The previously discarded Jim Morrison lyric that helped save The Doors’ third album
The “sophomore jinx” is the more familiar pitfall that new bands hope to avoid after a breakout success, but in 1967, The Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger was more concerned about “third album syndrome”.
Krieger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore, and frontman Jim Morrison had already managed to avoid a follow-up flop earlier that year when their second LP, Strange Days, reached number three on the US charts.
As the band reconvened at Sunset Sound studios in the late autumn of ‘67, though, they knew they’d already recorded just about all of the best songs they’d written in the hyper-creative lead-up to their self-titled debut. Most of Morrison’s batches of lyrical poetry from 1965 and ‘66 had been thoroughly examined and either utilised or tossed aside, leaving the band to ponder a very different approach for the album that would become Waiting for the Sun.
While side A of the record would include a handful of songs in a somewhat familiar style to their previous work, side B would entirely consist of an ambitious “suite” called ‘Celebration of the Lizard’, a partially spoken-word art piece based on a jam session the band had started incorporating into their gigs at the time. That idea was quickly abandoned, however, partially as a result of Morrison’s drinking problems and unreliability. This left the rest of the band in a bit of a pickle.
“Usually a group will have enough songs in their repertoire to record one or maybe two albums,” Krieger said in the 1987 band bio, The Doors. “Then what will happen is they go on tour and they don’t have time to write any more stuff. By the third album you find yourself trying to write stuff in the studio and it shows.”
This was the aforementioned “third album syndrome” beginning to rear its head, and in combination with Morrison’s struggles, it was causing a small panic, leading Densmore to throw his sticks across the room at one point and threaten to quit the band. “I was just frustrated,” he later said. “Maybe I was trying to say to Jim, ‘don’t be so self-destructive.’”
Eventually, in a state of desperation, Densmore, Krieger, and Manzarek decided to revisit some of Morrison’s unused lyrics when he wasn’t around, particularly some of the material he’d written when he was living in Venice with Manzarek after graduating from UCLA. This brought them around to ‘Hello, I Love You,’ a song idea they’d kicked around in the past and shelved.
Morrison wrote the words, supposedly, as an ode to a girl he’d seen walking on the beach. “I think the music came to my mind first and then I made up words to hang onto the melody,” he recalled, as quoted in the 1980 Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive. “I could hear it and since I had no way of writing it down musically, the only way I could remember it was to try and get words to put to it.”
There’s a reason those words hadn’t made it to a record yet, as they weren’t Morrison’s best: “She holds her head so high / Like a statue in the sky / Her arms are wicked and her legs are long / When she moves, my brain screams out this song.”
As Morrison admitted, writing place-holder lyrics for melodic reasons didn’t tend to work anyway, as you’d usually wind up with “just the words” in a notebook, because you “couldn’t remember the melody” after some time passed. That’s exactly what happened with ‘Hello, I Love You’, which did at least leave the rest of the Doors some wiggle room to melodically re-engineer the song into, perhaps, a worthwhile single in its second incarnation.
This time around, Krieger instructed Densmore to go for a ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ sort of beat, referring to the recent hit by Cream. Krieger’s own guitar lick, however, reminded a lot more people of the Kinks’ ‘All Day and All of the Night’, including Ray Davies himself, who ended up collecting the majority of the royalties that the song earned in the UK.
Even so, ‘Hello, I Love You’ still managed to get the Doors out of a bind, becoming the lead-off track on Waiting for the Sun and one of the band’s biggest-ever hits, reaching number one in 1968. The dreaded “third album syndrome” had, by most measures, been avoided.
