The Doors began with a chance beach meeting and one sung lyric
One July day in 1965, two former UCLA film students ran into each other on the sand at Santa Monica. Jim Morrison admitted he had been writing songs and sang a few lines about swimming to the moon. Ray Manzarek heard music in them at once, and within six years the band had become rock royalty.
Drummer John Densmore, whom Manzarek knew from meditation classes, joined in August 1965, and on 2 September the group cut a six-song demo in Los Angeles. Their name came from Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, which borrowed a line from William Blake about perception cleansed to reveal the infinite. Guitarist Robby Krieger arrived late that year. A residency at a shabby club called the London Fog in early 1966 gave Morrison stage confidence and let the band stretch songs such as The End and Light My Fire.
Moving up to the Whisky a Go Go as house band, they caught the attention of Elektra president Jac Holzman on 10 August 1966, on the tip of Love singer Arthur Lee, and signed eight days later. Three days after that the Whisky fired them, after Morrison improvised an obscene take on the Oedipus myth during The End. The debut album arrived in January 1967, and when Break On Through made little impact, Light My Fire became Elektra's first number-one single on the Billboard Hot 100, selling over a million copies.
Trouble followed success. On The Ed Sullivan Show in September 1967, network staff asked them to drop the word higher; it was sung anyway, and Sullivan cancelled six further bookings. That December in New Haven, Morrison became the first rock performer arrested onstage mid-concert. Strange Days, built with a Moog synthesizer, peaked at number three but slid quickly.
Morrison died in 1971 in unclear circumstances, and the trio broke up in 1973. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. The Recording Industry Association of America credits them with 36 million albums sold domestically, and they were the first American band with eight consecutive gold or platinum LPs.
Source: The Doors
