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immediately by the prestigious Whisky a Go Go, becoming the house band and opening for Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Them, Love, the Turtles and the Byrds. The band played there for three months, earning $125 each a week. They soon gained a reputation for playing too loud and attempting to blow the headlining act offstage. They also started to attract a small crowd who would turn up night after night to see them. Morrison was now the star attraction, having learned to love the spotlight. He would often turn up drunk, stoned or both, though unsurprisingly this only endeared him to the band’s growing audience.
    It was at the Whisky that they were first seen by Jac Holzman, the founder and president of Elektra Records, an independent New York company mostly known for its folk-rock catalogue. Elektra had recently signed Arthur Lee’s psychedelic quintet Love, and was looking to sign up other rock acts. After a few returnvisits, Holzman offered to sign the Doors. Although desperate for a deal, the band nevertheless played it cool. But secretly they were more than pleased with the proposition – Elektra had the integrity that a lot of the major labels lacked, and the deal gave them almost complete control over their output. They soon signed. The timing was right, as they had recently been fired from the Whisky, too. One night Morrison, blitzed on LSD, decided to improvise during one of their longer songs, ‘The End’. Digging through his library books, he came up with a trite spoken passage steeped in Freudian theory: ‘Father,’ Morrison shouted from the stage. ‘Yes son . . . I want to kill you . . . Mother . . . I want to . . . FUCK YOU!’ He had been orchestrating silences, screams and manic outbursts during most of the band’s recent performances, but this was a primal scream to end them all. The audience were shocked; the management, appalled, fired the band.
    Ray Manzarek described how the song developed. ‘ “The End” was originally a very short piece, but because of all the time we had to fill onstage, we started extending songs, taking them into areas that we didn’t know they would go into . . . and playing stoned every night. It was the great summer of acid, and we really got into a lot of improvisation, and I think the fact that no one was at the club really helped us to develop what the Doors became.’
    A year before, the band had sounded like any other beat combo, but now, with Morrison writing nearly all of their songs, the Doors were firmly entrenched in the emerging drug culture. Morrison’s songs were often incongruous and demanding, but they were written like advertising copy: concise and compact.
    Encouraged by the group’s success, he began incorporating more and more philosophical and mythological references into the songs, drawing on his considerable literary knowledge. Those days in the library hadn’t been wasted, as he now used his wide reading to build himself a career, page by page.
    Morrison’s creativity was helped by his staggering drug intake: his experiments with LSD, peyote, grass and alcohol. He still had nowhere to live, preferring to wander the streets of West Los Angeles, looking for kicks and sleeping rough. By comparison the rest of the group were clean-living, and their drug-taking never seemed to interfere with their day job. But drugs now fuelled Morrison’s work, and he began more and more to rely on them to keep himself sane. Success was only just around the corner, and he had to be prepared.
    Morrison saw himself as a Dionysian, and may well have believed himself to be testing the reality of Rimbaud’s assertion that a poet becomes a visionary through ‘a long, boundless and systematic disordering of the senses’ – a creed, to quote writer Mick Brown,‘which has percolated into rock and roll as the mythology of romantic self-destruction’.
    His ‘Big Thing’,