The riff that The Doors ripped off for their greatest number one: “We should sue them!”
When one artist accuses another of ripping off their song, it often ends in a courtroom, but not when Jim Morrison from The Doors was around. The man even had the brass neck to admit it.
Indeed, by the time ‘Hello, I Love You’ eventually got released as a single in June 1968, it had been more than three years since Morrison had seen a girl walking down Venice Beach and wrote the tune. In a trajectory of success that was so bold but equally so fleeting, that meant there was a massive gulf of time for The Doors to completely change.
As such, even though the song went to the top of the charts and subsequently became the band’s second and final number one, it has been roundly dismissed over the years by Doors diehards, who claim that it’s too shallow and basic to ever reflect the textural genius of what they really were.
But here’s the real kicker: Morrison might actually have agreed with that assessment, however harsh. On top of that, he would have likely added fuel to the fire even more by proudly proclaiming that ‘Hello, I Love You’ was never actually work from his own fair hand in the first place. It was simply ripping off other people.
Quite brazenly, this was something that the frontman readily admitted to, leaving the lawyers of the world reeling, and the fleeced artists themselves even more flummoxed. In many ways, there was just no point in hiding it – Morrison stole the riff completely in plain sight, not from some small, poor, defenceless band, but from one of the most mammoth to ever exist.
It was certainly a go big or go home move when he decided to rip off ‘All Day and All Of The Night’ by The Kinks in pursuit of one of his greatest hits. But, of course, it was also the mark of the man that he managed to get away with it unscathed, simply for remaining his purely unapologetic self through it all.
That was something that even took Ray Davies by surprise when he was informed of the theft. As he recalled in 2013: “The funniest thing was when my publisher came to me on tour and said The Doors had used the riff for ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ for ‘Hello, I Love You’, I said, ‘Rather than sue them, can’t 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.”
If there’s nothing else that we’ve learned, it would be to never allow Davies to stand up against a hardened criminal, because he would just let them get away with it, as proven in this case. It’s clear that he obviously wasn’t in need of the fat cheque he inevitably would have won if he were to hold Morrison and Co up against the wall.
Yet as Morrison careered through life like a cannonball, leaving that effervescent, illustrious, and always slightly enigmatic trail in his wake, it emerged that there was probably very little room for him to waste time and start getting hung up on the small stuff. His policy was that if you own up to the crime, magically it all disappears – and somehow, that actually worked.
