The building featured on the cover of The Doors’ 1970 album ‘Morrison Hotel’ has been badly damaged by a fire.
Per Variety, the blaze broke out on Thursday (December 26), with the building at the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles requiring 17 fire companies to get the fire under control after an hour and a half.
The building has been used as a training site for Los Angeles Fire Department in recent years and had been scheduled to be converted into affordable housing. But in the late 1960s, it served as the Morrison Hotel.
The photograph used for the cover art was snapped by rock photographer Henry Diltz in December 1969, with the album being released the following February. The image of the band’s members sitting behind the glass window was taken in a brief moment when the lobby was empty, with the band appreciating the irony of the hotel sharing its name with singer Jim Morrison.
‘Morrison Hotel’ was The Doors’ fifth studio album and was hailed by many at the time as a return to form for the band, returning them to an earthier, blues rock-centric sound, after the brass and string experiments they had played with on 1969’s ‘The Soft Parade’.
Beloved tracks such as ‘Roadhouse Blues’, ‘Peace Frog’ and ‘You Make Me Real’ appear on ‘Morrison Hotel’, which peaked on the US charts at Number Four in 1970, while in the UK it reached a high of Number 12. It has since been declared platinum in the US, selling over a million copies.
In other Doors news, the rights to the band’s publishing catalogue, master recordings, trademarks and merchandising options were sold to Primary Wave Music last year in what was described as a “monumental acquisition”.
Earlier this year, it emerged that The Libertines had bought the bathtub in which Morrison died in 1971. The item will be placed in one of the rooms in the band’s Margate hotel, The Albion Rooms.
