I think that the Doors are completely deserving of their iconic and timeless status as far as music history is concerned. I was first introduced to them the same way that most people in the 80's and 90's were, by a friend with the album.
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The two CD set was later in my and most people's CD collection. We wouldn't realize until many years later that it was in-fact completely unnecessary for it to be on two CD's but well, corporations really took us to the cleaners on that entire concept now didn't they?
Light my Fire was first released in 1967 on The Doors debut album in January. The song wasn't officially released as a "single" until April and then I honestly don't know what happened but I guess it took a while for it to get popular. It reached its pinnacle of success starting with July 7th and remained at number one for 3 weeks.
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I wonder how much a mint-condition original press EP of this is worth today?
The song was written almost entirely by Robby Krieger but Jim Morrison is credited with writing the second verse of lyrics. The original album version was over 7 minutes long but was edited down to around 3 minutes for the single that played on the radio and subsequently resulted in the song hitting number one.
In the original version there is an extremely long musical interlude which I am sure anyone who had this album (and if you were a teenager in the 90's you DEFINITELY had this album) already knows about.
Personally I feel the doors message and music is / was / will be timeless. It seems to transcend the time period it was created in and a lot of the political messages that are in the lyrics are not time-specific but seem to apply to present life because they are just vague enough to be open to interpretation.
