“We were in awe”: When The Doors were finally silenced by a support act at the Whiskey a Go Go
Owing to Jim Morrison’s riotous ways, The Doors were passed around Los Angeles like an acid-dipped joint.
Where they went, a swirling air of ominous atmosphere followed. They were brave, bold and bombastic. Like an Alaskan Vampire, they were willing to embrace darkness and dismay in a scene overcome with flower power hayfever. And this meant that they were frequently shuffled from venue to venue like an unruly but loveable rescue dog.
As Densmore has asserted, “Something scary, but very attractive to humans, resides in that ‘dark matter’ space where sound gets swallowed up by silence.” This was the brooding style that they were happy to unleash. Frequently, Morrison would command a hush at an LA club – even his band was unsure of his next move – and then he’d punctuate the pregnant seconds of quiet with the first rumble of a Doors track being debuted.
Thus, the group became foremost purveyors of the importance of the silent spaces between sound. “Complete emptiness,” Densmore describes it, “The void. It was hard for some acts to follow us because of the ominous vibe we left in the air.” But it wasn’t just the support acts who struggled with it. Plenty of venues were equally perturbed.
The Doors were in need of a home and their free-form amorphous energy met its match with the spaced-out hippies at the Whisky a Go Go who liked to dance to the beat of a different drum, shunning the mainstream and happily delving into the plashy mire of mysticism. The Doors fit right in there. They were the right band for that time and place.
They had found their spiritual stage and were signed up by the savvy Ronnie Harran. She also whisked Morrison off to her boudoir for something a little more intimate than signing a contract. Then, she swiftly instated them as the club’s house band. Plenty of guest stars would come and go, but it was always the ‘Light My Fire’ group that presided over the evening.
The set-up was that The Doors would open, then a guest headliner would follow them, and then The Doors would take to the stage once more before the headliner closed the show with an encore. It was confusing. This set-up often made it a difficult mishmash for some of the bands to deal with. People like Van Morrison, for instance – a man who very much sought his own space – would struggle in such an environment. Or so you’d imagine.
One night, the “boys from Belfast”, a band simply called Them, were booked to play the fraught headliner set. They were relative unknowns. When they showed up as buttoned-up, reserved youngsters in a world of groovy madness, their cards were marked in advance. Alas, all sorts of spirituality would ensue, and the Whiskey a Go Go was stunned.
“We were in awe,” Densmore would later opine. He recalls in his book, Riders on the Storm, the evening in vivid detail. “They brashly took the stage,” he begins. “They slammed through several songs one right after another, making them indistinguishable. Van seemed drunk and very uptight, crashing the mike stand down on the stage. But when he dropped his lower jaw and tongue and let out one of those yells of rage, something Irish in me made my skin crawl with goosebumps. Ancient angst.”
The Doors hovered around, almost confused. Spellbound by the spirituality of Van Morrison and Them, they didn’t even know how to hold their instruments, never mind return to the stage. And it didn’t stop there, either. The notoriously socially anxious Van Morrison arrived back at Harran’s apartment for a small afterparty.
He sat glowering in the corner while the others gingerly chatted, still shaken by his awesome performance. Then, seemingly determined to top it, he decided to give them an impromptu peek at Astral Weeks.
He had been nervously holding onto Astral Weeks for a while, after the mob had taken over the Bang Records label he was signed to. Following a disagree, they had initially threatened to reveal his shady visa status and have him deported from the States. Then when he swiftly resolved to marry his girlfriend, Janet Planet, to acquire citizenship, they decided to simply threaten his life.
He went on the run and his Astral Weeks away. So, as he sat there at this very LA afterparty, he was surely feeling wildly ambivalent, and then, quietly, suddenly, he transmuted all of that into music so bottomless you could drop an anvil into it and never hear it hit the bottom. For the second time that evening, The Doors were silenced.
“It was as if Van couldn’t communicate on a small-talk party level,” Densmore writes, “so he just burst into his songs. We were mesmerized. It didn’t seem appropriate to shower him with compliments because his music came from such a deep place. So when he finished, there was silence for a minute or so. A sacred silence.” Then, drunken chatter nervously returned.
For the rockers who valued silence as much as sound, it took an awful lot to shock them into it when they were off stage. So, if that isn’t a measure of Van Morrison’s incorporeal intensity, then what the hell is?
