Back in March, 1967 - when The Doors played a residency at The Matrix, a small club in San Fransisco - almost nobody would have known who they were. They had just released their first, self-titled LP, although it wasn't yet getting any radio airplay as FM radio didn't exist yet in most places, and ventured down to the City by the Bay in an effort to grow their LA fan base beyond its current local, embryonic status.
They'd spent the first couple of months of the year bouncing between various clubs in L.A. and San Francisco, opening for groups such as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Sparrow (who would soon change their name to Steppenwolf), The Quirks, The Groupies, Country Joe and The Fish and The Grateful Dead. Other than one night in early January, when they headlined a gig The Grateful Dead failed to show up for, they were always top of the bill, always first up to play, always the runt of the litter - and many nights three or four or sometimes five bands would be on the same bill. It was a far cry from the headlining spot they would dominate just a few months later.
The Matrix, a former pizza parlour, opened on August 13th, 1965. It was a very small club with a total capacity of maybe 100 people. The entrance was recessed two feet from the sidewalk, left of centre on a windowless wall. Inside, not far from the entrance on the left, stood a small beer and wine bar. The interior of the club was only about 50x80 feet. The right front area had some chairs and cocktail tables, and the stage was a step above the floor on the right side at the rear. A local Bay Area musician, Marty Balin, negotiated a partial ownership deal with the club's backers that allowed him to manage the place, and he immediately put together a house band for which the guitarist he'd recruited, Jorma Kaukonen, suggested the name Jefferson Airplane. Balin inserted himself as band leader and their first-ever gig was at The Matrix on opening night. They played in front of a mural of The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, which the band members are said to have painted prior to the club's opening. Grace Slick was not a member of Jefferson Airplane initially - she was fronting her own band called The Great Society, which also played The Matrix many times - although she was in the audience watching that first night.
Balin sold his share of the club to Peter Abram and Gary Jackson, two of the original partners, in 1966 or '67, and that's the reason this recording exists. Abram took over managing the club, booking the musicians and arranging for promotional posters to be made. He also started recording the bands he liked - and he liked The Doors enough to record every note they played during their four-day residency, using his Akai tape recorder and Scotch 201 quarter-track tapes.
Sadly, however, the shows on the 8th and 9th were lost when another performance by some other band was accidentally recorded over those two dates. That's why all you get to hear from those nights is is a wonderful performance of The End and another partial performance of the same song, renamed Let's Feed Ice Cream To The Rats, after Jim's onstage ramblings. And that song ends abruptly, like a car crash. I initially thought my tonearm had skidded across the record!
What remains are the performances from the 7th and 10th, and a copy of those tapes eventually made their way to Elektra Records CEO, Jack Holzman, who wasn’t interested in a live album so early in The Doors’ career. "Nobody knows who they are," he said, before banishing the tapes to Elektra’s vaults for safekeeping. But that didn't work out so well. Someone - probably an employee of the record label - stole them, and almost immediately after that happened, the earliest known bootlegs of those shows started to appear in the underground music scene. They sounded awful, but it turns out the tapes that had been given to Elektra weren't Abram's original masters but instead third generation copies that sounded like bootleg recordings, which in the hands of actual bootleggers was made even worse. Hoping to stem the bootleg sales, Elektra legitimately released two tracks from the Matrix shows with The Doors Box Set, in 1997. But they also sounded like shit, although that didn't stop the company from officially releasing a 2-CD set in 2008 called Live At The Matrix that sounded just as bad, having come from the same source. It was thought to be all there was. Until …
Rumours started to circulate that Peter Abram was in possession of the original master tapes that they sounded far superior. The Doors organization entered into negotiations with Abram and purchased the original master tapes from him in 2009, and this purchase resulted first in a couple of celebrated Record Store Day (RSD) releases and now this box set, which includes everything on the RSD releases plus everything else - except the shows on the 8th and 9th, which no longer exists. So this is a good as it will ever get, and it really is quite good.
When this recording was made The Doors’ debut album had only been out for two months, so what you hear on these five LPs are songs from that album, as well as songs from their as-yet-unrecorded second album, Strange Days, that they were still working out and wouldn't be released for several more months. There's also some covers, such as John Lee Hooker's Crawling King Snake, and two Miles Davis' instrumentals - All Blues and Bag's Groove - during which Morrison is said to have taken a seat at the bar at the back of the room to watch his bandmates play and, one presumes, have a few drinks.
Hearing these performances is striking because they stray from the studio arrangements, often stretching into long improvisations. The club setting provided The Doors with a loose, almost rehearsal-like feel that allowed them to indulge in whatever they wanted to do and try different things. Light My Fire, for example - although already recorded and released on their first album (but not yet a hit single) - does not feature Ray Manzarek's iconic organ intro, which is here replaced with the soft strumming of two chords by guitarist Robbie Krieger. It's interesting to hear, and it's obvious they are having fun. What might have been just as interesting to hear would be how they played it on the 8th or 9th - assuming they did - but we'll never know. They did not play it on the 10th, so its one appearance here (on the 7th) is all you'll get of that soon-to-be-a-classic song. But it's incredible. The band is tight and focused. They're feeding off each other, pushing boundaries and trying to figure out how far out they can go, which, in the end, would be very far out indeed.
The set comes housed in a colorful, psychedeliciz-looking box and, in addition to the 5 LPs, there's also a one-sided, 33 1/3 7” single that contains the aforementioned Bag's Groove. The four-panel insert features credits and liner notes by Joel Selvin, a music critic who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle back in the day. But that's all you get. No photos from these club dates are known to exist and nether of the surviving Doors' members' (Kreiger and drummer John Densmore) recollections of that moment 50+ years ago, when the band was standing on fame's launch pad with the fuse already lit, are included.
Longtime Doors producer Bruce Botnick mastered these first-generation tapes (digitally) and Bernie Grundman got them onto vinyl, which was pressed at GZ Vinyl. I think that's the only downside, as GZ isn't known for excellence. My set has a few ticks and pops, even after being cleaned ultrasonically. It's just enough to be annoying, but not too annoying, although it does make me wish they'd pressed these records elsewhere, maybe at RTI.
But The Doors Live At The Matrix 1967: The Original Masters sounds pretty good overall. Abram, apparently, had microphones hanging from the rafters for the show on the 7th, and then on the 10th had all the instruments close mic’d and fed Morrison's microphone through a reverb unit. You can hear the differences, most notably on Jim's pushed out vocals recorded on the 7th. To my ears, the 10th has a somewhat fuller sound.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this set is the fact it exists at all. It's a recording of a band completely unaware they are perched on the cusp of international superstardom that is mere months away. Without this wonderful set of LPs, nobody - band members included, I'm willing to bet - would have remembered these four days. Just another run of nights in a backstreet club, nothing special. Krieger points out that most nights there were only five or 10 people in the attendance. One night, it has been reported, just two people showed up. "We treated it as a paid rehearsal," Kreiger said, decades later. Between tracks you can hear polite clapping. And sometimes, during the quieter moments, if you listen very carefully, you are privy to pieces of a conversation someone was having at a nearby table.
For all the above reasons, this set is …
Back in March, 1967 - when The Doors played a residency at The Matrix, a small club in San Fransisco - almost nobody would have known who they were. They had just released their first, self-titled LP, although it wasn't yet getting any radio airplay as FM radio didn't exist yet in most places, and ventured down to the City by the Bay in an effort to grow their LA fan base beyond its current local, embryonic status.
They'd spent the first couple of months of the year bouncing between various clubs in L.A. and San Francisco, opening for groups such as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Sparrow (who would soon change their name to Steppenwolf), The Quirks, The Groupies, Country Joe and The Fish and The Grateful Dead. Other than one night in early January, when they headlined a gig The Grateful Dead failed to show up for, they were always top of the bill, always first up to play, always the runt of the litter - and many nights three or four or sometimes five bands would be on the same bill. It was a far cry from the headlining spot they would dominate just a few months later.
The Matrix, a former pizza parlour, opened on August 13th, 1965. It was a very small club with a total capacity of maybe 100 people. The entrance was recessed two feet from the sidewalk, left of centre on a windowless wall. Inside, not far from the entrance on the left, stood a small beer and wine bar. The interior of the club was only about 50x80 feet. The right front area had some chairs and cocktail tables, and the stage was a step above the floor on the right side at the rear. A local Bay Area musician, Marty Balin, negotiated a partial ownership deal with the club's backers that allowed him to manage the place, and he immediately put together a house band for which the guitarist he'd recruited, Jorma Kaukonen, suggested the name Jefferson Airplane. Balin inserted himself as band leader and their first-ever gig was at The Matrix on opening night. They played in front of a mural of The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, which the band members are said to have painted prior to the club's opening. Grace Slick was not a member of Jefferson Airplane initially - she was fronting her own band called The Great Society, which also played The Matrix many times - although she was in the audience watching that first night.
Balin sold his share of the club to Peter Abram and Gary Jackson, two of the original partners, in 1966 or '67, and that's the reason this recording exists. Abram took over managing the club, booking the musicians and arranging for promotional posters to be made. He also started recording the bands he liked - and he liked The Doors enough to record every note they played during their four-day residency, using his Akai tape recorder and Scotch 201 quarter-track tapes.
Sadly, however, the shows on the 8th and 9th were lost when another performance by some other band was accidentally recorded over those two dates. That's why all you get to hear from those nights is is a wonderful performance of The End and another partial performance of the same song, renamed Let's Feed Ice Cream To The Rats, after Jim's onstage ramblings. And that song ends abruptly, like a car crash. I initially thought my tonearm had skidded across the record!
What remains are the performances from the 7th and 10th, and a copy of those tapes eventually made their way to Elektra Records CEO, Jack Holzman, who wasn’t interested in a live album so early in The Doors’ career. "Nobody knows who they are," he said, before banishing the tapes to Elektra’s vaults for safekeeping. But that didn't work out so well. Someone - probably an employee of the record label - stole them, and almost immediately after that happened, the earliest known bootlegs of those shows started to appear in the underground music scene. They sounded awful, but it turns out the tapes that had been given to Elektra weren't Abram's original masters but instead third generation copies that sounded like bootleg recordings, which in the hands of actual bootleggers was made even worse. Hoping to stem the bootleg sales, Elektra legitimately released two tracks from the Matrix shows with The Doors Box Set, in 1997. But they also sounded like shit, although that didn't stop the company from officially releasing a 2-CD set in 2008 called Live At The Matrix that sounded just as bad, having come from the same source. It was thought to be all there was. Until …
Rumours started to circulate that Peter Abram was in possession of the original master tapes that they sounded far superior. The Doors organization entered into negotiations with Abram and purchased the original master tapes from him in 2009, and this purchase resulted first in a couple of celebrated Record Store Day (RSD) releases and now this box set, which includes everything on the RSD releases plus everything else - except the shows on the 8th and 9th, which no longer exists. So this is a good as it will ever get, and it really is quite good.
When this recording was made The Doors’ debut album had only been out for two months, so what you hear on these five LPs are songs from that album, as well as songs from their as-yet-unrecorded second album, Strange Days, that they were still working out and wouldn't be released for several more months. There's also some covers, such as John Lee Hooker's Crawling King Snake, and Miles Davis' All Blues and Bag's Groove, instrumentals during which Morrison is said to have taken a seat at the bar at the back of the room to watch his bandmates play and, one presumes, have a few drinks.
Hearing these performances is striking because they stray from the studio arrangements, often stretching into long improvisations. The club setting provided The Doors with a loose, almost rehearsal-like feel that allowed them to indulge in whatever they wanted to do and try different things. Light My Fire, for example - although already recorded and released on their first album (but not yet a hit single) - does not feature Ray Manzarek's iconic organ intro, which is here replaced with the soft strumming of two chords by guitarist Robbie Krieger. It's interesting to hear, and it's obvious they are having fun. What might have been just as interesting to hear would be how they played it on the 8th or 9th - assuming they did - but we'll never know. They did not play it on the 10th, so its one appearance here (on the 7th) is all you'll get of that soon-to-be-a-classic song. But it's incredible. The band is tight and focused. They're feeding off each other, pushing boundaries and trying to figure out how far out they can go, which, in the end, would be very far out indeed.
The set comes housed in a colorful, psychedeliciz-looking box and, in addition to the 5 LPs, there's also a 7” single. The four-panel insert features credits and liner notes by Joel Selvin, a music critic who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle back in the day. But that's all you get. No photos from these club dates are known to exist and nether of the surviving Doors' members' (Kreiger and drummer John Densmore) recollections of that moment 50+ years ago, when the band was standing on fame's launch pad with the fuse already lit, are included.
Longtime Doors producer Bruce Botnick mastered these first-generation tapes (digitally) and Bernie Grundman got them onto vinyl, which was pressed at GZ Vinyl. I think that's the only downside, as GZ isn't known for excellence. My set has a few ticks and pops, even after being cleaned ultrasonically. It's just enough to be annoying, but not too annoying, although it does make me wish they'd pressed these records elsewhere, maybe at RTI.
But The Doors Live At The Matrix 1967: The Original Masters sounds pretty good overall. Abram, apparently, had microphones hanging from the rafters for the show on the 7th, and then on the 10th had all the instruments close mic’d and fed Morrison's microphone through a reverb unit. You can hear the differences, most notably on Jim's pushed out vocals recorded on the 7th. To my ears, the 10th has a somewhat fuller sound.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this set is the fact it exists at all. It's a recording of a band completely unaware they are perched on the cusp of international superstardom that is mere months away. Without this wonderful set of LPs, nobody - band members included, I'm willing to bet - would have remembered these four days. Just another run of nights in a backstreet club, nothing special. Krieger points out that most nights there were only five or 10 people in the attendance. One night, it has been reported, just two people showed up. "We treated it as a paid rehearsal," Kreiger said, decades later. Between tracks you can hear polite clapping. And sometimes, during the quieter moments, if you listen very carefully, you are privy to pieces of a conversation someone was having at a nearby table.
For all the above reasons, this set is …
BONUS TRACK
Other shows known to have been recorded at The Matrix include a 1966 show performed by The Great Society (Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane band), which is known to have been released at least twice under two different names: Conspicuous Only In Its Absence and How It Was. Both were promoted as "Grace Slick & The Great Society" and contain the first commercial recordings of White Rabbit and Somebody to Love).
In 1969, ABC Dunhill released an early Steppenwolf collection of sets originally assumed to have been recorded on May 14, 1967. But the recordings were actually made when Steppenwolf was still called The Sparrow, and the shows were recorded between May 9 and May 11, 1967, or possibly between May 19 and 21. On May 14, Sopwith Camel were playing the last day of a three-day residency at The Matrix and The Sparrow was not on the bill.
There's also some Big Brother And The Holding Company, supposedly recorded sometime in 1966 0r '67, when Janis Joplin would have been in the band.
The Matrix went through a couple of renovations before shutting down in 1972, although there were attempts to revive it over the years, none of which were successful. At one point it was a DJ-only (no live music) club. Then, in 2000, the space was renamed The MatrixFillmore, probably for nostalgic reasons related to grown up baby boomers with lots of disposable income, and live music was again on tap. In 2017 the club's name was changed back to The Matrix and described as a casual neighbourhood bar with DJs and dancing on weekends. In 2018, The Matrix was remodelled and renamed the White Rabbit. Heavy sigh.
The Matrix was a nightclub located at 3138 Fillmore Street, in San Francisco, from 1965 to 1972 and is where what eventually became known as the "San Francisco Sound" was developed, due in no small part to the many appearances of houseband Jefferson Airplane and other psychedelic-sounding bands.
Many bands played The Matrix during its brief existence, and they included blues and jazz artists in addition to rock and roll. Here's a list of some of the artists other than The Doors and Jefferson Airplane who performed there:
- Big Brother and the Holding Company
- Elvin Bishop
- The Blues Project
- Butterfield Blues Band
- The Chambers Brothers
- The Charlatans
- Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen
- Country Joe & the Fish
- Electric Flag
- Ramblin' Jack Elliot
- Flamin' Groovies
- Grateful Dead
- The Great Society
- Vince Guaraldi
- Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks
- Hot Tuna
- Howlin' Wolf
- Jerry Garcia
- John Lee Hooker
- Lightnin' Hopkins
- Steve Miller
- Moby Grape
- Charlie Musselwhite
- New Riders of the Purple Sage
- Otis Rush
- Quicksilver Messenger Service
- Boz Scaggs
- Santana
- Siegel-Schwall Band
- Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
- Sopwith Camel
- Status Quo
- The Sparrow (Steppenwolf)
- T-Bone Walker
- Taj Mahal
- The Tubes
- The Velvet Underground
- The Wailers
- Johnny Winter
Other shows known to have been recorded at The Matrix include a 1966 show performed by The Great Society (Grace Slick's pre-Jefferson Airplane band), which is known to have been released at least twice under two different names: Conspicuous Only In Its Absence and How It Was. Both were promoted as "Grace Slick & The Great Society" and contain the first commercial recordings of White Rabbit and Somebody to Love).
In 1969, ABC Dunhill released an early Steppenwolf collection of sets originally assumed to have been recorded on May 14, 1967. But the recordings were actually made when Steppenwolf was still called The Sparrow, and the shows were recorded between May 9 and May 11, 1967, or possibly between May 19 and 21. On May 14, Sopwith Camel were playing the last day of a three-day residency at The Matrix and The Sparrow was not on the bill.
There's also some Big Brother And The Holding Company, supposedly recorded sometime in 1966 0r '67, when Janis Joplin would have been in the band.
The Matrix went through a couple of renovations before shutting down in 1972, although there were attempts to revive it over the years, none of which were successful. At one point it was a DJ-only (no live music) club. Then, in 2000, the space was renamed The MatrixFillmore, probably for nostalgic reasons related to grown up baby boomers with lots of disposable income, and live music was again on tap. In 2017 the club's name was changed back to The Matrix and described as a casual neighbourhood bar with DJs and dancing on weekends. In 2018, The Matrix was remodelled and renamed the White Rabbit. Heavy sigh.
