Original subtitles

Wake up!

He can't remember where he was. And this dream stops.

You know they say, "if you can remember, you weren't there."

And I was there and I can't remember.

No, the Bowl was a one-time, giant privilege.

- It's always been a big deal. - Oh, yeah.

Everybody wants to play the Hollywood Bowl.

- My God! It's like... - It's the place to play in LA. Yeah.

Hell, we wanted to play the Whisky a Go Go.

As far as we were concerned, we had made it when we got to the Whisky a Go Go.

All we needed was a recording contract.

And we got that with Jac Holzman and Elektra Records.

The Bowl, when we recorded, was July 5th, 1968.

- And who was the opening act? - Steppenwolf and the Chambers Brothers.

If you don't know the Chambers Brothers, the Chambers Brothers are,

"Time has come today."

- Yeah, that had just come out. - "Time, Time."

"Time has come today, time, my soul has been psychedelicized."

Psychedelic soul guys, man. They were acidheads.

But to play at the Hollywood Bowl with the Doors and with Steppenwolf,

it was just... It was like a giant leap for us.

- We felt like we were big rock stars. - It was like a quantum leap in our lives, man.

And Steppenwolf had, of course, Born To Be Wild.

"Get your motor running, head out on the highway."

- Boy, they were good, too. - John Kay. Yeah.

John Kay, a great singer.

So it was a great concert, a great triple bill, a real LA triple bill.

And the whole thing was... What a great night. We had a great time.

Well, this show, and actually, for almost their entire career onstage,

the Doors didn't use sound reinforcement. Ever

I mean, that wall of sound,

they took on the road but in a much smaller configuration.

Four or six columns were Jim. Four or six columns were John.

Then there was Ray's amp, Robby's amp, you know, a couple of amps, and that was it.

So what happened was we said, "Boy, we're gonna play the Hollywood Bowl,

"let's get... Let's be really loud."

So we got our company who we were with, called Acoustic,

that's those blue amplifiers you see on the stage.

We called the guy at the company,

"Hey, how many amps can you bring down to the Hollywood Bowl?"

"Fifty." He brought 52 amps.

It's a four-piece band, and one of them is a singer, so it's a trio.

How many amps did we have? Robby had 20 or something and Ray had 20.

What happened was before the stage took place,

- we saw this truck come in. - Yep, flatbed truck came.

Yeah, with every piece of acoustic amplification

they had manufactured up to that time.

And they come in and start unloading it onto the stage.

And they're stacking it, and stacking it and stacking it.

They put a whole wall of amplifiers.

There's a wall of acoustics up there with them.

And we was like, "Whoa! We're gonna finally have a sound!

- "What a sound we're gonna have here!" - "Oh, my God!"

And they finished setting this whole thing up.

And we said, "Well, where we gonna plug in at?"

- And then the guy comes over and says... - "This is for the Doors only."

We were going to blast the sound all the way down the hills,

- down to Hollywood Boulevard. - To the beach.

We wanted them to know on Hollywood Boulevard

that the Doors are playing Light My Fire at the Hollywood Bowl.

Right at the end of our set, the fire marshals showed up.

And they came up with their pens and pads, and they were looking at all the equipment.

And they says, "Who does this belong to?" We said, "The Doors."

So it ended up where we could only use one each.

Out of fifty amps, Ray could use one, I could use one,

we had a couple for John's drums. Very disappointing.

And my amp I could only turn up to two. Two out of ten.

So it sounded a little tinny, but we made it.

I do remember that Robby was very upset

because he couldn't play loud.

And he had this wall of loud speakers, and he wound up just using one.

Yeah. The other guys didn't care.

But he was upset, it actually affected his playing that night.

It was very disappointing for him. It was disappointing for us, too,

because we're friends, we knew each other. We cared about each other.

And to see this happen to them, it hurt us.

- We were in sympathy with them. - Disappointed.

Because I know how, we know how it feels to be,

you know, a place that size and you can't have volume.

If you can't have volume, it's like having sex and you can't scream.

- You know what I mean? Yeah, so... - That's a bad one.

Hey, Mr Lightman.

You got to turn those lights way down, man.

They had made the decision to film this show.

They made the decision. This had nothing to do with Elektra Records.

It had nothing to do with Paul Rothchild. They decided they wanted to do it.

They wanted to record it. This was a venture that they personally paid for.

It's the Hollywood Bowl. Maybe we should shoot this thing.

But of course when you shoot you need good lighting,

and that's why Jim is going, "Turn the lights down."

But he's on acid, he's not thinking that we're shooting this thing

and he can't get him to turn the lights down. He forgot.

What do we care.

The performance at the Hollywood Bowl was the last filming

by Paul Ferrara, a buddy of ours from the UCLA film school,

that had been with us for the previous year

shooting all kinds of gigs and shooting this and that

and around the studio, us around town, us going on the road, us in New York City.

We took Paul with us. "Now that we're famous and made some money,

"let's film this stuff and see what happens."

It was going to climax, and did, with the performance of four, five,

however many cameras there were, shoot at the Hollywood Bowl.

That's when Paul said that, "You're playing at Hollywood Bowl, let's film that."

And Jim and I both went, "Yeah,"

and John and Robby said, "Yeah, let's stop paying for all this filming

"and do something with it and we'll conclude

"with The Doors: Live at the Hollywood Bowl."

From my perspective, the filming of the show

had to do with producing some sync sound film

for the film that they were making about themselves,

which ended up being called Feast of Friends,

a film that I ended up editing.

The hope was to produce a significant amount of footage for that film

that was sync sound, and the Bowl presented a perfect opportunity

because Elektra was going to be recording the show

for the live album that the Doors were assembling material for.

This was a very minimal set-up.

In those days we could only record eight track, that's all we had.

And one of those tracks had to have a 60-cycle sync pulse,

so that we could sync it up with the picture.

I didn't know what that meant, but we recorded it.

So I only had seven channels to work with, which was

Ray, Robby, Jim, John on

one track? Yeah, two tracks,

and two audience reaction mics, and that was it. So, it's seven channels.

So it hit. It fit hand in hand. They were doing the sound.

We were going to get good sound. It was going to be crystal sync sound,

and we were going to film it with four or five cameras.

Two of the cameras were... Paul's camera and my camera were fully sync.

The other three cameras, one was a high-speed Aeroflex

in which we wanted to get some slow-motion footage.

There were bits of absolutely magic film coming out of that camera.

When I was editing Feast of Friends, I ignored the other two cameras

because I thought between Paul's camera and my camera, we have enough coverage.

I threw in pieces of David's camera,

especially when Jim wasn't singing because then I didn't have to match the voice,

but by the time we got down to editing the film for Feast of Friends,

we just ignored those cameras.

It was a difficult editing project

because there were only two cameras in operation.

At any one time there were maybe three, four cameras.

One was a wild camera.

We should have had eight cameras, but at least we had three.

It's exciting for this production in which we'll see all five cameras, hopefully,

and we'll see coverage of those songs

from angles that I don't even remember seeing.

But it's interesting now to find out that that footage that we had produced

is now going to be used so that people can appreciate the band live.

You had to be there to see them.

And on the nights that they were working, they were absolutely great.

This particular night we had dinner with Mick Jagger.

- And Mick was there. - Mick was there.

We ate dinner with him and some of the other guys earlier that night.

- At Mu Ling's, remember? - Right.

- Chinese place, great place. - Chinese food.

Hollywood Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard.

And then the ritual, always started by me because no one else would do it,

"What are we playing tonight, guys, okay."

And no one is very...

I can get the first few tunes out of everybody, and I can't get further.

This is how it always was.

The Bowl I got them to plan out pretty good.

I remember Mick Jagger looking over at me trying to corral them into a set list.

He was probably shaking his head.

Well it was kind of like Get Him To The Greek.

We were at Mu Ling's and it was, "Hey, man, it's getting late. We better get over there."

And Jim is having a few drinks and Mick Jagger is there. We were late.

I remember driving up to the Bowl after dinner

with the Stones or some of the Stones,

and getting right behind the shell and seeing 18,000 people and going,

"Jesus. Wow. I hope we're good."

It was intimidating, definitely intimidating.

That's why maybe Jim took acid. Oh, my God.

So there is a rumour that Jim was on acid.

We don't know. I don't know that for a fact one way or the other.

He didn't tell the band he was doing this.

And so, that he managed to perform at all,

that he hit everything on cue, things were drawn out more than usual.

You can kind of tell at first that he's kind of self-conscious.

You know, how you get on acid, on the first part of the trip, you know.

But then I think he kind of loosened up as time went on.

So, in the beginning he's kind of, you know, he's all right.

And then he starts to... You can see him, kind of...

And then by the middle, "Oh, my God. What? There's a moth on the floor."

He's just tripping out on little finite stuff.

And when he goes over to see the grasshopper,

because he's talking about a grasshopper,

and he goes down and he realises it's not a grasshopper

and he comes back to the microphone and says,

"I blew it, it's a moth."

And he smiles that boyish smile that he could produce and the audience just...

And if you look closely, you can see the moth flying away.

Either he took too much or not enough.

So, what can I say. He was a different kind of guy.

Mick Jagger was in the front row, sitting next to Pam Courson, Jim's wife.

Pam was sitting on his lap.

For the whole show?

What do I know, man? I play keyboards.

And I don't know what happened, but I'd sure love to know what he thought.

In Melody Maker, a music magazine, they said,

"We were nice chaps but we played a bit long."

Yeah, acid. It expands time.

That concert at the Hollywood Bowl was one to be remembered.

That was just...

I remember driving there in our limo, and we had a few choice chicks in our car,

and we were just cruising along. We got into the Hollywood area.

We were listening to, I think, K-Earth 101 or something like that.

Some station, yeah.

And there was an interruption and somebody came on and says,

"if you are in the Hollywood area, don't try to go near the Hollywood Bowl.

"There's some kind of rock concert going on there tonight and it's totally crammed up,

"there's a traffic situation."

It took us 45 minutes to get from Franklin up to the Bowl.

And when we heard that on the radio, we says,

"Man, we are big time. Somebody's big time on this show," right?

There's some kind of rock stars here.

But they were unique, you know, to take the Doors' show,

it is a show with Jim's out-of-body performances,

to such a large venue with no video in those days.

No big screens like there is now. You go to the Bowl

and you spend more time looking at the screen than you do looking at the stage.

You had to be drawn in.

The audience had to lean forward a little bit in order to see what was happening.

And obviously watching and listening to the show,

you can tell the audience were right with him.

Today we're so used to that close image, it kind of takes the immediacy away, I think.

I remember Jim's performance that night at the Hollywood Bowl.

He was outstanding and he had a very good rapport with the audience.

I hope that shows.

In The End I thought that he went

from humour to drama to kidding with the audience.

When he puts his hands in front of his eyes

during The End, and he talks about, "Father I'm going to..."

And he smiles.

I was framed on him, so that smile is very, very apparent.

He understood that those words were

probably not acceptable for a large part of the audience that had come to see him.

But he was not going to leave out those lyrics.

It's a great performance. I thought we played really well.

And there were some people that want Jim Morrison to jump around more,

but if you listen to the intensity of that music,

there are four guys that are locked in like this.

- Fabulous music. - And you know what?

I think we actually rehearsed for that show, which is something we never did.

Because the way we did Five to One and Back Door Man and Whisky Bar...

And then we went back to Back Door Man.

- That's the only time we ever did that. - That's right.

- I was shocked. - Yeah, me, too.

I was listening to it and I went, "Whoa, wait a minute..."

We must have planned that.

We're supposed to keep on going and finish up Five to One.

That shows you how important the Hollywood Bowl show was

and just the fact that we bothered to film it in the first place.

We played The End...

We always played The End at the end, as our encore.

Light My Fire, we'd get them all up dancing, as you see,

and then we'd play The End, and then they'd go out like devastated.

Kind of, like, too weak to clap.

And maybe that's more powerful. They're taking it home.

They're chewing on it. It's like pin-drop time.

And so I relish that.