In Oliver Stone's 1991 movie The Doors, the band staple Light My Fire was seemingly written very, very quickly.
As Rick Beato accurately describes the scene, “You [referring to Robby Krieger character] pull out a handwritten piece of paper with lyrics on it, and you start playing A minor, F sharp minor, and you sing your melody, and then the Jim Morrison character comes out, and he's like, ‘Yeah, that's good. And they start singing along.’”
However, Krieger is now setting the record straight – asserting that the songwriting process for what was to become one of The Doors' calling cards was not as rose-tinted as Hollywood made it seem.
“That was one thing I wanted to get right with Oliver,” Krieger tells Beato. “I went to his house and made sure he knew how that one had happened.” While drummer John Densmore quips that it was exactly what happened, Krieger jokingly claps back, “That's because you saw the movie!”
“What happened was, I had come up with the chords for that intro. When I first wrote the song, I wanted to use a lot of chords in my first song ever, so I used every chord I knew, which was about 14 chords,” he explains.
"I had all these chords and didn't really know where to use them in the song. We first did the normal song, ‘Baby light my fire…’ And then I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I've got this other part.’
He continues, “And so we ended up using it to get out of the instrumental break, back into the third verse. We played it that way at the Whiskey for a year. Then it was [producer] Paul Rothchild's brilliant idea to use those chords not only in the intro, but [also in] the outro, so it happens three times.
“As Ray [Manzarek, the Doors' keyboardist] played it every night at The Whisky, he would come up with more Bach[-inspired] parts. And it wasn't just, ‘Oh, I'll do this.’ You know, it took a long time.”
What's more, Krieger initially envisioned a more folk-rock approach to the song – whereas drummer John Densmore segwayed into more of a Latin rhythm. Further additions transpired every time they tried and tested the song live – which led to all the flourishes that the seven-minute oeuvre is known for.
“[The solos were] Ray's idea, because we love Coltrane. And those are the chords Coltrane used,” clarifies Krieger.
Considering how the song took a life of its own, Beato asks whether listening to it takes them back to that period – or it’s a quasi-surreal feeling, almost like coming across someone else's song.
To which Densmore proudly replies, “No, that's our song. I can't get enough of it!”
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