tracks on LP: 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
Record label: Elektra EKS-74007
Released: 04/01/67
Purchased: 1982
The Doors is the debut studio album by the American rock band the Doors, released on January 4, 1967, by Elektra Records. Recorded in August 1966 at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, California, the album was produced by Paul A. Rothchild. It contains the full-length version of the group’s breakthrough single “Light My Fire” and concludes with “The End”, noted for its improvised Oedipal spoken-word section.
The Doors developed much of the material for their debut during live performances in 1966, particularly at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles. After being dismissed from the venue, they signed with Elektra and began recording sessions. Musically, the album incorporates a wide range of styles, including jazz, blues, classical, pop, and R&B, all anchored in a rock foundation. The Doors has since been recognized as a landmark of psychedelic rock and one of the most influential albums of the 1960s, inspiring numerous subsequent artists and recordings.
The album was a commercial and critical success, establishing the Doors as a leading rock act of their era. Widely considered one of the greatest albums in rock history, The Doors has also been consistently ranked among the greatest albums of all time by various publications, including the BBC and Rolling Stone.
The Doors’ final line-up was formed in mid-1965 after keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s two brothers Rick and Jim ‘Manczarek’ left Rick & the Ravens, whose members included besides Manzarek, jazz-influenced drummer John Densmore and then-novice vocalist Jim Morrison. The group’s four man membership was established when guitarist Robby Krieger agreed to join.
The Doors | The Doors (first LP) | (Elektra) 1967
Though he had previous experience playing folk and flamenco, Krieger had only been playing the electric guitar for a few months when he was invited to become a member of the band, soon renamed the Doors. They were initially signed to Columbia Records under a six-month contract, but they asked for an early release after the record company failed to secure a producer for the album and placed them on a drop list.
Following their release from the label, the Doors played residencies in mid-1966 at two historic Sunset Strip club venues, the London Fog and Whisky a Go Go. They were spotted at the Whisky a Go Go by Elektra Records president Jac Holzman, who was present at the suggestion of Love singer Arthur Lee. After he saw two sets, Holzman called producer Paul A. Rothchild to see the group. On August 18, after attending several appearances of the band, Holzman and Rothchild ultimately signed them to Elektra Records.
The Doors continued performing at the Whisky until on August 21, when they were fired due to their performance of “The End” on which Morrison improvised a retelling section of Oedipus Rex.
The Doors was recorded by producer Paul A. Rothchild and audio engineer Bruce Botnick at Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood, California, over about a week in late August 1966. “Indian Summer” and “Moonlight Drive” were the first rehearsal outtakes of the album, while the first recorded songs that appeared on the album being “I Looked At You” and “Take It As It Comes”.
The Doors | The Doors (first LP) | (Elektra) 1967
A four-track tape machine was used at the cost of approximately $10,000. Three of the tracks were utilized as: bass and drums on one, guitar and organ on another, and Morrison’s vocals on the third. The fourth track was used for overdubbing.
The album’s instrumentation includes keyboards, electric guitar, occasional bass guitar, drums, and marxophone (on “Alabama Song”). Rothchild had forbidden Krieger from using any of his guitar effects (particularly the wah wah pedal) on the record in order to avoid what Rothchild thought was the overuse of these devices. However, the studio was equipped with an echo chamber which gave that specific effect to the sound.
Ray Manzarek, explaining the bass-overdubs, said:
. . . on some of the songs we brought in an actual bass player, one of the Los Angeles cats, Larry Knechtel, who played the same bass line that I played on “Light My Fire.” He doubled my bass line.
According to Botnick, “What you hear on the first album is what they did live. It wasn’t just playing the song–it transcended that.” Session musician Larry Knechtel and Krieger overdubbed bass guitar on several tracks in order to give some “punch” to the sound of Manzarek’s keyboard bass. Morrison explained in 1969, “We started almost immediately, and some of the songs took only a few takes. We’d do several takes just to make sure we couldn’t do a better one.” For “The End” and “Light My Fire”, two takes were edited together to achieve the final recording.
The album was mixed and completed in October 1966. Although “Indian Summer” was recorded during the sessions and thought was given to including it as the final track, it was eventually replaced with “The End”.
The Doors features many of the group’s most famous compositions, including “Light My Fire”, “Break On Through (To the Other Side)”, and “The End”. In 1969, Morrison stated:
Every time I hear “The End”, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song . . . Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don’t know. I think it’s sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.
Interviewed by Lizze James, he pointed out the meaning of the verse “My only friend, the end”:
Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate . . . That doesn’t make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It’s strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend.
The Doors | The Doors (first LP) | (Elektra) 1967
“Break On Through (To the Other Side)” was released as the group’s first single but it was relatively unsuccessful, peaking at No. 104 in Cash Box and No. 126 in Billboard. Elektra Records edited the line “she gets high”, knowing a drug reference would discourage airplay (many releases have the original portions of both “Break On Through” and “The End” edited).
The song is in 4/4 time and quite fast-paced, starting with Densmore’s bossa nova drum groove in which a clave pattern is played as a rim click underneath a driving ride cymbal pattern. Densmore appreciated the new bossa nova craze coming from Brazil, so he decided to use it in the song. Robby Krieger has stated that he took the idea for the guitar riff from Paul Butterfield’s version of the song “Shake Your Moneymaker” (originally by blues guitarist Elmore James). Later, a disjointed quirky organ solo is played quite similar to the introduction of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say”.
The Doors’ breakout hit “Light My Fire” was primarily composed by Krieger. Although the album version was just over seven minutes long, it was widely requested for radio play, so a single version was edited to under three minutes with nearly all the instrumental break removed for airplay on AM radio. Krieger has claimed that it was Morrison who encouraged the others to write songs when they realized they did not have enough original material. He recalled that Morrison had suggested to him to write “about something universal.”
Additionally, Morrison wrote “Take It As It Comes”, which is thought to be a “tribute to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi”. It came from one of his observations on Maharishi’s meditation classes, which Morrison wasn’t initially studying contrary to the other group members, but was later convinced by them to attend. Manzarek’s organ solo on the song was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach. The lyrics to “Twentieth Century Fox” refer to either Manzarek’s wife Dorothy Fujikawa or Morrison’s girlfriend Pamela Courson.
The Doors also contains two cover songs: “Alabama Song” and “Back Door Man”. “Alabama Song” was written and composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill in 1927, for their opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). The melody is changed and the verse beginning “Show me the way to the next little dollar” is omitted. On the album version, Morrison altered the second verse from “Show us the way to the next pretty boy” to “Show me the way to the next little girl”, but on the 1967 Live at the Matrix recording, he sings the original “next pretty boy”. A notable peculiarity of the band’s version is the unusual use of the marxophone. The Chicago blues “Back Door Man” was written by Willie Dixon and originally recorded by Howlin’ Wolf.
The Doors | The Doors (first LP) | (Elektra) 1967
The Doors was released on January 4, 1967, by Elektra Records. Jac Holzman originally intended to release the record in November 1966, but after a negotiation with the band, he decided to postpone the release to the new year, as he felt it was the appropriate time for better album sales.
For the album’s cover, Joel Brodsky was hired to provide a photo of the group, which later received a Grammy nomination. Holzman also suggested an association with Billboard magazine for the album’s advertisement by promoting the record with “hoarding”, a novel concept which was made popular later on. It was promoted with the slogan “Break On Through With An Electrifying Album”. The Doors were the first rock band to use this advertising medium.
The Doors made a steady climb up the Billboard 200, ultimately becoming a huge success in the US once the edited single version of “Light My Fire” scaled the charts to become No. 1, with the album peaking at No. 2 on the chart in September 1967 (kept off the top spot by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) and going on to achieve multi-platinum status.
In Europe the band would have to wait slightly longer for similar recognition, with “Light My Fire” originally stalling at No. 49 in the UK singles chart and the album failing to chart at all; however, in 1991, buoyed by the high-profile Oliver Stone film The Doors, a reissue of “Light My Fire” reached No. 7 in the singles chart, and the album reached No. 43.
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