Pantheon Songs

The thing that makes “Light My Fire” iconic—the thing that makes it absolutely timeless—is its simplicity. Now, the idea of “this is timeless because it is simple” is not a revolutionary notion. In fact, almost everything that is timeless is so because it does not back itself into needless complexities. Why do you think there will always be people who love a song like “Yesterday” by The Beatles? Because it is musically and lyrically so simple that it cuts right into you.^[1]

But with The Doors it was different because simplicity wasn’t something that could come easily when Jim Morrison—a drunken rambler who thought of himself as a poet internally and a Christ-like figure externally—is fronting your band and is the face of your band. Don’t get me wrong, Morrison’s dramatic persona could be used to high effect and still not disrupt the song (see: “The End”). “Light My Fire” (and to some degree “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” and “People Are Strange”) is top shelf in every aspect from beginning to end because Morrison is being a simple version of himself, rather than the supposedly complex (but really kind of a caricature) version of himself.

Clocking in at over seven minutes long you would expect “Light My Fire” to be pretty complex, especially considering that there is an organ-driven four and a half minute solo that makes up the bulk of the track. Beyond the weight of the song, though, lies its simplicity. Morrison’s on a short leash with regards to the lyrics: they have a surrealism and are idiomatic of the era but they are also concise;^[2] Ray Manzarek’s keyboard sounds more complex than it is because the notes (and volume) are so high; Robby Krieger’s guitar, because it at times sounds quasi-Middle Eastern, sounds more exotic than it actually is; John Densmore keeps everything in place with his wonderfully paced drums, going from workmanlike to accelerated with no expectation of glory in performing either style.^[3] The circle of the solo completes with the little mini-swirl of notes that Manzarek started the song with, followed by a bridge that leads to a final climax involving Morrison singing the final lyrics louder, before the song ends with a drum stop.

Finally, another thing that sets “Light My Fire” apart from other songs of the psychedelic era is that it is true psychedelic rock, meaning it is a psychedelic song and a rock song. Many psychedelic rock songs of this time have the rock portion drowned out by the psychedelic portion. And while “Light My Fire” certainly has its heavy psychedelic elements (the aforementioned organ and sometimes Arabic-sounding guitar), if you compare it to the bigger psychedelic acts of the day (Pink Floyd’s and The Grateful Dead’s debut albums) and the localized acts of the day that time mostly forgot about (The Blues Magoos and Strawberry Alarm Clock) “Light My Fire” still feels like a real rock song—one that, even nowadays, would not be classified by most as psychedelic even though it was born directly out of that genre’s womb.

Ray Manzarek didn’t invent the electric organ solo or re-establish a new paradigm for its inclusion in to rock, and Jim Morrison wasn’t the first singer to incorporate sex and drugs into the lyrics of a song. But what they did do was package both things into a truly classic song that not only helps define the music of the late ’60′s and electric organ-driven rock in general, it also acts as a perfect demarcation point in mainstream L.A. rock history—squarely in between surf rock and the Dead on one end, and the whiskey-fueled hair metal acts of the ’80′s on the other.

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[1] Two quick things about “Yesterday”: 1) it has the most cover versions of any song ever written, and 2) has there ever been a more profound lyric in a song about a break-up than “Oh, I believe in yesterday”? The first point is a fact and the second point is an opinion, yet the two are very much intertwined.

[2] For example, the brilliance of the lyrics “You know that it would be untrue/You know that I would be a liar/If I was to say to you/Girl, we couldn’t get much higher.” They are completely singable, and it straddles the line perfectly between being direct and cryptic. I would love to visit a Lost-like sideways reality in which Jim Morrison only smoked weed—no booze, no LSD, no pills. I like the odds in that reality that he could have become a consistently good songwriter.

[3] Given the era that this song was released in Densmore would have been within his rights to let off a Ginger Baker-like masturbatory drum solo but he does not. And we all better off because of it.