“I hate that song”: The song The Doors always regretted
It wasn’t easy for Los Angeles acid rock outfit The Doors. Right from 1967’s eponymous debut, the standard they’d set for themselves was sky high, boasting canonical West Coast cuts like ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Break On Through (to the Other Side)’.
From the word go, they had ensured themselves as the eternal soundtrack of the turbulent 1960s whenever stock rolling footage of Vietnam, the Altamont disaster, or the general death of the hippy idyll is required on any given documentary—nudged to a close second place by The Rolling Stones’ ‘Gimme Shelter’.
The curse of the blinding debut had tainted future releases. The Doors had captured such a magic synergy and poetic transcendence the formula had been perfected, which all later LPs were inescapably judged by, despite a run of albums that boasts some of the finest psychedelic garage rock of the era.
While follow-up Strange Days rounded off the material they still had knocking about from their live sets, 1968’s Waiting for the Sun was the first LP to demand a host of new compositions—aside from the album’s second single ‘Hello, I Love You’ which was one of the last sketches from frontman Jim Morrison’s 1965 lyrical notebook.
Guitarist Robby Krieger has spoken candidly about his relationship with The Doors’ legacy. Speaking to Vulture in 2021, Krieger confessed the one track they didn’t quite get right. “There’s a couple that I’m not crazy about, but the one that I never really got was ‘My Wild Love’,” he confessed.
He added: “‘My wild love went riding / She rode all the day’. It had a bunch of us doing background vocals. We were doing tambourines and stuff. It’s kind of like a chant more than a song. It just didn’t sound like The Doors to me. I never really liked it. Funny enough, one day our bodyguard said, ‘Hey, you know my favourite Doors song? ‘My Wild Love”. So I responded, ‘Oh shit, man, I hate that song'”.
It does feel a little undercooked, like a scratch piece in need of one or two extra instruments to breathe in more life. But it’s charged with special Doors energy, a dusky desert wander as the LSD’s starting to wane and you stagger back into the Earthly realm. It’s a number that would have oozed pretension in a lesser band’s hands, but Morrison’s mage-like ability to rifle through Americana’s cultural grab bag and sing the songs of old with authority does ‘My Wild Love’ a greater service than Krieger gives credit for.
Waiting for the Sun was their biggest hit yet, their only album to top the Billboard 200. But for Krieger, The Doors’ third LP holds extra sentimental affection, crediting ‘Yes, the River Knows’ as the track that most remind him of the late keyboardist Ray Manzarek: “I think John got lost, or something, because he got hypnotised by Ray playing. He was just waiting forever to come in. It took him two minutes when it usually took 30 seconds”.
