The 1967 song by The Doors that Jim Morrison detested: “”F**k your mother”
For every idealistic dream of the summer of love and hippie counterculture, there is usually a far darker and uglier side.
For every flower power moment, there is dirt under your fingernails, and for every enlightening and ground-shaking anthem, there is a singer who absolutely hated it. This is not only the duality of pop music creation but of life itself. All that and more is compounded within The Doors’ euphoric song ‘Light My Fire’.
The song is largely regarded as one of the band’s finest pieces of pop music, and it arrived at a time when the entire of the world was beginning to let its hair down. However, the tune did not sit well with the singer of the track, Jim Morrison, who largely detested the tune.
Released in 1967, amid the burgeoning hippie scene in San Francisco, it provided a powerful reminder of the art at the heart of the new counterculture movement. Propelled by the aggressive and confounding lyricism of Jim Morrison (quite possibly the only true heir to the throne of generational poster boy), the track has become a landmark moment in musical history. And, yep, you guessed it, Morrison hated it.
Truth be told, it’s not unusual for a songwriter to fall out with their own work. Just ask Radiohead’s Thom Yorke about ‘Creep’ or Kurt Cobain about ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Both artists eventually grew to resent their biggest singles, largely because of how enormous they became, leaving the original intention behind and taking on a life of their own. What makes Morrison’s disgust for this song especially strange, however, is that it arguably captured the essence of the band more clearly than anything they released before or since.
At the heart of the track is a lustful, youthful wail. It’s a hedonist’s dream that seems to reduce the complexities of love, life and the human condition to something as simple as striking a match. Poetic and powerful at almost every turn, ‘Light My Fire’ quickly found an audience and became a sly anthem of rebellion. The song surges forward on its bassline and has a way of making listeners tap their feet whenever it plays. There’s something almost shamanic about the sway it inspires. Yet the song itself began in the simplest possible way, with its basic musical elements.
Robby Krieger was the main man behind the song, and he recalled to Uncut how the traditional elements of fire, air, earth and water had inspired his pen: “I was living with my parents in Pacific Palisades – I had my amp and SG. I asked Jim, what should I write about? He said, ‘Something universal, which won’t disappear two years from now. Something that people can interpret themselves.’ I said to myself I’d write about the four elements; earth, air, fire, water; I picked fire, as I loved the Stones song, ‘Play With Fire,’ and that’s how that came about.”
With a melody in mind and a folk slant on the song’s procession, Kreiger took the track back to The Doors’ “communal mind”, where the band would paw over the song and make some amends. When Morrison wrote the second verse of the track, including the infamous line “our love become a funeral pyre”, the song kicked into gear. Ray Manzarek would provide an organ lick like no other, allowing John Densmore’s pounding rhythm to come to the fore. It would be released on September 17th, 1967, as the autumn fell over the summer of love and reached number one in the charts.
At the time, the song sounded like a door being kicked open. Radio was still largely ruled by neat two-minute pop tunes, yet The Doors arrived with a sprawling track that drifted through jazz-tinged organ passages, psychedelic poetry and a hypnotic groove that refused to fucking behave. For many listeners, it was their first real taste of what the counterculture actually sounded like once it escaped the coffee houses and found its way onto the airwaves.
But popularity does not always breed esteem, and almost as quickly as the song became a huge hit, it became a bugbear for the band’s singer. Morrison allegedly indicated in his personal notebooks that he didn’t care for the song at all and absolutely hated performing it, something which was backed up when one unlucky fan requested the track during a fateful performance.
Morrison’s best friend, January Jansen, has noted several different moments in the singer’s life when fame got a little too wild, including a female fan jumping from a roof onto the hood of their Rolls-Royce. However, one moment confirmed Morrison’s distaste for ‘Light My Fire’. Performing with the band, a request from the song was yelled out from the crowd to which Morrison simply replied: “Fuck your mother.”
For the rest of the band, though, the track was never quite the burden Morrison believed it to be. Manzarek, in particular, always spoke about it as the moment when The Doors properly found their identity. The extended middle section, with its winding organ solo and Krieger’s guitar runs, gave the group space to stretch out and prove they were something more than just another West Coast rock band chasing radio play.
Like so many artists who would come after him, it was clear that Morrison saw the song as a weight around the neck of his artistic direction. With the song’s popularity turning The Doors into the latest ‘pop sensation’, Morrison felt his message was being clouded by money, fame and intrigue. It would be an issue for him until his dying day.
In a twist of fate, ‘Light My Fire’ would be the final song Morrison performed live for his audience on December 12th, 1970. At this stage of his life, The Lizard King had become detached from his art, and fame had become an ever-present succubus. Beleaguered and drunken, Morrison became bored with the final song and smashed his microphone into the floor, breaking it, ending the show, and concluding his live performances.
