‘Light My Fire’: How The Doors ripped off The Kinks for their biggest hit
The Doors were one of the greatest American bands of all time, but were they also the greatest cons?
Let’s get one thing straight: nothing can ever diminish the power of their songs, their reckoning to the British invasion, and the sheer effervescence of a frontman like Jim Morrison. Put simply, there’s no one who could do it better. But even still, there’s no escaping the fact that this was a band whose very orbit of success spun on the axis of stealing other people’s ideas.
Take the example of the band’s 1968 chart-topper ‘Hello, I Love You’: iconic in many ways, but not least for the brass neck exhibited when Morrison freely admitted that the song was a rip-off of The Kinks’ ‘All Day and All of the Night’. Even Ray Davies himself couldn’t help but be stunned into submission.
“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?’” the frontman recalled in 2013. “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.”
All of this is to say that there is a certain level of precedent when it comes to The Doors flagrantly passing off other musicians’ tunes as their own, so it didn’t particularly come as any huge shock when the band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, admitted to the very same act of theft in another of their most famous songs.
Everything about ‘Light My Fire’ symbolised a world afoot with change. It was the turning of a landscape into the swirling tones of psychedelia, the beginning of a countercultural resistance, and the uprising of a group who would dominate it all. Yet they would have been nothing had Fats Domino not laid the groundwork first.
This was something that Manzarek freely confessed in later years, proving that the melody of the classic rocker’s 1956 standard ‘Blueberry Hill’ transformed into the bassline of ‘Light My Fire’. “Thank you, Fats!”, he proudly proclaimed, with seemingly not a care in the world that this admission could, indeed, come back to bite him.
It was the mark of a truly different time, because if a confession like that were to be so brazenly made today, without any of the necessary compensation, there’s only one legal route it is ever going to go down. The evolution of rock and roll was different – maybe not in the spirit of stealing, but in the sense that each song was as reverential as the next.
Well, that might have been the excuse Manzarek and the rest of The Doors would have given you, regardless of whether it actually transpired to be true or not. They may have been cons, but the charming and pioneering type that changed the rock and roll scene forever. Somehow, they can get away with that.
