The story of The Doors

A Navy son and a film student

James Douglas Morrison was born on the eighth of December 1943 in Melbourne, Florida. His father, George Stephen Morrison, was a naval officer who had witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor and would rise to rear admiral. In August 1964 he was commanding American naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the clash used to justify deeper American involvement in Vietnam. Jim grew up moving from base to base, in New Mexico, Texas, California and Virginia. The Morrison children were not spanked. Instead the family used a military habit called dressing down, where a child was berated until they cried and admitted their faults. Jim was a restless, gifted student who read far beyond his age, and a high school test put his IQ at one hundred and forty nine.[1] [2] [3]

His senior English teacher was so puzzled by the obscure books Jim reported on, including old English texts on demonology, that she had a colleague check the Library of Congress to make sure they were real. They were. He read Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Blake, Kerouac and the French playwright Antonin Artaud, whose idea of a confrontational theater would shape his stage act. After a spell at Florida State University, where he was arrested in 1963 for drunken pranks at a football game, he moved to the film school at UCLA in Los Angeles. He graduated in 1965 but skipped the ceremony, so the university mailed his diploma to his mother. By then he had drifted away from his family, and he would soon cut contact almost entirely.[1] [2]

Ray Manzarek came from a very different world. He was born Raymond Daniel Manczarek on the twelfth of February 1939 on the South Side of Chicago, to parents of Polish descent. He grew up on jazz and blues, played piano in a college jazz band, and earned a degree in economics from DePaul University. He tried law school at UCLA, dropped out, served in the Army Security Agency, and then returned to UCLA to study film, earning a master's degree in cinematography in 1965. In Los Angeles he played in a surf and frat rock band called Rick and the Ravens with his brothers Rick and Jim. At film school he met his future wife, Dorothy Fujikawa, and a quiet undergraduate named Jim Morrison.[1] [2]

The other two Doors were Los Angeles kids. John Densmore, born on the first of December 1944, grew up playing piano and school marching drums, and worshipped the jazz drummer Elvin Jones, who played with John Coltrane. Robby Krieger, born on the eighth of January 1946, taught himself guitar at boarding school, learned flamenco, and fell for the electric blues of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Densmore and Krieger played together in a group called the Psychedelic Rangers. What linked them to Manzarek was not a club or a record shop but a meditation class. All three attended Transcendental Meditation lectures connected to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Densmore later joked that there would not have been any Doors without the Maharishi.[1] [2] [3] [4]

From Venice Beach to the Whisky

In July 1965, a few weeks after graduation, Ray Manzarek was sitting on the beach in Venice when Jim Morrison walked by. Jim had lost weight, grown his hair into curls, and spent the summer living on a friend's rooftop, taking LSD and writing lyrics. He told Ray he had been writing songs. Ray asked to hear one, and Jim, eyes closed, sang the opening of Moonlight Drive. Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide. Manzarek thought it was spooky and cool, and said they should start a rock band. Morrison later explained that his first songs felt like taking notes at a fantastic rock concert going on inside his head. The name came from Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, itself borrowed from William Blake.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The new group grew out of Rick and the Ravens. On the second of September 1965 they cut a six song demo at World Pacific Studios, with Morrison singing, Ray on piano, his brothers on guitar and harmonica, Densmore on drums and Patty Sullivan on bass. The songs included Moonlight Drive, Hello, I Love You and Summer's Almost Gone, and all of them later turned up on Doors albums. The Manzarek brothers were unimpressed and left, saying the band was going nowhere fast. Densmore brought in his friend Robby Krieger that autumn. When Ray took over the bass lines on a Fender Rhodes keyboard bass, the bassist was dropped, and the classic four piece line up was set.[1] [2] [3]

Things moved slowly at first. Columbia Records signed them, then placed them on a drop list, and the band asked to be released. To pay the bills they improvised a soundtrack for a Ford customer service training film called Love Thy Customer, and earned two hundred dollars for the day. In early 1966 they became the house band at the London Fog, a nearly empty club on the Sunset Strip. Manzarek remembered an audience of an occasional sailor and a few drunks, but it gave them time to stretch songs like The End and Light My Fire. It was also at the London Fog that Morrison met Pamela Courson, a young art student who would be his companion for the rest of his life.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

From May 1966 the Doors were the house band at the Whisky a Go Go, opening for acts including Van Morrison's group Them. On Them's last night the two bands jammed together on Gloria. On the tenth of August, Elektra Records boss Jac Holzman came to see them on the advice of Arthur Lee of the band Love. He brought producer Paul Rothchild, and on the eighteenth of August the Doors signed to Elektra. Three days later the Whisky fired them. During The End, Morrison had improvised a profane retelling of the Greek myth of Oedipus, with a son who wants to kill his father. Morrison had worked on a student production of Oedipus Rex at Florida State, and the club owners were not amused.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The debut and Light My Fire

The Doors recorded their first album at Sunset Sound in Hollywood in August and September 1966, with Paul Rothchild producing and Bruce Botnick engineering, a team that became almost a fifth and sixth Door. It was cut on a four track machine for around ten thousand dollars, and Manzarek said it was basically the band live, with very few overdubs. Because the Doors had no bass player, Rothchild quietly brought in session player Larry Knechtel to double Ray's bass lines on several songs. He was not credited at the time. The album ended with the nearly twelve minute drama of The End, stitched together from two takes. It came out on the fourth of January 1967.[1] [2] [3]

One night during the sessions, the story goes, Morrison had taken LSD during the recording of The End and was sent home. He came back alone, climbed over the locked gate, and sprayed the studio with a fire extinguisher, soaking the instruments. Jac Holzman paid for the damage and nobody called the police. To launch the record, Holzman did something new. He rented a billboard on the Sunset Strip, near the Chateau Marmont, for about twelve hundred dollars a month. It read Break On Through with an electrifying album. It was the first time a rock band had been advertised on a billboard, and the idea soon spread along the Strip.[1] [2] [3]

The first single, Break On Through, stalled at number one hundred and twenty six. Elektra had even cut the word high from the chorus to protect airplay. The breakthrough came from an unlikely source. Light My Fire was the very first song Robby Krieger ever wrote. Morrison had told the others to write something universal, and Robby chose fire, inspired by the Rolling Stones' Play with Fire. Jim added the second verse about the funeral pyre, Ray wrote the Bach flavored organ introduction, and John gave it a Latin beat. Radio demanded a shorter version, so Rothchild cut the seven minute track to under three minutes. In July 1967 it reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed there for three weeks.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Light My Fire was the first Elektra single ever to top the American chart. The album climbed to number two, held off the top only by the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, and it went on to sell more than thirteen million copies worldwide, the band's biggest seller. In Britain the story was slower. The single stalled at number forty nine in 1967, and only became a top ten hit there in 1991, after the Oliver Stone film. In 1968 the Puerto Rican singer José Feliciano released a gentle Latin version that reached number three in America and won him Grammy awards. Krieger later said he owed Feliciano a big debt, because after his version, everybody started covering the song.[1] [2] [3]

Strange Days, Ed Sullivan and New Haven

On the seventeenth of September 1967 the Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, the programme that had launched Elvis and the Beatles. Before the broadcast, a producer asked them to change the line girl, we couldn't get much higher to girl, we couldn't get much better, because of the drug reference. On air, Morrison sang the original lyric. Sullivan did not shake their hands, and the band was told it would never appear on the show again. Six further bookings were cancelled. Morrison reportedly shrugged and said, hey man, we just did the Sullivan Show. The day after, photographer Joel Brodsky shot the shirtless young lion portraits of Morrison that became some of the most famous rock photos ever taken.[1] [2] [3]

Their second album, Strange Days, arrived on the twenty fifth of September 1967, just eight months after the first. This time Rothchild and Botnick had an eight track machine, and the band experimented freely. Ray played the introduction to Unhappy Girl backwards. Morrison himself played a Moog synthesizer, one of the earliest uses of the instrument on a rock record. The singles were People Are Strange, written after a gloomy Morrison took a walk up Laurel Canyon with Krieger and Densmore, and Krieger's Love Me Two Times, with Manzarek on harpsichord. The album reached number three. It sold less than the debut, but many writers, and the band itself, count it among their best work.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the ninth of December 1967, before a concert at the New Haven Arena in Connecticut, a police officer found Morrison with a young woman in a backstage shower. Not recognising the singer, he told them to leave. Morrison told him to eat it, and the officer sprayed him with Mace. The show started an hour late. On stage, during Back Door Man, Morrison told the crowd an obscene version of what had happened and taunted the police lining the stage. Officers dragged him off mid song. He became the first rock singer arrested while performing, charged with inciting a riot, indecency and public obscenity. The crowd spilled into the streets and more people were arrested. The charges against Morrison were later dropped.[1] [2] [3]

Waiting for the Sun and the Lizard King

By 1968 the Doors were one of the biggest bands in America, but they had used up Morrison's old notebooks of songs. The sessions for the third album were hard. Rothchild demanded endless takes, and The Unknown Soldier, Morrison's bitter song about the Vietnam War on television, needed one hundred and thirty. Morrison was drinking heavily, and at one point Densmore walked out of a session in frustration. The writer Joan Didion watched a day at the studio and described the band waiting for their absent singer. A planned side long piece, Celebration of the Lizard, was shelved, leaving only the fragment Not to Touch the Earth, with its line I am the Lizard King, I can do anything.[1] [2] [3]

Waiting for the Sun came out in July 1968 and became the Doors' only number one album, topping the Billboard chart for four weeks. Its single, Hello, I Love You, dated back to the 1965 demo, and it became their second American number one. It was also promoted as one of the first stereo rock singles, with a sound that swept dramatically from one speaker to the other. Not everyone was pleased. The riff sounded a lot like the Kinks' All Day and All of the Night. Ray Davies did not take them to court, but in Britain the royalties for the song were paid to him. Morrison admitted it was not one of their best songs, and said he preferred the B side, Love Street.[1] [2] [3]

In September 1968 the Doors played outside North America for the first time, at the Roundhouse in London alongside Jefferson Airplane, filmed for a Granada documentary called The Doors Are Open. In Amsterdam on the fifteenth of September, Morrison swallowed and smoked almost everything fans handed him. He wandered on stage during Jefferson Airplane's set, danced, and collapsed, and was taken to hospital. The other three went on without him, with Manzarek singing the whole set. Back home, the shows were growing wilder. A concert at the Chicago Coliseum that May had ended in frenzied scenes between fans and police, and a riotous show at the Singer Bowl in New York followed in August.[1] [2] [3]

While Morrison stayed on in London after the tour, Buick offered the Doors seventy five thousand dollars to use Light My Fire in a car advert, with the line come on Buick, light my fire. Unable to reach Jim, the other three agreed. The band had promised from the start to share everything equally, and each member had a veto. When Morrison found out he was furious, and threatened to smash a Buick with a sledgehammer on television if the advert ran. Buick dropped the campaign. Manager Bill Siddons said it was the end of the dream, and that from then on Jim spoke of associates rather than partners. Decades later, this episode would shape the band's biggest legal fight.[1] [2] [3]

Miami and The Soft Parade

Late in 1968 the Doors released Touch Me, a Krieger song with strings, horns and a saxophone solo by Curtis Amy. It reached number three, their last American top ten hit. Its working title was Hit Me, a blackjack phrase, but Morrison changed the line because he feared rowdy crowds would take it as a challenge to attack him. He was proud that it was the first rock hit with a jazz solo. By now Morrison had changed. He had put on weight, grown a beard and swapped his leather trousers for jeans and T shirts, trying to escape the Lizard King image. He told the others he wanted to quit, and Manzarek persuaded him to stay for six more months.[1] [2] [3]

On the first of March 1969 the Doors played the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, a converted seaplane hangar with no air conditioning. Around twelve thousand people were packed into a room meant for about seven thousand. Morrison had been drinking all day, missed flights, and arrived more than an hour late. Inspired by the confrontational Living Theatre, he taunted the crowd, calling them idiots and slaves, and demanding to know what they were going to do about it. Someone poured champagne on him, he took off his shirt and held it in front of his groin, and the show dissolved into chaos. Within days the Dade County authorities issued warrants accusing him of indecent exposure, profanity and public drunkenness.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The fallout was enormous. There was a rally for decency at the Miami Orange Bowl, radio stations dropped the band, and around twenty five concerts were cancelled. Densmore reckoned it cost them a million dollars in gigs. In September 1970 a six person jury convicted Morrison of indecent exposure and profanity, while acquitting him of the more serious charges. He was sentenced to six months with hard labour and a five hundred dollar fine, and stayed free on a fifty thousand dollar bond while he appealed. He later said that without unlimited money to fight, he would already be in jail. Forty years on, in December 2010, Florida granted him a posthumous pardon. The surviving Doors said he had never needed one, and asked for an apology instead.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Meanwhile the band made its most expensive and most divisive record. For The Soft Parade, released in July 1969, Rothchild added strings and brass, and the sessions dragged on for months at a cost of more than eighty thousand dollars, compared with about ten thousand for the debut. Rothchild himself was by then struggling with cocaine. Morrison contributed less, and Krieger wrote half the album. For the first time the songs carried individual credits, because Morrison refused to be linked to Krieger's lyric in Tell All the People urging listeners to get their guns. The album reached number six, but critics and the underground scene hated the orchestrations, and it is still seen as their weakest album with Morrison.[1] [2] [3]

Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman

In November 1969 Morrison was arrested again, after he and his friend Tom Baker harassed airline staff on a flight to Phoenix to see the Rolling Stones. He faced a possible ten year federal sentence, but the charges were dropped in 1970 when a stewardess said she had confused him with Baker. That same month the band began a back to basics blues album. Morrison Hotel came out on the ninth of February 1970 and reached number four. The cover was shot by Henry Diltz at a real hotel on South Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles. They had no permission, so they ran inside while the clerk was away from the desk. The opener, Roadhouse Blues, became a radio staple.[1] [2] [3]

Through 1970 the Doors kept touring, though conservative cities still banned them. They played the Isle of Wight Festival in August. On the eighth of December, his twenty seventh birthday, Morrison recorded his poetry in a studio with friends. Three days later the band played two strong shows in Dallas, debuting new songs including Riders on the Storm. The next night, the twelfth of December 1970, at the Warehouse in New Orleans, Morrison was drunk. He forgot words, told rambling jokes, sat down during Light My Fire, then smashed his microphone stand into the stage until the wood splintered. It was the last concert the four Doors ever played together. Afterwards the others agreed to stop touring.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sessions for L.A. Woman began badly. Paul Rothchild, who had produced every album so far, listened to the new songs and walked out, calling one of them cocktail music. He was also grieving the death of Janis Joplin, whose final album he had just made. Engineer Bruce Botnick stepped in to co produce with the band, and they recorded in their own rehearsal room, the Doors Workshop at 8512 Santa Monica Boulevard. Morrison sang in the bathroom doorway, since there was no vocal booth. They hired Elvis Presley's bassist Jerry Scheff and guitarist Marc Benno, and cut most songs live in a few takes. Krieger said that with Rothchild gone, the warden was gone.[1] [2] [3] [4]

L.A. Woman came out on the nineteenth of April 1971. It reached number nine, and later became their second best selling studio album. The title track is Morrison's portrait of Los Angeles as a lonely woman, and in it he chants Mr. Mojo Risin, an anagram of his own name. Love Her Madly, which Krieger wrote while fighting with his girlfriend Lynn during Morrison's trial, reached number eleven. The final track, Riders on the Storm, drew on the cowboy song Ghost Riders in the Sky and on Morrison's recurring image of a hitchhiking killer. It was the last song the four Doors recorded together, and Morrison's whispered vocals on it were among his final recordings with the band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Paris, 1971

On the eleventh of March 1971, while L.A. Woman was still being mixed, Morrison took a leave of absence and flew to Paris to join Pamela Courson in an apartment she had rented on the rue Beautreillis, in the Marais. The others thought it was a good idea. For a while he seemed better. He shaved his beard, lost weight, took long walks and wrote. A Parisian acquaintance said that sober he looked like a quiet, shy American student, and drunk he became a madman. He phoned John Densmore to ask how the album was doing, and was pleased to hear Love Her Madly was a hit. He said he would be back eventually. Densmore was the last Door to speak to him.[1] [2] [3]

In the early morning of Saturday the third of July 1971, Pamela Courson found Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their apartment. He was twenty seven. The official cause was heart failure, but no autopsy was carried out, because French law did not require one. That missing autopsy has fuelled arguments ever since. His death came two years to the day after that of Rolling Stone Brian Jones, and months after Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, all at twenty seven. In a strange twist, the day before he died, his estranged father, Admiral Morrison, had given the keynote speech at the decommissioning of the aircraft carrier he once commanded, the Bon Homme Richard.[1] [2] [3]

Manager Bill Siddons flew to Paris and arranged the funeral with Courson. He never saw the body, as the coffin was closed. Morrison was buried on the seventh of July in the poets' corner of Père Lachaise Cemetery, alongside figures like Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf, and the news was made public only after the burial. The filmmaker Agnès Varda, a friend, said just four people were at the funeral, and she was one of them. The grave had no proper marker for years and was listed as Douglas James Morrison. In 1990 his father placed a stone with a Greek inscription usually translated as true to his own spirit. It became one of the most visited graves in the world.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pamela Courson never really recovered. Morrison's will named her his sole heir, but legal challenges delayed it for three years. She drifted, used heroin, and on the twenty fifth of April 1974 she died of an overdose in Los Angeles, also at twenty seven. Her parents buried her as Pamela Susan Morrison, and a court later ruled that she and Jim had been in a common law marriage. Her parents and his parents then fought over the estate until 1979, when they agreed to split it equally. Morrison's poetry had its own saga. A box of his notebooks labelled 127 Fascination passed through several hands, including a drug dealer, before a legal settlement in 1989.[1] [2] [3]

Three Doors, then a revival

The surviving three decided to carry on without replacing Jim. Singers including Iggy Pop were reportedly considered, but in the end Manzarek and Krieger shared the vocals. Other Voices came out in October 1971, just three months after Morrison's death, and reached number thirty one. Full Circle followed in August 1972, jazzier and funkier, with a surprise international hit in The Mosquito, a partly Spanish song Krieger wrote after hearing local musicians in Mexico. Neither record reached the top ten. Tensions grew between Manzarek, who wanted to go further into jazz, and the other two, who wanted to rock. Their Elektra contract lapsed and the Doors broke up in 1973. Krieger said later they probably released the first album too soon.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1978 the three reunited to put music behind poetry Morrison had recorded in 1969 and 1970. An American Prayer was billed as a Jim Morrison album with music by the Doors. It went platinum and was nominated for a Grammy for spoken word. Paul Rothchild hated it, calling it a violation of Morrison's intentions. The record started a revival. Its live version of Roadhouse Blues got heavy rock radio play. In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola opened Apocalypse Now with The End, and in 1980 Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman published No One Here Gets Out Alive, which hit number one on bestseller lists and flirted with the idea that Morrison had faked his death.[1] [2] [3]

Danny Sugerman had started working for the Doors at twelve, answering fan mail, and became the band's manager after Morrison died. The revival kept growing. Elektra reported that Doors albums were selling better than in any year since their release, and a Greatest Hits album in 1980 stayed on the chart for nearly two years. A 1985 compilation, The Best of the Doors, was eventually certified diamond for ten million units. Meanwhile the members went their own ways. Manzarek produced the first four albums by the Los Angeles punk band X. Densmore turned to dance and theatre. Krieger made jazz fusion records. None of them escaped the pull of the band.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1991 Oliver Stone released his film The Doors, with Val Kilmer as Morrison and Meg Ryan as Pamela. Kilmer learned about fifty songs and did his own singing, and the band said they sometimes could not tell his voice from Jim's. Krieger and Densmore advised on the film. Manzarek refused to take part and was scathing about the result. He said it was not about Jim Morrison the poet, but about Jimbo Morrison, the drunk. Densmore guessed a third of it was fiction, while Krieger said it could have been a lot worse. Patricia Kennealy, portrayed in the film, called it a distortion. Still, the film sent a new generation to the records, and Light My Fire finally became a British top ten hit.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The name on trial, and losing Ray

In 1993 the Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Manzarek, Krieger and Densmore played Roadhouse Blues, Break On Through and Light My Fire, with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam singing, and dedicated the honour to Morrison. In 2000 they reunited again for a tribute album, Stoned Immaculate, and a VH1 Storytellers show with guest singers including Scott Weiland and Ian Astbury. In 2002, Manzarek and Krieger began touring as the Doors of the 21st Century, with Astbury of the Cult singing. Densmore was not on stage. It was said he had tinnitus, but he later claimed he had not been invited. Police drummer Stewart Copeland filled in, until he broke his arm falling off a bicycle.[1] [2] [3]

The dispute turned bitter. In 2003 Cadillac offered fifteen million dollars to use Break On Through in an advert. Remembering Morrison's rage over Buick, Densmore used his veto. He also sued over the use of the Doors name, joined by the Morrison and Courson families. Manzarek and Krieger countersued for forty million dollars. Densmore said opposing lawyers painted him as unpatriotic, a communist and even an eco terrorist. Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Eddie Vedder, Tom Petty and Randy Newman backed him, and Stewart Copeland testified on his side. In July 2005 Densmore and the estate won a permanent injunction, and in 2008 the California Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal. The touring band became Riders on the Storm, then simply Manzarek and Krieger.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In early 2013 Ray Manzarek was diagnosed with bile duct cancer and went to Germany for treatment. Densmore heard he was very sick and called him, and the two made peace. Manzarek died on the twentieth of May 2013 in Rosenheim, Germany, at seventy four, with his wife and brothers beside him. Krieger said Ray had been a huge part of his life. Densmore said there was no keyboard player on the planet more suited to support Jim Morrison's words. Just before his death, the three had recorded together again, with the producer Skrillex on a track called Breakn' a Sweat, and behind the poet Michael C. Ford. Manzarek once said of Morrison that there were four musicians in the band, and one of them played words.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the twelfth of February 2016, what would have been Manzarek's seventy seventh birthday, Krieger and Densmore played together for the first time in fifteen years at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood, raising money for Stand Up to Cancer. Guests included members of X, Foo Fighters, Jane's Addiction and Stone Temple Pilots. Densmore told the crowd that Ray saw something in Jim before anybody. The next year, on the fourth of January 2017, fifty years after the first album, Los Angeles declared the Day of the Doors, and the two lit a Doors sign beneath the Venice letters, a short walk from where Ray and Jim had met on the beach.[1] [2] [3]

Both surviving Doors kept telling the story. Krieger's 2021 memoir, Set the Night on Fire, painted Morrison as brilliant, funny and deeply troubled. In May 2025 Paris police, searching in an unrelated fraud case, stumbled on the marble bust of Morrison that vanished from his grave in 1988, still covered in graffiti and missing its nose. As of 2026, the Doors are credited with more than one hundred million records sold worldwide. They were the first American band with eight straight gold or platinum albums, their debut sits in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and singers from Iggy Pop to Ian Curtis and Eddie Vedder have named Morrison as their biggest influence.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around The Doors

Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson. They met at the London Fog in 1966 and stayed together, on and off, until his death. It was an open and often stormy relationship, and both saw other people, but Courson believed in him as a poet and pushed him to write. Engineer Bruce Botnick recalled Morrison violently shaking her during a drunken argument at the Morrison Hotel sessions, though he wondered if Jim was partly putting on a show. She found him dead in Paris, inherited his estate, and died of an overdose three years later, also at twenty seven.[1] [2] [3]

Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek. Two UCLA film students who started the band on a beach. Manzarek heard Moonlight Drive and saw a star, and he talked Morrison out of quitting in 1969. After Jim's death, Ray became the keeper of the Doors myth, which some bandmates felt he romanticised. Krieger suggested that some of the wilder stories were Ray's fabrications. Densmore said simply that Ray saw something in Jim before anybody else did.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Densmore and Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger. For years the three were on the same page musically, but the Cadillac offer and the Doors of the 21st Century split them apart. Densmore sued, won, and was countersued. He felt especially hurt by the break with Krieger, once his roommate and best friend. Densmore and Manzarek reconciled by phone shortly before Ray died in 2013, and Densmore and Krieger played together again in 2016.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Jim Morrison and Admiral George Stephen Morrison. The admiral wrote to his son urging him to give up singing, citing what he called a complete lack of talent. Jim cut off contact and told Elektra his parents were dead. They never saw each other again. Late in life the admiral said the family looked back on him with great delight, and in 1990 he placed the Greek inscription on Jim's grave. At eighty six he joined Densmore in court to protect his son's legacy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Doors and Paul Rothchild. The Elektra producer shaped their first five albums and was sometimes called the fifth Door. He was a perfectionist who demanded dozens of takes, which the band came to resent, and he quit before L.A. Woman. He later called An American Prayer a violation of Morrison's work, yet he coached Val Kilmer for the 1991 film. He died of lung cancer in 1995.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Doors and Jac Holzman. The founder of Elektra Records signed the Doors in August 1966 after Arthur Lee of Love tipped him off. He delayed their debut to the new year, bought rock's first billboard for it, paid for Morrison's fire extinguisher damage, and chose Love Her Madly as a single over the band's wishes. When he entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, John Densmore gave the induction speech.[1] [2] [3]

Jim Morrison and Patricia Kennealy. The editor of Jazz and Pop magazine interviewed Morrison in 1969 and became his lover. She said they were joined in a pagan handfasting in 1970. He could be tender and then cold, and she speculated he took the ceremony less seriously than she did. She later attacked Oliver Stone's film, which made her character a composite, and wrote her own memoir, Strange Days.[1] [2] [3]

Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin. Their encounters were ugly. David Crosby recalled Morrison treating Joplin cruelly at a party, and she reportedly hit him over the head with a whiskey bottle in front of witnesses. Afterwards she referred to him with an insult whenever his name came up. When Dick Cavett offered to light her fire on his show, she joked that it was her favourite singer, then said, I guess not.[1]

Jim Morrison and Mary Werbelow. His first love, whom he met on a Florida beach in 1962. She ended the relationship in 1965, just before the Doors began. Manzarek said The End started as a short goodbye love song to her, and Densmore said The Crystal Ship was written for her too. Werbelow later said Jim told her the first three albums were about her, though she never went to a Doors concert.[1] [2] [3]

Ray Manzarek and Oliver Stone. Manzarek had long wanted a Doors film, but opposed Stone and would not approve his approach. Stone said Ray ranted at him for hours and wanted to dominate. Manzarek said the finished film was about a drunk, not a poet. Krieger later claimed Ray was jealous because he wanted to direct it himself, and Densmore agreed Ray had once hoped to.[1] [2]

Rare facts about The Doors

• Before their first album, the Doors scored a Ford training film for two hundred dollars. Dropped by Columbia in 1966, the broke band improvised music for a Ford customer service film called Love Thy Customer. Thought lost, it turned up in the UCLA film vaults in 2002.[1]
• The Doors were the first rock band advertised on a Sunset Strip billboard. Jac Holzman rented the billboard for around twelve hundred dollars a month to push the debut album. A radio host teased them that you cannot hear a billboard.[1] [2]
• For decades, the album version of Light My Fire played about three and a half percent too slow. A Brigham Young University professor, Michael Hicks, noticed the recording sat almost a half step below how the band played it. The speed was finally corrected for the fortieth anniversary mix.[1] [2]
• The bass on much of the debut album was played by an uncredited session player, Larry Knechtel. Rothchild felt Ray's keyboard bass needed more punch, so Knechtel of the Wrecking Crew overdubbed matching lines. Densmore explained he simply copied Ray's left hand.[1] [2]
• In the Elektra press biography, Morrison listed his parents as deceased. His brother Andy only learned Jim was a rock star when a friend pointed out the resemblance on an album cover. He played it for their father, who listened without saying a thing.[1] [2]
• Jim Morrison played the Moog synthesizer on Strange Days. It was one of the earliest uses of the Moog on a rock album, programmed with help from Paul Beaver. Morrison otherwise rarely played instruments beyond maracas and tambourine.[1] [2]
• A New York cab driver was paid five dollars to pose with a trumpet on the Strange Days cover. Photographer Joel Brodsky could not find enough real street performers for the shot in Sniffen Court, Manhattan, so his assistant played a juggler and a passing cabbie became a trumpeter.[1]
• The Unknown Soldier took around one hundred and thirty takes. Paul Rothchild's perfectionism peaked on the anti war single. On stage, Morrison acted out the song's firing squad by pretending to be shot by Robby Krieger.[1] [2]
• Hello, I Love You was one of the first rock singles released in stereo. It featured a showy sweep of sound from one speaker to the other, and is credited with helping push the industry toward stereo singles.[1]
• Touch Me began life as Hit Me, a blackjack phrase. Morrison changed the line because he feared rowdy crowds might take it literally and attack him. At the end of the song he shouts stronger than dirt, a slogan from an Ajax advert.[1]
• On Roadhouse Blues, the harmonica player is credited as G. Puglese. It was really John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, using a false name for contract reasons. Blues guitarist Lonnie Mack played bass because the regular bassist was stuck in traffic.[1]
• The Morrison Hotel cover was shot without permission. They had no permission, so photographer Henry Diltz and the band waited until the clerk was called away, then dashed in and posed behind the window.[1]
• Michelangelo Antonioni turned down L'America for his film Zabriskie Point. Manzarek said the band played it so loud it pinned the director to the wall. He thanked them and fled, then turned to Pink Floyd instead.[1]
• Morrison recorded the vocals for L.A. Woman in a bathroom doorway. The Doors Workshop had no vocal booth, so he sang there into the same microphone used on their last tour. Hyacinth House was recorded in the bathroom itself for the echo of the tiles.[1] [2] [3]
• Mr. Mojo Risin, chanted in L.A. Woman, is an anagram of Jim Morrison. Densmore said the phrase was sexual, so he slowly sped the track back up during that section. In 2000 the New York Mets adopted it as a rallying cry.[1] [2] [3]
• Riders on the Storm entered the Hot 100 in the same week Morrison died. The single charted in the week ending the third of July 1971 and later reached number fourteen. In 2010 it entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.[1]
• The day before Jim died, his father gave a speech at the retirement of an aircraft carrier. Rear Admiral George Morrison was keynote speaker when the Bon Homme Richard, his former command, was decommissioned on the second of July 1971.[1]
• Morrison's grave was listed in the cemetery directory as Douglas James Morrison. It had no official marker for years. A shield placed by French officials was stolen in 1973, and a marble bust added in 1981 was stolen in 1988.[1] [2]
• At his death, thirty seven paternity actions were pending against Morrison. Despite that, none of the people named in them ever made a claim against his estate.[1]
• Before Paris, Morrison approached Lalo Schifrin about setting his poetry to music. He had also sketched out cover art with painter T. E. Breitenbach. After his death the other Doors made An American Prayer themselves, unaware of the painting.[1]
• A box of Morrison's poems ended up with a San Francisco taxi driver. Pamela Courson gave the box, labelled 127 Fascination, to a cab driver she dated in 1972. It later passed through a drug dealer before a 1989 legal settlement.[1]
• Morrison once wrote a fan letter to a professor of French literature. In 1968 he thanked Wallace Fowlie of Duke University for his Rimbaud translations, saying the book travelled everywhere with him. Fowlie later lectured on Morrison and Rimbaud.[1]
• Robby Krieger's open tuning on The End came from lessons at Ravi Shankar's music school. Krieger and Densmore both studied at the Kinnara School of Music in Los Angeles, and the tuning gave The End its sitar like drone.[1] [2]
• Ray Manzarek produced the first four albums by the punk band X. He also played on some of them. At the 2016 tribute concert, John Doe of X recalled fans on early tours shouting, where's Ray.[1] [2]
• Manzarek played keyboards on Weird Al Yankovic's Doors pastiche Craigslist. Yankovic called the 2009 session one of the high points of his life, and released video of it on the day Manzarek died.[1]
• Ray Manzarek followed Atenism, an ancient Egyptian religion. He discovered it through Sigmund Freud's book Moses and Monotheism. In 2021 his 1965 student film Evergreen was added to the National Film Registry.[1]
• John Densmore played Dylan's sponsor on Beverly Hills 90210. After the Doors he moved into dance and theatre, won a Los Angeles theatre award, and played a studio engineer in the Oliver Stone film.[1]
• The Mosquito, sung partly in Spanish, was the post Morrison Doors' biggest hit. Krieger wrote it after three local musicians in Mexico sang him a song about a mosquito. It did well across Latin America and Europe.[1]
• The original Full Circle album came with a cut out zoetrope. The spinning animation device showed a man's life from infancy to old age, matching the album's theme. It returned on the 2015 vinyl reissue.[1]
• Ian Astbury turned down the role of Morrison in Oliver Stone's film. He disliked how Morrison was going to be portrayed. A decade later he fronted Manzarek and Krieger's Doors of the 21st Century.[1] [2]
• Morrison was first arrested at a Florida State football game in 1963. Drunk on wine, he mocked players and fans, then stole an umbrella and a police officer's helmet from a squad car before being caught.[1] [2]
• Morrison chose a Telefunken microphone because Frank Sinatra had used the same model. Bruce Botnick showed him the U47 at Sunset Sound. Sinatra was Morrison's favourite singer, and Paul Rothchild called him a rock and roll Bing Crosby.[1]
• Robby Krieger says Morrison was excited to catch syphilis. In his 2021 memoir, Krieger claimed Jim wanted to leave it untreated to feel close to the nineteenth century poets he idolised.[1]
• A French police fraud search recovered Morrison's stolen grave bust in 2025. The marble bust by Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin vanished in 1988. It turned up thirty seven years later, still covered in graffiti and missing its nose.[1] [2]
• Status Quo reshaped their sound after hearing Roadhouse Blues in a German club. In 1970 the band liked its twelve bar shuffle so much they used it as a template, and their live version later stretched past twenty minutes.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.