Light My Fire
Although it was the spark that set the career of the then-struggling Doors alight, Jim Morrison, irked by it not being one of his songs, thought it was throwaway.
Saturday August 5, 1967. The hottest hit of the summer, Light My Fire, begins its second week at No.1 on the US Billboard chart. Acolossal moment not just for The Doors – the tripped-out, LA-noir four-piece bringing arthouse cinema and beat poetry to rock – but also for the whole history of late-20th-century music.
Officially, the summer of ’67 is about Sgt. Pepper, the Monterey festival and wearing flowers in your hair. Other singles in the American Top 10 that week include the equally immortal All You Need Is Love, AWhiter Shade Of Pale and White Rabbit. But The Doors are not about summer or love; The Doors are about rock apocalypse. The only love-love-love they chorus of, is the one burning on a funeral pyre. As Doors singer Jim Morrison yowled like a wildcat: ‘Come on baby light my fire/Try to set the night on… FIRE!’
Light My Fire was less Summer Of Love, more winter in hell. It had originated a year before, when The Doors were the $40-a-night house band at the Fog, a flea haven on Sunset. The stage stood above a wooden shack that served as the toilets. Playing five sets a night, four nights a week to empty rooms, the band began noodling, then experimenting, then creating forked lightning. First to benefit was a two-minute jingle-jangle called The End, now transformed into a lengthy Indian acid-rock raga.
Then there was Light My Fire, which guitarist Robby Krieger had come up with on his own after Morrison had chastised him for not writing more. Already at the Fog they had the bossa nova rhythm, the cascading Bach-like filigree intro and the extended phantom-of-the-opera instrumental section, Morrison crooning over it like an attentive vampire lover before the whole thing swirls into a gothic ent
