The Doors

The Doors came together in Los Angeles in 1965 and lifted their name from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which had borrowed it in turn from William Blake, and from the first bar they sounded like a band that had actually read the books. Jim Morrison sang like a lounge crooner who'd stumbled into a séance. Ray Manzarek worked the keyboards and handled the low end on a keyboard bass. Robby Krieger's guitar slid between blues and something more exotic, and John Densmore drummed with a jazzman's feather touch, all dynamics and nerve.

Elektra signed them in 1966, and 1967 was their year: the debut album The Doors and Strange Days both came out in it, and so did "Light My Fire", stretching out into long, trance-like solos, and "The End", which crawls toward the darkness and doesn't blink when it gets there. Waiting for the Sun and The Soft Parade followed. Somebody dubbed them the Kings of Acid Rock, and Morrison did his best to earn the controversy that came with the crown: the stage act was erratic, the words were loaded, and the law kept turning up.

Morrison Hotel arrived in 1970, the same year "Roadhouse Blues" hit like a greasy boogie at closing time, and L.A. Woman came in 1971, alongside "Riders on the Storm", which sounds like rain on a windshield with something waiting out in the dark. That was the end of it with Morrison. He died in 1971, in circumstances nobody has ever fully settled: six studio albums in five years, and gone.

The other three carried on as a trio for two more albums before closing the doors in 1973, then regrouped in 1978 to set new music behind Morrison's recorded poetry on An American Prayer. They reunited briefly for their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 1993, and the Grammys handed them a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. In 2002 Manzarek and Krieger went back on the road with Ian Astbury of the Cult singing, until Densmore and the Morrison estate took them to court over the name; they toured on as Manzarek–Krieger until Manzarek died in 2013.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.