The Doors

The Los Angeles band that brought poetry, blues, and barely-contained menace to American rock in the second half of the 1960s. Formed in Venice in July 1965 by singer Jim Morrison and keyboardist Ray Manzarek — UCLA film-school friends who agreed to start a group after Morrison recited an early version of Moonlight Drive on the beach — the Doors filled out their lineup with guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore and signed to Elektra in 1966. Their self-titled 1967 debut produced Light My Fire, the band's first and only US number one in Morrison's lifetime, and the album has since been certified four times platinum. Over the next four years they released six studio records with Morrison — The Doors, Strange Days, Waiting for the Sun, The Soft Parade, Morrison Hotel, and L.A. Woman — that have continued to outsell most of what surrounded them.

Jim Morrison died in Paris on July 3, 1971, weeks after the release of L.A. Woman. He was twenty-seven. The surviving trio completed two further albums — Other Voices (1971) and Full Circle (1972) — and disbanded in early 1973, returning in 1978 to set Morrison's spoken-word poetry against new music as An American Prayer. The Doors were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. Ray Manzarek died in 2013. Krieger and Densmore are the remaining living members. The catalogue has been continuously in print for more than half a century, and the band has sold over 100 million records worldwide.