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The Doors music biography continued...

even some thirty years after they broke up. Formed in 1965, The Doors consisted of Jim Morrison (vocals), Ray Manzarek (keyboard), Robbie Krieger (guitar) and John Densmore (drums). Morrison and Manzarek met while attending film school in Los Angeles, while Krieger and Manzarek met in meditation classes. The four hooked up musically and borrowed their name from The Doors Of Perception, a novel by Aldous Huxley. Their first album, The Doors, released by Elektra in 1967, was notable for its blending of blues and R&B with classical and flamenco music. Like its hit single, "Light My Fire," The Doors self-titled album was a massive hit and was considered a groundbreaking element of the psychedelic era in American rock music history, placing the group on par with leading counterculture bands like Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead.



The group would go on to record nine studio albums and 18 singles prior to breaking up in 1972, soon after the mysterious, thought to be drug-related death of frontman Morrison at the age of 21. The Doors' music and Morrison's legend has continued to captivate succeeding generations of rock fans: In the mid-'80s, Morrison was as hot a name as he'd been in the mid-'60s, and Elektra has sold numerous quantities of the Doors' original albums plus reissues and releases of live material over the years, while publishers have flooded bookstores with Doors and Morrison biographies. In 1991, director Oliver Stone made The Doors, a feature film about the group starring Val Kilmer as Morrison. Throughout the years Manzarek and Densmore tried to recreate the group with different members, but none really gelled as the Morrison-led band had. The two original band members continue to release live versions of concerts filmed when Morrison was alive. In 2007, Manzarek described the band's sound as "Bauhaus" music. "It's clean, it's pure. There is a keyboard on one side, a guitar on the other, drums in the middle, a bass line underneath that and the singer up front and you can hear the words. That's one of the reasons why The Doors' sound is still important today. It's perfectly modern. That's what we wanted." And no band has yet surpassed their raw electricity.