Not much ran smoothly for The Doors. And so it was with sessions for their sixth album, L.A. Woman. In November 1970, regular producer Paul Rothchild, unconvinced by what he was hearing in the studio, decided to quit. Enter engineer Bruce Botnick, who joined the band in their old rehearsal space, the Doors Workshop, on Santa Monica Boulevard. It was a back-to-basics move that mirrored the eventual tone of the album itself. Gone were the symphonic flourishes and painstaking exactitude of their most recent work, replaced instead by a freer, garage-blues sound that harked back to their beginnings.
This was most keenly expressed on the title track, the final track recorded during the album sessions. On one level, it’s a simple song about barrelling down the LA Freeway, lights a-blur and the wind at its tail. But it’s also a conflicted homage to Los Angeles as a living entity, a promised land of midnight alleys and Hollywood bungalows, peopled by the lost and lonely.
