The Doors
02-25-1969
Sunset Sound
Hollywood, CA
101. Roadhouse Blues (vocal vamp fragment)
102. Seminary School (playback over bit of track)
103. Talk
104. Seminary School - Whisky Mystics (full take)
105. Whisky Mystics (Rock Is Dead pt. 1)
106. Love Me Tender
107. Gonna Save The Whole World
108. Woman Is A Devil - Rock and Roll is dead
109. No Impablimations...let's roll! (Rock Is Dead pt. 2)
110. Boogie All Night Long
111. Rock and Roll Woman
112. Queen Of The Magazines
113. Madison" (fragment) - Wipe Out (Ventures song) (Rock Is Dead pt. 3)
114. Naked Woman
115. Rock Me
116. Mystery train Jam
117. A Little Piece...
118. I Could Not Help Myself...
119. Rock And Roll Is Dead
120. It's Over...I Feel So Sad...
121. We Had Some Good Times
122. ...Under The Ground...
123. The death of rock...
201. Petition The Lord (take 1)
202. Love Me Tender (part 2)
203. Rock is Dead (edited)
204. Woman Is The Devil (bass solo part)
205. Boogie All Night Long
206. Rock and Roll Woman 207. Queen of the Magazines
208. Wipe out (Ventures song)
209. Naked woman (cuts) - Rock Me
210. Mystery train (cuts)
211. Train jam (with JM Harp)
212. A little piece...Don't do it...
213. It's Over...I Feel So Sad...
214. Whiskey, Mystics and Men (with Petition... intro)
215. Love me Tender (short)
216. Woman Is A Devil
217. Train jam (edit)
218. Rock is Dead Jam (edit)
219. Whiskey, Mystics and Men (with Petition... intro)
220. Love me Tender (short clip)
221. Woman Is A Devil
For some reason there appears to be TWO "Part 2.rar" files. I have yet to download this, so I am not sure what the deal is but here are the links anyway:
Part 1
Part 2a
Part 2b
Part 3
An excerpt taken from Stephen Davis's book on Jim Morrison, p.312-313
On Tuesday, February 25, 1969, the Doors were recording at Sunset Sound. Jim laid down two stentorian versions of "When I Was Back in Seminary School," his scary southern gospel radio riff, plus a blues titled "Build Me a Woman" - also known as "The Devil Is a Woman," lifted from Robert Johnson's "Me And The Devil." A new bootleg record of the unreleased Robert Johnson recordings had just appeared, and Jim immediately reworked "Love in Vain," which the Rolling Stones would soon approipriate. He also cut a sing song fragment called "Whiskey, Mystics, and Men," with accompaniment by the band.
That eveing the Doors and their entourage went out to supper together at a local Mexican joint, the Blue Boar, where they stuffed themselves in a private dining room and drank beer and tequila for a couple of hours. Well lubed, they returned to the studio, and started jamming. Jim sang Elvis's "Love Me Tender" and, as the band played free form R & B, started improvising about the death of rock and roll. He kepr repeating "Rock is dead," and "Listen, listen, I don't wanna hear no more talk about revolution," as if trying to damn the rock movement as something that was definetly over. "I'm not talking about no revolution," Jim sang. "I'm not talking about no demonstration. I'm talking about...the death of rock and roll....The death is rock, is the death of me....And rock is dead,...We're dead! All right! Yeah....Rock is dead!"
This was then interspersed with a memory riff. The singer was now a child, overhearinghis mother complain about him to his father. "Mama didn't like the way I did my thing. Papa says, 'You gotta hit him, baby.'...And I'm feeling real bad, real bad, real bad.
The "Rock Is Dead" jam - forty-five minutes of primal bar-band R & B - was Jim Morrison's disgusted, explicit farewell to the rock movement that had launched him into immortality. It summed up the depressive, changing climate of the youth movement of 1969, when the Haight-Asbury had become a slum of panhandlers, burnouts and runaways. Led Zeppelin was hammering its way to the top. Ken Kesey had denounced LSD. The Nixon presidency escalated the war in Vietnam and started persecuting its critics. The Doors had lost the avant-garde, and were now hated by the same writers who had fawned on them the year before. Jim Morrison's original audience - college students and bohemians who responded to the long silences and mannered gestures of rock theater - had been replaced by dopey high school kids, pressed together like goats, giggling at "The End" and catcalling to Jim, "Hey, you wanna fuck me?" It was all too much. For Jim, rock was truly dead.
Jim later explained: "We needed another song for this album. We were wrecking our brains trying to think - what song? We started throwing up these old songs in the studio. Blues trips. Rock classics. Finally we just started playing, and went through the whole history of rock music - blues, rock and roll, LAtin jazz, surf music, the whole thing. I called it 'Rock Is Dead.' I doubt if anyone will ever hear it." The "Rock Is Dead" session remained officially unreleased for almost thirty years, but was notoriously bootlegged and became familiar to fans of the Doors. Tapes of this session also featured an early Doors version of Elvis' "Mystery Train." This would soon become a Doors concert staple when the band was prodded by Jim Morrison into more conservative, and personally manageable, artistic terrain.
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