‘City of Night’: The erotic novel that inspired The Doors song ‘L.A. Woman’
No band summed up the defiance and cultural revolution of the 1960s quite like The Doors. Led by hippie king Jim Morrison, the band typified the psychedelic sounds of America during that time, using their music to explore everything from protests against the Vietnam War to Morrison’s unavoidable drug habit. Their broad range of sounds and songwriting themes meant that The Doors fostered a variety of truly iconic tracks, but one which has always stood out within their discography has been ‘L.A. Woman’.
Originally released in April 1971 on the album of the same name, ‘L.A. Woman’ was something of a swan song for Jim Morrison. After all, the L.A. Woman album was the last Doors record to be released during his lifetime, arriving only months before the singer’s tragic death at the age of 27. Although this brought more listeners to the album after his death, the record and its title track would undoubtedly go down among The Doors’ finest exports even without the morbid connection to Morrison’s untimely death.
Morrison was a songwriter who could soak up inspiration from virtually any source. Everything from his childhood experiences to the things he saw on television were drawn upon during his time with The Doors. For ‘L.A. Woman’, Morrison drew from his eclectic and intense interest in literature, with the song itself taking a narrative, almost cinematic structure. The songwriter had a knack for subverting expectations of rock songwriting, and the storytelling aspect of ‘L.A. Woman’ is a prime example of this.
Nevertheless, Morrison did not pluck the narrative of the track out of thin air. In fact, the songwriter was heavily inspired by a cult novel from 1963: John Rechy’s City of Night. Notable for its semi-autobiographical exploration of the United States homosexual underbelly, the controversial novel clearly struck a chord with Morrison. Even Rechy’s stream-of-consciousness writing style seems to fit in with Morrison’s approach to songwriting.
Broadly, the novel follows the tale of a male prostitute – or “young man”, as Rechy calls him – as he travels across cities like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. He also focuses a lot on the various characters that this narrator encounters along the way, ranging from sadomasochist obsessives to bed-ridden old men. Although the tale is not entirely autobiographical, the author did draw upon many of his real-life experiences within the novel.
Most notably, Rechy discusses the Cooper Do-Nuts Riot in 1959, during which the LGBTQ+ community fought back against police harassment and discrimination. The author had been present at the riot, which is often cited as one of the earliest examples of an LGBTQ+ uprising in the fight for gay rights, although he managed to escape from police detainment.
Of course, Morrison did not channel all of this into the lyrics of ‘L.A. Woman’, but the lineage of Rechy’s landmark novel is certainly present within the song. The most obvious difference between the two is that Morrison largely removed the homosexual angle from Rechy’s work, but he kept the idea of a hustler travelling into town and looking to meet new faces.
Morrison’s ability to channel the inspiration of this largely underground publication into one of The Doors’ defining anthems is typical of his songwriting skill. Few other figures within the counterculture age could live up to the standards set by Morrison and The Doors, with ‘L.A. Woman’ being a particularly good example of the sheer musical skill contained in each individual member of the group.
