A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 148: “Light My Fire” by the Doors

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

Episode one hundred and forty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Light My Fire” by the Doors, the history of cool jazz, and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “My Friend Jack” by the Smoke. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs By Andrew Hake Episode 148 Light My Fire by the Doors There are two big problems that arise For anyone trying to get an accurate picture of history and which have certainly arisen for me during the course of this podcast.

Things which make sources unreliable enough that you feel you have to caveat everything you say on us subject. One of those is hagiography, and the converse desire to tear heroes down. No matter what one wants to say on, say, the subjects of Jesus or Muhammad or Joseph Smith, the only sources we have for their lives are written either by people who want to present them as unblemished paragon's of virtue, or by people who want to destroy that portrayal. We know that any source is written by someone with a bias, and it might be a bias that we agree with, but it's still a bias. The other related problem is deliberate disinformation.

This comes up especially for people dealing with military history. During conflicts, governments obviously don't want their opponents to know when their attacks have caused damage, or to know what their own plans are. And after a war has concluded, the belligerent parties want to cover up their own mistakes and war crimes. We're sadly seeing that at the moment in the situation in Ukraine. Depending on one's media diet, one could get radically different ideas, of what is actually going on in that terrible conflict. But it happens all the time, in all wars and on all sides.

Take the Vietnam War. While the US was involved on the side of the South Vietnamese government from the start of that conflict, it was in a very minor way, mostly just providing supplies and training. Most historians look at the real start of US involvement in that war as having been in August 1964. President Johnson had been wanting,

since assuming the presidency in November 1963 after the death of John F. Kennedy to get further into the war, but it needed an excuse to do so. The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided him with that excuse. On August 2nd, a fleet of US warships entered into what the North Vietnamese considered their territorial waters. They used a different distance from shore to mark their territorial waters than most other countries used, and one which wasn't generally accepted, but which they considered important. Because of this, some North Vietnamese ships started following the American ones. The American ships, who thought they weren't doing anything wrong, set off what they considered

to be warning shots, and the North Vietnamese ships fired back, which to the American ships was considered them attacking. Some fire was exchanged, but not much happened. Two days later, the American ships believed they were getting attacked again, and spent several hours firing at what they believed were North Vietnamese submarines. It was later revealed that this was just the American sonar systems playing up, and that they were almost certainly firing at nothing at all, and some even suspected that at the time. President Johnson apparently told other people in confidence that in his opinion they'd been firing at stray dolphins. But that second attack, however flimsy the evidence, was enough that Johnson could tell Congress and the nation

that an American fleet had been attacked by the North Vietnamese, and you'd use that as justification to get Congress to authorize him sending huge numbers of troops to Vietnam and getting America thoroughly embroiled in a war that would cost innumerable lives and billions of dollars for what turned out to be no benefit at all to anyone. The commander of the US fleet involved in the Gulf of Tonkin operation was then captain, later rear admiral, Steve Morrison.

And he came to a door, and he looked inside. Father, yes, son, I want to kill you. We've talked a bit in this podcast previously about the development of jazz in the 40s, 50s and early 60s. There was a lot of back-and-forth influence in those days between jazz, blues, R&B, country, and rock and roll, far more than one might imagine looking at the popular histories of those genres. And so we've looked at swing, bebop and modal jazz before now.

But one style of music we haven't touched on is the type that was arguably the most popular and influential style of jazz in the 50s, even though we've mentioned several of the people involved in it. We've never yet had a proper look at cool jazz. Cool jazz, as its name suggests, is a style of music that was more laid back than the more frenetic bebop or hard-edged modal jazz. It was a style that sounded sophisticated, that sounded relaxed,

that prized melody and melodic invention over super-fast technical wizardry, and that produced much of what we now think of when we think of jazz as a popular style of music. The records of Dave Brubeck, for example, arguably the most popular 50s jazz musician, are very much in the cool jazz mode. And we have mentioned on several occasions the modern jazz quartet, who were cited as influencers by everyone from Ray Charles to the Kinks to the modern folk quartet. We have also occasionally mentioned people like Moe's Allison, who occasionally worked in the Cool Jazz mode,

but we've never really looked at it as a unified thing. Cool Jazz, like several of the other developments in jazz we've looked at, owes its existence to the work of the trumpeter Miles Davis, who was one of the early greats of Bop, and who later pioneered modal jazz. In 1948, in between his Bop and Modal periods, Davis put together a short-lived nine-piece group, the Miles Davis Nonette,

who performed together for a couple of weeks, in late 1948, and who recorded three sessions in 1949 and 1950, but who otherwise didn't perform much. Each of those sessions had a slightly different line-up, but key people involved in the recordings were Davis himself, arranger Gill Evans, piano player John Lewis, who would later go on to become the leader of the modern jazz quartet, and baritone-saxe player Jerry Mulligan. Mulligan and Evans, and the group's alto player Lee Connitz, had all been working for the big band, Claude Thornhill and his orchestra, a band which, along with the conventional swing instruments,

also had a French horn player and a tuba player, and which had recorded soft, mellow, relaxing music. The Davis-Nonet also included French horn and tuba, and was explicitly modelled on Thornhill's style, but in a stripped-down version. They used the style of playing that Thornhill preferred, with no vibrato, and with his emphasis on unison playing, with different instruments doubling each other playing the melody,

rather than call-and-response riffing. Those recordings were released as singles in 1949 and 1950, and were later reissued in 1957 as an album titled Birth of the Cool, by which point Cool Jazz had become an established style, though Davis himself had long since moved on in other musical directions. After the birth of the cool sessions, Jerry Mulligan had recorded an album as a band leader himself and then had moved to the West Coast, where he'd started writing arrangements for Stan Kenton, one of the more progressive big band leaders of the period.

While working for Kenton, Mulligan had started playing dates at a club called The Hague, where the headliner was the vibraphone player Red Norvo. While Norvo had started out as a big band musician, playing with people like Benny Goodman, he had recently started working in a trio with just a guitarist, initially Tal Farlow, and bass player, initially Charles Mingus. By 1952, Mingus had left Norvo's group, but they were still using the trio format, and that meant there was no piano at the venue,

which meant that Mulligan had to form a band that didn't rely on the chordal structures that a piano would provide. The idea of a group with a rhythm section that didn't have a piano was quite an innovation in jazz at this time, and freeing themselves from that standard instrument ended up opening up extra possibilities. His group consisted of himself on saxophone, Chepp Baker on trumpet,

Bob Whitlock on bass, and Chico Hamilton on drums. They made music in much the same loose, casual style as the recordings Mulligan had made with Davis, but in a much smaller group, with the emphasis being on the interplay between Mulligan and Baker. And this group with the first group to record on a new label, Pacific Jazz, founded by Dick Bock.

Bock had served in the Navy during World War II, and had come back from the South Pacific with two tastes, a taste for hashish and for music that was outside the conventional American pop mould. Bock loved the Mulligan Quartet, and in partnership with his friend Roy Hart, a notable jazz drummer, he raised $350 to record the first album by Mulligan's new group. Pacific Jazz, the label Bokin Hart founded, soon became the dominant label for Cool Jazz, which also became known as the West Coast Sound. The early releases on the label were almost entirely by the Mulligan Quartet, released either under Mulligan's name as by Chek Baker,

or as Lee Kohnitz and the Jerry Mulligan Quartet, when Mulligan's old bandmate Connitz joined them. These records became big hits, at least in the world of jazz, but both Mulligan and Baker were heroin addicts, and in 1953, Mulligan got arrested and spent six months in prison. And while he was there, Chet Baker made some recordings in his own right and became a bona fide star.

Not only was Baker of a great trumpet player, he was also very good-looking, and it turned out he could sing too. The Mulligan group had made the song My Funny Valentine, one of the highlights of its live shows, with Baker taking a trumpet solo. But when Baker recorded a vocal version for his album Chet Baker sings, it made Baker famous. When Mulligan got out of prison, he wanted to rehire Baker.

But Baker was now topping the popularity polls in all the jazz magazine. and was the biggest breakout jazz star of the early 50s. But Mulligan formed a new group, and this just meant that Pacific Jazz had two of the biggest acts in jazz on its books now, rather than just one. But while Bach loved jazz, he was also fascinated by other kinds of music, and while he was in New York at the beginning of 1956, he was invited by his friend Georgian, a producer who had worked with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and others, to come and see a performance by an Indian musician who was working with. Avakian was just about to produce Ravi Shankar's first American album, The Sounds of India,

for Columbia Records. But Columbia didn't think that there was much of a market for Shankar's music. They were putting it out as a speciality release, rather than something that would appeal to the general public, and so they were happy for Bach to sign Shankar to his own label. Boch renamed the company World Pacific, to signify that it was now going to be putting out music from all over the world, not just jazz, though he kept the Pacific Jazz label for its jazz releases. And he produced Shankar's next album, India's master musician. Most of Shankar's recordings for the next decade would be produced by Bach, and Bach would also try to find ways to combine

Shankar's music with jazz, though Shankar tried to keep a distinction between the two. But for example, on Shankar's next album for World Pacific, improvisations and theme from Pathapan Charlie, he was joined by a group of West Coast jazz musicians, including Bud Shank, who will hear about again in a future episode on flute. But World Pacific weren't just putting out music. They also put out spoken word records. Some of those were things that would appeal to their jazz audience, like the comedy of Lord Buckley. Clipsters, flippers and finger-poppin'-naddies, knock me your lords. I came here to lay Caesar out. But he's cut He's cut out.

But they also put out spoken word albums that appealed to box interest in spirituality and philosophy, like an album by Gerald Hurd. Heard had previously written the liner notes for Chepp Baker sings. But as well as being a jazz fan, Heard was very connected in the world of the arts. He was a very close friend with Aldous Huxley and was also interested in various forms of non-Western spirituality.

He practiced yoga and was also fascinated by Buddhism, Vedanta and Taoism. He who so mounts and enters and goes above and beyond himself, he truly mounts up to God. Therefore, let thy mind raise itself above itself and say, He who above all things I need is above all things I know. so gathering thyself into that all-sufficient good, thus continue, till thou dost arrive at that true life,

which is God himself. We've come across Heard before, in passing, in the episode on Tomorrow Never Know's, when Ralph Mentioner said of his experiments with Timothy Leary and Randass, at the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Hurd, we began using the Bardot Thurdo, Tibetan Book of the Dead,

as a guide to psychedelic sessions. Heard was friends with both Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and in fact had been invited by them to take part in the masculine trip that Huxley wrote about in his book The Doors of Perception, the book that popularised psychedelic rug use, though Hurd was unable to attend at that time. Heard was a huge influence on the early psychedelic movement, though he always advised Leary and his associates

not to be so public with their advocacy, and just to keep it to a small enlightened circle, rather than risk the wrath of the establishment. and he's cited by almost everyone in Larry's circle as having been the person who, more than anything else, inspired them to investigate both psychedelic drugs and mysticism. He's the person who connected Bill W of Alcoholics Anonymous with Osmond and got him abdicating LSD use. It was Hurd's books that made Houston Smith,

the great scholar of comparative religions and associative Leary, interested in mysticism and religions outside his own Christianity, and Hurd was one of the people who gave him. Leary advice during his early experiments. So it's not surprising that Boch also became interested in Leary's ideas before they became mainstream. Indeed, in 1964, he got Shankar to do the music for a short film based on the psychedelic experience, which Shankar did as a favour of his friend, even though Shankar didn't approve of drug use. The film won an award in 1965, but quickly disappeared from circulation, as its ideas were too controversial.

the most effective method, because the language of the body, the language of the nervous system, is itself biochemical. Another form of direct energy which can produce the psychedelic experience is music. Energy vibrations artfully energized to take us into new dimensions of space, time, and identity. And heard introduced Bach to other ideas around, philosophy and non-Western religions. In particular, Bok became an advocate for a little-known Hindu mystic who had visited the US in 1959, teaching a new style of meditation, which he called transcendental meditation. A lot is unclear about the early life of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,

even his birth name. Both Maharishi and yogi are honorifics rather than names as such, though he later took on both as part of his official name, and in this and future episodes I'll refer to him as the Maharishi. What we do know is that he was born in India, and had attained a degree in physics before going off to study with Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, a teacher of the Advaita Vedanta School of Hinduism. Now, I am not a Hindu,

and have only a passing knowledge of Hindu theology and traditions, and from what I can gather, getting a proper understanding, requires a level of cultural understanding I don't have, and in particular a knowledge of the Sanskrit language. So my deepest apologies for any mangling I do of these beliefs in trying to talk about them, as they pertain to mid-60s psychedelic rock. I hope my ignorance is forgivable,

and seen as what it is rather than malice. But the teachings of this school, as I understand them, seem to centre around an idea of non-separation, that God is in all things and is all things, and that there is no separation between different things, and that you merely have to gain a deep realisation of this. The Maharishi later encapsulated this in the phrase, I am that, thou art that, all this is that,

which much later the Beach Boys, several of whom were followers of the Maharishi, would turn into a song. The other phrase they're singing there, J-Guru Dave, is also a phrase from the Maharishi, and refers to his teacher Brahmananda Saraswati. It means all hail the divine teacher, or glory to the heavenly one, and Guru Dave, or Guru Daver, was the name the Maharishi would use for Saraswati after his death,

as the Maharishi believed that Saraswati was an actual incarnation of God. It's that phrase that John Lennon is singing in Across the Universe as well, another song later inspired by the Maharishi's teachings. The Maharishi became, by his own account, Saraswati's closest disciple, advisor and right-hand man, and was privy to his innermost thoughts. However, on Saraswati's death, the leadership of the monastery he led became deeply contested, with two different rivals to the position, and the Maharishi was neither.

The rules of the monastery said that only people born into the Brahmin caste could reach the highest positions in the monastery's structure, and the Maharishi was not a Brahmin. So instead of remaining in the monastery, the Maharishi went out into the world to teach a new form of meditation which he claimed he had learned from Guru Dave, a technique which became known as transcendental meditation. The Maharishi would, for the rest of his life, always claimed that the system he taught was Guru Dave's teaching for the world, not his own, though the other people who had been at the mastery with him said different things about what Saraswati had taught. But of course it's perfectly possible for a spiritual leader to have had multiple ideas and given

different people different tasks. The crucial thing about the Maharishi's teaching, the teaching. The way it differed from everything else in the history of Hindu monasticism, as best I understand this, is that all previous teachers of meditation had taught that to get the benefit of the techniques one had to be a renunciate. You should go off and become a monk, and give up all worldly pleasures and devote your life to prayer and meditation. Traditionally, Hinduism has taught that there are four stages of life. The student, the householder or married person with a family, the retired person, and the Sanyasi or enunciate, but you could skip straight from being a student to being a sannyasi and spend your life

as a monk. The Maharishi, though, said, obviously enough, there are two ways of life, the way of the sanyasi and the way of life of a householder. One is quite opposed to the other. A sanyasi renounces everything of the world, whereas a householder needs and accumulates everything. The one realizes through renunciation and detachment, while the other goes through all attachments and accumulation of all that is needed for physical life. What the Maharishi taught was that there are some people who achieve the greatest state of happiness by giving up all the pleasures of the senses, eating the plainest possible food, having no sexual, familial or romantic connections with anyone else, and having no possessions. While there are other people who achieve the greatest state of

happiness by being really rich and having a lot of nice stuff and loads of friends, and generally enjoying the pleasures of the flesh, and that just as there are types of meditation that can help the first group reach enlightenment, there are also types of meditation that will fit into the latter kind of lifestyle, and will help those people reach oneness with God, but without having to give up their cars and houses and money. And indeed, he taught that by following his teachings, you could get more of those worldly pleasures. All you had to do, according to his teaching, was to sit still for 15 to 20 minutes, twice a day, and concentrate on a single Sanskrit word or phrase, a mantra, which you would be given after going through a short course of teaching.

There was nothing else to it, and you would eventually reach the same levels of enlightenment as the ascetics who spent 70 years living in a cave and eating only rice, and you'd end up richer, too. The appeal of this particular school is, of course, immediately apparent, and Bok became a big advocate of the Maharishi, and put out three albums of his lectures. Medification has the greatest healing power,

because it leads to greatest happiness. Meditation leads to greatest happiness of permanent order. It leads to kingdom of heaven. It leads to the glory of God. It leads to eternal bliss, happiness of greatest order and of permanent nature. Therefore, we hold. Meditation has the greatest healing power. Bock even met his second wife at one of the Maharishi's lectures in 1961.

In the early 60s, World Pacific got bought up by Liberty Records, the label for which Jan and Dean and others recorded. But Bach remained in charge of the label and expanded it, adding another subsidiary, Aura Records, to put out rock and roll singles. ORA was much less successful in the other World Pacific labels. The first record the label put out was a girl group record, Shoe Doobie by the Lewis sisters, two jazz-singing white school teachers from Michigan who would later go on to have a brief career at Motown.

The most successful act that Orr ever had was Sunny Knight, an R&B singer who had had a top 20 hit in 1956 with Confidential, a song he'd recorded on specialty records with Bumps Blackwell, and which had been written by Derinda Morgan. Sentimental Has a rose and moonlight My love for you will always be confidential to me

But night's biggest hit on ORA If You Want This Love Only made number 71 on the pop charts If you want this love of mine Treat me gentle Treat me kind Don't be mean and don't be begging that you is love that you ever had. If you want my lips to kiss, cuddle clothes and don't resist.

Loving you is all I crave and if you love. Knight would later go on to write a novel, the day the music died, which Greelmark has described as the bitterest book ever written about how rock and roll came to be. and what it turned into. Marcus said it was about how a rich version of American black culture is transformed into a horrible, enormously profitable white parody of itself,

as white labels sign black artists only to ensure their oblivion and keep those blacks they can't control penned up in the ghetto of the black charts. As white America, faced with something good, responds with a poison that will ultimately ruin even honest men. Given that night was the artist who did the best out of ORA records, that says a great deal about the label.

But one of the bands that Orra signed, who did absolutely nothing on the charts, was a group called Rick and the Ravens, led by a singer called Screaming Ray Daniels. They were an LA club band who played a mixture of the surf music which the audience has wanted, and covers of blues songs which Daniels preferred to sing.

They put out two singles on ORA, Henrietta, and Soul Train. Ray Daniels was a stage name. His birth name was Ray Manzarek, and he would later return to that name, and the core of the band was Ray on vocals and his brother's Rick on Guitar and Jim on Harmonica. Manzarek thought of himself as a pretty decent singer, but they were just a bar band,

and music wasn't really his ideal career. Manzarek had been sent to college by his solidly lower-middle-class Chicago family in the hope that he would become a lawyer, but after getting a degree in economics and a brief stint in the army, which he'd signed up for to avoid getting drafted in the same way people like Dean Torrance did.

He'd gone off to UCLA to study film, with the intention of becoming a filmmaker. His family had followed him to California, and he'd joined his brother's band as a way of making a little extra money on the side, rather than as a way to become a serious musician. Manzarek liked the blues songs they performed, and wasn't particularly keen on the surf music, but thought it was okay. What he really liked, though, was jazz.

He was a particular fan of McCoy Tyner, the pianist on all the great John Coltrane records. Manzarek was a piano player himself, though he didn't play much with the Ravens, and he wanted more than anything to be able to play like Tyner. And so when Rick and the Ravens got signed to Oara records, he of course became friendly with Dick Bock, who had produced so many great jazz records and worked with so many of the greats of the genre. But Manzarek was also having some problems in his life. He'd started taking LSD, which was still leaving.

and been fascinated by its effect, but worried that he couldn't control him. He couldn't tell whether he was going to have a good trip or a bad one. He was wondering if there was a way he could have the same kind of revelatory mystical experience, but in a more controlled manner. When he mentioned this to Bach, Boch told him that the best method he knew for doing that was Transcendental Meditation. Bach gave him a copy of one of the Maharishi's albums and told him to go to a lecture on Transcendental Meditation,

run by the head of the Maharishi's West Coast Organisation as by this point the Maharishi's organisation, known as Spiritual Regeneration, had an international infrastructure, though it was still nowhere near as big as it would soon become. At the lecture, Manzarek got talking to one of the other audience members, a younger man named John Densmore. Densmore had come to the lecture with his friend Robbie Krieger and both had come for the same reason that Manzarek had.

They'd been having bad trips and so had become a little disillusion. with acid. Krieger had been the one who'd heard about transcendental meditation while he was studying the sitar and sarod at UCLA, though Krieger would later always say that his real major had been in not joining the army. UCLA had one of the few courses in Indian music available in the US at the time, as thanks in part to Bok, California had become the centre of American interest in music from India, so much so that in 1967 Ravishankar would open up a branch of his own Kinara music school there. And you can get an idea of how difficult it is to separate fact from fiction when researching this episode that one of the biographies ever used for the doors says that Krieger heard about the

Maharishi while studying at the Canara School. As the only branch of the Canara School that was open at this point was in Mumbai, it's safe to say that unless Krieger had a really long commute, he wasn't studying there at this point. Denzmore and Manzarek got talking, and they found that they shared a lot of the same tastes in jazz. Just as Manzarek was a fan of McCoy Tyner, so Densmore was a fan of Elvin Jones, the drummer on those Coltrane records, and they both loved the interplay of the two musicians. Manzarek was starting to play a bit more keyboards with the Ravens, and he was also getting annoyed with the Ravens drummer, who had started missing rehearsals. He'd turn up only for the shows themselves. He thought it might be an idea

to get Densmore to join the group, and Densmore agreed to come along for a rehearsal. That initial rehearsal Densmore attended had Manzarek and his brother, and may have had a bass player named Patricia Hansen, who was playing with the group from time to time around this point, though she was mostly playing with a different bar band, Patty and the Esquires. But as well as the normal group members, there was someone else there, a friend of Manzarex from film school named Jim Morrison. Morrison was someone who, by Manzarek's later account, had been very close to Manzarek at university, and who Manzarek had regarded as a genius, with a vast knowledge of beat poetry in European art film,

but who had been regarded by most of the other students and the lecturers as being a disruptive influence. Morrison had been a fat, asthmatic, introverted kid. He'd had health problems as a child, including a bout of rheumatic fever which might have weakened his heart, and he'd also been prone to playing the kind of practical jokes which can often be a cover for deeper problems. For example, as a child he was apparently fond of playing dead,

lying in the corridors at school and being completely unresponsive for long periods no matter what anyone did to move him, then suddenly getting up and laughing at anyone who had been concerned and telling them it was a joke. Given how frequently Morrison would actually pass out in later life, often after having taken some substance or other, at least one biographer has suggested that he might have had undiagnosed epilepsy, or epilepsy that was diagnosed but which he chose to keep a secret,

and have been having absence seizures and covering for them with the jokes. Robbie Krieger also says in his own autobiography that he used to have the same doctor as Morrison, and the doctor once made an offhand comment about Morrison having severe health problems, as if it was common knowledge. His health difficulties, his weight, his introversion, and the experience of moving home constantly as a kid because of his father's career in the Navy, had combined to give him a different attitude to most of his fellow students, and in particular a feeling of fruitlessness. He never owned or even rented his own home in later years, just moving in with

friends or girlfriends, and a lack of a sense of his own identity, which would often lead to him making up lies about his life and acting as if he believed them. In particular, he would usually claim to friends that his parents were dead, or that he had no contact with them, even though his family have always said he was in at least semi-regular contact. At university, Morrison had been a big fan of Rick and the Ravens, and had gone to see them perform regularly. but would always disrupt the shows. He was, by all accounts, a lovely person when sober but an aggressive bore when drunk,

by shouting out for them to play Louis-Louis, a song they didn't include in their sets. Eventually, one of Ray's brothers had called his bluff and said they'd play the song, but only if Morrison got up on stage and sang it. He had, the first time he'd ever performed live, and had surprised everyone by being quite a good singer. After graduation, Morrison and Manzarek had gone their separate way,

with Morrison saying he was moving to New York. But a few weeks later they'd encountered each other on the beach. Morrison had decided to stay in L.A. and had been staying with a friend, mostly sleeping on the friend's rooftop. He'd been taking so much LSD he'd forgotten to eat for weeks at a time and had lost a great deal of weight,

and Manzarek properly realised for the first time that his friend was actually good-looking. Morrison also told Manzarek that he'd been writing songs. This was summer 1965, and the bird's version of Mr. Tambourine Man, Dillon's Like a Rolling Stone, and the Stone's satisfaction, had all shown him that there was potential for pop songs to have more interesting lyrical content than Louis-Louis. Manzarek asked him to sing some of the songs he'd been writing,

and as Manzarek later put it, he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the turkey joint, but in a Czech baker voice. The first song Morrison sang for Ray Manzarek was one of the songs that Rick and the Ravens would rehearse that first time with John Decker. Burnsmore, Moonlight Drive. The time, pin it to try the ocean. Manzarek invited Morrison to move in with him and his girlfriend. Manzarek seems to have thought of himself as a mentor, a father figure for Morrison,

though whether that's how Morrison thought of him is impossible to say. Manzarek, who had a habit of choosing the myth over the truth, would later claim that he had immediately decided that he and Morrison were going to be a duo and find a whole new set of musicians, but all the evidence points to him just inviting Morrison to join the Ravens as the singer. Certainly the first recordings this group made, a series of demos,

were under the Rick and the Ravens' name and paid for by Aura Records. They're all of songs written by Morrison, and seemed to be sung by Morrison and Manzarek in close harmony throughout. But the demos did not impress the head of Liberty records, which now owned ORA, and who saw no commercial potential in them,

even in one that later became a number one hit when we recorded a couple of years later. Although, to be fair, that song is clearly the work of a beginning songwriter, as Morrison has just taken the riff to all day and all of the night by the kinks and stuck new words to it. But it seems to have been the lack of success of these demos that convinced Manzarek's brothers and Patricia Hansen to quit the band. According to Manzarek, his brothers were not interested in what they saw as Morrison's pretensions towards poetry,

and didn't think this person who seemed shy and introverted in rehearsals, but who they otherwise knew as a loud, annoying drunk in the audience, would make a good frontman. So Rick and the Ravens were down to just Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, and John Densmore, but they continued shopping their demos around, and after being turned down by almost everyone, they were signed by Columbia Records. chords, specifically by Billy James, who they liked because he'd written the liner notes to a bird's album, comparing them to Coltrane, and Manzarek liked the idea of working with an A&R man who knew Coltrane's work, though he wasn't impressed by the birds themselves,

later writing, The birds were country, they didn't have any black in them at all, they couldn't play jazz, hell they probably didn't even know anything about jazz, there were folk rock for Christ's sake, country music, for whites only. Manzarek was white. They didn't get an advance from Columbia, but they did get free equipment. Columbia had just bought Vox, who made amplifiers and musical instruments, and Manzarek in particular was very pleased to have a Vox organ, the same kind that the animals and the Dave Clark 5 used, but they needed a guitarist and a bass player. Manzarek claimed in his autobiography that he was thinking along the lines of a four-piece group even before he met Densmoor, and that

his thoughts had been, someone has to be thumper and someone has to be Les Paul slash Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz and the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have

to make the music I heard in my head. But whatever Manzarek was thinking, there were only two people who auditioned for the role of the guitar player in this new version of the band, both of them friends of Densmore, and in fact two people who had been best friends since high school, Bill Wolf and Robbie Krieger.

Wolf and Krieger had both gone to private boarding school. They had both originally gone to normal state schools, but their parents had independently decided they were bad influences on each other and sent them away to boarding school to get away from each other, but accidentally sent them to the same school, and they had also learned guitar together. They had both loved a record of flamenco guitar called Dos Flamencoes by Jaime Grifo and Nino Marvino.

and they'd decided they were going to become the new Dose Flamencoes. They'd also regularly sneaked out of school to go and see a jug band called Mother MacRee's Uptown Jug Champions, a band which featured Bob Weir, who was also at their school, along with Jerry Garcia and Pig Penn McCurnan. Krieger was also a big fan of folk and blues music, especially bluesy folk revivalists like Spider John Kerner, and was a massive fan of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Creager and Densmore had known each other before Krieger had been transferred to boarding school and had met back up at university, where they would hang out together and go to see Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery and other jazz musicians.

At this time, Krieger had still been a folk and blues purist, but then he went to see Chuck Berry live, mostly because Skip James and Big Mama Thornton were also on the bill, and he had a damascene conversion. The next day he went to a music shop and traded in his acoustics, for a Red Gibson, as close to the one Chuck Berry played as he could find. Wolf, Densmore, Krieger, and piano player Grant Johnson, had formed a band called the Psychedelic Rangers. And when the Ravens were looking for a new guitarist, it was natural that they tried the two guitarists from Densmore's other band.

Krieger had the advantage over Wolf for two reasons, one of which was actually partly Wolf's doing. To quote Krieger's autobiography, a critic once said I had the worst hair in rock and roll, It stung pretty bad, but I can't say they were wrong. I always battled with my naturally frizzy, kinky dufo. So one day my friend Bill Wolf and I experimented with Ultrachene, a hair relaxer marketed mainly to black consumers. The results were remarkable. Wolf, as we all called him, said, You're starting to look like that jerk Brian McLean. According to Krieger, his new hairdo made him

better looking than Wolf, at least until the straightener war off, and this was one of the two things that made the group choose him over Wolf, who was a better technical player. The other was that Krieger played with a bottleneck, which astonished the other members. If you're unfamiliar with bottleneck playing, it's a common technique in the blues. You tune your guitar to an open chord

and then use a resonant tube. These days usually especially made metal slide that goes on your finger, but for all the blues musicians, often an actual neck of a bottle, broken off and filed down, to slide across the strings. slide guitar is one of the most important styles in blues,

especially electric blues, and you can hear it in the playing of greats like Elmore James. But while the members of the group all claim to be blues fans, Manzarek talks in his autobiography about going to see Muddy Waters in a club on the south side of Chicago, where he and his friends were the only white faces in the audience. None of them had any idea what bottleneck playing was. And Manzarek was worried when Krieger pulled it out

that he was going to use it as a weapon, that being the only association he had with bottlenecks. But once Krieger played with it, they were all convinced he had to be their guitarist, and Morrison said he wanted that sound on everything. Krieger joining seems to have changed the dynamic of the band enormously. Both Morrison and Densmore would independently refer to Krieger as their best friend in the band.

Manzarek said that having a best friend was a childish idea and he didn't have one. But where before, this had been Manzarek's band with Morrison as the singer, it quickly became a band centred around the creative collaboration between Krieger and Morrison. Krieger seems to have been too likable for Manzarek to dislike him, and indeed seems to have been the peacemaker in the band on many occasions. But Manzarek soon grew to resent Denzwar, seemingly as the closeness he had felt to Morrison started to diminish, especially after Morrison moved out of Manzarek's house, apparently because Manzarek was starting to remind him

of his father. The group soon changed their name from the Ravens to one inspired by Morrison's reading. Aldous Huxley's book on psychedelic drugs had been titled The Doors of Perception, and that title had in turn come from a quote from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, by the great mystic poet and artist William Blake, who had written, If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. Incidentally, in one of those weird coincidences that I like to note when they come up, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell had also inspired the book The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis,

about the divorce of Heaven and Hell, and both Lewis and Huxley died on the same date, the 22nd of November 1963, the same day John F. Kennedy died. Morrison decided that he wanted to rename the group The Doors, although none of the other group members were particularly keen on the idea. Krieger said that he thought they should name the group Perception. instead. Initially, the group rehearsed only songs written by Morrison, along with a few cover versions. They worked up a version of Willie Dixon's Back Door Man, originally recorded by Halle Mulf, and a version of Alabama song, a song written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Vile, from the opera at the

rise and fall of the city of Mahagony, with English language lyrics by Elizabeth Hauptmann. That song had originally been recorded by Lottie Lennier, and it was her version that the group based their version on. at the suggestion of Manzarek's girlfriend. Oh, don't ask why. We must find the next whiskey bar, for if we don't find the next whiskey bar, I tell you we must die,

I tell you we must die. I tell you, I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die. Though it's likely, given their tastes in jazz, that they were also aware of a recent recording of the song by Eric Dalfi and John Lewis. But Morrison started to get a little dissatisfied with the fact that he was writing all the group's original material at this point, and he started to put pressure on the others to bring in songs. One of the first things they had agreed was that all band members would get equal credit and shares of the songwriting, so that nobody would have an incentive to push their own mediocre song at the expense of someone else's great one,

but Morrison did want the others to start pulling their weight. As it would turn out, for the most part, Manzarek and Densmore wouldn't bring in many song ideas, but Krieger would, and the first one he brought in would be the song that would make them into stars. The song Krieger brought in was one he called Light My Fire, and at this point it only had one verse and a chorus. According to Manzarek, Densmore made fun of the song when it was initially brought in, saying, we're not a folk rock about it.

and suggesting that Krieger might try selling it to the mamas and the poppers, but the other band members liked it. But it's important to remember here that Manzarek and Densmore had huge grudges against each other for most of their lives, and that Manzarek is not generally known as an entirely reliable narrator. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about the influences that have been acknowledged for this song, but before I do, there's one that I haven't seen mentioned much, but which seems to me to be very likely to have been at least a subconscious influence.

She's Not There by The Zombies Now there Now there are several similarities to note about the Zombies record First, like the doors The zombies were a keyboard-driven band Second, there's the dynamics of the songs Both have soft, slightly jazzy verses

And then a more straight-ahead rock chorus And finally, there's the verse chord sequence. The verse for She's Not There goes from A minor to D repeatedly. While the verse for Like My Fire goes from A minor to F sharp minor. And for those who don't know, the notes in a D chord are D, F sharp and A. While the notes in an F sharp minor chord are F sharp, A and C sharp. They're very similar chords. So She's Not There is...

While Light My Fire is... At least, that's what Manzarek plays. According to Krieger, he played an Asos 2 chord rather than an A-minor chord, but Manzarek heard it as an A-minor and played that instead. Now, again, I've not seen anyone acknowledge she's not there as an influence, but given the other influences that they do acknowledge, and the music that was generally in the air at the time, it would not surprise me even the smallest amount if it was.

but either way, what Krieger brought in was a simple verse and chorus. Incidentally, I've been talking about the song as having A minor chords, but you'll actually hear the song in two different keys during this episode, even though it's the same performance throughout, and sometimes it might not sound right to people familiar with a particular version of the record. The band played the song with the verse starting with A minor, and that's how the mono single mix was released,

and I'll be using excerpts of that in general. But when the stereo version of the album was released, which had a longer instrumental break, the track was mastered about a semi-tone-too-slow, and that's what I'll be excerpting when talking about the solos. And apparently that speed discrepancy has been fixed in more recent remasterings of the album than the one I'm using. So if you know the song and bits of what I play sound odd to you,

that's why. Krieger didn't have a second verse, and so writing the second verse's lyrics was the next challenge. There was apparently some disagreement within the band about the lyrics that Morrison came up with, with their references to funeral pires, but Morrison won the day, insisting that the song needed some darkness to go with the light of the first verse. Both verses would get repeated at the end of the song in reverse order, rather than anyone writing a third or fourth verse. Morrison also changed the last line of the chorus. In Krieger's original version, he'd sung, Come on Baby Like My Fire three times.

but Morrison changed the last line to try to set the night on fire, which Krieger thought was a definite improvement. They then came up with an extended instrumental section for the band members to solo in. This was inspired by John Coltrane, though I have seen different people make different claims as to which particular Coltrane record it was inspired by. Many sources, including Krieger, say it was based on Coltrane's famous version of My Favorite Things.

But Manzarek, in his autobiography, says it was inspired by Olae. the track that Coltrane recorded with Eric Dolphy. Both are, of course, similar musical ideas, and either could have inspired the Light My Fire instrumental section, though none of the doors are anything like as good or inventive on their instruments as Coltrane's group. And of course, Light My Fire is in 4-4 rather than 3-4. So they had a basic verse-chorus song with a long instrumental jam session in the middle. Now comes the bit that there's some dispute over.

Both Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger agree that Manzarek came up with the melody used in the intro but differ wildly over who came up with the chord sequence for it and when and how it was put into the song. According to Manzarek, he came up with the whole thing as an intro for the song at that first rehearsal of it and instructed the other band members what to do. According to Krieger though, the story is rather different

and the evidence seems to be waited in Krieger's favour. In early life performances of the song, they started the song with the A minor to F sharp minor shifts that were used in the verse itself, and continued doing this even after the song was recorded. But they needed a way to get back out of the solo section and into the third verse. To do this, Krieger came up with a sequence that starts

with a change from G to D, then from D to A. before going into a circle of fifths. Not the ascending circle of fifths in songs like Hey Joe, but a descending one, the same sequences in she came in through the bathroom window, or I Will Survive, ending on an A-flat. To get from the A-flat to the A-minor or A-Sus-2 chord on which the verse starts,

he simply then shifted up a semitone from A-flat to A-major for two bars. Over the top of that chord sequence that Krieger had come up with, Manzarek put a melody line, which was inspired by one of Barck's two-part inventions. The one that's commonly cited is invention number eight in F major, BWV-779. Though I don't believe Manzarek has ever stated directly which piece he was inspired by, other than that it was one of the two-part inventions. And to be honest, none of them sound very much like what he plays to my ears. And I think more than anything, he was just going for a generalized Baroque style,

rather than anything more specific. And there are certainly stylistic things in there that are suggestive of the baroque, the stepwise movement, the sort of skipping triplets, and so on. But that was just to get out of the solo section and back into the verses. It was only when they finally took the song into the studio that Paul Rothschild, the producer who we'll talk about more later,

came up with the idea of giving the song more structure by both starting and ending with that sequence, and formalised it so that rather than just, general noodling, it was an integral part of the song. They now had at least one song that they thought had the potential to be a big hit. The problem was that they had not as yet played any gigs, and nor did they have a record deal, or a bass player. The lack of a record deal may sound surprising, but they were dropped by Columbia before ever recording for them. There are several different stories as to why. One biography I've read says that after they were signed, none of the label's

staff producers wanted to work with them, and so they were dropped, though that goes against some of the other things I've read, which say that Terry Melcher was interested in producing them. Other sources say that Morrison went in for a meeting with some of the company executives while on acid, came out very pleased with himself at how well he'd talked to them, because he'd been able to control their minds with his telepathic powers, and they were dropped shortly afterwards, and others say they were dropped as part of a larger set of cutbacks the company was making, and that while Billy James fought to keep them at Columbia, he lost the fight. Either way, they were stuck without a deal and without any proper gigs, though they

started picking up the odd private party here and there. Krieger's father was a wealthy aerospace engineer who did some work for Howard Hughes, among others, and he got his son's group booked to play a set of jazz standards at a corporate event for Hughes, and they got a few more gigs of that nature, though the Hughes gig didn't exactly go well. Manzarek was on acid, Krieger and Morrison were on speed, and the bass player they brought in for the game. gig managed to break two strings, something that would require an almost superhuman effort. That bass player didn't last long, and nor did the next. They tried several, but found that the addition of a bass player made them sound less interesting, more like the animals or the rolling

stones that are grouped with their own character. But they needed something to hold down the low part, and it couldn't be Manzarek on the organ, as the rock's organ had a muddy sound when he tried to play too many notes at once. But that problem solved itself, when they played one of their earliest gigs. There, Manzarek found that another band, who were regulars at the club, had left their Fender keyboard bass there, clipped to the top of the piano.

Manzarek tried playing that, and found he could play bass lines on that with his left hand and the main parts with his right hand. Krieger got his father to buy one for the group, though Manzarek was upset that they bought the wrong colour, and they were now able to perform without a bass player. Not only that, but it gave the group a distinctive sound quite unlike all the other bands.

Manzarek couldn't play busy bass lines while also playing lead lines with his right hand, and so he ended up going for simple lines without a great deal of movement, which added to the hypnotic feel of the group's music, though on record they would often be supplemented by a session bass player to give them a fuller sound. While the group was still trying to get a record deal,

they were also looking for regular gigs, and eventually they found one. The Sunset Strip was the place to be, and they wanted desperately to play one of the popular venues there, like the Whiskey A Go-Go. But those venues only employed bands who already had record deals. They did, though, manage to get a residency at a tiny, unpopular club on the strip, called The London Fog, and they played there, often to only a handful of people, while slowly building in confidence as performers.

At first, Morrison was so shy that Manzarek had to sing harmony with him throughout the sets, acting as joint frontman. Creager later said It's rarely talked about but Ray was an actual born showman and his act for stirring drama would serve the door's legacy well in later years but Morrison soon gained enough confidence

to sing by himself but they weren't bringing in any customers and the London fog told them that they were soon going to be dropped and the club itself shut not long after but luckily for the group just before the end of their booking the booker for the Whiskeyer-Gogo

Ronnie Harron walked in with a genuine pop star Peter Asher, who as half of Peter and Gordon had had a hit with A World Without Love, written by his sister's boyfriend, Paul McCartney. Haren was impressed with the group, and they were impressed that she had brought in a real celebrity. She offered them a residency at the club, not as the headlining act. That would always be a group that had records out, but as the consistent support act for whichever big act they had booked. The group agreed, after Morrison first tried to play it cool, and told Haram they would have to consider it,

to the consternation of his bandmates. They were thrilled, though, to discover that one of the first acts they supported at the whiskey would be them, Van Morrison's group. One of the cover versions they had been playing had been them's Gloria. They supported them for two weeks at the whiskey, and Jim Morrison watched Van Morrison intently. The two men had very similar personalities, according to the other members of the Doors,

and Morrison picked up a lot of his performing style from watching Van on stage every night. The last night then played the venue. Morrison joined them on stage for an extended version of Gloria, which everyone involved remembered as the highlight of their time there. Every major band on the LA scene played residences at the whiskey, and over the summer of 1966, the doors were the support act for the mothers of invention,

the birds, the turtles, the Buffalo Springfield, and Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. This was a time when the Sunset Street, was the centre of California musical life, before that sent a move to San Francisco, and the doors were right at the heart of it, though it wasn't all great. This was also the period when there were a series of riots around Sunset Strip,

as immortalised in the American International Pictures film Riot on Sunset Strip, and its theme song by The Standells. Just don't seem fair, too buggy because you got long hair, even the parents are begin. We'll look at those riots in more detail in a future episode, so I'll leave discussing them for now, but I just wanted to make sure they got mentioned.

That's Stan Dell's song, incidentally, was co-written by John Fleck, who under his old name of John Fleckenstein we saw last episode as the original bass player for Love, and it was Love who ensured that the Doors finally got the record deal they needed. The deal came at a perfect time for the doors, just like when they'd been picked up by the Whiskey A-Gogo, just as they were about to lose their job at the London Fog. So they got signed to a record deal, just as they were about to lose their job at the whiskey.

They lost that job because of a new song that Krieger and Morrison had written. The end had started out as Krieger's attempt at writing a Raga in the style of Ravi Shankar, and he had brought it into one of his increasingly frequent writing sessions with Morrison, where the two of them would work out songs without the rest of the band. and Morrison had added lyrics to it, lyrics that were partly inspired by his own thought relationship with his parents, and partly by Oedipus Rex. And he looked inside.

Father, yes, son, I want to kill you, mother! And in the live performance, Morrison had finished that phrase with the appropriate four-letter Edible payoff, much to the dismay of the owners of the Whiskey or Go-Go, who had told the group they would no longer be performing there. But three days before that, the group had signed a deal with Elektra records. Elektra had, for a long time, been a folk specialist label, but they had recently branched out into other music,

first with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a favourite of Robbie Krieger's, and then with their first real rock signing, Love. And Love were playing a residency at the Whiskey A-Gogo, and Arthur Lee had encouraged Jack Holtzman, the label's owner, to come and check out their support band, who he thought were definitely worth signing. The first time Haltzman saw them he was unimpressed. They sounded to him just like a bunch of other white blues bands,

but he trusted Arthur Lee's judgment and came back a couple more times. The third time, they performed their version of Alabama song, and everything clicked into place for Holtzman. He immediately signed the group to a three-album deal with an option to extend it to seven. The group were thrilled. Electra wasn't a major label like Columbia. but they were a label that nurtured artists and one that just tossed them aside.

They were even happier when soon after they signed to Electra, the label signed up a new head of West Coast A&R, Billy James, the man who had signed them to Columbia, and who they knew would be in their corner. Jack Holtzman also had the perfect producer for the group, though he needed a little persuading. Paul Rothschild had made his name as the producer for the first couple of albums by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

They were Robbie Krieger's favourite group, so it made sense to have Rothschild on that level. And while Rothschild had mostly worked in New York, he was in L.A. that summer, working on the debut album by another Elektra signing, Tim Buckley. The musicians on Buckley's album were almost all part of the same LA scene that the doors were part of. Other than Buckley's normal guitarist Lee Underwood,

there was keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, bass player Jim Fielder, who had had a brief stint in The Mothers of Invention and was about to join Buffalo Springfield, and drummer Billy Mundy, who was about to join the Mothers of Invention. And Buckley himself sang in a crooning voice extremely similar to that of Morrison,

though Buckley had a much larger range. Who used to call me names? Aren't you the girl who used to play games? Weren't you the one who used to run and hide? Now you're the one who's prying way inside. Oh, I know. There was one problem many times to me. There was one problem, though.

Rothschild didn't want to do it. He wasn't at all impressed with the band at first, and he wanted to sign a different band, managed by Albert Grossman instead. But Holtzman persuaded him because Rothschild owed him a favour. Rothschild had just spent several months in prison after a drug bust, and while he was inside, Holtzman had given his wife a job so she would have an income.

and Holtzman also did all the paperwork with Rothschild's parole officer to allow him to leave the state. So with great reluctance, Rothschild took the job, though he soon came to appreciate the group's music. He didn't appreciate their second session, though. The first day they tried recording a version of The End, but it hadn't worked. So on the second night they tried recording it again, but this time Morrison was on acid and behaving rather oddly. The final version of the End had to be cut together from two takes, and the reason is that at the point we heard earlier, Morrison was whirling around, thrashing about,

and knocked over a TV that the engineer, Bruce Botnick, had brought into the studio so he could watch the baseball game, which Manzarek later exaggerated to Morrison throwing the TV through the plate glass window between the studio and the control room. According to everyone else, Morrison just knocked it over and they picked it up after the take finished, and it still worked fine. but Morrison had taken a lot of acid and on the way home after the session

he became convinced that he had a psychic knowledge that the studio was on fire he got his girlfriend to turn the car back around drove back to the studio climbed over the fence saw the glowing red light bulbs in the studio became convinced that there were fires and sprayed the entire place with the fire extinguisher

before leaving convinced that he had saved the band's equipment and leaving telltale evidence as his boot got stuck in the fence on the way out and he just left it there. But despite that little hiccup, the sessions generally weren't well. And the group and label were pleased with the results. The first single released from the album,

Break on Through, didn't make the Hot 100. But when the album came out in January 1967, Elektra put all its resources behind the album and it started to get a bit of airplay as a result. In particular, one DJ on the new FM radio started playing Like My Fire. At this time, FM had only just started, and while AM radio stuck to three-minute singles for the most part, FM stations would play a wider variety of music.

Some of the AM DJs started telling Elektra that they would play the record too if it was the length of a normal single. And so Rothschild and Botnick went into the studio and edited the track down to half its previous seven and a half minute length. When the group were called in to hear the edit, they were initially quite excited to hear what kind of clever editing micro-surgery had been done to bring the song down to the required length,

but they were horrified when Rothschild actually played it for them. As far as the group was concerned, the heart of the song was the extended instrumental improvisation that took up the middle section. On the album version, that lasted over three minutes. Rothschild and Botnick cut that section down to just this. The group were mortified. What had been done to their song?

That wasn't the sound of people trying to be McCoy, Tyner and Alvin Jones. It was just a pop song. Rothschild explained that that was the point. To get the song played on IM radio and get the group a hit. He pointed out how the Beatles records never had an instrumental section that lasted more than eight bars, and the group eventually talked themselves round. after all, wasn't this really more subversive? You get the kids hooked with the pop single

and then they buy the album and the track is a whole other thing. It would blow the kids' minds. So they eventually agreed to let the track go out like that and it made number one on the charts. The doors were now a major success and they even got a slot on the Ed Sullivan show though that went badly for them. They were asked not to use the line

we couldn't get much higher because of the drug reference. And they agreed, but then Morrison either forgotten the excitement or deliberately ignored the request, depending on who you ask. According to Manzarek, this led to a massive confrontation with the producers after the show, though Krieger denies any confrontation happened, and says, The way Ray told stories, I'm surprised his version didn't end with the strutting in slow motion down Broadway while the CBS studios exploded in the background.

Whatever the truth, they weren't invited back on the Ed Sullivan show again, but that didn't matter. The Doors had had their first number one hit, they had a charismatic lead singer, and they were about to put out their second album. But as we'll see the next time we look at the doors, what you find when you can't get much higher is that the only way to go is down.

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