The Doors: 10 of the best

The Doors remain one of the most influential band of the 60s, with charismatic frontman Jim Morrison and songs that swirl with poetry, sex and death

1 Light My Fire
Few bands divide critical opinion like the Doors. For some, they dine at the top table of the critically revered, their company typified by Julie Burchill’s line that Roxy Music, at their very best, were “better than David Bowie, than the Supremes, than the Doors, than the Sex Pistols, than anyone I imagine I will ever hear”. However, especially in more recent years, the Doors have been subject of much reappraisal and opprobrium. Much reputational damage was probably done by Oliver Stone’s abysmal 1991 biopic, with Val Kilmer playing Jim Morrison as a drunken caricature. After defining the art of the rock frontman every bit as influentially as Mick Jagger, Morrison has been subsequently blamed for every leering wannabe in leather trousers. However, love or loathe him, Morrison brought theatrical excitement to 1960s rock and the Doors albums continue to sell in significant quantities. Artists from Echo and the Bunnymen to the Stranglers to Skrillex and Chase and Status have taken something from their organ-heavy sound, while Morrison’s fusion of rock and poetry inspired Patti Smith, who paid tribute to the singer on stage in Manchester as recently as last week. Light My Fire – the band’s signature song – still best represents their adventurous creativity. In the absence of a bass player, Ray Manzarek used a Vox Continental organ as a lead instrument while his left hand played bass sounds on a Fender Rhodes piano bass – a similar set-up to that of Sky Saxon’s punkier Seeds, but the Doors took it somewhere more dreamlike and transcendental. Morrison sang about classic themes of sex and death, but Manzarek’s playing equally captured the fairground aspect of Los Angeles. Penned by guitarist Robby Krieger, the single version of Light My Fire has undoubtedly been slightly dulled by radio ubiquity. However, the much longer version from their classic eponymous 1967 debut – the first of six albums inside just four years – still sounds glorious, not least the thrilling moment where Krieger’s beautifully economical guitar solo crashes back into Manzarek’s waterfalling signature melody. The three-minute edit gave them an international number one and a standard that has been covered by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Will Young.

2 The Crystal Ship
The Doors story begins on Venice Beach, Los Angeles in 1965, where Manzarek encounters fellow UCLA film student Morrison, who tells him he’s been writing song lyrics with the idea of forming a band, and sings him a few lines of what would later become Moonlight Drive, on 1967’s No 1 album Strange Days. Lines such as “Let’s swim to the moon, uh, uh, let’s climb through the tide, celebrate the evenin’ that the city sleeps to hide” so impressed Manzarek that they quickly assembled a band to accompany Morrison’s poetry. Perhaps not all Morrison’s words read so well on the page, but at his best he was brilliant at channelling literary heroes – such as Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception provided the band’s name – into crisp, fully realised pop tunes. Another from the first LP, The Crystal Ship has been variously interpreted as a farewell to a love affair (specifically, with early sweetheart Mary Werbelow), a goodbye to the dying and a trip to an afterlife dimension (also the theme of debut single Break on Through). The glacial boat itself supposedly represents the band and/or stardom, after which he will return to his soulmate. Either way, where Light My Fire was a straightforward sex song, this feels otherworldly and sentimental, with a killer opener: “Before you slip into unconsciousness, I’d like to have another kiss.” In 1967, or any other year, nobody began songs like that.

3 The Unknown Soldier
After Light My Fire’s success, the last thing the Doors’ career demanded was an unusual anti-war song. However, where Morrison would routinely address environmental or sociopolitical concerns, his lyrics here reflect the singer’s horror at the way the Vietnam war was being presented in the US media. Meanwhile, this 1968 single dispenses with conventions of pop songwriting to include a gunshot, tolling bells, a military marching cadence and Morrison’s hopeful invitation: “Wait until the war is over and we’re both a little older.” It reached No 39 with a bullet – or rather, without, as the gunshot was edited from the version supplied to radio and most stations refused to play it – but they’d delivered one of their eeriest, most affecting songs.

4 Love Me Two Times
For all their sometimes sprawling theatre, the Doors knew how to pen a perfect pop song. Another song written by Krieger – clocking in at a radio-friendly 3 minutes 17 seconds – this single from 1967’s Strange Days turns blues elements into a mightily catchy tune. The lyrics are again possibly influenced by Vietnam, apparently referring to a soldier who makes love to his girlfriend for the final time before shipping out. However, Manzarek conceded that the song could variously be “Robby’s great blues/rock classic about lust and loss” or “about multiple orgasms”. Such blurred lines meant the Doors again fell foul of some radio authorities, so listeners in New Haven were denied one of Manzarek’s most glorious moments – a freewheeling harpsichord solo.

5 Five to One
By mid-1968, Strange Days had given the Doors their first chart-topping album and they were outselling the Grateful Dead fivefold, yet were undoubtedly also part of the emerging counterculture. As a student at Florida State University in the early 1960s, Morrison had become particularly engaged with the philosophies of protest and the psychology of crowds, and brought these elements together in his performances of one of the band’s most powerfully political and controversial songs, initially recorded on third album Waiting for the Sun. The title supposedly refers to the ratio in the US between young and old, perhaps with a nod to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “If our forces are 10 to the enemy’s one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him”. The lyrics – “The old get old but the young get stronger, may take a week but it may take longer. They’ve got the guns, we’ve got the numbers” – recognise youth’s dormant power and reflects Morrison’s belief (as per many of the Summer of Love generation) that music could change the world. Perhaps his subsequent realisation that American youth was inherently more conservative than it let on led – along with copious quantities of wine and beer – to the song’s infamous performance in Miami in 1969. With the stage swarmed by policemen, the star interrupts the groove to rail at the audience: “You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots, letting people push you around … You’re all a bunch of fucking slaves…” etc. Morrison was subsequently arrested and put on trial for drunkenness, indecency and profanity. The Miami Five to One remains officially unreleased (you can hear it here) but this swinging take from Absolutely Live captures the tune’s tumultuous live power.

6 Touch Me
We’ve now heard the Doors as a psychedelic rock band, protest vehicle and pop group, but each album progressed their sound and 1969’s flawed but brave the Soft Parade saw them experimenting with orchestral pop-rock. The album’s big single is another Krieger composition, which takes a riff from the Four Seasons’ C’mon Marianne and blasts into a symphonic arrangement with a blazing saxophone solo courtesy of the great American session player Curtis Amy. In Stone’s awful film, Morrison is portrayed changing the lyrics to make the song about oral sex, but surely lyrics such as: “I’m gonna love you/ Till the stars fall from the sky for you and I”, suggest that it is a song about the physical union of devotional love.

7 I Will Never Be Untrue
And maybe, deep down, Morrison was a lover, not a fighter. His latter-day reputation as a boorish drunk is not well served by the rich seam of tenderness, romance and sentimentality that runs through his band’s canon. This long-lost live obscurity from the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood finds Morrison in characteristic mischievous mood – promising a lover that he will “never stay out drinking no later than two …Two thirty…” – before it gradually turns into a more tender song about yearning for a soulmate. Like the equally ill-fated Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, Morrison was among the 60s generation for whom Blake’s “the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom” provided a doctrine, but all were young people unprepared for the cost, and his later lyrics contain several references to loneliness and melancholy. Here, we can now hear the effects of hard living in Morrison’s vocal, but this simple, slow blues – which surfaced on 1999’s Essential Rarities – is surely one of their most human and lovely.

8 The Wasp (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)
John Peel’s favourite Doors song typifies the blend of poetry and music which so entranced Patti Smith. The lyrics were written some years previously and Morrison initially performed them as poetry before Manzarek and drummer John Densmore conjured up this crackling funk beat for 1971’s L.A. Woman. Effectively a eulogy to Morrison’s inspiration by music, the vivid language and imagery describes the impact of hearing DJs such as Wolfman Jack in his youth as they blasted out of Texas and Virginia, mesmerising the youngster and the “friends I have gathered together on this thin raft … Out here on the perimeter there are no stars/Out here we is stoned – immaculate.”

9 L.A. Woman
By 1971, bloated and bearded, troubled by post-Miami litigation and something of a bete noire after various onstage incidents, Morrison looked like a man grown old before his time. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he managed to rouse himself for what may be his best set of performances. L.A. Woman, the Doors’ final album with him, finds the band returning to the blues but with a new, urban raw edge. The title track pays homage to their City of Angels. For Manzarek – who didn’t exactly shy from making from grand pronouncements – the song was about “driving madly down the LA freeway. You’re a beatnik on the road, like Kerouac and Neal Cassady, barreling down the freeway as fast as you can go”. Densmore, meanwhile, finds the depiction of city as a woman a “brilliant metaphor, ‘Cops in cars, never saw a woman so alone’ – great stuff. It’s metaphoric, the physicality of the town and thinking of her and how we need to take care of her, it’s my hometown”. The “Mr. Mojo rising” in the lyrics is often believed to refer to Morrison’s penis: in fact it’s an anagram of Jim Morrison and a name for a voodoo charm widely used in the blues. Whatever one makes of the lyrics, beginning with an automobile noise and building to a driving pace, the song certainly captures the unique atmosphere of a city mythologised by everyone from Frank Sinatra to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

10 The End
The Doors’ most controversial song was famously used in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, to soundtrack the bloody killing of Colonel Kurtz. I’ve ducked the chronological order to include it as the last song of the 10 because it’s hard to imagine it anywhere else – the Doors themselves generally relied on it to close their shows. The song centres around an Oedipal fantasy, in which the protagonist murders his father and has sex with his mother, the recording of which in near-darkness led producer Paul Rothchild to later describe as the singularly most exciting moment in his studio career. It was long believed that Morrison’s dip into Greek mythology – via Freud’s Oedipus complex – was the Lizard King’s way of addressing a troubled childhood under a military father. However, Densmore recalls the singer explaining to him that “kill the father, fuck the mother” section was essentially about getting rid of the “alien concepts” which society installs in us as human beings. Morrison himself once suggested that the song had a different meaning for him each time he sang it, from the death of childhood innocence to the final curtain. “It’s strange that people fear death,” he considered, towards what indeed was the end. “Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over.” There are several officially released live versions of The End, each of them very different. At New York’s Felt Forum in 1970, a year before his death, Morrison begins it with a blood-curdling cry of “Bring out your dead!”, as used by corpse collectors during the Great Plague. I’ve plumped for this 17-minute 1968 Hollywood Bowl version because it’s such a brilliant emotional rollercoaster. With Morrison reputedly high on acid and again singing in near-darkness, there’s humour as the singer spots a grasshopper on the stage, another intriguing diversion as he refers to a fatal accident, some genuinely spooky moments as he foresees his death (wanting to die in an open field, where he can be devoured by worms and snakes) and the musical prowess that made them such a formidable live act. Morrison never got his wish – instead meeting his demise in a Paris bathtub, aged just 27. The Doors are possibly pop’s ultimate Marmite band, but no one can accuse them of not striving to push the envelope.

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