A whisper left on the ride out
Rain is already falling when the Rhodes piano enters, a jazz figure with nowhere urgent to be, and Jim Morrison’s voice comes in low, as if he were telling the story from the passenger seat.
Riders on the Storm was recorded between December 1970 and January 1971 at the Doors’ own workshop, 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, produced by Bruce Botnick and the band, for L.A. Woman. Ray Manzarek plays electric piano. Robby Krieger’s guitar shivers with tremolo. John Densmore keeps a soft, steady ride. The rain and thunder are studio weather, laid under a song that began, by Krieger and Manzarek’s account, as a jam on (Ghost) Riders in the Sky. Morrison brought a hitchhiker who kills, a figure he had already chased in a screenplay, kin to the real killer Billy Cook. Then the last verse turns, and asks for love, as if the storm had changed its mind. The album came out in April 1971. The single followed in June.
After the lead vocal was done, Morrison whispered the lyric back over himself, a second voice fading under the first. Manzarek later called that whisper the last thing Jim ever recorded, a voice thinning toward eternity. Morrison left for Paris. He died there on 3 July 1971, at twenty-seven. The band has been careful, and sometimes not, about turning the calendar into a myth. What is plain on the tape is the sound: a song that refuses to climax, seven minutes on the album, the storm simply getting farther away. On stage, while he was still there, it was a closer that did not want to end.
There’s a whisper voice on Riders on the Storm, if you listen closely, a whispered overdub that Jim adds beneath his vocal. That’s the last thing he ever did.
(Ray Manzarek, Uncut, 2011)
Radio took a shorter cut and still could not make it ordinary. The song has scored films, commercials, any picture that needs a wet road at night, and it survives the overuse because the recording is specific. You can hear the room on Santa Monica, four men who had nearly come apart and were, for a few weeks, a band again. Botnick, who had engineered them for years, kept the vocal dry and the rain wide. The contrast is the drama. Morrison does not shout. He narrates, then he ghosts himself.
What remains is that second voice. The hitchhiker story is pulp, and the spiritual turn at the end is earnest, and both sit inside a groove that could have come from a lounge if the lounge had a storm outside. Manzarek’s piano is the weather system. When the whisper arrives, the song stops being a scene and becomes a leaving. He was twenty-seven, and the tape did not know it. Listeners do, and the knowledge changes the fade, which was only, at the time, a band riding a good tempo out of the room.
