the Doors

the Doors, American band that, with a string of hits in the late 1960s and early ’70s, channeled the dark undercurrents of the era’s counterculture with such songs as “The End,” “Light My Fire,” and “Riders on the Storm.” The band was the creative vehicle for singer Jim Morrison, one of rock music’s mythic figures.

Musical style and themes

The Doors’ instrumentalists—keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore—combined backgrounds in classical music and blues with the improvisational daring of a jazz band. It was the dark-edged eroticism of Morrison’s baritone and poetic lyrics, however, that set the Los Angeles-based quartet apart from the prevailing hippie utopianism that pervaded West Coast rock in the late 1960s. Morrison’s early death, at age 27, only enhanced his reputation as the quintessential rock showman and troubled artiste for subsequent generations.

(Is 27 an especially deadly age for musicians?)

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Band formation and breakthrough

Morrison and Manzarek, acquaintances from the film school of the University of California, Los Angeles, conceived the group after the singer recited one of his poems to the keyboardist on a southern California beach. Morrison took the band’s name from Aldous Huxley’s book on mescaline, The Doors of Perception (1954), which in turn refers to a line in a poem by Romantic artist and writer William Blake. The Doors acquired a reputation for pushing the boundaries of rock composition, both musically and lyrically, in performances on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Their breakthrough hit, “Light My Fire,” was an anthem in 1967, but it was songs such as “The End”—an 11-minute Oedipal drama with sexually explicit lyrics and a swirling ebb-and-flow arrangement—that established the Doors’ reputation as one of rock’s most potent, controversial, and theatrical acts. Indeed, the group was banned from the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles after an early performance of the song.

Arrest of Jim Morrison in 1969

Though the group’s ambitious music encompassed everything from Chicago blues to German cabaret, their string of pop hits caused them to be dismissed by some critics as a teenybopper act. This deeply troubled Morrison, who craved acceptance as a serious artist. By the time of the release of the Doors’ third album, Waiting for the Sun (1968), Morrison had created a shamanistic alter ego for himself, “the Lizard King”; the singer’s poem “The Celebration of the Lizard” was printed inside the record jacket. His concert performances were marked by increasingly outrageous stunts, and Morrison was arrested in 1969 for allegedly exposing himself onstage in Miami. He was convicted on indecent exposure and profanity charges and sentenced to six months in prison but was granted bail pending his appeal. The incident served notice of Morrison’s physical decline, in part because of his addiction to alcohol.

Death of Jim Morrison and later band projects

Morrison took increasing solace in his poetry, some of which was published, and the group’s tours became less frequent. The Doors reestablished their artistic credibility with the blues-steeped Morrison Hotel (1970), but after the quartet’s sixth studio release, L.A. Woman (1971), Morrison retreated to Paris, where he hoped to pursue a literary career. Instead, he died there of heart failure in 1971. Without Morrison, the Doors produced two undistinguished albums before breaking up. They reunited briefly in 1978 to record An American Prayer, providing backing music for poetry Morrison recorded before his death. Manzarek also produced albums for the punk band X.

In the early 2000s Manzarek and Krieger began touring with other musicians standing in for Morrison and Densmore, but lawsuits by Morrison’s parents and Densmore forced them to perform under the name “the Doors of the 21st Century.” Both Densmore and Manzarek released memoirs, and they collaborated with Krieger and Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres on an authorized biography of the band, published as The Doors in 2006.

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Legacy and honors

In death Morrison was lionized by generations of fans, both as a youth icon and as an influence on singers such as Iggy Pop, Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch, and Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. The Doors’ releases continued to sell in the millions, and The Doors, a 1991 movie directed by Oliver Stone and starring Val Kilmer as Morrison, was a critical and popular success. The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2007. Morrison was posthumously pardoned in 2010 for his indecent exposure conviction in Miami. In 2014 the band’s debut album was added to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress.