“The guy’s a genius”: Alice Cooper on the brilliance of Jim Morrison and The Doors’ self-titled debut
Detroit shock rocker Alice Cooper is one of music’s greatest survivors. It’s often forgotten just how far back he goes, but before glam embraced him with his nightly guillotining spectacles and monster hits like ‘I’m Eighteen’ and ‘Schools Out’, Cooper was part of the late 1960s psychedelic scene, his rag-tag crew arriving at Frank Zappa’s Los Angeles home eager for a record deal. Joining the ranks of Captain Beefheart and The GTOs, Cooper and his crew were signed to Zappa’s Straight Records and began immersing themselves in LA’s decadent counterculture.
With a well-known reputation for enjoying the sauce until his 1983 sobriety, it was natural that Cooper would cross paths with equally famed booze-hound Jim Morrison. Meeting just as The Doors were exploding, Cooper and his band played together, hung out in the studio, and partied hard. After waking up following a particularly heavy night, Morrison was required to attend an album cover shoot for Waiting for the Sun. Lacking a suitable shirt for the shoot, Cooper’s guitarist Glen Buxton handed him his purple, ballooned-sleeved top, which a hungover Morrison wore for the day’s photo sessions.
Cooper also claims to have directly inspired a Doors lyric. “I come from the school of, ‘Write the lyrics, rehearse it, do it exactly like you did it in rehearsal, and perform it exactly like you did it on the album,” Cooper told Vice in 2013. “I certainly don’t go in not knowing what I’m going to do! But the Doors were just the opposite.”
He added: “In fact, you know the line in ‘Roadhouse Blues‘ that goes, ‘I woke up this morning, got myself a beer?’ That’s my line. I was sitting there talking to him, and Jim says, ‘What did you do today?’ I said, ‘I woke up this morning, got myself a beer, duh, duh, duh…’ Next thing I know, I hear it in that song.”
When revealing his ten favourite albums to Rolling Stone, Cooper stayed very put in the 1960s, selecting records from The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Love, The Rolling Stones, and The Doors’ 1967 debut.
It’s an obvious entry into the West Coast acid-rockers’ oeuvre, featuring their seminal hits ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’, ‘Light My Fire‘, and the stirring psychedelic odyssey of ‘The End’. The Doors established a formula they’d occasionally match but never surpass, Ray Manzarek’s organ magic percolating like heady, lysergic glitter atop Morrison’s cerebral lyrical mysticism and powerhouse performances.
“There are certain people you meet and you just know they won’t be around forever, and Jim was one of those people,” Cooper told Classic Rock in 2023. “The guy was a genius, and I don’t throw that word around very often, but he did not treat himself very well. He would eat pills like you might eat Skittles, and he was a big drinker. He could have died 100 times. He was a risk taker, fearless. You’d be at a party and see him standing on the edge of a 300-foot-high building, balancing himself with a whisky bottle in each hand: that was a normal day for him.”
Holding deep affection for the late frontman, upon hearing the news of Morrison’s death during the Killers session in ’71, Cooper wrote ‘Desperado’ in honour of the old comrade who took his little-known band under his wing and helped their way to rock stardom.
