Henry Diltz: Last News

The Doors’ 1970 album ‘Morrison Hotel’ has been badly damaged by a fire.Per Variety, the blaze broke out on Thursday (December 26), with the building at the intersection of Pico Boulevard and Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles requiring 17 fire companies to get the fire under control after an hour and a half.The building has been used as a training site for Los Angeles Fire Department in recent years and had been scheduled to be converted into affordable housing. But in the late 1960s, it served as the Morrison Hotel.The photograph used for the cover art was snapped by rock photographer Henry Diltz in December 1969, with the album being released the following February.

William Earl A downtown Los Angeles building made famous as the setting of an album cover photo for the legendary rock band the Doors was heavily damaged after fire broke out Thursday morning. The building that was once home to a transient hotel known as the Morrison Hotel was the setting for cover photo for the band’s fifth album, titled “Morrison Hotel,” given the nod to the surname of Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison. The photo, snapped by famed rock photographer Henry Diltz, was taken on the fly in December 1969.

The Los Angeles Fire Department knocked down a fire Thursday in a vacant downtown building that was formerly the home of the Morrison Hotel, which became famous after it was photographed as the cover art for the 1970 album by seminal L.A. band The Doors.

The Recording Academy announced its 2023 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipients today, with Bobby McFerrin, Nirvana, Ma Rainey, Nile Rodgers, Slick Rick “The Ruler,” The Supremes, and Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson of Heart making the cut.

Roy Trakin There’s a famous photograph by Henry Diltz of Joni Mitchell playing guitar in Mama Cass Elliot’s Laurel Canyon backyard, with David Crosby holding up a joint in back and Eric Clapton sitting cross-legged watching transfixed. There, in the foreground, is Cass’ nine-month-old daughter Owen, teething on a film canister. “I often wonder what I was thinking,” says the now-55-year-old mother of two kids in their 20s, who lives in Encino with her husband of 31 years. “Clearly, I was thinking about that film canister. It was all pretty surreal, pretty cool.” Owen Elliot-Kugell, the only child of Mama Cass of the Mamas & the Papas, the seminal co-ed group that came to define the sound of 1960s hippie culture, has for years spearheaded the campaign to get her mother a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The ceremony will finally take place on Monday, Oct. 3 on a stretch of Hollywood Blvd. between Sycamore and LaBrea alongside the stars of Sidney Poitier and Tyne Daly, with the likes of bandmate Michelle Phillips and good friend John Sebastian on hand to mark the occasion.

Chris Willman Music WriterThe return of the Jazz Foundation of America’s annual benefit at Herb Alpert’s Vibrato club saw lifetime achievement awards being presented to four musical legends whose careers date to the ’60s or before, Randy Newman, Smokey Robinson, jazz fusion figure Bennie Maupin and producer Lou Adler. Homage was paid at the intimate nightspot in Bel Air by singers and actors including Jackson Browne, Merry Clayton, Herbie Hancock, Jeffrey Wright and Danny Glover.Drummer Steve Jordan — currently between Rolling Stones pickup gigs — led a house band out of the fantasies of anyone who scanned liner notes during the last 60 years, joined by Stones backup singers Lisa Fischer and Bernard Fowler among the serenaders, and jazz players Tom Scott, Billy Childs and Davell Crawford also taking the lead on tribute numbers during a two-and-a-half hour dream jam.