The London Fog — Sunset Strip, West Hollywood

The London Fog was a small, often half-empty club on the Sunset Strip where the Doors played a residency in early 1966 before being discovered and hired by the Whisky a Go Go next door. The gigs were unpromising — the Strip was loud with competition and the London Fog drew sparse, indifferent crowds — but the months of near-nightly performance gave the band the tightness and confidence that would make their Whisky residency so explosive. Morrison, Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore worked through their set in a room that mostly didn't care, which turned out to be exactly the kind of pressure-free environment in which something dangerous could quietly develop.

The Sunset Strip of 1966 was the West Coast counterpart to Greenwich Village — every club, every parking lot, every diner booth was full of people becoming famous or trying to. Eve Babitz, who met Morrison in this period, described the Strip as a place where the city's ambitions condensed into something almost visible: leather and ambition and the smell of nightclub and the specific electricity of young people convinced they were about to change everything. Morrison fit perfectly and also stood slightly apart — he had already constructed a persona so complete that even his contemporaries couldn't quite see through it.

The London Fog site on Sunset Boulevard is now occupied by other businesses and nothing formally marks its location. The Whisky a Go Go, where the Doors' residency that followed made them famous, still stands a short distance along the Strip and remains one of the most active live music venues in Los Angeles.