Hear the eerie isolated vocals of Jim Morrison on The Doors’ last-ever recording
When Jim Morrison died, aged 27 in 1971, he left behind an immortal legacy as the mystical frontman of The Doors. The band struck gold early on with the release of their eponymous debut album in 1967. The winning formula of poetic psychedelic blues struck a chord with the blossoming counterculture of babyboomer USA and soon found its way to foreign shores.
Over the five decades since his death, the mystique of Morrison’s legacy has morphed him into a rock deity, thanks to his deeply spiritual and enigmatic persona in life and the mystery surrounding his demise. Morrison’s distinctly opaque and poetic lyrics have also magnified this mysticism. A keen disciple of Beat Generation literature, Morrison enjoyed wordplay and hidden quirks, such as his anagram pseudonym, Mr. Mojo Risin’.
In a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, Morrison discussed his writing process as rather autonomous; words would simply manifest during improvisational blues jams. When asked if there were any Doors tracks he liked more than others, he replied: “I tell you the truth, I don’t listen to the stuff much. There are songs I enjoy doing more in person than others. I like singing blues — these free, long blues trips where there’s no specific beginning or end. It just gets into a groove. I can just keep making up things. And everybody’s soloing. I like that kind of song rather than just a song. You know, just starting on a blues and just seeing where it takes us.”
Morrison added that the songs that he preferred to perform live were those that gave freedom to the band to improvise on stage. “It starts off with a rhythm,” he said. “You don’t know how it’s going to end up or how long it’s going to be or really what it’s about until it’s over. That sort I enjoy best. I get a rhythm, a river of sound rolling along. I can just completely relax and not worry about time or how it’s going to begin or end, or what I’m going to say. But not all people enjoy listening to that.”
The Doors’ classic song ‘Riders on the Storm’ from L.A. Woman was the last he ever recorded before moving to France to meet his fate. The song evolved from a jam session in which the band was toying with ‘Ghost Riders In the Sky’, a 1948 cowboy song by Stan Jones later recorded by Johnny Cash and Bing Crosby. Morrison changed the title to ‘Riders On The Storm’ as he had occasionally referred to himself as a “rider on the storm”.
Listen to the isolated vocals from The Doors’ last-ever recording below. As the song comes to a close, you can just about hear Morrison’s haunting whispers over his own lead vocals. As The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek recalled in a conversation with Uncut magazine in 2011: “There’s a whisper voice on ‘Riders on the Storm,’ if you listen closely, a whispered overdub that Jim adds beneath his vocal. That’s the last thing he ever did. An ephemeral whispered overdub.”
