The Doors' Robby Krieger discusses assorted tracks on the reissued L.A. Woman album.

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“Hyacinth House”

“I had a little house up in Benedict Canyon, which is near Laurel Canyon. Jim and John and a couple other people came over there one night, and we were just fooling around, taping some stuff. The song makes a reference to some hyacinth flowers right outside the window. And in that line about the bathroom, Jim was talking about this friend of ours who was there who kept hogging the bathroom all night. Jim wanted to go to the bathroom, and he couldn’t. Finally, the guy got out of the bathroom, and Jim goes, ‘I see the bathroom is clear,’ which is the line in ‘Hyacinth House.’ He wrote the song on the spot, and I think that was how some of the best Doors songs were written.

"Then we just recorded it on my little Sony four-track, which was a real nice, high-quality tape recorder. To call it a home studio is kind of funny, but it was a pretty revolutionary piece of home machinery at the time.

“At the time, I had a pet bobcat, which would mostly stay outside. That’s where Jim got that line in the song about the lions. I saw her in a pet store when she was a cute little kitten and said, ‘She looks just like a bobcat,’ and the guy said, ‘She is a bobcat.’ She was a great pet for about three years and then she got a little bit nasty.

"She was getting real big, and kind of dangerous, so I didn’t let people pet her or anything. I gave her to this weird guy who loved jungle cats and specialized in taking people’s pets that had gotten too big and releasing them into the wilds in the Ventura County mountains. But he claimed that she attacked him and he had to shoot her. Poor kitty. But at least she is remembered forever as the ‘lion’ in ‘Hyacinth House.’ ”

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