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10/15/2026

Letterman's at it again.....

10/15/2026

The gum......

Link Wray - "Rumble" (Live at Winterland, 1974) | The Birth of the ...

10/15/2026

Robby Krieger had never written a song in his life when Jim Morrison told him to try, and the first thing he came back with became a No. 1 hit that helped turn The Doors into rock legends.

That should not have happened.

Krieger was only 20 or 21.

He had been playing guitar for just a few years.

He did not think of himself as the band’s songwriter.

Jim Morrison handled that.

Then The Doors hit a problem.

They simply did not have enough original material.

They were still filling club sets with covers like “Gloria.”

Morrison finally looked at the others and told them they needed to start writing too.

Krieger later remembered asking what he was supposed to write about.

Morrison gave him one instruction.

Write about something timeless.

Something that would not sound outdated next year.

Krieger went home with almost no songwriting experience and started thinking.

Earth.

Air.

Fire.

Water.

He settled on fire partly because he loved the Rolling Stones song “Play with Fire.”

Then he decided his first song should not sound like every basic three-chord rock tune around him.

So he used almost every chord he knew.

Krieger later joked that this amounted to roughly 14 chords.

Then he brought the song into rehearsal.

It was called “Light My Fire.”

The band started reshaping it immediately.

John Densmore introduced the Latin-influenced rhythm.

Ray Manzarek developed the organ parts and the famous Bach-inspired passage.

Morrison contributed additional lyrics.

The song kept getting longer when they played it live.

Sometimes the instrumental sections stretched wildly because Krieger and Manzarek used it as their showcase.

But nobody could know what was coming.

The Doors had already spent roughly two years struggling.

Record companies had turned them down.

Their first single, “Break on Through,” failed to become a major hit.

Krieger later said the band was growing desperate because success seemed to keep moving further away.

Then “Light My Fire” was released as their second single in 1967.

Everything exploded.

The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The Doors suddenly became one of the biggest bands in America.

And the guitarist who had never written a song before had just written the one that broke them nationally.

That fact bothered Krieger for years.

Millions associated The Doors primarily with Jim Morrison.

Morrison was the face.

The voice.

The mythology.

So many people simply assumed Morrison had written their biggest songs.

Krieger later admitted it frustrated him that people did not realize “Light My Fire” was largely his composition.

He even pushed to make sure Oliver Stone’s 1991 film The Doors showed him bringing the song into rehearsal because he wanted that piece of history remembered correctly.

But Krieger’s contribution went much further.

He went on to write or co-write other major Doors songs including “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me,” and “Love Her Madly.”

The quiet guitarist standing beside one of rock’s most magnetic frontmen had become one of the engines behind the band’s sound.

Then Morrison died in 1971 at only 27.

The center of The Doors disappeared.

Krieger, Manzarek, and Densmore tried continuing without him, but nothing could recreate what the original four had been.

Still, the music survived.

And “Light My Fire” became bigger than any of them could have predicted.

José Feliciano later transformed it into another major hit.

The song entered the Grammy Hall of Fame.

It became one of the defining recordings of the psychedelic era.

Think about how thin that line was.

Jim Morrison could have kept writing everything himself.

Krieger could have laughed off the suggestion.

He could have decided he was only a guitarist.

Instead, he went home and tried writing one song.

His first one.

Robby Krieger did not spend years learning how to write a hit.

He wrote “Light My Fire” before he even knew whether he could write songs at all.

And that first attempt helped ignite one of the biggest bands in rock history.

10/10/2026

And the hits just keep coming......

10/09/2026

David Letterman. He had all the good ones! (And so do we 😉). Enjoy your weekend.

10/07/2026