Linda McCartney Remembers Jim Morrison

Photographer Bobby Klein talks about this photo shoot: “We arrived in Venice in the morning and walked along the canals. This bridge has been preserved in its original form in Venice, which was designed in the early 1900s. On the way there, in my car, the guys heard ”Break On Through" on the radio for the first time," and everyone was delighted. They understood what it was like to have a hit. " January-February 1967, Venice Beach, California. © Bobby Klein.

Jim Morrison, Jule 28th-30th, 1967, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA. 📷 Paul Ferrara

1967.05.29. Grover Cleveland High School, Reseda, CA. Photo by Don Johnson

The Doors shot an early morning photo session with Bobby Klein atop a billboard on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California. Photo Credit: Bobby Klein © January 1967.

The first Doors album – simply titled The Doors – took just five days to make. Yet it took five months for Elektra to finally release it.  Jim and Ray had pushed at that point for the album to be released immediately, in time for Christmas. But Jac, the wise old label head, knew better and talked them into allowing Elektra to hold back its release until the new year. Jim threw a tantrum and again needed to be talked down.Jac painted Jim a picture of the kind of campaign Elektra would build around the album when it was finally released in January 1967: “I said: ‘We’ll have more time to prepare for you and I’ll release no other album that month, which means you’ve got Elektra working a hundred per cent on your album for the first month. And by the way, I have this idea about putting a billboard up on Sunset Strip…’ Well, that caught Jim. He loved that idea. He said: ‘Where’d you come up with that?’”

Magnifique winter 💙

I received an Aztec wall


of vision


& dissolved my room in


sweet derision


Closed my eyes, prepared to god


A gentle wind inform’d me so


And bathed my skin in ether glow

That was a great summer. I was hanging out at the film school and I was hanging out with friends in Venice. Ray had a house there, so I’d go and watch them rehearse sometimes because we were still hanging around that summer...A few years later, after we became friends, I told Jim about my first impression of him at that first show, and I said, “I thought you were terrible that night”. I remember he gave me a look that seemed to suggest that he didn’t like the word “terrible” [laughs]...

But then I told him he had improved tremendously and he was like a Frank Sinatra crooner who could also sing rock, and I asked him, “What changed?” He just said, “I just kept practicing and I kept practicing, practicing, practicing”. And obviously he had been doing something to improve. If you listen to their first demo and then their first album, there is such a difference and you can hear it. But they rehearsed a lot and they played a lot, too. I guess you can’t really help but improve if there’s the will and the talent, right?"-Frank Lisciandro

1966.08-09 Ray's Beach House Session ©Bill Harvey

KARLA opens the Doors.

The Doors very first appearance on the radio takes place in February of 1967 on KRLA 1110 during a 15 minute news broadcast by Lew Irwin. The subject of this news segment on The Doors is the newly erected Elektra billboard on the Sunset Strip, where Lew Irwin of KRLA is present with a tape recorder on the same day The Doors are photographed by Bobby Klein. A photograph of the band taken by a staff member of Foster & Kleiser, who erected the billboard, shows Lew interviewing the band with microphone in hand. Tape recordings made for KRLA news segments are known to have been continually reused and a copy of this news segment has never been found.  

Amy and Ozzy by Ross Halfin