The 50th anniversary of the Doors' Morrison Hotel is celebrated in the new issue of Classic Rock magazine. The album was created in the wake of Jim Morrison's obscenity conviction for indecent exposure during a 1969 Miami concert with Morrison then-currently appealing the ruling. The Doors' tour manager Vince Treanor set the scene as the band entered 1970, recalling, “The boys did not hate Jim. The boys did not dislike Jim. The boys wanted Jim to be part of the group, but they couldn’t take the trouble that Jim was causing. They couldn’t take the loss of (so many) performances as a result of his behavior. They couldn’t take the loss of all the record sales. They couldn’t deal with the loss of radio time.”
He went on to explain that the band was worried they wouldn't survive the band press they were battling against: “The censure that went down, the newspaper articles, the pastors and the righteous ministers with their boyfriends in the closet that got up and were saying how terrible the Doors was and how perverted Morrison was. The whole thing. They didn’t want to deal with that kind of bad, negative, horrible publicity.”
“As Jim got more out of control — the roomful of gunpowder waiting for somebody to light a match — Ray (Manzarek) became more alienated and isolated from him. Now Ray never disowned Jim, but he never did what we all should have done, which was to say: 'Look, ass****, smarten up, you’re wrecking everything!'”
Treanor remembered Morrison once telling him, “People wanna see me drunk on stage.' I said: 'Nobody wants to see you do that. They want to see a Doors performance. They do not want see you lumbering around the stage drunk, forgetting your words and putting on a show where you stand there babbling nonsense. Put on a Doors show, sing Doors music, stop the nonsense, because it’s only gonna hurt!'”
Elektra Records head Jac Holzman pushed the band to take its frustration out in the studio, recalling, “It was not over before Miami, but it could have been over after Miami. John (Densmore) was disgusted. They didn’t know what to do. They were being blacklisted in large (venues) around the country, and they said: 'What are we gonna do?' I said: 'Time to make another record. Go into the studio. Work out your demons in the studio.' And Morrison Hotel came out of that. Not the easiest record, but it was stuff that Jim was comfortable with and there was some really fabulous material. So that was the right thing for them to do, because I knew (Miami) was gonna blow over eventually and they would go out on the road again.”
Just prior to his 2013 death, Ray Manzarek told us he understood that the public would always be fascinated by Jim Morrison's short time on Earth and long for more of the long-dead “Lizard King”: “I love the fact that people love the Doors. When you say 'The Doors,' it's very important to know the psyche of Jim Morrison. America cannot figure out the psyche of Jim Morrison. And they are having a marvelous Freudian struggle trying to figure out who he was, why he was that way, and they just can't figure it out. So I understand completely why they're so intrigued with him. And want more and more and more.”