I found a transcription of a small part of the conversation... The 5th voice representing The Doors is their manager, the young Bill Siddons.
and a little more..
Bill: Yeah, Vince Trenor is the genius of the industry. At every gig we’ve ever played, promoters come up and say, “Where’d you get that guy?” He fixed Robby’s amp a few fays ago. I didn’t know what was wrong with it, but all of those little things in the back that are wired together were all over the florr. Vince wsa working in darkness with just his hands when, all of sudden, buzzt! It’s on. He’s one of those people who just knows everything.
Q: When you write a song, Jim, do you just write a bunch of words at length and then sort them out later, or do you sit down and write a specific song?
Jim: It happens both ways-and a lot of other ways, too. Once a song is there, it’s always hard to remember how it got there. The ideas come from everywhere. Actually, once an idea comes, it becomes a song pretty fast. It just takes a few times.
Q: Do you have an idea for the melody when you write the words?
Jim: Sometimes. Actually, I did most of my writing in a short burst a few years ago. I haven’t written too many songs since then. Robby is starting to do a lot of the writing now.
Q (to Robby): Do you write both the words and melody?
Robby: I usually start with a melody and then get the words. Or I take some of Jim’s words and make up a melody for them.
Q: On paper, “Not to Touch the Earth” looks almost formless. But when you hear it, the structure is nice, and everything flows together.
Jim: Usually, songs like “The End”, and “When the Music’s Over,” “Not to Touch the Earth,” and “Five to One” are built like a building. All of the lyrics aren’t there at the beginning, and there’s no song. Instead, there’s just a kind of start, and then it builds.
Q: When do you find time to put new material together? Do you rehearse much when you’re not touring?
Jim: We don’t rehearse that much.
John: But we did for the new album.
Bill: They’ve prepared for this album a lot better than they did for previous ones. We’ve got a duplex office and the downstairs area can be used for practice. There’s been a lot more work toward getting it together before going into the studio this time.
John: Right. Before, instead of wasting all that time in there.
Jim: You see, when we were playing clubs, we could write songs while we were playing, but now we can’t do that as well, now we have to rehearse.
Q: When I was playing regularly with Dave Ray, We’d start a song, and he’d say, “Okay-E.” We’d start playing some worse would come out, and I’d remember the best ones and tell him later. The next night, he’d use those words and the melody in a different way. Eventually, It would evolve into a song.
John: That’s just what we used to do. That’s how our whole first album evolved.
Robby: The second album, too.
Q: How much of “The End” was complete when you went into the studio?
Jim: “The End” is one of those songs which has a basic framework. A skeleton is there. But we do it differently every time. When we recorded it, that was just our version of it at that time.
Robby: It’s still changing, really. I think it’s a lot better now than it was then.
John: When we play it, we good around a lot. We improvise with the music and the lyrics.
