The Doors were already recording without Jim Morrison when the news came from Paris. The singer had stayed behind while the rest of the band started work in Los Angeles, and he died before he could return to the United States. Instead of stopping, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore decided to keep the group alive. The result was Other Voices, the seventh Doors studio album, released on 18 October 1971 on Elektra Records.
Recording without Morrison
It was the first Doors record to appear after Morrison's death in July of that same year. The band had begun the sessions at their own Doors' Workshop studio in Los Angeles, working from June through August. With no singer left, Manzarek and Krieger split the vocal duties between them. That was the biggest risk: a band defined by Morrison's voice and presence now had to sound like The Doors without him.
The label wanted them to continue. Decades later, Krieger remembered that Elektra pushed for new material, and the three musicians threw themselves into constant rehearsals and writing after Morrison died. He also admitted that releasing an album so soon might not have been the right call. But the work was already done, and the record came out in October, a few months after Morrison's death in July.
Singles and critical reception
The first single was Tightrope Ride, which the trade magazine Record World called a stunning barnstormer. A second single, Ships w/ Sails, followed in 1972. The album itself was a moderate commercial success, with an initial pressing of around 300,000 copies according to Elektra's Jack Holzman. Critics were split. Many agreed the band had made a strong record without Morrison, but it did not match their best earlier work.
For years, The Doors treated Other Voices and its follow-up Full Circle as if they did not exist. The group said they did not have the master tapes, and for a long time neither album was reissued on CD. The first compact disc edition of Other Voices finally appeared on 23 October 2006, paired with Full Circle by the label Timeless Holland.
The official reissue story is just as tangled. On 27 September 2011, both albums were released digitally for the first time, and this time the original master tapes were used. Four years later, on 4 September 2015, Rhino Records put out Other Voices and Full Circle together on a double CD and separately on 180-gram vinyl. The CD reissue added one bonus track, Treetrunk, the B-side of the single Get Up and Dance.
The album itself runs just under forty minutes, with every song written by Manzarek, Krieger or Densmore. Manzarek wrote In the Eye of the Sun alone, while Krieger wrote Variety Is the Spice of Life, Down on the Farm, I'm Horny, I'm Stoned and Wandering Musician. The two of them co-wrote Tightrope Ride and Hang on to Your Life, and Krieger teamed with Densmore for Ships w/ Sails. The sessions also drew on a handful of outside musicians. Bassist Jack Conrad played on three tracks, while Jerry Scheff handled bass on several others. Wolfgang Melz, Ray Neapolitan and Willie Ruff each contributed bass to one song, and Francisco Aguabella added percussion to two. The album runs just under forty minutes, with a precise length of 39 minutes. That compact runtime kept the focus on the band's new vocal approach and the tight arrangements they had worked out in their own studio.
Other Voices never became a buried treasure that critics later rescued. The mixed reviews stuck. What keeps the album interesting is the decision behind it: three musicians who lost their frontman and chose to keep working, pushed by their label and their own momentum, even when one of them later wondered if they had moved too fast. The record is what that choice sounded like.