The Doors released Live in New York on November 17, 2009, through Bright Midnight Archives and Rhino. The six-CD box set gathered four concerts recorded at New York City’s Felt Forum on January 17 and 18, 1970, with two shows each night. These were the band’s last New York City appearances with Jim Morrison, captured just before Morrison Hotel reached record stores.
Felt Forum was the smaller venue within the Madison Square Garden complex, and drummer John Densmore valued its closeness to the crowd. “It was more intimate, and you could feel the audience more,” he said in Rhino’s announcement for the set. He also pointed to acoustics designed for music. The setting suited a weekend that moved between new songs and the blues covers the band had played earlier in its career.
“Roadhouse Blues” opened all four shows. With Morrison Hotel, their fifth studio album, still weeks away, “Peace Frog” and “Ship of Fools” also appeared across the weekend. The new material shared set space with “Light My Fire” and blues covers such as “Who Do You Love.” For listeners discovering the tapes in 2009, those songs were familiar catalog entries. At the concerts themselves, the Morrison Hotel material belonged to an album the audience couldn’t yet buy. Keeping the shows together also preserved differences in the sets: the first night’s late performance included “The End,” while the following night’s late show featured “Celebration of the Lizard.”
The release retained introductions, tuning pauses and Morrison’s spoken interludes as individual tracks. Those stretches between songs made the room part of the record. The opening show included a pause of more than two minutes before “Peace Frog,” while the first January 18 show preserved a false start of “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)” before the next attempt.
Some of the concert material had already appeared on Absolutely Live in 1970 and the band’s 1997 box set. For the 2009 collection, longtime engineer Bruce Botnick mixed and mastered the shows, but reassembling them required more than a fresh mix. Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen reported that earlier releases had left the tapes heavily edited. The team reconstructed the concerts from eight-track and two-track recordings, using audience tapes as a reference.
The final show added two guests to the group. Harmonica player John Sebastian joined for “Rock Me,” and drummer Dallas Taylor joined him for “Going to N.Y. Blues” and “Maggie M’Gill.” Sebastian had also played on the studio version of “Roadhouse Blues.” His appearance connected the encore to the new record, but a recording problem meant that his contribution needed special attention decades later.
Sebastian’s microphone had fed the venue’s sound system without being routed to the recording truck. Botnick explained the problem in his technical notes, reproduced in Lindsay Planer’s AllMusic review. In 2009, Sebastian joined Botnick and Ray Manzarek at Skywalker Sound in San Rafael to recreate the missing harmonica parts. He used the faint harmonica captured by the audience microphones as a guide to what he had played at Felt Forum.
