woman session tapes. Dave Horn reviewed it on Amazon, and it's worth hearing his view on it:This one isn't just another reissue of the well known album but also one for the discerning Doors fans and collectors, featuring as it does different versions of 7 of the 10 tunes plus the unissued 'She Smells So Nice'/'Rock me Baby', all recorded in The Doors Workshop at the time of the 'LA Woman' sessions. The quality of the alternative versions is, as one would expect, excellent of course and I'm surprised that they have never appeared before. Enough has been said about the original album so I'll concentrate here on the alternative versions. I haven't actually compared any of them to the originals, merely listened to the unreleased ones and said what comes to mind, but I can say with certainty that most of the alternate versions are less polished than those used on the album and, indeed, sound at times like demos rather than alternate takes or versions. 'The Changeling', which Jim tells the band is his favourite number, is longer at nearly 5 minutes and powers along at around the same speed as the album version but with a different keyboard riff. It is, perhaps, more powerful and certainly bluesier with more raucous lead guitar. 'Love Her Madly' features a lazier Morrison vocal with different lyrics and a totally different keyboard section in the middle. 'Been Down So Long' is probably the least different alternative, much the same as the album version apart from being a bit rougher and longer. The slow, dirty, blues of 'Cars Hiss By My Window' seems to feature somewhat more prominent guitar than the LP version and is 30 seconds longer. 'LA Woman' meanwhile features different lead guitar riffs and a weird bit of extra vocalising brings it to a sudden end at 8.45. 'The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)' features different lyrics and is 1.20 longer than the album version but this comprises a cacophony of jazzy guitar and drums with no discernible tune. Clocking in at 2 minutes longer than the original, 'Riders on the Storm' could have been the jewel in the crown here, were it not for the fact that the extra time is occupied by a throw away Morrison ditty, false start and chat occupying the first 2 minutes plus a somewhat flat Morrison vocal, especially evident at the start of the tune proper. Finally, music-wise, you get the addition of an actual unreleased song 'She Smells So Nice', which morphs into 'Rock Me', but both are pretty much filler and it`s no wonder they were not used on the 'LA Woman' album proper. One further song is reputed to have been recorded at these sessions, but 'Paris Blues' is only known to exist on a cassette tape that was originally in Ray Manzarek's possession, but somehow, over time, the cassette was inadvertently recorded over in parts by his son Pablo. Efforts are apparently being made to repair/restore it, with a view to adding it to a future box set, but as there isn't even a copy of the damaged tape online, we'll just have to bide our time and wait to hear it. I usually edit out the studio chatter on albums like this, but as it's The Doors I thought that I'd leave it in, although I have also included an edited version in case you only want to hear the chatter the once. 
Track listing
01 The Changling02 Love Her Madly03 Cars Hiss By My Window04 LA Woman05 The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)06 Been Down So Long07 Riders On The Storm08 She Smells So Nice >09 Rock Me
As promised in my last Doors post, here is an album made up from the legendary 'Rock Is Dead' sessions. The story of the recording is fascinating, so here is an excerpt taken from Stephen Davis's book 'Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend'.On Tuesday, February 25, 1969, the Doors were recording at Sunset Sound. Jim laid down two stentorian versions of 'When I Was Back in Seminary School', his scary southern gospel radio riff, plus a blues titled 'Build Me a Woman' - also known as 'The Devil Is a Woman', lifted from Robert Johnson's 'Me And The Devil'. A new bootleg record of the unreleased Robert Johnson recordings had just appeared, and Jim immediately reworked 'Love in Vain'' which the Rolling Stones would soon appropriate. He also cut a sing song fragment called 'Whiskey, Mystics, and Men', with accompaniment by the band. That evening the Doors and their entourage went out to supper together at a local Mexican joint, the Blue Boar, where they stuffed themselves in a private dining room and drank beer and tequila for a couple of hours. Well lubed, they returned to the studio, and started jamming. Jim sang Elvis's 'Love Me Tender' and, as the band played free form R & B, started improvising about the death of rock and roll. He kepr repeating 'Rock is dead', and 'Listen, listen, I don't wanna hear no more talk about revolution'. as if trying to damn the rock movement as something that was definitely over. 'I'm not talking about no revolution'. Jim sang. 'I'm not talking about no demonstration. I'm talking about...the death of rock and roll....The death is rock, is the death of me....And rock is dead,...We're dead! All right! Yeah....Rock is dead!'. The "Rock Is Dead" jam - forty-five minutes of primal bar-band R & B - was Jim Morrison's disgusted, explicit farewell to the rock movement that had launched him into immortality. It summed up the depressive, changing climate of the youth movement of 1969, when the Haight-Asbury had become a slum of panhandlers, burnouts and runaways. Led Zeppelin was hammering its way to the top. Ken Kesey had denounced LSD. The Nixon presidency escalated the war in Vietnam and started persecuting its critics. The Doors had lost the avant-garde, and were now hated by the same writers who had fawned on them the year before. Jim Morrison's original audience - college students and bohemians who responded to the long silences and mannered gestures of rock theater - had been replaced by dopey high school kids, pressed together like goats, giggling at 'The End' and catcalling to Jim, "Hey, you wanna @#$%& me?" It was all too much. For Jim, rock was truly dead. Jim later explained: 'We needed another song for this album. We were wrecking our brains trying to think - what song? We started throwing up these old songs in the studio. Blues trips. Rock classics. Finally we just started playing, and went through the whole history of rock music - blues, rock and roll, Latin jazz, surf music, the whole thing. I called it 'Rock Is Dead.' I doubt if anyone will ever hear it.' The 'Rock Is Dead' session remained officially unreleased for almost thirty years, but was notoriously bootlegged and became familiar to fans of the Doors. Eventually a heavily-edited 16-minute version appeared on the 1997 'The Doors Box Set', but this often only included snippets of full songs that were recorded, so by adding the full versions of those tracks from the various bootlegs, I've come up with a surprisingly listenable album. Obviously it's nowhere near their best work, but it's also not as bad as some critics have made out (mainly because I've excised the worst excesses and self-indulgent nonsense from the session, and just left the more or less completed songs). If you listen to this solely as a historical archive recording, and don't expect too much from it, you might actually enjoy it.
Track listing
01 Love Me Tender / Save The Whole World02 Rock Is Dead03 Boogie All Night Long04 Naked Woman Jam05 Me And The Devil (a.k.a. Build Me A Woman)06 Queen Of The Magazines07 Rock And Roll Woman08 Pipeline09 Whiskey, Mystics And Men (with 'Petition' intro)
Following Jim Morrison's arrest and subsequent trial for indecent exposure at a Miami concert in March 1969, The Doors found it hard to get gigs, and so with time on their hands they visited various studios around Los Angeles and New York to come up with some ideas and record possible songs for their follow-up to 'The Soft Parade'. In July they were booked for two gigs at the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood, and so to prepare for that they played a private rehearsal there, which was taped for posterity. Both the studio sessions and the live rehearsal produced songs which never actually made to to 'Morrison Hotel', as well as providing alternate versions of songs that did, and so the best of those recordings are gathered here. In February of the same year they recorded the infamous 'Rock Is Dead' sessions following a drunken dinner at The Blue Boar Mexican restaurant, and while those recordings are nowhere near as polished as these, I will be posting an edited version of that at some point in the future, if only as a historical artifact.
Track listing
01 Whiskey, Mystics And Men (Elektra Studios 1969)02 Gloria (Aquarius Theatre Rehearsal 1969)03 I Will Never Be Untrue (Aquarius Theatre Rehearsal 1969)04 Build Me A Woman (PBS Studios 1969)05 Blues For Lonnie (Elektra Studios 1969)06 Who Scared You? (b-side of 'Wishful Sinful' 1969)07 Queen Of The Highway (Jazz Version) (Elektra Studios 1969)08 Woman Is A Devil (Elektra Studios 1969)09 Mystery Train / Crossroads (Aquarius Theatre Rehearsal 1969)
