‘An American Prayer’: when The Doors reincarnated Jim Morrison for one last album
On July 3rd, 1971, Jim Morrison, the iconic frontman of The Doors, was found dead in an apartment in Paris, France. While there are several confounding theories as to how the ‘Light My Fire’ singer met such a bleak end, very few will argue against the star’s spiralling issues with drug addiction being central to the mystery.
Earlier that year, Morrison was convicted in the US for indecent exposure and open profanity after allegedly exposing himself on stage during an infamous Miami gig in 1969. He was sentenced to six months in jail, and while he was appealing the verdict, he took flight for Paris with his partner Pamela Courson.
Naturally, this period saw The Doors enter a hiatus, though they had already completed work on L.A. Woman. This was the band’s sixth album and final to be released during Morrison’s lifetime, on April 19th, 1971. Despite Morrison’s concurrent turmoil, the album was an unmitigated success thanks to the title track and its hit singles ‘Love Her Madly’ and ‘Riders on the Storm’.
Following Morrison’s death, the surviving members, John Densmore, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek, regrouped to record new material with Manzarek and Krieger handling the vocals. The first of two Doors albums not to feature Morrison was aptly titled Other Voices and released in October 1971.
“It was a tough time, of course,” Krieger told Stereogum in 2021. “When Jim was gone … we had kept going. The three of us were practising all the time, writing new stuff. When Jim passed, we said, ‘Jeez, what’re we going to do?’ We could just give it up, or, you know, we have all these songs. Let’s go in and record and see what happens.”
Continuing, the guitarist defended the band’s decision to release the album so soon after Morrison’s death. “We probably shouldn’t have put it out that quick after Jim’s passing,” he admitted. “We just felt like that was all we could do. We could’ve sat around and been depressed. Which we were. But I don’t know. The record company, Elektra, they were wanting us to continue. It wasn’t that hard of a decision.”
As one might expect, The Doors struggled to pull in the same critical and commercial attention without their figurehead, despite releasing some enjoyable music on Other Voices and 1972’s Full Circle. However, Morrison’s iconic voice wasn’t dead and buried just yet.
Following five years of dormancy, The Doors returned for one final album, 1978’s An American Prayer. The album heard Morrison’s vocals return from beyond the grave in a series of poems he had recorded between 1969 and 1970. The frontman initially intended to release the spoken word recordings in a solo album. He had allegedly approached composer Lalo Schifrin to collaborate with him for the musical accompaniment just before leaving for Paris in March 1971.
When Morrison passed away, the project was abandoned, but his three trusty bandmates picked up the threads in 1978. The surviving trio composed some jazz-rock music to accompany Morrison’s anthology, dividing the concepts into five chapters.
A tribute to Morrison’s intensely creative life, An American Prayer followed chronologically. “We did this album to show the side of Jim which has been underrated all these years,” Manzarek told the Los Angeles Times in November 1978. “As far as we were concerned, Jim was a poet. But being the Lizard King has overshadowed the fact that he did some incredible poetry.”
Manzarek continued to outline the album’s chapters: the first part of the album covered Morrison’s childhood, the second part his high school years, the third part “the young poet, stoned on a rooftop with acid dreams,” the fourth, his time fronting The Doors, and the final part “a final summation in a way, of the man’s entire life and his philosophy.”
Upon its release on November 17th, 1978, An American Prayer was billed as “Poems, lyrics and stories by James Douglas Morrison.” Although it continued work by every member of The Doors, it was released as “A Jim Morrison Almum”, featuring The Doors in the credits. The album sold 250,000 copies in its first run, making it the biggest-selling spoken-word album in history.
Listen to the Jim Morrison and The Doors’ final farewell below.
