Two film students and a band
The Doors began in the summer of 1965 in Venice, a beachside part of Los Angeles. Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek had both studied film at UCLA, and the story usually told is that they met again on the beach, where Morrison sang some lyrics he had written. Manzarek, a keyboard player, proposed forming a band. They were joined by the drummer John Densmore and the guitarist Robby Krieger, who brought blues, jazz and flamenco-influenced playing to the mix.
The name came from Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception, whose own title borrowed from the poet William Blake. It tied the group to the mood of psychedelic experimentation that was spreading through young audiences, though the band’s sound was never simply a copy of any one scene’s.
The lineup had no bass guitarist. Manzarek played the keyboard bass lines himself, usually on a small piano-style instrument with his left hand, while his right hand played the Vox organ that gave the Doors much of their identity.
The Sunset Strip
In the mid-1960s Los Angeles had a lively rock scene based on the Sunset Strip, a stretch of Sunset Boulevard with clubs such as the Whisky a Go Go, London Fog and Gazzarri’s. The Byrds, Love and Buffalo Springfield were among the groups associated with the area. Teenagers crowded the clubs and local authorities responded with curfews, which led to protests on the Strip in late 1966.
The Doors played at the London Fog first, and then got a position as a house band at the Whisky in 1966, where they worked as a support act for visiting groups. Morrison’s stage presence, and the length and theatrical quality of songs such as “The End”, drew attention. The band was reportedly dismissed from the Whisky in August 1966 after a version of “The End” that included more provocative lyrics than the management wanted. The details differ depending on who tells it, but the dismissal came at about the time they signed a recording contract.
Jac Holzman, the head of Elektra Records, a label known mainly for folk music, signed them in 1966, reportedly after hearing them at the Whisky and being encouraged by Love’s singer Arthur Lee. It was one of Elektra’s first moves into rock.
Recording the album
The album was recorded quickly, in the late summer of 1966, at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood. Paul A. Rothchild produced it and Bruce Botnick engineered. The band had played the songs on stage for months, so the sessions were efficient, and the sound was kept close to a live performance, with only modest overdubs.
The album came out on 4 January 1967 and had eleven tracks:
- “Break On Through (To the Other Side)”, “Soul Kitchen”, “The Crystal Ship”, “Twentieth Century Fox”, “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)”, “Light My Fire”
- “Back Door Man”, “I Looked at You”, “End of the Night”, “Take It as It Comes”, “The End”
“Alabama Song” was a cover of a piece by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, while “Back Door Man” was a blues by Willie Dixon. The rest were original songs, most credited to the whole band.
Light My Fire
“Light My Fire”, more than seven minutes long on the album, was written chiefly by Krieger, with other members contributing. It featured long organ and guitar solos. For radio, it was edited to a much shorter length and released as a single in April 1967. It climbed steadily and reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer, in July 1967. The edit was needed because AM stations rarely played long tracks, whereas FM radio would later make more room for full-length album cuts.
The album itself reached the top few places of the American album chart and stayed there for a long time. A later appearance on a national variety programme in September 1967 became controversial over a lyric, but it belongs to the band’s second year and is a separate story from the debut.
“The End”
The closing track runs for nearly twelve minutes and is the most debated piece on the record. It began as a farewell song and grew into a long, slowly building piece with a spoken section that references a story of family conflict. This section was provocative to many listeners and was one reason the band was removed from the Whisky. The piece was later used in a film about the Vietnam War, which gave it a new set of meanings that its writers had not planned.
What the album meant
The debut established the Doors as one of the leading American rock bands. Its mixture of blues, jazz-like improvisation and Morrison’s poetic and theatrical lyrics was unusual in a period dominated by short songs. It helped make Los Angeles a counterweight to San Francisco and London as a source of ambitious rock, and it gave the city a different mood: darker and more urban than the Bay Area’s communal image.
It also made Jim Morrison a public figure. His later life and death are covered in his biography, but the 1967 album remains the clearest picture of what the band sounded like when it was new, well before the fame and difficulties that followed. Together with the Velvet Underground’s debut in New York, it suggested that the American counterculture could produce darker material alongside the optimism of the Summer of Love.