The Doors' Rehearsal Space — Santa Monica Boulevard

The Doors maintained a rehearsal space and later an office at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood — the address that served as their operational base during the height of their career from the late 1960s. The building gave the band a private space away from their homes and the chaos of the Sunset Strip to work on material, manage the administrative side of their increasingly complex career, and maintain some degree of collective identity as the pressures of success created tensions between Morrison and the other three members. Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore were professional, disciplined musicians who arrived on time and expected the same from their singer; Morrison was increasingly unreliable.

The Doors had formed from an unlikely meeting between Morrison and Manzarek on Venice Beach in the summer of 1965, when Morrison recited lyrics he had been writing in a notebook and Manzarek heard the potential in them. Krieger and Densmore were recruited from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation classes. The combination of Morrison's lyrical ambition and vocal magnetism with Manzarek's keyboard bass lines (the band had no bassist, with Manzarek's left hand covering the bass register), Krieger's flamenco-influenced guitar, and Densmore's jazz-informed drumming produced a sound that was unique in the rock landscape of the period.

The Santa Monica Boulevard address is in the commercial strip of West Hollywood between the Sunset Strip to the north and the residential streets of the city. The building has been used for various purposes since the Doors' occupancy. West Hollywood's music industry geography — centred on the Sunset Strip, Sunset Sound, and the cluster of management companies and record labels in the area — has been relatively stable since the 1960s, and the Doors' connection to the neighbourhood is embedded in the city's self-understanding as a music industry capital.