The Doors’ first studio recording was for a Ford training video
California was filled with wanna-be rock stars in the mid-1960s. Virtually everybody had a band that wanted to follow in the footsteps of what The Beatles were doing, but very few had the right ideas or connections to make it happen. The Doors were now different: a collection of film school burnouts and hippies-to-be were bumming around Los Angeles trying to get their sound together. It was a slow process, but it was starting to gain some traction by 1966.
A year later, The Doors would have a number one hit and be crowned new kings of the counterculture. But in 1966, The Doors still needed money. They had a residency at the London Fog club, where they backed up exotic dancers and played to drunks. What they didn’t have was any studio experience, but that would change when they landed a job: creating incidental music for a Ford Motor Company training video.
Nobody is quite sure who secured them the gig to provide music for Love Thy Customer, but the end credits clearly list “Original Music by The Doors”. Although some cheesy canned music is used in the film’s introduction, some familiar instrumentation begins to filter in once a dream sequence begins around the two-minute mark.
Ray Mazarak’s plastic organ sound is unmistakable, as is Robbie Krieger’s stinging Gibson SG guitar. John Densmore doesn’t get much to do besides keeping time, but at least he’s kept busy. Since it’s just instrumental music, there’s no role for a young Jim Morrison to play in the Ford training video. There are claims that Morrison provided additional percussion, but even if that’s true, it remains faint throughout the film.
“The Doors piled into a cramped screening room at Los Angeles’ Rampart Studios, where they viewed the 25-minute clip on a small monitor,” Rolling Stone would later report about the session. “They composed a soundtrack largely on the spot, jamming live as the scenes flickered past. Fragments of what later became ‘I Looked at You’, ‘Build Me a Woman’ and ‘The Soft Parade’ can be heard in the finished product. Though they played only instrumental passages, Morrison is said to have contributed percussion and additional sound effects. The day of work earned them $200.”
Since The Doors wouldn’t get discovered by Elektra Records president Jac Holzman until August of 1966, this recording could represent the first professional recording that the band ever did. Just three days after signing with Elektra, the band would be fired from the Whisky a Go Go for performing a particularly explicit version of ‘The End’. That was fine: work on The Doors had been completed by that point, paving the way for The Doors to ascend as one of America’s most popular psychedelic rock bans.
Check out Love Thy Customer down below.
