January 4, 1967: The Doors Release Their Self-Titled Debut Album

Left to right: Jim Morrison, John Densmore,

Ray Manzarek & Robbie Krieger

January 4, 1967: Los Angeles-based rock and roll band The Doors release of their self-titled debut album. This begins a year in which many landmark albums would be released.

George Morrison graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy, and witnessed the bombing of Pearl Harbor 6 months later. Two years after that, in between his combat missions as a Navy pilot, he and his wife Clara became the father of a boy they named James Douglas Morrison. George was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in the Korean War, and was commander of the U.S. naval forces that became involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which led to the escalation of America's role in the Vietnamese Civil War. He retired with the rank of Rear Admiral.

It was quite a career -- and yet, he's best known as the father of a rock star who wrote a lyric about wanting to kill him.

Jim, as were his younger sister Anne and their younger brother Andrew, was a "Navy brat," never staying in one place too long due to his father's transfers. One of them was to the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C., and Jim graduated from George Washington High School, one of the schools in Alexandria, Virginia that was folded into T.C. Williams High School, the school from the football-themed film Remember the Titans.

Speaking of movies: Jim was accepted into film school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Before that, he dropped out of Florida State University, after getting arrested for disturbing the peace and petty larceny after getting drunk at a football game on September 28, 1963. (The Seminoles lost to Texas Christian University, 13-0 at Doak Campbell Stadium in Tallahassee.)

At the infamous Miami concert in 1969, Jim allegedly told the crowd, "I'm from Florida! I went to Florida State!" The crowd cheered. Then he said, "Then I got smart, and moved to California!" The cheers quickly turned to boos.

At UCLA Film School, he met Ray Manzarek, a classical pianist and a blues fan from the South Side of Chicago, who had been in a band with his brother Rick, named Rick & the Ravens. Being Polish, he noticed that the music produced by the black blues performers on the South Side was heavy enough to remind him of the kind of classical music produced in Slavic countries like Russia, Poland and Hungary, and it influenced his performing.

Jim and Ray bonded over their shared love of film, poetry, and rock and roll. Morrison read some of his own poetry, and told Manzarek, "I got a whole concert in my head." Manzarek said, "Let's get a rock and roll band together, and make a million dollars!" (How quaint the amount sounds now.)

In his memoir, Manzarek said of the musicians he wanted to fill out the band, "I wanted guys who wanted to make music more than they wanted to fuck." He found two men who shared his love of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Guitarist Robbie Krieger had written a song titled "Light My Fire," and suggested "putting some long solos on it, like Coltrane did on 'My Favorite Things.'"

And drummer John Densmore asked Manzarek if he liked Coltrane. Of Coltrane's pianist, Manzarek said, "McCoy Tyner is my idol!" Of Coltrane's drummer, Densmore said, "I worship Elvin Jones. He is the greatest drummer on the planet." Morrison approved of both hirees, and, as Manzarek put it, "the diamond" was set.

And it would be a diamond, 4 members: Vocalist, organist, guitarist, drummer. Instead of hiring a bass guitarist, Manzarek played a Vox Continental organ with his right hand, and, on top of that, placed a Rhodes Piano Bass, which he played with his left hand.

Morrison named the group whose concert he heard in his head The Doors. Manzarek initially interpreted the name as "opening the doors of your mind." He was close: Morrison, a devotee of psychedelic drugs, had read Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception. And he knew that Huxley got his title from a line by English poet William Blake: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

The Doors merged their influences of rock and roll, jazz and classical music, and Morrison's interest in older literature and poetry for their lyrics, to form one of the most spectacular bands of all time. Morrison's looks, stage presence and lyrics made them stand out.

Krieger wrote the lyrics to their hits "Light My Fire," "Love Me Two Times," "Touch Me" and "Love Her Madly," but Morrison wrote most of the others. They moved up among the music clubs of Los Angeles in 1965 and 1966, until, in May 1966 they became the house band at the biggest club of them all, the Whisky a Go Go, at 8901 Sunset Boulevard. (The "Sunset Strip" is roughly 8000 to 9300 Sunset Blvd.)

They -- or, rather, Morrison -- blew that gig with his song "The End." As if the song, with its imagery of death, a snake, "a Roman wilderness of pain," insane children, and a mysterious bus, wasn't weird enough. On August 21, Morrison slipped in a spoken-word piece, a rock retelling of the Greek myth of Oedipus:

The killer awoke before dawn.
He put his boots on.
He took a face from the ancient gallery
and he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived 
and then he paid a visit to his brother
and then he, he walked on down the hall!
And he came to a door!
And he looked inside!

"Father?"
"Yes, son?"
"I want to kill you."
"Mother, I want to..."

The words "fuck you!" wouldn't make it onto the album -- he just yelled unintelligibly at that moment in the song -- but he would do it in his concerts, and he did it on this occasion. The show over, the club fired the band. But Jack Holzman, head of Elektra Records, and his top producer, Paul Rothchild, were on hand, and they offered the band a record deal.

They recorded their self-titled debut album 3 days later, on August 24, 1966. Ten songs, including the very long "Light My Fire" and the even longer "The End," all in one day. You could do that back then.

They covered the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill song "Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)" and blues singer Howlin' Wolf's "Back Door Man," but all the other songs were originals. The album opened with "Break On Through (To the Other Side)," so Morrison was opening with a metaphor for death. They closed, naturally, with "The End." The last song on the 1st side was "Light My Fire," which hit Number 1 that Summer, and made them legends.

The Doors during their controversial appearance

on The Ed Sullivan Show, September 17, 1967.
L to R: John Densmore, Robbie Krieger,

Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek.

But Morrison was an alcoholic, and a user of psychedelic drugs, and as they went along -- releasing Strange Days later in 1967, Waiting for the Sun in 1968, The Soft Parade in 1969, Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Cafe in 1970, and L.A. Woman in 1971 -- he became more controversial and less reliable.

Much like a later Los Angeles-based band, Guns N' Roses, a Doors concert was unpredictable: You never knew when the lead singer was going to join with the others to give you a transcendent experience, or when he was going to start a riot, or whether he was going to show up drunk and practically useless, or whether he was going to show up at all.

On September 18, 1970, another of the icons of psychedelic rock, Jimi Hendrix, died as a result of mixing drugs and alcohol. When asked for her thoughts on it, bluesy rock singer Janis Joplin said, "There but for the grace of God go I." She wasn't kidding. She died just 16 days later.

When he found out about Jimi's death, Morrison asked his friends, "Do you believe in omens?" Like Janis, he didn't take the hint. When Janis died, Jim told his friends, "Believe it or not, you're drinking with number three."

In March 1971, Morrison left Los Angeles for Paris, the adoptive home of so many writers and composers he'd admired, in the hopes of getting away from L.A., clearing his mind, and getting ready to make great art again. By this point, he had gotten fat, and had started using harder drugs like heroin. He was joined by Pamela Courson, his longtime girlfriend.

At first, the sabbatical seemed to work. He wrote of taking long walks through the great city. He lost weight, including some of the puffiness in his face that had led him to grow a beard. But on July 3, Pam found Jim in the bathtub, dead. She said he seemed to be looking up, with a smile and a look of peace on his face.

He had seemed to celebrate death in some of his songs, and now he had achieved it. He seemed not to have found peace in life. I hope he found it in the afterlife.

Pamela claimed to have married Jim -- but so did Patricia Kennealy, a journalist who claimed to be a witch. If either of them had married him, it wasn't legal. When Pamela died in 1974, also from drugs, that settled Jim's estate: It went, irony of ironies, to his parents. Jim is not known to have fathered any children.

Clara Morrison lived until 2005, Admiral George Morrison until 2008, Ray Manzarek until 2013, Patricia Kennealy until 2021. As of January 4, 2022, Robbie Krieger, John Densmore, Jim's brother Andrew Morrison, Jim's sister Anne Morrison Chewning, and producer Jac Holzman are still alive.

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January 4, 1967 was a Wednesday. Actress Marina Orsini was born.

Baseball was out of season. Football was between its league championship games and its 1st-ever "AFL-NFL World Championship Game," which would be retroactively renamed "Super Bowl I."

There were 3 games played in the NBA:

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Chicago Bulls, 136-115 at the Philadelphia Civic Center.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Baltimore Bullets, 132-126 in double overtime at the Baltimore Civic Center (now the CFG Bank Arena).

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the St. Louis Hawks, 122-101 at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena. Jerry West led all scorers on the day with 35 points.

There were 2 games played in the NHL. The New York Rangers and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a tie, 1-1 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. And the Montreal Canadiens and the Chicago Black Hawks played to a tie, 2-2 at the Chicago Stadium. The Boston Bruins and the Detroit Red Wings were not scheduled to play.