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The Doors Special
And here we are outside the Hard Rock Café, with the name there and everything. The Hard Rock Café had been there since the ‘30s, so it didn’t have anything to do with hard rock music. Hard rock mining probably, or “a rock and a hard place.” The story was that after we did the Morrison Hotel photos, which was a few blocks away, Jim wanted to go have something to drink. It was late afternoon and we decided to drive down to Skid Row where all the bars were. And as we drove down there looking for a likely spot to go in, we all at the same time spotted this Hard Rock Café out of the windows of John Densmore’s Volkswagen van and said “Oh, we gotta go in there!” The front of the Hard Rock Café was the back of the Morrison Hotel album. It didn’t have The Doors in the picture, but this does (I think there was a couple of guys standing there, but not The Doors). That was the back of their album and sometime later, they got a call from England saying “Do you mind if we use that name? We’re starting a café here in London and we’d like to use the name off your album.” And they said “No, go ahead, fine.” And that was the first Hard Rock Café. Peter Morton and Isaac Tigrett – two guys started the whole Hard Rock Café chain there in London, and they named it after this picture. And we don’t get free burgers or anything!
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The Doors Special
December 2002
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