Did The Doors ever try to replace Jim Morrison?
Shortly before his death in 1971, Jim Morrison rather bluntly told a reporter, “I only like the highest and the lowest points; all the other points in your life are unimportant”. However, left to deal with the aftermath of his untimely demise, Morrison’s bandmates in The Doors struggled to share that same appreciation for a mutual low point.
“We went through a lot of ‘where do we go from here?’” keyboardist Ray Manzarek acknowledged to the Philadelphia Inquirer several months later, “Just sitting around, not knowing what to do next, trying new things, and talking. Then we just decided that the music was too good, and we said, ‘Okay, let’s boogie’.”
In retrospect, that healing and re-assessment period looks pretty swift; while news of Morrison’s death had arrived in early July, The Doors were back on tour by November of 1971, having decided to carry forward with Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger now handling the lead vocals. T
This was the more respectful approach, it seemed, a wise recognition that some frontmen just cannot and should not be replaced by an outsider, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some uncomfortable conversations beforehand, however, and even some secret auditions.
“We did think about [bringing in a new singer],” Manzarek said during the ‘71 tour. “We even tried a few guys out. But we realised it would never work. No matter who we got, he’d be compared to Jim. It just wouldn’t work.”
Manzarek might have also been a tad overconfident in his own ability to keep The Doors’ crystal ship moving. Earlier in his music career, he’d been the frontman for an LA band called Rich and the Ravens, for which he sang under the stage name ‘Screamin’ Ray Daniels’, so the prospect of grabbing the mike again wasn’t entirely terrifying.
“We sort of had reservations at first,” he admitted, “It had been a long time since any of us sang, and we were a little shaky. Then we figured, ‘Oh, boy, here we go’. The first time in front of the mic, there were a lot of frogs in the throat. But then it started to get easier.”
As Manzarek and Krieger would soon learn, though, being an original member of The Doors did not shield them from unfavourable comparisons to Morrison, and the group’s subsequent tours and recordings quickly faded in public interest, leading to their disbandment in 1973.
It doesn’t seem that the 1970s could have played out any differently for The Doors if they’d recruited a new frontman, and for all the same, obvious reasons, but many years later, during an appearance on Late Night with David Letterman, Manzarek did get more specific about those other singers they’d considered as Morrison’s replacements.
“We talked about a lot of singers,” Manzarek said, “We talked about Iggy Pop. We talked about Van Morrison. We talked about Mick Jagger, but he already had a job… But, you know, who is gonna replace Morrison? Morrison is Morrison,” and we can safely assume he was talking about Jim and not Van.
