The Doors

The Doors formed at UCLA in Los Angeles in 1965, when film student Jim Morrison met keyboard player Ray Manzarek on the beach at Venice. Morrison brought Rimbaud and Nietzsche, a poet’s ambition and a performer’s gift for self-destruction; Manzarek brought a classical training that allowed his left hand to cover the bass on a keyboard, freeing the band to operate without a bassist. The formula was unusual: organ-driven, darkly theatrical, with Morrison’s baritone at the center.

“Light My Fire” (1967), their breakthrough hit, showed the range: a pop single that opened and closed with extended organ and guitar improvisation — the album version running to seven minutes — in which Morrison’s sexuality was as provocative as anything in rock. Their debut album was made with no bass guitar at all; Manzarek played bass on a keyboard while guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore held the rest of the band together.

Morrison’s stage persona — the Lizard King, the Dionysiac rock shaman — made him both a star and a provocation. He was arrested onstage in New Haven and Miami for alleged indecent exposure; his poetry was published in two volumes during his lifetime. He died in Paris in July 1971, of heart failure at 27. The remaining Doors released two albums without him before disbanding in 1973.