The Rain in Riders on the Storm Is Real — Jim Morrison Stopped the Session to Make Sure and What He D
The rain sound came into the recording from somewhere outside the song. This is the first thing to understand about it because it determines everything else. The rain was not a production decision made in a conference room, not a stylistic choice debated in a committee of label executives and producers, not an effect selected from a catalog of available sounds.
The rain was found brought in from the actual world, the specific acoustic fact of water falling because someone understood that the song needed it and because Jim Morrison, when he heard it played back through the studio monitors for the first time, stopped and asked the question that everything else turns on.
He asked, “Is that real?” Bruce Botnick, the engineer who had set up the rain sound for the session, said, “Yes.” It was real rain recorded from an actual storm, the specific sound of water on specific surfaces, the sound that rain makes when it is actually raining rather than the sound that rain makes when it is being synthesized to approximate raining. It was real.
Jim Morrison heard the confirmation and was quiet for a moment with the quality of quiet that preceded the things he said that mattered. Then he said, “Good. It needs to be real. This song needs real rain.” What came before that moment, what had produced the song and the session and the need for rain, was a year that had been moving toward it from many directions simultaneously.
The Doors had been recording L. A. Woman through the fall of 1970 and into the early weeks of 1971 at the converted rehearsal space on Santa Monica Boulevard. The sessions that had been unlike any previous Doors recording because of the conditions they had created, no professional studio, Jim Morrison on a stool rather than standing, the band playing in a room not designed for recording and discovering that the imperfection produced something the professional studios had not.
The music came from that imperfection. It was rougher and more direct and closer to the source than anything they had previously recorded because the conditions had stripped away the management of distance that recording studios are designed to provide. The distance between the music and the moment of making it was shorter on L A woman than on anything before.
The music sounded like it was happening. Riders on the Storm was the last song recorded for the album. This was not entirely planned. Songs do not always arrange themselves in the order of their making, but it had the quality of a last thing, of something that arrives at the end of a process and contains, almost involuntarily, the knowledge of everything that has preceded it.
Jim Morrison had been writing around the imagery of the storm and the road and the rider for the entirety of his career. The highway as condition of being, the weather as the exterior form of interior states, the traveler who is not going toward a destination, but who is in the condition of going, which is the condition he had always understood himself to be in and that the poem kept returning to regardless of what other territory the other poems were covering.
The song began as a rhythm, John Densmore establishing the pattern that would carry the whole thing, a light and slightly floating time that did not anchor the song to the ground, but let it move above it, the way weather moves. Ray Manzarek found the keyboard part that went with the rhythm, which was the part that made the song feel like what it felt like.
Nocturnal, slightly awkward, the feeling of being in a vehicle moving through a night that has rain in it. Robbie Krieger added the guitar in the spaces that the keyboard left open, and then Jim Morrison stood at the microphone and delivered the vocal that would become one of the most recognized beginnings in the music of that era, Riders on the Storm.
The vocal was different from earlier recordings. John Densmore would say this consistently in the years after, that the voice on Riders on the Storm was the voice he had heard in the dressing room in New Orleans, the voice that was not performing. The voice that was simply there in the song saying what the song said without the management of distance that the earlier vocal performances had required and that this one no longer needed.
Jim Morrison on the stool at Santa Monica Boulevard singing into a microphone in a room not designed for recording giving the song the voice it needed rather than the voice the image required. And then the rain was added. Bruce Botnick brought the rain sound into the mix, real rain recorded from a real storm, the sound of water on actual surfaces.
The reason for real rain rather than synthesized rain was simple and technical. Synthesized rain does not behave the way real rain behaves. It does not have the specific randomness of actual water, the way drops arrive at irregular intervals that the ear processes as natural even when it cannot consciously identify why, the way the sound layer shifts and breathes and is never quite the same from one second to the next.
Synthesized rain is consistent in the way that only synthesized things are consistent, which is to say too consistent in a way that the subconscious ear registers as wrong even when the conscious mind accepts the approximation. Jim Morrison understood this without needing the technical explanation.
When he heard the real rain in the playback and asked if it was real and Botnick confirmed that it was and Jim said good, it needs to be real. What he was saying was what he had always been saying in the language specific to this moment rather than the language of the poems or the performances or the notebooks.
He was saying that the authentic and the artificial were not interchangeable. He was saying that the song could feel the difference even when the listener could not consciously identify it. He was saying that the song required the thing itself rather than the approximation of the thing because the song was made of real things, real rhythm, real voice, real keyboard, real guitar, and the rain needed to be what it was, not what it approximated.
This was the principle that had governed everything Jim Morrison made, the realness of the thing, not the approximation of the realness. The poems pressed against the hardest questions in the actual language, rather than the poetic approximation of actual language. The performances gave the audiences something that had been drawn from the actual interior, rather than from the performed version of the interior.
The voice on the Santa Monica recording sang in the actual voice, rather than the amplified and calibrated version of the actual voice. And the rain on Riders on the Storm was real rain, the sound of actual water, because the song required the actual thing, and the actual thing was available, and there was no reason to accept the approximation when the real was there.
Ray Manzarek heard this principle articulated for the first time in these terms, or heard it articulated in the specific form of a question about rain, and recognized it as the same principle he had been watching Jim apply to the music since the Venice Beach Pier. He had always known, from the first afternoon he heard Jim read from the notebook, that Jim was interested in the real thing, rather than the approximation.
The whole project, the poems becoming songs, the songs becoming performances, the performances reaching audiences across the distance that separated one interior life from another, had always been organized around the idea that the real thing could close the distance in a way that the approximation could not.
The rain question was the clearest single articulation of that idea that Ray had ever heard Jim give. Is that real? Good. It needs to be real. John Densmore was behind the drums when the rain was added to the mix, hearing it through the studio monitors for the first time with Jim’s question and Botnick’s confirmation still in the air.
He has talked about this moment in interviews, the specific quality of hearing real rain enter a song that was already, through the combination of his floating rhythm and Ray’s nocturnal keyboard and Robbie’s guitar and Jim’s voice sounding like the interior of a storm. The rain completed something.
It did not transform the song. The song was already what it was and the rain did not change its structure or its meaning. It confirmed something. It gave the song the last thing it needed, which was the actual weather, the real storm, the sound of rain that was raining rather than the sound of rain that was being performed.
Robby Krieger understood the rain decision in the guitar player’s way, which was through the texture of the sound. The way the rain interacted with the other elements of the recording, sitting in the spaces that the guitar left open, occupying the same sonic territory as the background of the night that the song was set in.
He understood it as the right sound for the right space. He did not elaborate extensively on the decision in later accounts. It was right. It was real. That was sufficient. The session that produced Riders on the Storm was the last recording session of Jim Morrison’s career. He went to Paris in March 1971, six weeks after the L.A.
Woman sessions concluded. He took the notebooks. He did not take a recording studio or a microphone or any of the apparatus of the music. He took the writing tools because the writing was what came first and what he was going back to. And Paris was the place where the writing would happen in the conditions the writing needed, which were essentially the same conditions the rain needed, real, actual, the thing itself rather than the approximation.
He died on July 3, 1971. L.A. Woman was released 3 months before his death in April. Riders on the Storm was released as a single. It reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100. The rain runs through from the opening seconds to the final fade, real rain, the sound of actual water, giving the song the weather it needed because the song was made of real things and the real things required one another.
Jim Morrison had asked, is that real? And the answer had been yes, and he had said, good, it needs to be real. And that had been in the most practical and the most essential sense, the last artistic decision he made in a recording studio, the decision that the rain in the last song of his last album would be the actual rain, not the approximation, because the song required the actual thing and there was no reason to accept anything less when the actual thing was available.
That was how he had always worked, rain or poems or voice or performance, always the actual thing, always the real rain. Always the thing itself rather than the version of the thing that was easier to manage and less likely to be imperfect and less likely to breathe in the way that real things breathe, which is never the same from one second to the next, never consistent in the way that only synthesized things are consistent, always subject to the specific randomness of actual water, of actual weather, of the actual world. Jim Morrison wanted the actual world in his songs. He wanted the rain to be real. And on the last song of the last album, in the last recording session of his career, it was what Bruce Botnick understood about the rain question, what he has described in the interviews he has given about the L. A. Woman sessions was that it was not a casual question. Jim Morrison did not ask casual questions about recordings. He asked
questions that were organized around a specific understanding of what a recording was supposed to do and what it failed to do when it accepted approximations in the place of the actual thing. The question is that real was the same kind of question as the question he had been asking in different forms the entirety of the sessions at Santa Monica Boulevard, is this the actual thing or is this the version of the actual thing that is easier to produce and less likely to be inconvenient? The Santa Monica sessions had been organized implicitly around this question, the decision to leave. Sunset Sound and Record in the converted rehearsal space, a decision that had been imposed by circumstance, but that Jim had embraced with something that went beyond acceptance, was a decision to accept the inconvenience of imperfect recording conditions in exchange for the authenticity that the imperfect conditions produced. Professional studios were designed to produce excellent approximations of
music. The rehearsal space on Santa Monica produced music with all the imperfections and inconveniences that music has when it is happening in a room not designed to contain it. The imperfections were part of the realness. The inconvenience was what made the authenticity available. The rain was the same logic in compressed form.
Synthesized rain would have been easier, no licensing, no storage, no technical process of integrating a field recording into a studio. Mix real rain was harder and it was the actual thing and the actual thing was what the song required. Jim Morrison’s question was not really a question. It was a confirmation, a check to ensure that the thing being used was the thing it was supposed to be before the song was finished and the session was over and the chance to use the real thing instead of the approximation had passed. Bill Siddons heard the story of the rain question later, not in the session where he was not present, but in the days following when the final sessions for L. A. Woman were complete and the album was being prepared for release. He heard it the way he had heard most of the stories about Jim Morrison in his four years as the band’s manager, as evidence of the principle that had made Jim Morrison both the most extraordinary and the most ungovernable client he had ever worked. With the principle that the real thing
was not negotiable, that the approximation was not sufficient, that the distance between the actual and the simulated was not a detail but the whole of the matter, and that no amount of convenience or efficiency or institutional pressure could make the simulated thing adequate when the actual thing was available.
This principle had produced over 4 years the concerts that people remembered for the rest of their lives. It had produced the recordings that felt in the best moments like something that was happening rather than something that had been produced. It had produced the confrontations with club owners and television producers and police officers that had resulted from Jim Morrison simply not being able to treat the approximation as sufficient when the actual thing was present and available and the only thing. Standing between the actual and the performed was the management of someone else’s institutional requirement. The rain on Riders on the Storm is the most concentrated single example of this principle in Jim Morrison’s entire body of work because it is the smallest instance of it, a technical decision, a question about a sound effect, a confirmation that what was being used was real rather than synthesized, and because it contains exactly the same logic as the largest instances.
The rain needed to be real for the same reason the poems needed to be actual rather than poetic, the performances needed to draw from the actual interior rather than the performed version of the interior, the voice needed to be the voice that the poems came from rather than the voice that the arena required.
Because the song, like all the songs, like all the poems, like all the performances, was an attempt to close the distance between the actual world and the person receiving the song, and that closing required the actual thing, always the actual thing. The approximation was not what it was supposed to close the distance with. The actual thing was.
Ray Manzarek played the keyboard part on Riders on the Storm with the full understanding of what the song was doing. The nocturnal, aqueous, floating quality of the sound that he had found in the relationship between John Densmore’s rhythm and the keyboard’s harmonic content. The thing that made the song feel like the interior of weather rather than the description of weather.
He has talked about this in the specific musical terms that he used to discuss everything connected to Jim Morrison. In terms of what the sound was doing and what it needed to do. The relationship between the technical elements and the emotional result. But he has also talked about the rain question in a way that went beyond the technical.
In a way that connected it to the larger question he had been carrying since the Venice Beach Pier. What does it mean to make something real rather than something that approximates the real? His answer, distilled from the music and the sessions and the long accounting he had been doing since 1965, was this.
You start with the actual thing. You use the real rain. You use the voice that comes from the actual interior rather than the voice that the performance has been trained to project. You use the imperfect room rather than the room designed to produce excellent approximations. And what you get when you start from the actual thing and stay with the actual thing is not perfection.
The Santa Monica Boulevard recordings were not perfect. Riders on the Storm was not perfect. Real rain is not a perfect sound effect, but something that the imperfection makes possible, which is the sense that the thing is happening rather than being produced. The sense that the rain is falling rather than the sound of rain being placed in a song.
