The Doors

Four musicians with no recording experience walked into Sunset Sound Studios in Hollywood for six days in August 1966 and made one of the defining debut albums in rock history. The Doors had been the house band at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, and the week before they recorded this album they had been fired from that gig for performing an explicit re-enactment of the Oedipus Rex myth during "The End." Elektra Records had signed them after the label's founder watched their set and decided he had never heard anything like it. He was right.

What makes The Doors so immediately striking is how unlike anything else it sounded in 1967. Ray Manzarek played the bass lines with his left hand on a keyboard because the band had no bassist, freeing the music from the low-end thud of most rock and giving it a strange, floating quality. Robby Krieger's guitar moved from flamenco to blues to hard rock within a single track. John Densmore's drumming came from jazz and bossa nova rather than the straight-ahead rock patterns of most bands. And Jim Morrison wrote lyrics that were soaked in William Blake, Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, and the kind of late-night American darkness that nobody else in pop music was addressing.

"Break On Through," "Soul Kitchen," "Alabama Song," "Light My Fire" all appear here, followed by "The End," an eleven-minute descent into Oedipal mythology that closes the record like a door being shut on everything that came before it in pop music. This band sounded like danger. They sounded like they meant it. The debut album is where all of it was still fresh.