On the evening of September 10, 1967, Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist for Los Angeles rock band The Doors, was sitting at home with his fiancee Dorothy Fujikawa, watching America's most popular TV variety programme, The Ed Sullivan Show.
At the very end of the broadcast, as the musician was about to change channels. host Ed Sullivan said, “Next week we’re going to have… a rock group from California, The Doors, doing their number one hit Light My Fire.”
“We looked at each other, saying, Oh I guess we’re on The Ed Sullivan Show next week,” Manzarek later told the show's website.
In a new interview with YouTube star Rick Beato, The Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummer John Densmore recall their excitement at being offered a slot on the show.
“There was nothing bigger,” says Densmore. “Elvis, The Beatles, us... great! I remember Mr Sullivan coming around when we were rehearsing, saying, 'You know, you boys look good when you smile, you should smile.”
The band weren't smiling, however, when following their rehearsal, and with just 15 minutes until the show was set to go live, a producer called into their dressing room, and informed frontman Jim Morrison that he would need to make a change to the lyrics of Light My Fire, specifically the line, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher”, as it might be interpreted as an endorsement of the use of illegal drugs. Hugely annoyed by this demand, the group nevertheless agreed to play ball.... until the producer left the room.
“I thought they were kidding,to tell you the truth,” Robbie Krieger admits. “Like, really? I said, Fuck it, let's just do it the way that we do it.”
Which is what they did. And the TV people were absolutely not impressed.
“They said, 'You boys will never do this show again!'” John Densmore recalls. “And I think Jim said, 'Well, we just did it, so we don't care'.”
“No, that was in the movie,” Krieger says with a smile, referring to Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic of the band.
The show's producers later informed the band that they had been lined up for a further six appearances on the programme. But true to their word, they never invited The Doors back.
Watch The Doors' Ed Sullivan Show performance, and Densmore and Krieger's interview with Rick Beato, below.
