The Doors 10 greatest songs, as chosen by the band

Originally published in Uncut Take 339 (June 2025 issue)…

As John Densmore scrutinises the list of Doors songs Uncut has asked him to talk about to mark the band’s 60th anniversary, the drummer smiles at the variety of music they produced in such a short time. “The Doors were an American melting pot,” he says. “Ray Manzarek had blues and classical, Robby Krieger was flamenco, I brought the jazz; then we had Jim’s literary and cinematic approach. We made a delicious gumbo from all these diverse ingredients.”

Their music is indeed a rich stew, from baroque pop to heavy rock and epic psychodramas like “The End” and “When The Music’s Over”. The band recorded six albums on Jac Holzman’s Elektra label during a tumultuous period that ended with Morrison’s death in July 1971. We are speaking just days after another loss in The Doors’ extended family: Val Kilmer, who gave such a memorable performance as Morrison in Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic. “Val really did an amazing job,” says Robby Krieger. “He did 90 percent of the vocals himself. It was like he became Jim Morrison that whole time – I was calling him Jim. He was such a cool guy.”

Krieger and Densmore are both still located in LA, where the band was formed in 1965 by Morrison and fellow UCLA film student Ray Manzarek. Both have been hit by the recent LA fires, with Densmore still waiting to return to his home – “my drum kit and gold records are all safe” – and Krieger having lost the house in the Palisades where he wrote the band’s first No 1 hit, “Light My Fire”.

The irony of the song title has not escaped him, but it hasn’t stopped Krieger from celebrating the band’s 60th birthday with a series of concerts at the Whisky A Go Go on Sunset Strip, where The Doors were the house band from May to August 1966. “We did the whole first album in order the other night,” he says. “They filmed it. I’m doing all the albums, one each month.”

Densmore is due to join Krieger at the Whisky to play LA Woman. Beyond that, he continues to hold close the legacy of The Doors and their inner circle. Among the three albums he’s working on, one has been recorded with Adam Holzman – son of Elektra Records founder Jac – who learned to play keyboards after watching Manzarek in the studio. Holzman went on to play with Miles Davis and he and Densmore have covered a series of songs by both Miles and The Doors.

What would Morrison make of his bandmates’ ongoing creativity? “It’s hard to imagine what he’d have been like, had he lived,” says Krieger. “Maybe he’d have mellowed, become like the older Val Kilmer. Ray once joked that Jim wasn’t really dead and that idea never went away. Because if there was anybody who could have pulled off a trick like that, it was Jim.”

LIGHT MY FIRE

(THE DOORS, 1967)

The first song written by Krieger, “Light My Fire” stayed at No 1 in the US for three weeks and introduced America to the sound of The Doors.

KRIEGER: We established ourselves in LA pretty quick. We got a gig at the London Fog on Sunset Strip and one day somebody saw us and booked us into the Whisky as the house band. When we recorded “Light My Fire” for Elektra in 1966, we only did two takes because we had been playing it every night at the Whisky and Ray had developed this great part over a period of months. That wasn’t the intro at the time – it was in the middle of the song as a means of getting out of the solos and back into the verse – but our producer Paul Rothchild had the idea of making that the intro. We edited it, but eventually the DJs played the longer version on the radio.

DENSMORE: We were proud to break that three-minute barrier. That was terrific, as it removed those restraints. It’s good to expand, it’s good for the mind. As soon as Robby played the song, I knew it was a hit. I got goosebumps. This was before Ray’s incredible Bach-like intro and the long jazz solos in the middle, when it was more like a little folk song. Robby wrote that version in his parents’ house in the Palisades – that house just burnt down.

It’s Robby’s song, but Ray showed straight away that we were different. I felt total simpático with Ray musically because his left hand was our bass. Ray played bass with his left hand and soloed with his right hand, and if he got a little excited the tempo would increase, and that’s when I had to hold back those reins. We had auditioned a bass player or two but we just sounded like another white rock band trying to play the blues. The keyboard gave us room to improvise and a unique sound from the start.

BRUCE BOTNICK, (ENGINEER): I had been working with Love and then I met The Doors. I’d never worked with a band that didn’t have a bass player. Ray talked about being two people: Ray and Lefty, and Lefty was the left hand. Nobody had heard anything like that intro and it set the whole thing up. They were such an interesting band. Robby was one of the only guitar players I know who can play with his fingers; he didn’t use a pick. Then there’s John. John wasn’t keeping time, he was playing the song, responding directly to Jim. Ray brings the blues with some classical influences. He was a very deep individual who knew more about world religion than anybody I ever met. He was full of facts but a master of confabulation, which is pretty much how he played. He takes the basics and then extrapolates.

THE CRYSTAL SHIP

(THE DOORS, 1967)

The Doors tackled some dark and daring themes, but “The Crystal Ship” highlighted Morrison’s gift for exquisite love songs.

DENSMORE: This is an example of the incredibly gorgeous but very difficult melodies that Jim had in his head. He couldn’t play an instrument, so he thought up melodies to help him remember the lyrics. I always viewed the words as percussive. Take a line like “Break on through to the other side” – I wanted to play the drums to that beat. He was a natural songwriter who heard a concert in his head but didn’t know how to get it out, so we accessed it for him. Nearly all our songs were written by Jim in that style, although Robby wrote quite a few – “Light My Fire”, “Touch Me”, “Love Her Madly” – more of the hits.

KRIEGER: We recorded the first two albums very quickly; it was only later things got more complicated. After The Doors came out, I remember listening to Sgt Pepper with Bruce. We were glued to the speakers because it was very cool, but we didn’t think we had to copy that as we had our own thing going on. We were part of this whole West Coast thing with the San Francisco bands playing these longer songs, which was what the West Coast bands brought to the ring.

BOTNICK: This was a beautiful song by Jim, but you could always sense Jim’s darker side. You saw the writing on the wall. I still meet people every day who are blown away by what he had to say. A lot of people spend money on shrinks, but Jim went to a bar with a beer and came back with a song.

THE END

(THE DOORS, 1967)

Honed during live shows at the Whisky, “The End” was the band’s first great psychotropic epic, showing the West Coast could do nihilism just as well as The Velvet Underground.

KRIEGER: According to the movie, “The End” got us kicked out the Whisky, but that’s not how I remember it. When “Light My Fire” was a hit we simply became too big for the Whisky. But the other part of the movie was right – he did the Oedipal part the first time on stage at the Whisky. The night we recorded it, he was on a lot of acid. I remember sitting round the table at Sunset Sound and he was saying over and over, “fuck the mother, kill the father, fuck the mother, kill the father”. OK Jim, we get it. He could be an intense guy. He wasn’t always like that, but he was like that more than most.

DENSMORE: Jim sang “The End” to us a cappella. I thought it was a beautiful love song. Well! Over many months in clubs it kind of evolved into this dirge-like epic. The Oedipal section, he just sprang that on us one night at the Whisky and by the time we recorded it, we had nurtured it along. We always did “The End” as an encore, which wiped everybody out. They left quietly, chewing on what they heard.

BOTNICK: If you look at The Doors in relation to the other bands at the time, nobody was doing anything like “The End”. This was new. He was one of the few songwriters who was genuinely a poet, and when you look at the best Doors songs, they all celebrate that life experience.

WHEN THE MUSIC’S OVER

(STRANGE DAYS, 1967)

The band’s masterly second album ended with another psychedelic epic, with Morrison digging into foreboding themes from environmental awareness to loss of innocence – over expansive guitar and organ backing.

BOTNICK: I’d been working with The Turtles and George Harrison had given them a mono reference copy of Sgt Pepper. I played that for the guys and they loved it. We had an eight-track and this permission to experiment. So when Robby did his solos for “When The Music’s Over”, we overdubbed three guitars. We wanted to be creative because of Sgt Pepper, so I plugged Robby’s guitar into the console and turned it up until the lights were glowing, giving it a fuzz. Jim came in the next day and sang. He was into psychedelics, and who knows what he saw? We were right across the street from a Catholic church and Jim would occasionally disappear over there and have an epiphany. Maybe some of that went into “When The Music’s Over”.

KRIEGER: Jim had this song in his mind, the words and melody. I don’t know exactly what it’s about, other than it’s one of the first rock songs about the planet and environmentalism. Ray started playing the bassline from the Herbie Hancock song, “Watermelon Man”, and we went from there. The night before we went to record it, I got a call from Jim. He was with Pam [Courson] and they were having a bad trip. He said they needed help. I went over, told them to put on some clothes and took them to Griffith Park to hang out by the fishpond until their mood improved. We went to the studio the next day and Jim didn’t show, so we played “When The Music’s Over” with Ray on guide vocals. Jim came in the next day and did the vocals in one take. He gave a great performance because he was a bit embarrassed.

DENSMORE: I am very proud of that one. It’s really tight. I had seen John Coltrane as a kid and watched what Elvin Jones did with the sax player – they had this conversation. So on “When The Music’s Over”, as Jim was singing “What have they done to the Earth, what have they done to our fair sister?”, I started jabbing at the drums. I am crazy for that song and we played it really well live. We’d open the show with it and the audience would be bludgeoned.

LOVE STREET

(WAITING FOR THE SUN, 1968)

A lighter moment from their third album, with Krieger’s baroque guitar chords, a jazzy piano solo from Densmore and Morrison tipping a bemused nod to Laurel Canyon’s hippie counterculture.

DENSMORE: Going into Waiting For The Sun, things were getting more difficult. We had used all our material on the first two records, which meant we had to write songs in the studio which is a very expensive way of doing things. Plus Jim was starting to drink more. I didn’t know he had a disease, but I knew there was an elephant in the room. I wanted to get off the road but the records continued to be good. We had another big hit with “Hello, I Love You”, which was also our first hit in the UK. One of my favourites from Waiting For The Sun is “Love Street”, which is kind of lamenting the Summer of Love and Laurel Canyon. Ray does a lovely solo and the melody is gorgeous. What can I say? I’m just tooting our horn.

BOTNICK: Jim was inebriated a lot of the time, but he was a romantic. He loved women and “Love Street” is about that. Some of his love songs could be so teenage, like “Hello I Love You”, and there was the more poetic psychological stuff, but when you take something like “Love Street” or “The Spy” you hear that pure appreciation of the feminine form.

KRIEGER: Sunset Strip was hippie heaven, but “Love Street” was written about this place where Pam lived in Laurel Canyon. As it comes down from the hill to meet Sunset, halfway down there is a little shopping area, and that’s where she lived. Recently they renamed one of the streets there Love Street. I loved doing this song. It was the first time I got to do major seventh chords, which I guess are kind of baroque.

SUMMER’S ALMOST GONE

(WAITING FOR THE SUN, 1968)

Morrison laments the end of a love affair on one of the many songs on Waiting For The Sun imbued with a sense of loss.

DENSMORE: This is a bit of a fan favourite. It reminds me of sitting on the beach in Venice, California. We’d look south towards LA airport to watch the planes taking off and think that one day that might be us. Around then, we came to the UK for the first time. We played the Roundhouse – “the psychedelic sound comes to London”. Rumour has it that McCartney was there. We had equal billing with Jefferson Airplane and I remember the audience staring at us as if we came from Mars. But we could see the counterculture was international. I walked up and down Chelsea and it was like the Fillmore or the Strip: the same people, the same clothes. It felt like we were taking over.

KRIEGER: Jim wrote this after breaking up with one of his girlfriends. Pam was consistent, but others were coming and going. For this album we tried to record the epic poem, The Lizard King Trilogy [released as “Celebration Of The Lizard” on 1970’s Absolutely Live]. Jim was obsessed with lizards, I don’t know why. He wanted it to be almost the entire album, but that was just asking too much. So we put the poem on the inner sleeve instead.

TOUCH ME

(THE SOFT PARADE, 1969)

Morrison’s arrest on March 1, 1969 in Miami for indecency took the band off the road for months. But The Doors continued to make classic singles – including Krieger’s beautiful “Touch Me”, one of the highlights from The Soft Parade, which introduced horns and strings to their sound.

KRIEGER: This is the album [where] we started to bring in different instruments. We got criticised, but I love some of the songs we did on that record with Paul Harris, who wrote the string and horn parts. I love especially “Touch Me”, there’s some great stuff on that one. It was originally called “Hit Me”, as I wrote it about a game of blackjack we were playing in Hawaii, but Jim really didn’t like that idea – he thought people might actually come on stage and hit him – so he said we should change it. The Miami incident meant we couldn’t get a gig, but that gave us plenty of time to record. I worried about Jim, but in those days it was “do your thing, man”. This was the ’60s, it wasn’t cool to get in the way – although one day we did take him to my dad’s house. He tried to talk Jim into seeing a shrink and Jim did actually try it, but I think he stopped because he felt he was smarter than the shrink, so why should he listen to him?

BOTNICK: Rolling Stone put Jim on the cover that photo of him like Jesus – and Jim saw it on the mixing desk in the studio and got a black Magic Marker and drew a big beard. We taped that over the glass. He was reacting against his fame. He just wanted to make the music. He was still a lot of fun, even if he didn’t have a lot of songs. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we called it “Hit Me”. It wouldn’t have been a No 1 record, that’s for sure. It was one of the band’s great singles, and we were still in a Top 40 world where you needed a hook and a memorable lyric.

DENSMORE: That was another gift from Robby Krieger, and the arrangement was quite wonderful. We started recording the album just after the Miami incident. I don’t know what to say. Jim did not expose himself, but he was drunk. It was a mess, basically. There was a “Rally For Decency” with 30,000 people, the homophobe Anita Bryant gave a talk, Nixon sent a telegram of support and all our gigs were cancelled. But that was OK, because I was worried about Jim’s drinking. I didn’t mind that we were taking a break, and Jim was still writing great lyrics.

WILD CHILD

(THE SOFT PARADE, 1969)

Music and the cultural mood was getting heavier in 1969, which suited The Doors. Some of that rage and aggression went into “Wild Child”, where the band dug deep without forgetting to swing.

DENSMORE: This has really great lyrics by Jim about Pam. I found myself doing this Art Blakey roll, bringing in a different beat. It’s a really strong song, with a lot of bottom. I think partly Jim was writing about the energy of the ’60s and the energy of rock’n’roll: it’s a human healing energy. America’s greatest gift to the world. It’s cathartic.

BOTNICK: “Wild Child” was the very first song recorded at the new Elektra studio on the West Coast and if we had continued down that road for the rest of the album, it would have been a lot more like Morrison Hotel.

KRIEGER: That one let me use my slide guitar with this real fuzzy sound. Most of the other songs with the slide were like “Moonlight Drive”, a bit swoopy, but this was more rough and ready. Music was getting heavier, but we were always like that. When we played Isle Of Wight in 1970 it was dark, in more ways than one. Jim wouldn’t let them turn the lights on because he wasn’t happy with how he looked – he was quite overweight and had his beard. It was a very intense show. We always did quite a heavy show.

PEACE FROG

(MORRISON HOTEL, 1970)

A funky number with an outstanding psychedelic organ solo from Manzarek, “Peace Frog” was – like “Five To One” and “The Unknown Soldier” – one of the more political songs written by the son of a US Navy Admiral.

DENSMORE: Robby had this little guitar riff and Ray and I were salivating when we heard it. But Jim had nothing. So we recorded it as an instrumental track with a bit of a James Brown influence. But you have to hand this one to Paul Rothchild: he asked for one of Jim’s poetry journals and pulls out “Blood on the street in the town of Chicago” with this sort of sub-story about a woman with “sunlight in her hair“. He combined these two poems to create “Peace Frog”. The main lyric kind of emulates our own journey: New Haven, where Jim was busted; Venice, where we formed; Chicago, where Ray was from – like this flow of blood through our career. It’s about that and it’s about the civil unrest of the time.

BOTNICK: Things were getting darker at the end of the 1960s, but Jim was in better shape by Morrison Hotel. Being in the studio for an artist can be a very safe space. “Peace Frog” is a peculiar song. I have friends in the movie business who want to make movies about that whole time – 1968 and 1969 – and this would be the ideal song. Jim was bringing his life experiences to historic events and putting them together in a way that made perfect sense.

KRIEGER: Paul found a poem that Jim wrote about an abortion one of his girlfriends had. We didn’t want to call the song “Abortion Stories”, which was the name of the poem, so we called it “Peace Frog”. I never really thought of it as being about anything else. For bass, we used Ray Neopolitan. Ray was an unusual player and played the bass with a pick, so it’s a very strange part, real kind of jumpy.

RIDERS ON THE STORM

(LA WOMAN, 1971)

The last song Morrison ever recorded, the haunting “Riders On The Storm” featured sound effects of rain and thunder, bringing another new dimension to the band’s sonic landscape. Released as a single shortly before Morrison’s death, it demonstrated that the band still had plenty to offer.

BOTNICK: “Riders…” was such a funny song. The famous story is Paul Rothchild calling it “cocktail jazz” – he might have had a point, as Ray in jazz mode was not as fluid as any of the great jazz pianists. Paul stood down and I became producer [for LA Woman], which was fine for the band. Jim wanted to add lightning and thunder and I’d recorded a storm for an Elektra sound effects record. We added that. That was a magical thing, as it still gets played on the radio whenever it rains in LA. It really brings out the cinematic quality of the band and I wonder where they would have taken it if Jim had lived.

KRIEGER: You can’t really talk about The Doors without “Riders On The Storm”. We’d been jamming on the surf song “Ghost Riders” and that does not sound like cocktail music, but Paul had recorded with Janis Joplin just before she died and he became really worried that Jim would be next. He didn’t want to be known as the suicide producer, so he quit. That song always feels like a look at the possible future of The Doors. It came from a jam. Jim came up with the words on the spot and then we added the sound effects. I feel that is how we would have continued to write.

DENSMORE: This was probably the most organic evolution of any song we ever did. The feel of the song was jazzy and I got to nudge it that way purposefully to make it a little less of the to-and-fro of rock’n’roll. That came from the words, which always told me what to do. As soon as we finished, Jim went to France. I was hoping he would clean up his act, but I know that he’s in Paris, where they have wine for breakfast. He didn’t come back. But Jim was a shooting star, a quick flash with a big impact.