Morrison Hotel

Recorded between November 1969 and January 1970 with Rothchild producing and Botnick engineering, as a reaction to the nine months it had taken to make The Soft Parade. Krieger said the new approach was to have fun without having to arrange horns and strings, and that it felt like a relief after the previous record. The two sides were titled Hard Rock Cafe and Morrison Hotel. Indian Summer was a track from the August 1966 sessions for the debut, and Waiting for the Sun, once meant for the third album, finally appeared. Roadhouse Blues took two days to record, with Lonnie Mack on bass and John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful on harmonica under the name G. Puglese. Peace Frog had music by Krieger and words that Morrison took from a poem in his notebook called Abortion Stories, before he gave the song its new title.

Henry Diltz took the cover photograph at the Morrison Hotel on South Hope Street in Los Angeles. The band had no permission, so they waited outside until the desk clerk left, then took their places in the lobby window. The back cover shows the Hard Rock Cafe, a bar nearby, and two young men in London later asked Diltz if they could use its name for a restaurant. The album was certified gold in February 1970, reached number four on the Billboard 200 and number 12 in Britain, the highest of their studio albums there. Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone called Roadhouse Blues a powerful blast of raw funk but thought the rest of the record ran mainly downhill. Robert Christgau gave it B+ in 1981, and Thom Jurek of AllMusic wrote that the Doors never used blues and R&B as consistently, adeptly or provocatively as they did here.