The song Robby Krieger wanted The Doors to be remembered for: “The song seems to remain timeless”
“The centre was not holding,” Joan Didion declared of San Francisco’s summer of love in 1967, in her groundbreaking essay chronicling the counterculture, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
Adding, “San Francisco was where the social haemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies’.”
In pursuit of the truth behind the rose-tinted idealism of the era’s youth culture, Didion probed at the heart of the United States’ failings, a country torn by bankruptcy, missing persons, crime and murder. In turn, she uncovered the insular California neighbourhood of Haight-Ashbury and its drug-induced inhabitants, revealing that while the hippie ideology may have persisted in popular culture, its origins were crumbling. As the movement’s pure intentions were slowly being tarnished, The Doors emerged with an esoteric offering.
Under the poetic reign of their charismatic hedonist of a lead singer, Jim Morrison, The Doors were a radicalisation of the hippie persona. In place of daydreamy lyrics and sun-soaked melodies, The Doors were provocative, openly questioning the notion of “peace and love” in favour of something deeper that lay beneath the surface.
They adopted their name from the title of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, which was taken from William Blake, centred on the line, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite.”
As Didion, a professed fan, wrote of The Doors in her essay The White Album, “The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood, and the Kama Sutra. The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein salvation,” declaring the band to be “missionaries of apocalyptic sex”
The power weaved within The Doors’ poetry was solidified early in their career, with their second single, ‘Light My Fire’, released on April 24th, 1967. While perhaps best immortalised in the band’s infamous performance on The Ed Sullivan Show that year, in which Morrison refused to change the line, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” and got his group subsequently banned from the show, ‘Light My Fire’ was, in fact, first composed in 1966 by guitarist Robby Krieger. He deems the seven-minute song the one he hopes to be remembered by.
“I feel that ‘Light My Fire’ encapsulates the feel of the 1967 Summer of Love,” Krieger asserted to Guitar World in 2002. “Being in San Francisco or anywhere in California that summer seemed to be the beginning of a whole new way of life.”
The Los Angeles-based Doors found themselves at the cultural epicentre and, in spite of the movement’s instability, they forged a sound that would preserve its intention while exposing the multifaceted nature of life, death and everything in between. At the suggestion of Morrison, who, then, had been the band’s principal writer, Krieger penned the beginnings of ‘Light My Fire’, the first song he’d ever written, inspired by the prolific jazz stylings of John Coltrane.
“My long, modal solo in this song was done over the same two chords John Coltrane soloed over on his version of ‘My Favourite Things’ – A minor and B minor,” he explains, and he brought his composition to The Doors’ next rehearsal, to which Morrison wrote the second verse and a portion of its chorus.
“The time to hesitate is through,” he declares, “no time to wallow in the mire”, comparing love to a funeral pyre and setting the night ablaze, ‘Light My Fire’ grows from a suggestive spark into an urgent call for chaos, brazenly brought to life by Krieger’s dizzying chord structures.
“‘Light My Fire’ helped light a fire for a new generation and opened people’s minds to a new vision,” Krieger declares. Now, nearly six decades later, as the guitarist believes, “the song seems to remain timeless.”
