“The beginning”: the 1970 album back cover that led to the Hard Rock Cafe
If you’re eager to behold pop culture relics like Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ wedding dress, Jimi Hendrix’s Flying V guitar, or John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to ‘Imagine’, you might have to consider wading into the corporate kitschery of your local Hard Rock Cafe.
A part of the tourist trap eateries, along with your Planet Hollywoods and Rainforest Cafes that litter the commercial hubs of major cities, American restaurateurs and businessmen Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton kick-started a globally dominating franchise when they first opened their rock and pop-themed diners back in 1971 in London’s Hyde Park.
While the menus are standard burgers and wings affair, the memorabilia buried in the Hard Rock vaults boasts the biggest private music reliquary in the world, a hoard started in earnest once Eric Clapton gifted his red Lead II Fender in 1979.
Since then, over 80,000 items have found their way into the Hard Rock collection, rotating around the various sites to be gawped at over a rack of ribs. The Doors are just one of many bands to be pulled into the chain’s corporate orbit. As well as the Hard Rock Cafe Hollywood proudly displaying the leather slacks frontman Jim Morrison was sporting for the 1968 Hollywood Bowl concert, it turns out that the Los Angeles psych-rockers lent an indirect hand in inspiring Tigrett and Morton’s rock and roll restaurant empire.
A year before the Hyde Park Cafe debut, The Doors were embroiled in creative and personal turmoil. 1969’s The Soft Parade was met with bafflement due to its lavish orchestral production, and Morrison’s drunken decision to expose himself on stage in Florida resulted in a radio blacklist and cancellation of lucrative touring dates. Eager to dial down the ‘Lizard King’ schtick, Morrison adopted a more conservative dress, and The Doors moved away from the potent psychedelia of earlier LPs in favour of a rawer, more down-home blues sound.
It’s become one of the most enduring images of The Doors lore, the band snapped guerrilla style by photographer Henry Diltz behind the glass of 1246 Hope Street’s Morrison Hotel in Downtown LA, gifting 1970’s LP its namesake title. During the photo shoot on December 17th, 1969, a characteristically thirsty Morrison dragged the Doors and Diltz to a dive bar in nearby Skid Row, posing with the regulars for Morrison Hotel’s gatefold as well as featuring its exterior on the back cover. Forging such an affection for the Hard Rock Cafe, they stuck its exterior on the back cover and even titled the record’s first side after the old boozer.
It was a good name, at least Tigrett and Morton thought so. “I guess, though, sometime the next year after the album came out with that picture on the back, they got a call from England, and this guy says, ‘Hello. Would you mind if we use that name on the back of your album? We’re starting a cafe over here in London, and we would like to use that name,’” Diltz recalled to radio personality Paul Harris in 1997. “And they said ‘no, go ahead,’ and that was the beginning of it.”
It turns out singer-songwriter Carole King may well have visited the same Hard Rock Cafe too, titling a key song from 1977’s Simple Things after a restaurant in Idaho and a bar downtown in LA, as revealed in her A Natural Woman autobiography and long before Tigrett and Morton took the name for their corporate conquering.
Still going strong, and impossible to avoid in any given Disneyfied city centre, you can’t blame Diltz for angling for a complimentary meal or at least a beer token should he ever show his face, “Now every time I go into a Hard Rock Cafe, whatever city I’m in, I always feel like I should get a free hamburger.”
