Interactive Chronological History
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Note: Some of the dates this year are estimates while using some dated guidelines. This is by far the vaguest year according to actual dates because the events are not documented like they are through concert dates and record releases. However, I've done much research and feel the events are very close to the actual date.
Legend: (DU)
= Date Unknown, Date,
EVENT,
Review,
Timeline,
Link,
Quote,
Poetry/Lyrics
Throughout the site pictures are placed like above as previews to photos
of events you may access via links in upcoming months. They are broken
up into quarterly segments unless otherwise noted.
"I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points
up and gasps 'Oh, look at that!' Then-whoosh, and I'm gone...and they'll
never see anything like it ever again... and they won't be able to forget
me - ever." - Jim Morrison
Thu. July 8: Jim
and Ray Come Together - Venice Beach, CA (DU
- Some people believe this encounter took place in August, as it is written
in many books, but it is highly unlikely due to the first hand account
of Ray, as the one that was there, and who has always claimed to remember
this event very well and has always said July)
After receiving a Bachelor's degree in cinematography
from UCLA and living on friend
Dennis Jacob's rooftop,
Jim Morrison runs into his fellow film school graduate
Ray
Manzarek on Venice Beach this afternoon around
1:00 p.m. and the idea of a band is formulated after Jim sings a couple
of his songs in this order "Moonlight Drive", "My Eyes Have Seen You" and
"Summers Almost Gone"
Let's swim to the moon
Let's climb through the tide
Penetrate the evening
That the city sleeps to hide
Let's swim out tonight, love
It's our turn to try
Parked beside the ocean
On our moonlight drive.
Jim tells Ray he wants to call the band The Doors, with reference to the William Blake line: "If the doors of perception were cleansed man could see things as they truly are, infinite". The idea of using the name is also in association to Aldous Huxley and his book The Doors of Perception which Ray digs as both of them are experimenting with drugs and expanding their consciousness. Huxley's book is primarilly about his experiences and accounts of taking mescaline. While staying on the rooftop, Jim would take acid daily, which is legal at this time and available at the local headshop, and rarely come down off the roof while writing constantly and eating very little.
"There
are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors." - Jim
Morrison
Jim Morrison wants to be the
door by which others can experience the unknown and ultimately change persons/society's
way of thinking by becoming open to all things possible. He wants to change
the world's narrow perceptions and has given over his life, willingly as
sacrifice, to be the one to do so. He will pass through the door
with the fear of death gone and along side an awakening of something greater
than life.
"But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be
quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less
cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his
ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to
things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries,
forever vainly to comprehend." - Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception,
last paragraph
Jim knows what he has to do and he will never do anything in moderation again. He believes that by ravaging the soul he can attain the unknown and holds strong to another Blake line - "The road to excess leads to the palace of widom". His accepted job, as a college graduate entering manhood, is to be the one to go out on the edge and bring his visions back to society, not unlike a shaman in a tribe, but the price he has to pay will be the greatest one of all. Jim also wants deeply to be remembered for what he is about to do and has a strong desire to be remembered long after he is gone like many of his idols; writers and poets. He sees poetry and writing as a way to eternal life and his plan is to use his words combined with music to reach the masses and change the world.
We want the world and we want it, now, now, NOW!
"I had been friendly with Jim at UCLA, and we talked about rock 'n' roll
even then. After we graduated, he (Jim) said he was going to New York.
Then, two months later, in July, I met him on the beach in Venice. He said
he had been writing some songs, so we sat on the beach and I asked him
to sing some of them. He did, and the first thing he tried was 'Moonlight
Drive'. When he sang those first lines - 'Let's swim to the moon/Lets
climb through the tide/Penetrate the evening/That city sleeps to hide'
- I said: 'That's it.' I'd never heard lyrics to a rock song like that
before. We talked a while before we decided to get a group together and
make a million dollars." - Ray Manzarek
Jim immediately moves in with Ray and his girlfriend Dorothy in their small flat on the beach in Ocean Park and sleeps in Ray and Dorothy's room as they move their mattress into the living room near the heater. Ray begins working on Jim's songs teaching him how to sing during the day while Dorothy is working.
"The best songs come unasked for. You don't have to think about them
. . . Summer is good for songs. When it's real warm, if you have
a sense of freedom, not a lot on your mind, and a feeling there's plenty
of time, it just seems to be a good climate for music." - Jim Morrison
After about two weeks Ray takes Jim to his parents house where the band rehearses and presents Jim to his group "Rick and The Ravens". Members include Ray's two brothers Rick and Jim Manzarek. The lyrics soar over their heads but they agree to work with the new singer and new material. Jim writes lyrics to songs wherever he roams while constantly expanding his mind and his vocal style. Jim is not a great singer at first but he does have a strong desire to get better and with his strong rich voice and good pipes it's only a matter of time. Ray strongly believes in Jim and it is this commitment that gives Jim the confidence he needs to develop into one of the greatest rock singers of all time.
" R i c k a n d t h e R av e n s "
This Month: Timeline
- Music
The
Beatles release Help!, Dylan releases Highway 61 Revisited,
and the single "Eve of Destruction" is topping the charts.
Wed. Aug. 11 - Mon. Aug. 16: Timeline
- Civil Rights
The
Watts Riots breakout in Los Angeles following the arrest of an unemployed
black man on charges of drunken driving. 34 persons are killed, 1,032
injured, and 3,952 are arrested during the five day riot. Fire damage
and property loses total over 215 million dollars.
Fri. Aug. 13: Timeline
- Music
The
Beatles play Shea Stadium to 55,000 and Marty Balin, singer and songwriter
of The Jefferson Airplane, co-opens The Matrix in San Francisco.
D R U M M E R J O H N D E N S M O R E J O I N S T H E B A N D
Fri. Aug. 20: John
Densmore - Joins The Doors (DU)
John Densmore, while attending college and uncertain of his major, is given
a call from Ray Manzarek to come to his parents house to play drums with
the band. John and Ray know each other somewhat from a mutual meditation
class they both attend regularly.
John is currently working
with a band called the "Psychedelic Rangers" with friend Robby Krieger.
John meets a shy Jim Morrison and likes the originals more than the covers
the band is practicing. He is intrigued by Jim's self-consciousness and
provocative mysterious lyrics and after a few rehearsals decides to join
the band two weeks prior to cutting a demo.
"So
Ray finally did call me and I went down to his parents' garage in Manhattan
Beach, although he lived in Venice. There wasn't any music.
It was just Jim's words. Ray said, 'This is Jim, the singer.'
He had never sung. But they showed me some of the lyrics and I was
attracted to them. Songs like 'Moonlight Drive' and 'Soul Kitchen'
were real out there, yet I could see the fluidity and rhythm to them and
right away thought, 'God, put this to rock music? Yeah! . . . I'll rehearse
for a while and see what happens." - John Densmore
Jim has no car but the other band members, especially John, regularly run him around to party with his old film school pals Phil O'Leno, Dennis Jacob, and Felix Venable at their apartments. Jim is smoking pot all day and often tripping on LSD while regularly hanging out around the UCLA campus or Venice Beach. He often crashes at the girl of the moment's house or anyone that will have him when he can't make it back to the beach from a long night of partying.
"It's like gambling somehow, You go out for a night of drinking and you
don't know where your going to end up the next day. It could work
out good or it could be disastrous. It's like the throw of the dice."
- Jim Morrison
Thu. Aug. 26: Timeline
- Vietnam War
This
is the last day marrying can improve your draft status.
Sun. Aug. 29: Timeline-
Music
The Beatles play The Hollywood
Bowl.
Tue. Aug. 31: Timeline
- Vietnam War
LBJ
signs the Selective Service Act making draft card burning a federal offense.
Thu. Sept. 2: World Pacific Jazz
Studios - Los Angeles, CA
"Rick and the Ravens" have some free studio time
coming from a trade off on an Aura Records deal. The Doors (without
Robby Krieger) cut a demo which sounds very little like The Doors
with a very young sounding Jim Morrison. The six songs on the demo are
all Morrison originals:
"Moonlight Drive"
"Hello I Love You"
"Summers Almost Gone"
"My Eyes Have Seen You"
"End of The Night"
"Go Insane (A Little Game)"
The band immediately begins to locally shop the demos around after the three hour session. Jim is delighted after hearing his voice on a record for the first time.
"Actually, I think the music came to my mind first and then I made up the
words to hang onto the melody, some kind of sound. I could hear it, and
since I had no way of writing it down musically, the only way I could remember
it was to try and get words to put to it. And a lot of times I would end
up with just the words and couldn't remember the melody." - Jim Morrison
Sun. Sept. 4: Jim Writes His Parents
(DU)
Around this time, Jim writes his parents in London
disclosing his plans to sing with a band. Jim's father, an admiral in the
navy, vehemently disagrees with Jim's choice and is very upset with his
son. He writes Jim back conveying his objection while mentioning
paying for four years of college, Jim abandoning his piano lessons as a
child, never caroling with the family, and most importantly mentioning
the band will never amount to anything. Jim isn't good at taking criticism
and never writes his family again!
"Some people surrender their freedom willingly but others are forced to
surrender it. Imprisonment begins with birth. Society, parents they refuse
to allow you to keep the freedom you were born with. There are subtle ways
to punish a person for daring to feel. You see that everyone around you
has destroyed his true feeling nature. You imitate what you see." - Jim
Morrison
Mon. Sept. 5: Timeline
- Of Interest
Writer
Michael Fallon coins the term "hippie" in describing the San Francisco
counterculture.
G U I T A R I S T R O B B I E K R I E G E R J O I N S T H E B A N D
Late September: Robby
Krieger - Joins The Doors
(DU)
Uncertain and dissatisfied with the direction of
the band Rick and Jim Manzarek decide to quit returning to school.
John asks friend Robby Krieger to play guitar with the band. Robby
is a talented guitar player who can play many styles including a mean bottleneck
that Jim loves immediately and asks him to play on every song they rehearse.
Robby likes the feel of the music and continues to play with the band quitting
his other band The Clouds and becoming the final member completing the
group.
The band moves the equipment out of the Manzarek's
and continues rehearsing 5 days a week
at Ray's beach house, the garage of friend Hank Olguin behind a Santa Monica
Greyhound bus depot in Venice, or Robby's house.
Fall: Timeline
- Fashion
Mini-skirts
appear nationwide in stores.
"One day late in '65, I came back from lunch
and there were these guys waiting for me. It was them, The Doors.
They had a quality that attracted me to them immediately. I guess
they appealed to the snob in me because they were UCLA graduates and I
thought, 'Great, here are some intellectual types getting involved with
rock 'n' roll.' They played me an acetate of several songs they'd
recorded. The music was so raw, so basic, so simplistic, so unlike
anything I was familiar with. It intrigued me that they could combine
this sort of music with such interesting lyrics." - Billy James
"It's
incredible they got a deal off that first demo, because they almost sounded
incompotent. The female bass player is like a full beat behind on
everything." - Bill Siddons
The band gets a few rare gigs at bar mitzvah's, weddings, and fraternity parties leaning heavily on a few easily recognized songs such as "Louie, Louie" and "Gloria" while occasionally slipping in one of their own compositions. Jim is too shy to sing most of the songs where Ray handles the vocals and Jim punctuates the music with a harmonica or yelling "Yeah!" or "Drive on!" occasionally.
Fri. Nov. 5: Pioneer
Club Boat Ride - Los Angeles, CA (DU)
This is one of The Doors earliest
engagements outside of frat parties and playing for friends.
Fri. Nov. 19: Hughes
Aircraft Union Dance - Los Angeles, CA
(DU)
The Doors begin auditioning in various small clubs, but are continuously turned down for either being too different or having no bass player. The band auditions bass players but none fit the mold. Ray, while auditioning for a gig, finds a unique Fender Rhodes piano bass organ which Columbia picks up the bill for. The Doors sound is finalized.
"We never found a bass guitarist we wanted to work with. The bass
players invariably played too much. No bass player would want to
play the way we wanted which was sparse and hypnotic. Then one day
we were auditioning at some place - we didn't get the gig of course because
we were too weird - but the house band there had an instrument called a
Fender Rhodes piano bass sitting on top of a Vox Continental organ just
like I had. I switched on the amplifier, played the thing, and realized
it was a keyboard bass. When I saw that I said 'This is it.
We have found our bass player!' " - Ray ManzarekIn that year we had a great visitation of energy
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