Did The Doors rip off The Kinks?
The 1960s was awash with iconic rock groups. The rock and roll boom of the 1950s paved the way for groups like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who to completely reinvent the face of popular music. Among the plethora of rock groups that shot the decade into legendary status, two of the biggest names are The Kinks and The Doors, two disparate groups who have a shared and tumultuous history.
Formed in the swinging city of London back in 1963, The Kinks quickly became one of rock’s most popular outfits. Particularly noted for their pioneering use of distorted – achieved by slicing guitar amplifiers with a razor – the Ray Davies fronted group were hugely influential, both on the mod-rock scene of the 1960s as well as the punk rock revolution of the decade which followed.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, The Doors had formed two years following Davies and co, eventually becoming one of America’s defining rock outfits. Having an invaluable place in establishing psychedelic rock music, The Doors and frontman Jim Morrison were nothing short of iconic. Despite the utter songwriting genius of Morrison, one certain track found the band in hot water, particularly with London’s finest rock and rollers, The Kinks.
For their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun, The Doors penned ‘Hello, I Love You’, which provided the psychedelic outfit with a number one single in the US. The song is a fairly strange one for The Doors. Its lyrics are fairly substanceless, and the track as a whole is strangely commercial for the countercultural icons. The controversy of the piece, however, arose not from its style but from its guitar riff.
The riff, played by Robby Krieger, was a direct rip-off of The Kinks’ seminal single ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Released in 1964, a full four years prior to The Doors’ effort, the song reached the heights of number two in the UK singles charts, even providing the distinctly English group with a number seven hit in the US, too. Inarguably one of their defining works, it was certainly a bold move for The Doors to lift the riff.
Davies’ was informed of The Doors’ plagiarism of his track while on tour. Recounting the tale to Mojo in 2012, the legendary songwriter shared, “I said rather than sue them, can we just get them to own up? My publisher said, ‘They have. That’s why we should sue them!’ Jim Morrison admitted it, which, to me, was the most important thing. The most important thing, actually, is to take [the idea] somewhere else.”
While many groups of the punk era borrowed riffs from The Kinks with little fuss, the result of this particular case of musical plagiarism was that The Doors were ordered by a UK court to pay royalties to The Kinks, as well as listing the group as songwriters for ‘Hello, I Love You’.
