Today is our last day of the Doors' Top 50 Countdown, so it's as good a time as any to talk about the schedule in the immediate future. First of all, in a week from now, a new top 50 countdown will begin, as a companion piece to the week's statistics. It will involve another one of the biggest rock groups of all-time. I hope that Pep from AfterElton is still following us because he will be pleased.
We have 11 more acts from the 70s to present on the weekdays, acts that belong to a variety of different genres. After we finish with these, the long-awaited thematic unity dedicated to disco music will begin. It will last as long as there are interesting songs to play - and then we will return to the 21st century to present a bunch of contemporary acts. After that, we'll have a number of divas who embraced and were embraced by LGBT+ people, which will eventually lead us into the 80s and the 90s.
As far as the Oscar-winning songs are concerned, they will continue. I know that you like that series, but it's a lot of work and that's the reason that there were less of it in the summer. It will continue, hopefully on a more regular schedule during the winter. But enough talk, time for the Top 5 songs of the Doors!
If you wanted to craft the perfect rock debut, the most obvious route wouldn't be to meld Bavarian oompah with Willie Dixon's Chicago blues, Bach minuets with John Coltrane charts, 12th-century Celtic myths with ancient Greek tragedy, topped off with plenty of existential angst and a healthy dose of psychedelics. But even with influences touching on all of the above, the Doors' 1967 self-titled debut would soon make the band immortal, thanks to songs like Break on Through (to the Other Side), The End and the immortal Light My Fire. All three of these songs are in our Top 5.
As the opening track on the band’s first album and their debut single, Break On Through (To The Other Side) was the song that introduced the world at large to The Doors. It’s a taut, potent track, fizzing with energy from Densmore’s opening bossa nova beat that drives the song. The lines that speak of love - “I found an island in your arms/Country in your eyes” - are swiftly undercut in the next stanza as the Lizard King sings about “Arms that chained/Eyes that lied.” Morrison's vocals, a mixture of feral drawl and perfect diction, sound even more ferocious in the unedited version of the song, available on the 2006 reissue of the album and 2003 set Legacy: The Absolute Best, where he sings “She get high” - the word “high” was mixed out on the track’s original release, due to its drug connotations.
"If it hadn't been for Butterfield going electric, I probably wouldn't have gone into rock & roll," Robby Krieger recently admitted on his website. The Doors guitarist spent his early years emulating flamenco masters like Mario Escudero, Carlos Montoya, and Sabicas before moving into the blues. From there he discovered the raw Chicago sound of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, bolstered by the searing twin guitars of Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Their work would have a marked influence on his playing style, particularly on the track Break on Through (to the Other Side).
When the Doors began arranging the Morrison composition, Krieger found a familiar line falling out of his guitar. "I got the idea for the riff from the Paul Butterfield song Shake Your Money-Maker, which was one of my favorites," he says in Classic Albums. "We just changed the beat around." The Butterfield version of the song – first recorded by Elmore James in 1961 – was a track off their self-titled 1965 debut, produced by future Doors collaborator Paul Rothchild.
In the same documentary, Manzarek also demonstrates how he lifted the keyboard bass line from Ray Charles' What'd I Say, as well as elements of his organ solo. "We'd steal from anybody!"
It's a dynamite song and manages to blow up our notions of safety in just two-and-a-half minutes. It is our #5 song.
This is the uncensored version:
Here's a good cover by the Stone Temple Pilots:
This is the Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog's version:
Roadhouse Blues is a bar-stomper so raucous you can smell the spilled booze and the sawdust on the floor just by listening to it. The Doors’ reputation is that of an acid rock, psychedelic band, but they were all fans of the blues. They could get down and dirty with the best of them, creating a song you can imagine them vamping on for hours (as they do on the outtakes). That driving bass line is played by session man Lonnie Mack, who was on the downturn at the time, working at Elektra Records and selling bibles. John Sebastian of The Lovin’ Spoonful, adds a wailing harmonica and Morrison’s vocal barrels out of the starting gate at full throttle, though the freewheeling mood is tempered by the unease in the lines “The future’s uncertain/and the end is always near.”
The song, which appeared on the B-side of You Make Me Real, was first released as a single from the album Morrison Hotel in March 1970 and peaked at #50 on the US Hot 100. It took two days to record it (November 4–5, 1969) with producer Paul A. Rothchild striving for perfection.The song quickly became a concert staple for the group. One of the ideal driving songs, it's at #4 on our list.
A studio version of the song with John Lee Hooker sharing vocals with Jim can be found on the Stoned Immaculate: The Music of The Doors album. Here it is, for your pleasure:
Here's a cover version by Frankie Goes To Hollywood:
Blue Öyster Cult performed the song on their Extraterrestrial Live album, with Robby Krieger joining the band.
At #3 is the song that for film lovers is the Apocalypse Now song, while for Rock History buffs is the song that got the Doors fired from the Whisky a Go Go on August 21, 1966, when Morrison added an explicit retelling and profanity-laden version of the Greek myth of Oedipus during a performance of The End.
Morrison originally wrote the song about breaking up with his girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but it evolved through months of performances at the Whisky a Go Go into a nearly 12-minute track on their self-titled debut album. It was first released in January 1967. The song was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing. Two takes were done and it has been held that the second take is the one that was issued. However, there is also a view that the issued version of the song was an edit of both takes, with at least one splice. The band would perform the song to close their last live performance as a foursome on December 12, 1970, at The Warehouse in New Orleans.
The song centers around an Oedipal fantasy, in which the protagonist murders his father and has sex with his mother, the recording of which in near-darkness led producer Paul Rothchild to later describe as the singularly most exciting moment in his studio career. It was long believed that Morrison’s dip into Greek mythology – via Freud’s Oedipus complex – was the Lizard King’s way of addressing a troubled childhood under a military father. However, Densmore recalls the singer explaining to him that “kill the father, fuck the mother” section was essentially about getting rid of the “alien concepts” which society instills in us as human beings. Morrison himself once suggested that the song had a different meaning for him each time he sang it, from the death of childhood innocence to the final curtain. “It’s strange that people fear death,” he considered, towards what indeed was the end. “Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over.” There are several officially released live versions of The End, each of them very different.
The End was the Doors' showstopper, an extended tour de force that blurred the lines between music and theater. The piece was especially exhausting for Morrison; performing The End before a live audience was enough of a challenge, but summoning the energy in a sterile recording studio took considerable effort on the part of the band, producer Paul Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick.
"The lights had been dimmed and the candles were burning right next to Jim, whose back was to the control room," Rothchild remembers in Stephen Davis' Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend. "The only other illumination came from the lights on the VU meters. The studio was very dark." To further set the mood, Morrison apparently took a tab of LSD.
At first, the hallucinogen had an overall positive effect on the performance, but during the playback, it became apparent that Morrison was, by Krieger's estimation, "too high to continue the session." Three of the Doors decided to continue work the following day. Morrison had a different idea.
"He trashed the studio after we did The End," Krieger told author Mick Houghton. "Jim was on a lot of acid, and when we finished recording, he didn't want to go home. The rest of us left, but he snuck back into the studio and got pissed off that there was no one else around, so he sprayed the place down with a foaming fire extinguisher."
Botnick elaborates on the episode in Mick Wall's Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre. "[Jim had] gone across the street to the Blessed Sacrament, a Catholic Church, and he had an epiphany over there. He came back to the studio and the gate was locked. He climbed over the gate, got in, but he couldn't get into the control room. That was locked. But the studio was open and the red lights were on." The red-hued work lights seemingly registered as a fire in Morrison's psychedelicized brain. "He thought it was on fire, so he grabbed a fire extinguisher and knocked over the ashtrays that were full of sand and tried to put out the fire."
Manzarek recalled the story slightly differently. In his memoir, Light My Fire, he claims that Morrison began ranting about a fire while being driven home from the studio by his girlfriend, Pamela Courson. He was so persistent that Courson reluctantly returned to the studio, and Morrison immediately bounded over the fence. "He took the fire extinguisher and hosed the whole place down," Manzarek told Houghton. "Not in the control room, thank God, just in the area where the band was ... just blasted the whole place man, just to cool it down." Much of the band's equipment was ruined, including a full sized harpsichord.
The following day, a single boot, belonging to Morrison, was found among the destruction. "The studio people just absolutely freaked," says Manzarek. "Paul [Rothchild] said, 'Uh, don't worry, don't worry, Elektra will pay for it. No reason to call the police.' He knew right away who did it, you know. We all knew right away what had happened." The only one who claimed ignorance was, predictably, Morrison himself. "I did that? Come on, really?" Densmore recalls him saying over breakfast the next day.
Elektra head Jac Holzman immediately cut a very large check to studio owner Tutti Camarata. "I rushed over and said, 'I agree, it's out of control. I'll pay for the damages," he told Mojo. The incident was smoothed over, but Krieger felt the moment marked a turning point in Morrison's psyche. "I thought Jim [felt], 'Well, I got away with that, I can get away with anything."
For all you film lovers out there, here's how the song figures in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now:
At New York’s Felt Forum in 1970, a year before his death, Morrison begins the song with a bloodcurdling cry of “Bring out your dead!”, as used by corpse collectors during the Great Plague.
Morrison's one-time lover Nico covered the song for her fourth album (1973), which shared the song's title.
Glorious on Strange Days (1967) and equally as good on Absolutely Live (1970), When The Music’s Over (our #2 song) was the ideal final encore: that’s your lot. But by then you’ve already heard Jim screaming ‘Persian night, babe. See the light, babe. Save us. Jesus. Save us.’ According to Krieger, his two guitar solos were “a real challenge because the harmony is static. I had to play 56 bars over the same riff.” It was worth the effort.
This 11-minute piece - far too sprawling to be considered a conventional song for radio play - doesn’t have the psychological underpinnings of something like The End but is just as dramatic in its own right. A simple keyboard intro from Manzarek leads to a shout from Morrison that’s quickly matched by Krieger’s wailing guitar. But however improvisational the piece feels, it never meanders aimlessly. Some of Morrison’s most recognizable phrases appear ("feast of friends," "alive she cried," "scream of the butterfly" "cancel my subscription to the Resurrection"), in a number that also takes a detour into environmental awareness ("What have they done to the earth?/What have they done to our fair sister?/Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her/Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn/And tied her with fences and dragged her down"), as well as making a demand that would be taken up by a generation: "We want the world, and we want it now!" It’s Morrison’s manifesto, perhaps, with a suitably downbeat conclusion.
Here's the studio version:
This is the version from Absolutely Live:
Here's a cover version by Gov't Mule:
It's time for my favorite song by the Doors. I guess that most of you have guessed what it is by now. Despite its familiarity, Light My Fire doesn’t smolder. It’s a conflagration of über-cool acid rock. Simply put, this is The Doors’ signature song.
After defining the art of the rock frontman every bit as influentially as Mick Jagger, Morrison has been subsequently blamed for every leering wannabe in leather trousers. However, love or loathe him, Morrison brought theatrical excitement to 60s rock and the Doors albums continue to sell in significant quantities. Artists from Echo and the Bunnymen to the Stranglers to Skrillex and Chase and Status have taken something from their organ-heavy sound, while Morrison’s fusion of rock and poetry inspired Patti Smith, among many others. Light My Fire – the band’s signature song – still best represents their adventurous creativity. In the absence of a bass player, Ray Manzarek used a Vox Continental organ as a lead instrument while his left hand played bass sounds on a Fender Rhodes piano bass – a similar set-up to that of Sky Saxon’s punkier Seeds, but the Doors took it somewhere more dreamlike and transcendental. Morrison sang about classic themes of sex and death, but Manzarek’s playing equally captured the fairground aspect of Los Angeles. Penned by guitarist Robby Krieger, the single version of Light My Fire has undoubtedly been slightly dulled by radio ubiquity. However, the much longer version from their classic eponymous 1967 debut – the first of six albums inside just four years – still sounds glorious, not least the thrilling moment where Krieger’s beautifully economical guitar solo crashes back into Manzarek’s waterfalling signature melody. The three-minute edit gave them an international number one and a standard that has been covered by everyone from Shirley Bassey to Will Young. As of December 1971, it was the band's best-selling single; with over 927,000 copies sold.
The Doors' guitarist may have had the greatest beginner's luck in rock history. Having never completed a song, the 20-year-old composed Light My Fire, the Number One smash that continues to evoke the Summer of Love's sensual heat.
"That was the first one I wrote because up until then Jim had been writing the songs," he told Reverb in 2016. "But we realized we didn't have enough originals, so Jim said, 'Why don't you write some? Why do I have to do all the work!?' So I said, 'OK, what should I write about?' And he goes, 'Write about something universal. Write about something that will last, not just about today.' So I decided I'd write about [either] earth, air, fire or water." Citing Play With Fire as one of his favorite Rolling Stones songs, he settled on fire.
Krieger labored over the song for several days, determined to conjure up something more than a standard rock progression. "Up until then the Doors were doing three-chord type songs that were pretty simple like I Looked at You or End of the Night," he told Clash Music. "I wanted to write something more adventurous. I decided I was going to put every chord I knew into this song – and I did! There are about 14 different chords in there." For a melody, he looked to Hey Joe, then a recent hit for Los Angeles band the Leaves.
With a verse and chorus under his belt, he brought the work-in-progress before his bandmates. The song had a folk-rock flair in this early state, leading some in the group to derisively compare it to a Sonny and Cher number. But Morrison saw its potential and offered to contribute some extra lyrics. "Jim came up with the second verse about the funeral pyre," Kreiger remembered in Classic Albums. "I said, 'Jim, why is it always about death? Why do you always have to do that?' And he said, 'No man, it'll be perfect. You'll have the love part of it and then you'll have that death part of it.' And he was right."
Manzarek added the cartwheeling Bach-like introduction and bass line (borrowed from Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill) while Densmore lent the Latin rhythm. When it was released the following year, the song would be jointly credited to the Doors.
The Doors' September 17th, 1967, appearance on the The Ed Sullivan Show infamously resulted in a lifetime ban after Morrison disobeyed the CBS Standards and Practices department and sang the original lyric to Light My Fire – "Girl we couldn't get much higher" – instead of their decidedly lackluster suggestion/demand: "Girl, we couldn't get much better." Producers and network executives were infuriated, and a stone-faced Sullivan denied Morrison the traditional post-performance handshake, instead cutting straight to a commercial for Purina Dog Chow.
The band was unbothered by the incident. "They said, 'You'll never do this show again!'" recalled Densmore in the Classic Albums documentary. "And we said, 'Well, we just did it. We only wanted to do it once. Cheers!'"
Buick offered The Doors vast sums to use the song in a car advert. The other band members agreed to the deal in Morrison’s absence. Morrison’s reply was: “Only if I can smash a Buick on stage with a sledgehammer.”
The song is #35 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It was also included in the Songs of the Century list and was ranked #7 in VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of All Time list.
Here's the full-length album version:
This is the shortened version that was used for the single:
This is a very good live version:
José Feliciano recorded Light My Fire in a Latin style and released it as a single, and in the summer of 1968, it reached #3 on the US pop charts with over one million copies sold in the US market alone. The song became a big hit in many countries, including Canada, Brazil, Sweden, the UK, and Australia and was awarded a gold record.
... And since we've mentioned it, here's Dame Shirley Bassey's powerful version:
Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; it was a good week for us: The number of total visits doubled from last week, an impressive feat. All of last week's stories did very well, but still at #1 for the week is the story that's obviously very attractive to many of you, the one of George Maharis. If somebody can get in touch with Mr. Maharis, please tell him how popular he is with us, I'm sure he'll be glad.
Each recent week, there is a country that is the protagonist as far as visits are concerned. This week it was Russia's turn to shine; not in the weekly top 10 at all last week, comfortably sitting at the top this week. The United States is at #2 but still decreasing their lead in the all-time list. The United Kingdom, on the other hand, is constantly doing well lately. There were minor changes in the percentages of the other countries. Canada, a former all-time top-tenner continues to do well and it may soon reclaim its position in the all-time chart. Speaking of former all-time top-tenners, this time it was Ireland that entered this week's top 10.
Here are this week's Top 10 countries:
1. Russia
2. the United States
3. the United Kingdom
4. France
5. Greece
6. Canada
7. Cyprus
8. the United Arab Emirates
9. Italy
10. Ireland
Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Argentina, Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Georgia, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, and Vietnam. Happy to have you all!
And here's the all-time Top 10:
1. the United States = 40.8%
2. Greece = 8.9%
3. the United Kingdom = 8.4%
4. France = 7.3%
5. Russia = 4.8%
6. Germany = 3.8%
7. Cyprus = 1.35%
8. Italy = 1.25%
9. the United Arab Emirates = 0.66%
10. Belgium = 0.63%
That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!
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