Saturday August 5, 1967. The hottest hit of the summer, Light My Fire, begins its second week at No.1 on the US Billboard chart. A colossal moment not just for The Doors – the tripped-out, LA-noir four-piece bringing arthouse cinema and beat poetry to rock – but also for the whole history of late-20th-century music.
Officially, the summer of ’67 is about Sgt. Pepper, the Monterey festival and wearing flowers in your hair. Other singles in the American Top 10 that week include the equally immortal All You Need Is Love, A Whiter Shade Of Pale and White Rabbit. But The Doors are not about summer or love; The Doors are about rock apocalypse. The only love-love-love they chorus of, is the one burning on a funeral pyre. As Doors singer Jim Morrison yowled like a wildcat: ‘Come on baby light my fire/Try to set the night on… FIRE!’
