Rock Is Dead.txt
The Doors February 25th (Tuesday), 1969 In The Studio - Sunset Sound, Hollywood, CA
2nd gen. cass.
CD1
tt:66:32
01. Roadhouse blues vocal vamp fragment
02. seminary school (playback over bit of track)
03. talk
04. seminary school/whisky mystics...(full take)
05. whisky mystics...cont.
Rock Is Dead (pt. 1)
06. Love Me Tender 07. "gonna save the whole world" 08. Woman Is A Devil / Rock and Roll is dead 09. "No impablimations...let's roll!..."
Rock Is Dead pt. 2 10. Boogie All Night Long / rap
11. Rock and Roll Woman 12. Queen of the Magazines
13. "madison" (fragment) /
Wipe out (Ventures song) Rock Is Dead pt. 3
14. Naked woman /
-
15. (cont. )
Rock Me /
16. Mystery train / train jam (with JM Harp) / "big black train" /
17. "A little piece..." /
18. "I could not help myself..."
19. "rock and roll is dead"
20. "it's over...i feel so sad..."
21. "we had some good times"
-
22. cont. "...under the ground...."
23. "the death of rock...." conclusion (JM harp)
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CD2
Version no. 3 (RK/BB tape)
1st gen. "with Edits"
tt:37:23 (1-13) plus extras on metal cass.
01. Petition the Lord (tk.1) / talk 02. Love me Tender (pt 2 only) / 03. Rock is Dead (edited) /
04. woman is the devil (?) bass solo part /
05. "i wanna talk to them peoples...." /
"No Revolution...No impablimations...let's roll!..." Boogie All Night Long / rap
06. "i wanna see some dancin' in the streets..." /
Rock and Roll Woman 07. Queen of the Magazines
"madison" (fragment) /
08. Wipe out (Ventures song) cuts /
09. Naked woman (cuts)
*BUT has more complete part before jam which cuts on other versions)* /
Rock Me / cuts
10. Mystery train (cuts)
11. / train jam (with JM Harp) / "big black train" / (cuts)
12. "A little piece... / Don't do it..."
"I could not help myself..." /
"rock and roll is dead"
13. "it's over...i feel so sad..."
"we had some good times"
/ "...under the ground...." /
"the death of rock...." conclusion (JM harp)
-
14. Whiskey, Mystics and Men (with "petition..." intro)
15. Love me Tender (short)
16. Woman Is A Devil
17. Train jam (edit)
18. Rock is dead jam (edit)
-
19. Whiskey, Mystics and Men (with "petition..." intro)
20. Love me Tender (short clip)
21. Woman Is A Devil
(last 3 tracks seem to be the same as previous)
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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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