Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry

by Gareth Murphy

  Throughout the sixties, a colorful new community of migrant record producers was forming. One character with a big future was Jerry Moss, a twenty-five-year-old promotions man from the Bronx, who in 1960 left the Brill Building in search of sunnier adventures out west. “The plane landed, my aunt picked me up, the weather was fantastic,” remembered Moss, who found work as an independent promotions man. Hungrier than the local competition, “I believed in working a full day!” Because he had no friends, he ended up hanging out with disc jockeys day and night. “It was a dreamy time in California. You could park your car in front of the radio station and walk right in. It was not like New York, which was high buildings and going through people. Here was a frontier feeling.”

  In those years, Jerry Moss befriended a musician and struggling actor named Herb Alpert with whom he began listening to the exotic jazz-samba records of Stan Getz, João Gilberto, and Brazilian bossa nova genius Antonio Carlos Jobim. Launching their long and illustrious career with Alpert’s Tijuana Brass band, “we gotta be able to make money while we’re sleeping,” vowed Moss to Alpert. “I don’t care if this record is six months old, we gotta keep letting radio stations know this is a hot act.” Right time, right place, right sound. By 1966, their four-year-old label, simply called A&M, was in orbit, selling 13 million Tijuana Brass records—more than the Beatles. Thanks again to their Brazilian inspirations, Alpert and Moss spotted and signed Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66, who scored a hit with “Mas Que Nada” while supporting Alpert on tour.

  Herb Alpert’s former business partner Lou Adler was another happening indie who had relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles. It was Adler, working as manager and producer, who guided the local folk group the Mamas & the Papas to their national breakthrough in early 1966 with “California Dreamin.’” In fact, even Byrds front man Roger McGuinn, the bespectacled face of California cool at the time, was actually a blow-in from Chicago.

  When it came to pioneering uncharted musical territory, pushing the wagons deeper into the wild west was Elektra founder Jac Holzman. In the spring of 1965, “I thought I had the Lovin’ Spoonful, and [losing them] really put me on edge,” Holzman recalled. Then came Bob Dylan’s electric set in Newport. “So I just pulled up the stakes and went to California because I thought everybody’s picking over what there is in New York.” Holzman already had a local promotions office in Los Angeles, but by the summer of 1965, was looking at ways to develop it into an A&R unit.

  The claustrophobia of New York’s folk scene contrasted with the expansive effect of marijuana, which was radically altering Elektra’s musical tastes and company culture. Beyond his official job in the studio, Elektra producer Paul Rothchild had a profitable side business selling grass among his circle of musicians and hipsters. Jac Holzman began hosting sessions in his Manhattan apartment, equipped with his high-definition stereo sound system, where guests would be served space cookies, then played the latest wow.

  In his many visits to Elektra’s Los Angeles office, Jac Holzman shot the shit with local players and noticed how “in California, musicians were finding each other naturally rather than being cobbled together by managers—big, big difference. You’d hang out there, you could get loaded, you’d bond—it was a lot more fun.” With its sunny climate and liberal atmosphere, California was also home to a booming marijuana culture. In these innocent days before baggage inspections and sniffer dogs, Holzman began flying back to New York with large bags of grass packed in his suitcase.

  Then, in the autumn of 1965, Paul Rothchild was busted and imprisoned for nine long months. Paying half of Rothchild’s salary throughout, Holzman tightened his gut and intensified his A&R reconnaissance missions into the unfamiliar underground of Los Angeles. “Colleges were really important in the folk scene, but rock was different,” he explained. “It wasn’t smart college kids sitting around in coffee houses. This was a different kind of audience; much more racially integrated … There were dozens of clubs in the heart of Hollywood, near Vine and on the Sunset Strip, from La Cienega on the east to Doheny on the west … I’d pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Free Press, I’d go through every listing of every band playing and check off the ones I’ve heard. The ones that seemed interesting to me, I’d check around with friends who’d say ‘oh yeah they’re interesting’ or ‘don’t waste your time.’”

  Eventually, in late 1965, Holzman’s first eureka moment struck at a club called Bido Lito’s, where a folk-rock ensemble called Love was performing. Accompanied by his wife, Nina, he stood among the “silken-clad girls with ironed blonde hair moving the kind of shapes you didn’t see in New York.” Nina Holzman recalled how “Arthur Lee got up, and he had these boots with the tongues hanging out, no laces, and his eye glasses had one blue lens and one red, and a funny shape. He was the most bizarre person I’d ever seen in my life, by far.” The Elektra boss was instantly hooked. “When there’s an element of danger, when you don’t know what a band is going to do next, that attracts me,” he explained. The next day, he set in ink a three-year, six-album deal for a $5,000 cash advance. That very day, the drug-crazed Arthur Lee bought a flashy convertible and gave his bandmates the change—$100 each.

  As the cookie crumbled, Love’s debut album and accompanying single provided vital experience for Holzman’s next discovery, Elektra’s biggest ever—the Doors, one of the most important acts of the late twentieth century. In early 1966, as Love was fast becoming the new noise in L.A., the Doors, fresh-faced and building up a repertoire, were playing in a Sunset Strip dive called the London Fog. “We were doing it for ourselves,” recalled keyboardist Ray Manzarek of those formative months before bleeping on anyone’s radar. “Most of the time there were about seven people in the club, the four Doors, the waitress, the bartender…, and Rhonda Lane, the go-go dancer.”

  Shopping their self-produced demo around town, they visited Lou Adler, who skidded the needle through the first five seconds of every song, then showed the Doors to the door. They took their acetate to another local indie, Liberty Records. When Jim Morrison’s voice sang, “Once I had a little game, I think you know the game I mean, the game called Go Insane,” the label boss ripped off the needle, shouting, “Get outta here! Take this record and get out! You guys are sick!”

  They eventually found a more receptive ear in Billy James, Bob Dylan’s former publicist, who was now working as an A&R man in Columbia’s Los Angeles office. “Their music was different,” said James. “It had an insidious quality, not just moody, almost threatening, a quality of implied danger. ‘The Game Called Go Insane,’ what an odd idea for a three-minute song that you want to get on AM radio and have little girls dancing to. Go insane—that’s an option we hadn’t considered in rock ’n’ roll.”

  “I like what you guys are doing,” he announced to the delighted youngsters. “You guys are now signed to Columbia Records.”

  A record contract was signed; however as James would later find out, “Columbia did nothing. Weeks went by, months, and then they put the Doors on their drop list.” Despite this crushing letdown, the four young men simply dusted themselves off and continued gigging, until, as so often happens with giant destinies, luck intervened. The very night the London Fog’s owner laid off the Doors due to lack of interest, a lady dropped in—Ronnie Haran, the booker for the hippest club in town, the Whisky a Go Go. Bowled over by Jim Morrison’s sex appeal, she announced, “I want you guys to be the house band.”

  It was at this crossroads that Jac Holzman bought his lucky ticket into the pantheon of record men. “In May 1966, I had flown to L.A. and was picked up at the airport by Ronnie Haran in her white convertible,” he explained. “Arthur Lee was playing the Whisky and expected me to drop by. It was 11:00 P.M. L.A. time, 2:00 A.M. New York metabolism time. I was beat, but I went. Arthur urged me to stick around for the next band.” At the time, Holzman was feeling jittery as the race to sign up California’s folk-rock bands intensified. “There was another group that played the Whisky that I had fallen in love
with and tried desperately to sign, Buffalo Springfield, but Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic was far more convincing. We were a smaller label without Atlantic’s amazing track record of hit singles. Love had gotten my foot in the rock door, and now I needed a second group to give Elektra more of that kind of credibility.”

  The young band onstage wasn’t grabbing him. “Jim was lovely to look at, but there was no command. Perhaps I was thinking too conventionally, but their music had none of the rococo ornamentation with which a lot of rock and roll was being embellished—remember, this was still the era of the Beatles and Revolver circa 1966. Yet, some inner voice whispered that there was more to them than I was seeing or hearing. So I kept returning to the club. Finally, the fourth evening, I heard them. Jim generated an enormous tension with his performance, like a black hole, sucking the energy of the room into himself. ‘Alabama Song,’ which I knew thoroughly, but what they did with it was pure Doors. And then I got it … And when I heard—really heard—Manzarek’s baroque organ line under ‘Light My Fire,’ I was ready to sign them.”

  Getting their four signatures on the dotted line was no foregone conclusion. Following their eye-opening disappointment with Columbia, they had turned down offers from independent producers Terry Melcher and Frank Zappa. Luckily for Holzman, Doors guitarist Robby Krieger was a devout fan of Elektra’s flamenco and blues records—he already considered the label a mark of quality. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek, not necessarily the natural leader of the band, but the eldest and most musically capable, instantly connected with the Elektra boss, later joking that Holzman was the first person he’d met in the record business who spoke in full sentences. “He was an intellectual,” said Manzarek, “the cowboy from New York. He was like Gary Cooper riding into town, but with brains. Jac even knew ‘Alabama Song’ was written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.”

  Besides being bohemians from liberal Jewish families, Manzarek and Holzman, along with Jim Morrison, shared a passion for movies. Originally from Chicago himself, Manzarek was in L.A. to study cinematography at UCLA—where he met Jim Morrison. Among this gang of kindred spirits, music was discussed in cinematic, literary, and musicological dimensions. “We loved Orson Welles and the music of Howlin’ Wolf, in other words darkness,” Manzarek said of the Doors’ inspirations. “Or Muddy Waters singing ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ Or listening to Miles Davis’s music, with its dark overtones. Music that had a deep psychological poetry. Allen Ginsberg’s opening line in Howl was very influential: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.’ That’s where the Doors come from: City of Night, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.”

  The shoe fit perfectly. “They liked me,” Holzman recalled, although “they were reticent because they had just been burned by Columbia. I finally realized what the closure might be: not to guarantee that I would release a record, but to guarantee I would release three albums. I knew they had enough [material] for two full albums, and I would give them what no other label would.” Although the basic terms of the contract were fairly standard for the period—a $5,000 advance, a 5 percent royalty on record sales, and a 75/25 percent split on publishing in favor of the artist—it was the long-term commitment that clinched the deal.

  The next problem was production. “At my insistence, Paul went to L.A. and watched one of the Doors sets,” explained Holzman, “and told me I was nuts. I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I looked at other producers, but kept coming back to Paul … The group needed a force they couldn’t push around, someone who could earn their respect, and Rothchild was all of that. And once Paul made a commitment he stuck to it. With great reluctance I finally said, “Paul, I never thought I’d say this to you, but you owe me. You’ve got to do this band. You are the only person for the job.” And Paul said … ‘Well, if you put it that way.’”

  Holzman had to meet Rothchild’s parole officer and sign documents guaranteeing Rothchild’s good conduct. True to his reputation, the tough Bostonian got the band practicing hard for two weeks solid before any recording began. Once in the studio, “we nailed the sound on the first day,” said sound engineer Bruce Botnick. “And after that, no one touched a knob, an amplifier, or a microphone. It was all recorded live. Even tape delays on the voice were done in the moment.”

  Among these capable musicians, Jim Morrison was clearly the odd man out—being unable to play an instrument and relatively ignorant of music. “Jim was a huge Elvis fan and an even bigger Sinatra fan,” Botnick noticed with a little bemusement. “Jim had this enormous vocal range and could go from a whisper to a scream, from zero to sixty in two seconds. He could croon and then scream … [But] Jim wasn’t a musician.” Paul Rothchild noticed that Morrison’s “timing was terrible—whenever he picked up maracas or a tambourine, myself or someone in the band would try to take it away from him.”

  Like all great artists, though, Morrison instinctively knew from which well to drink. One key influence turned out to be Van Morrison, front man of the Belfast group Them. Robby Krieger explained, “In the early Whisky days [Van Morrison] was a terror. I mean you’d be afraid to come anywhere near that stage—drunk as hell, throwing the mic around, screaming and railing and stuff. He had some real devils inside.” Jim Morrison carefully studied the Belfast singer’s brand of bewitched R&B, and the principle of trance carried much of his subsequent career. One of his friends, Digby Diehl, confirmed, “Jim would work himself into these frenzies. I would arrive with him and sit backstage and watch him in an hour or so drink or toke himself up into the performer that went on stage. Often he’d arrive as the shy poet, and he would become that wild, theatrical, sexual figure.”

  Recorded in just one week, the Doors’ debut album was a treasure trove of timeless classics. Although “Light My Fire” would later provide the commercial breakthrough, it was the album’s closing track that would resonate longest. “We were in the middle of recording ‘The End,’ a landmark composition,” Paul Rothchild recalled. “I got chills top to bottom … And at the end of the take, I was drained as anyone out in the room from the experience.”

  To faithfully capture the spirit of this organically written epic, Jim Morrison had dropped some acid before arriving at the studio. After the tension of the first take, Rothchild called a break, whereupon Morrison wandered off to a nearby church, tripping intensely. Staring at a statue of the Virgin Mary, he got so worked up about the song’s hidden meanings that his second take contained a thunderous performance of the song’s latter section where “the killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on,” then “walked on down the hall” to his Oedipal catharsis. Rothchild spliced the silky intro of the first take with the powerful finale of the second to create the now-legendary masterpiece. “And at that moment,” said Rothchild, “I knew the band was going to be famous.”

  The only lingering question mark was Jim Morrison’s volatility. After “The End” session wrapped up, Morrison went back to the empty studio, still tripping, and sprayed a fire extinguisher around the facilities, actually covering a harpsichord in foam. Although Holzman had to write a check for damages, he was pleasantly surprised with the Doors’ subsequent professionalism. When he suggested they wait four months for a January 1967 release to avoid being drowned out by the usual glut of pre-Christmas products, the band accepted without any tantrums. Also, despite the fact that Jim Morrison and Robby Krieger were the main songwriters, “all monies from performing, writing and publishing were split equally and all copyrights were listed in the name of the entire band.”

  While they waited for their album launch, Holzman secured them a month’s residency in New York at Ondine on Fifty-ninth Street, a hot spot whose sophisticated crowd Ray Manzarek described as “all the Andy Warhols and plastic inedible kinds of chicks and mod guys.” This October 1966 reconnaissance mission deep inside New York’s velvety underground provided the Doors with a glimpse of the very cutting edge of the art and music scene. “When it came to their visu
al image,” said Holzman, “the Doors knew what needed to be done—they put their personal egos aside and Jim upfront. During the photo shoot for the first album cover they said…, ‘Let’s make Jim a little bigger.’ They knew he was the draw.”

  One famous write-up in Rolling Stone mused that “Morrison is so pretty he looks like he was made up on the phone by two fags.” Inspired by Marlon Brando’s biker costume in The Wild One, Jim Morrison found a clothing designer, Mirandi Babitz, to work up his black-and-white silhouette, including his now-iconic belt and tight leather trousers.

  Elektra’s head of promotions, Steve Harris, noticed that “he knew how to look at a camera, better than any rock star I’ve ever known. He posed … Jim had a degree in film from UCLA.” As another perceptive witness, promoter Bill Graham, put it, “Watch him just move, the way he goes toward the microphone, what he does with the microphone stand, but mainly how he gets from one space to another, how he prowls the stage, and there’s that, if you want to call it, snake, panther, slithery whispery movement to him that exuded sexuality, sensuality. Especially dressed dark, the black leather pants … No underwear. Jim Morrison doesn’t wear ’em. Very powerful statement.”

  Both band and record company were thinking along the same lines. By shooting a video for “Break On Through”—a novel idea at the time—Elektra supplied TV networks with a striking image of the band’s true personality. “We could not afford to tour the Doors at the beginning,” Holzman explained. “And I didn’t want them performing in front of distracted teenagers on shows like Bandstand and Hullabaloo. I thought it would shift the focus away from the music. I wanted the exposure, but in a controlled situation.” Still thinking in wide-screen, Holzman also rented Doors billboards along Sunset Strip.

  Despite its title, the album’s accompanying single “Break On Through” only peaked at No. 106 on the Billboard charts—a resolute flop under the circumstances. However, an encouraging momentum was gathering behind the album, whose most instantly popular track seemed to be the seven-minute “Light My Fire.” Realizing they’d probably backed the wrong horse, Paul Rothchild made a three-and-a-half-minute radio edit by chopping out a large chunk of the swirling instrumental section. Hearing it, Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger looked at each other, skin crawling. Rothchild made his case. “Just imagine you’re a kid in Minneapolis, Minnesota, you’re seventeen years old, and you’ve never heard of the Doors. You love rock ’n’ roll—and this comes on the radio.”