News The Beatles’ album that took inspiration from The Doors
The year of 1967 saw the release of some huge records. Aretha Franklin put out I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, unleashing her iconic cover of ‘Respect’ in the process. The Beach Boys shared two new albums in one year. The period also welcomed new material from The Doors, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd – the year was filled to the brim with soon-to-be famed releases. But perhaps the most iconic of them all, expectedly, came from The Beatles in the form of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
An album entirely representative of the era, the success of Sgt. Pepper’s was always bound to eclipse the competition in sales and award wins. It even became the highest-selling album of the entire decade, beating out two other Beatles offerings, With the Beatles and Abbey Road. It’s an album that can still be found in record collections and lists of the greatest albums of all time today.
Somewhere else amidst those racks of vinyl and laudatory lists, you’re likely to find another record from one of the biggest bands of all time, released in 1967: The Doors’ self-titled debut. Though the album received its fair share of love at the time of release and has continued to do so for over five decades, The Doors still couldn’t quite compete with the cultural giant that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But to compare any artist to The Beatles is almost futile.
The record spawned some of The Doors’ most enduring hits, including ‘Break On Through (To the Other Side)’ and ‘Light My Fire’, but it also had its own hidden impact on the success of Sgt. Peppers. When songwriter Paul McCartney once named the “alter-egos” he wanted to channel, The Doors were one of the bands he cited.
With The Beatles hoping to “do a bit of B.B. King, a bit of Stockhausen, a bit of Albert Ayler, a bit of Ravi Shankar, a bit of Pet Sounds, a bit of the Doors,” Sgt Pepper’s was born. The Doors was released when The Beatles were already about a month into the making of Sgt Pepper’s, but the band purchased multiple copies of the record, and it came to influence their own creations. McCartney taking inspiration from Jim Morrison, legends inspiring legends.
Amidst off-kilter instrumentation and other genre influences, psychedelia became a primary focus on Sgt. Pepper’s, so it’s no surprise The Doors were a reference point. The record is big and colourful, a magical melting pot of influences, so it can be challenging to pin down direct callbacks and comparisons but the influence of Morrison, the drama and grandiosity of his own output, can certainly be felt.
Following both albums’ success and the Beatles’ eventual demise, McCartney took his admiration for the psych-rockers to the next level. The death of Morrison in 1971 prompted the band to seek out new members, so McCartney briefly played bass for the band.
Each iconic in their own right, both The Doors and Sgt. Pepper’s would stand the test of time and come to be considered amongst the greatest albums of all time. Though the latter would become the defining album of a generation, the former was an essential part of the counterculture it charted.
Revisit The Doors by The Doors below.
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