The Doors ( B2 )

The Doors were the first American band to accumulate eight consecutive gold LPs. According to the RIAA, they have sold 33 million records in the US and over 100 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling bands of all time. The Doors have been listed as one of the greatest artists of all time by magazines including Rolling Stone, which ranked them 41st on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". In 1993, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

History

Origins (July 1965 – August 1966)

The Doors logo, designed by an Elektra Records assistant, first appeared on their 1967 debut album.

The Doors began with a meeting between acquaintances Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, both of whom had attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, on Venice Beach in July 1965. Morrison told Manzarek he had been writing songs (Morrison said "I was taking notes at a fantastic rock'n'roll concert going on in my head") and with Manzarek's encouragement sang "Moonlight Drive". The members came from a varied musical background of jazz, rock, blues, and folk idioms.

Keyboardist Manzarek was in a band called Rick & the Ravens with his brothers Rick and Jim, while drummer John Densmore was playing with the Psychedelic Rangers and knew Manzarek from meditation classes. In August 1965, Densmore joined the group, which had been renamed the Doors. The five (Morrison having previously joined the band), along with bass player Patty Sullivan recorded a six-song demo on September 2, 1965 at World Pacific Studios, Los Angeles, California (officially made available much later in October 1997 on the Doors' Box Set CD release). This has circulated widely since then as a bootleg recording. The band took their name from the title of Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception, itself derived from a line in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: infinite". In mid-1965, after Manzarek's two brothers left, guitarist Robby Krieger joined.

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