Doors Plot 50th Anniversary Celebration in Los Angeles
The Doors will celebrate their 50th anniversary with a special ceremony in Los Angeles proclaiming January 4th to be “Day of the Doors.”
The event will take place at the intersection of Pacific and Windward Avenues, near the famous “Venice” sign. Original guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore will attend, as will family members of late keyboardist Ray Manzarek and singer Jim Morrison. Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin will make the proclamation.
“Very apropos that the Doors are jumpstarting our 50th in Venice where we started,” Densmore said in a statement. “Our songs sprang up out of the Pacific like beautiful, edible silverfish … and apparently the world took a big bite.”
While the Doors chose to mark their 50th by the January 4th, 1967 release date of their self-titled debut, the group formed in Venice in 1965. Earlier this year, the band released a new limited-edition box set, London Fog 1966, which collects their earliest known recordings and is named for the Los Angeles club where they held a residency in January 1966. The set features a recording of part of one London Fog show, which comprises several blues covers and a handful of early originals.
“The stage was so fucking high, you needed an oxygen mask,” Densmore said of the London Fog in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I was worried about Jim falling. It had all these stupid, little circus ropes around the sides of the stage so you supposedly wouldn’t fall. It was ridiculous. And across the way was a cage with Rhonda Layne, the go-go girl. She was slightly overweight and wore a miniskirt and go-go boots, doing the twist or the frug. She didn’t know how to dance to ‘The End,’ that’s for sure. How do you do the frug to ‘The End’? And the audience would stare at us like we’re nuts, and then we’d play ‘Lucille,’ and they’d go, ‘Oh, Little Richard, OK.'”