“The atmosphere was intense. Manson said hello and I froze. There was a feeling of extreme evil in the room”: Jon Keliehor went from an unknown psychedelic group to playing with The Doors, turning down The Byrds and rubbing shoulders with Charles Manson

In the summer of 1966, 25-year-old drummer Jon Keliehor was having breakfast in Duke’s Coffee Shop, the café of the Tropicana Motel, a popular haunt for local or visiting rock musicians in West Hollywood. Sitting next to him was a man he vaguely recognised, sporting fetching sideburns and smart modish attire. They got chatting.

“I asked him if he was staying in the Tropicana,” Keliehor recalls. “He said: ‘No, I’m rehearsing across the street in a little studio we rented. I’m a drummer.” I said: ‘Oh, so am I. What’s your group?’ ‘We’re called The Doors. My name’s John Densmore.’”

So began a friendship that resulted in a most unlikely and largely unreported twist of fate, when Keliehor deputised for Densmore in a late-1967 Doors show at the Portland Memorial Coliseum.

Keliehor was in a Pacific Northwest group called The Daily Flash. He and his fellow band members had relocated from Seattle to Los Angeles. Keliehor was impressed by his new pal Densmore, although on the West Coast the Flash were arguably better known, since they’d headlined over the Quicksilver Messenger Service and Country Joe & The Fish at the Avalon Ballroom, and The Turtles and The Byrds at other clubs. They’d also been invited by the Grateful Dead to join them and Janis Joplin’s Big Brother And The Holding Company at the Vancouver Trips Festival (July ’66).

“A car arrived to take us to the seaside,” he recalls of the latter. “The Dead’s LSD chemist Stanley Owsley drove it. We fell under his spell and the spell of his magic tablets.”

Densmore took his new acquaintance to The Doors studio. “All very casual,” he says. “But that night I went to see them play at Pandora’s Box on Sunset Boulevard. They were still wearing matching suits and ties, but it was right at the beginning of their ascendancy, before a small group of very loyal local fans. They had such magnetism, Jim Morrison in particular. It was clear everything was about to change. Next time I saw them, only weeks later, the crowds had swelled.”

Watching Doors rehearsals, Keliehor heard early attempts at what became the band’s self-titled debut album, which eventually sold more than 20 million copies. Containing their first single Break On Through (To The Other Side), the epic No.1 Light My Fire, and the near-12-minute Oedipal masterpiece The End, as well as slices of dreamy, haunting psychedelia like The Crystal Ship and End Of The Night, The Doors had astonishing intensity. Its stoned-immaculate bravura established it as one of the most culturally significant recorded landmarks in American rock history.

The Daily Flash’s contribution, by contrast, would be more modest. Big stars in Seattle, they were brought to LA by the notorious management team of Charles Greene and Brian Stone.

“Great manipulators those two,” Keliehor laughs. “But in good faith we joined a roster that included Sonny & Cher, Noel Harrison, Jackie DeShannon and Buffalo Springfield, whose debut they produced. They were real New York players who moved to LA, hired a fancy limo, walked into the MGM building like they worked there, found an unused office space, ordered a phone and literally camped out without anyone realising they had no right to be there at all!”

The Daily Flash ended up supporting The Doors at the Cheetah Club, the Doors’ local Venice Beach hangout, in 1967, but didn’t ‘break on through’ themselves. They never made an album, although they did release a decent cover of Bob Dylan’s Queen Jane Approximately in 1966, backed with their take on Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Jack Of Diamonds.

Their follow-up single, 1967’s The French Girl, was a folkier affair backed with Green Rocky Road, a staple vamp for the likes of Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin. Still, the Flash did a great job of it themselves, and eventually made it to the movies when the song was heard in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 film Targets.

In December 1966 The Daily Flash were flown to New York and enjoyed a month’s residency at East Side club Ondine, a private discotheque frequented by Jimmy James (later Jimi Hendrix) and Andy Warhol, plus Factory acolytes, Jackie Kennedy… and anyone who was anyone.

Noel Harrison was one such star, and he finagled the Flash a part in the TV series The Girl From U.N.C.L.E; in the 1967 episode The Drublegratz Affair, they played a camp trash number called My Bulgarian Baby, in a castle, while Stefanie Powers go-go danced in a cage behind them.

Ondine was prestigious and lucrative for Greene and Stone, but it wasn’t public exposure. Management got the Flash just one other New York gig, in February 1967 at Stony Brook University where they supported Jefferson Airplane. It was a missed opportunity. With no album on the horizon, Greene and Stone got the Flash a regular ‘house band’ slot on local LA teen TV show Boss City where they performed other people’s hits.

Infuriated by this arrangement, Hastings quit and briefly became a replacement for Neil Young in Buffalo Springfield, while Keliehor was sacked when he opted to take a Transcendental Meditation course rather than play a show in Las Vegas. “That meant I had no income and had to leave my house,” he says.

Looking for new digs, Keliehor bumped into a fellow Seattleite, bassist Kerry Magness. He let Keliehor move in. “A street away was Paul A Rothchild, Doors producer,” he remembers. “One day we brazenly walked up to him and asked if he had any work for us.”

Rothchild introduced them to Elektra Records A&R man Frazier Mohawk. Mohawk had been the driving Stephen Stills and Richie Furay down Sunset Boulevard when they fatefully bumped into a hearse driven by Neil Young and Bruce Palmer, which, it’s been said, led to the formation of Buffalo Springfield.

“Life was full of coincidence,” Keliehor muses. “David Crosby asked me to join The Byrds when drummer Michael Clark quit, but he reappeared during a rehearsal. He walked into the studio with his suitcases in hand and wasn’t too pleased to see me in his seat. That was the end of the session.”

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The Densmore and Rothchild friendships continued. Keliehor and Magness were invited to sessions for The Doors’ second album, Strange Days, in August ’67. He did some (unused) guide bass work (he didn’t appear on that record but does play on The Unknown Soldier on The Doors’ album Waiting For The Sun).

“I was enlisted to push a synthesiser patch,” Keliehor says. “I was only there as an observer but I did an organ pre-set for Ray Manzarek. They did dozens of takes, so I got bored and left.”

Then, on December 1, Keliehor received a strange request. The Doors management called him and asked: “Are you available to come to Portland tomorrow? John [Densmore] has the flu and he thought you’d be a good replacement.” Keliehor hotfooted it to Portland, checked in to the Holiday Inn then went straight to the venue, the Memorial Coliseum.

“I had no practice and no sound-check,” he remembers. “I waited backstage then walked out with the band. Time ceased to exist. It felt ludicrous… Jim Morrison nodded at me and then stood right behind me until he knew I was ready. The lights went down and the music began. I sensed the tempo and the beat, and then I listened like never before to the subtleties of each piece.

“I had to remain connected to complement the phrasing and the dynamic. Jim got nearer and nearer to the audience, and then something happened, either a profanity or he removed his clothing, or both. He certainly took his top off. A policeman came forward, grabbed him and dragged him off stage, and that was the end of the performance.”

Jim Morrison was by now the biggest rock star in America. His Gloria Stavers ‘Young Lion’ photo-spread had just appeared in Vogue and 16 magazine. The Doors were featured in Time and Newsweek. In the meantime, the authorities were getting antsy, and chose Morrison as their high-profile target.

Policemen had lined the stage in front of the band – a red rag to a bull like Jim. During the set, Morrison began scatting the lines to a new song, Five To One, in the middle of Light My Fire. He jumped off stage and started yelling: “The blueberries have the guns, but we have the power.” A riot ensued. He was warned to return to the stage but didn’t comply. The promoter was forced to pull the plug.

And so Keliehor’s place in Doors’ live history was short and sweet. That night he played on Back Door Man, Soul Kitchen, Gloria, Unhappy Girl, People Are Strange and Light My Fire. The band didn’t get to play The Crystal Ship, Twentieth Century Fox or The End, and the following day’s concert in Keliehor’s home town Seattle was cancelled.

A few days later, in New Haven, Connecticut, Morrison became the first rock star to be arrested on stage. He’d been making out with a groupie in the shower stalls backstage when a police officer told the band to get out. Morrison pushed him away, and was promptly sprayed in the face with the incapacitating aerosol Mace.

Once the band were allowed to perform, Morrison cut loose. “The whole fucking world hates me…” Turning on the officer who’d blinded him 20 minutes earlier, he pointed him out. “You’re a little blue man, in a little blue hat. You’re a little blue pig.” Then, to the audience: “I’m just like you guys, man. He did it to me, they’ll do it to you.”

Jim’s trial was set for the following January, a bond of $1,500 being posted, but charges were dropped.

Keliehor describes this time as all-out war on the hippie community. Soon after, a man would arrive hell-bent on poisoning flower power forever.

“In 1968 I went with Kerry Magness to visit producer Terry Melcher at his home on 10050 Cielo Drive, with a view to working on his act Gentle Soul, fronted by Pamela Polland,” Keliehor recalls. “We came into a big open-plan room. Three figures were by the window. Pamela introduced the third person, whose music she was listening to. The atmosphere was intense, and this man made me extremely nervous. ‘Jon, this is my friend Charles Manson. He’s a musician.’ Manson said hello and I just froze. There was a feeling of extreme evil in the room.”

A few weeks later the house was leased to film director Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, and in 1969 it was the site of the infamous Manson Family murders.

Keliehor’s LA sojourn didn’t end there. He was part of the ill-fated group Rhinoceros, which bombed. He bailed early, but did play on David Ackles’s solo debut. He and Magness were then part of the short-lived group Bodine, who in 1969 made one very obscure album. These days Keliehor lives in Glasgow and writes ambient music and composes for opera, theatre, film and contemporary ballet – anything but rock music. Somehow, one imagines Jim Morrison would approve.

Originally published in Classic Rock 259 (February 259)