How “L.A. Woman” Became Jim Morrison’s Farewell Letter to Los Angeles

In “L.A. Woman”, Jim Morrison humanizes Los Angeles over an eight-minute blues jam. It became the title track of the final album he’d record with The Doors during his lifetime. The verses he writes to a lonely woman he describes in metaphor feel, in hindsight, like parts of a goodbye note. He didn’t know it then, but that’s exactly what it was.

‘City Of Night’

“L.A. Woman” was inspired by John Rechy’s 1963 gay novel, City Of Night, which follows a narrator who hustles in city corners with seedy characters. Morrison similarly navigates Los Angeles here, exploring the depths of the city’s allure, burning hills, and, as he howls, murder and madness.

Motel, money, murder, madness,
Let’s change the mood from glad to sadness.

Joan Didion, writing about The Doors in The White Album, said, “The Doors were the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty, missionaries of apocalyptic sex.” To further her point, Morrison repeats the line “Mr. Mojo Risin’” in gyrating blues while the drummer John Densmore increases the song’s tempo to mimic an orgasm. Sex, obviously, but Morrison also places himself in the scene, rearranging the letters of his name into a phallic anagram.

L.A. Band

The Doors remain a, if not the, quintessential L.A. band. Not only in spirit, but in the band’s very DNA. They sourced their name from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception. And The Doors formed in Los Angeles just two years after Huxley had died in the same city.

Well, I just got into town about an hour ago,
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow.
Where the little girls in their Hollywood bungalows,
Are you a lucky little lady in the city of light,
Or just another lost angel?
City of night…

So it’s fitting for “L.A. Woman” to be something like a farewell letter from Jim Morrison to the city. In almost mythical rock and roll symmetry, he’d recorded the vocal to “L.A. Woman” in a bathroom. That’s where he left his voice on tape. Months later, in a bathtub in his Paris apartment, he was found dead.

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