100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Break on Through (To the Other Side)

02 Soul Kitchen

03 The Crystal Ship

04 Twentieth Century Fox

05 Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

06 Light My Fire

07 Back Door Man

08 I Looked at You

09 End of the Night

10 Take It as It Comes

11 The End

On the evening of 26 August 1966 the Doors nervously assembled to record their first album at Sunset Sound Recorders. They could not have imagined what a fuss that record would cause. ‘On the first album, Elektra didn’t want to spend much,’ said Jim Morrison. ‘Some of the songs [on The Doors] took only a few takes.’ The Doors were not even the most popular band on the Sunset Strip at the time. Columbia records had already signed and dropped them. Caution was warranted.

Essentially the Doors’ debut was based on their live act. Ray Manzarek on keyboards, Robby Krieger on guitar and drummer John Densmore came from jazz and R&B backgrounds but meshed together for a sound that had a sleazy undertow but flashy filigree. They agreed that a bass player would make them sound like the Animals or a million other bands so they eschewed bass (session man Larry Knechtel does play on some of these tracks). Their wild card in every sense of that phrase was Jim Morrison who was sexy and unpredictable, had the mind of a poet and the best rock & roll voice since Elvis Presley.

And the songs were something else. Their first hit single was ‘Light My Fire’, a song by Krieger. ‘Up until then the Doors were doing three-chord type songs that were pretty simple like “I Looked at You” or “End of The Night”. I wanted to write something more adventurous,’ says the guitarist. ‘I decided I was going to put every chord I knew into this song and did! There’s about 14 different chords in there. We said, Let’s do it like Coltrane, A minor to B minor like he did on “My Favourite Things”. As we played it over the next year the solos got longer and longer. It was very organic.’

The Doors were careful about showing their influences. Morrison, like every other poet on the Strip, dropped the names of the Beats and French writers. For the album they chose to cover Brecht and Weill’s ‘Alabama Song’ and also Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Back Door Man’, representing the heart and the head of rock music.

The album opens with ‘Break on Through’ which was Jim Morrison’s roadmap to the palace of wisdom via the road of excess.

According to producer Paul Rothschild there was some LSD consumption during the sessions and this song certainly fits with the contemporary psychedelic ideology.

Most striking and memorable was ‘The End’, a long improvisation around a poem by Morrison that gets into the head of a madman who kills his family and rapes his mother. Who knows where the inspiration came from? Whether Morrison was picking up on the speed freak vibes on the mean streets of Los Angeles or whether he had really seen into the zeitgeist and could tell that horrors like the Manson family were coming down the line, we’ll never know. In any case, it’s a tour-deforce performance, done in two takes.

As producer Rothschild recounts: ‘We were about six minutes into it when I turned to Bruce [Botnick, the engineer] and said “Do you understand what’s happening here? This is one of the most important moments in recorded rock & roll”. When it was done, I had goose bumps from head to toe.’

The combination of Krieger’s complex pop masterpiece ‘Light My Fire’ and the dark weirdness of ‘The End’ considerably expanded the parameters of what a rock album could do and it set up the Doors for the strange days ahead. As Morrison claimed, ‘maybe you could call us erotic politicians. We’re a rock & roll band, a blues band, just a band … but that’s not all.’