Robby Krieger tells how “Light my fire” was born

The guitarist of Doors Robby Krieger during a chat with Guitar Player he took a time leap back over 50 years and remembered how one of the great classics of the Californian band was created, “Light My Fire”. That was the first song Krieger wrote for the Doors.

It all began when the group harbored the ambition to stand out among the many bands that populated the Los Angeles city scene in the late sixties, and did not want to do so, as suggested by their frontman
Jim Morrison
playing only covers: “At one point he said, ‘Guys, we need more original songs. Why don’t you try writing some?’ So I said, ‘Okay. What should I write about?’ And he said, ‘Just write something timeless. Something that won’t go out of fashion next year.’ So I thought, what is timeless? Earth, air, fire, water. I couldn’t go wrong with any of these. I chose fire because I liked the Stones song “Play with Fire”.

Since many bands played simple songs with three chords, Krieger thought that if he used more chords i Doors they would stand out from the crowd. “So I decided I would write a song with a lot of chords. Nobody did that in rock and roll back then. I wanted to be different. It probably took me a couple of days or so before I showed what I had done to the guys in the band. They really liked it, so we started playing it.”

In 2017, in the year of the 50th anniversary of

“Light my fire”Krieger speaking to ABC News said that i Doors they always knew the song would be a hit because people went crazy every time they played it. Despite this they were not entirely convinced to release the song as a single since the original version had a duration of seven minutes. “People told us, ‘you have to cut that instrumental part’. But we didn’t want to because that was our favorite part.” He was the DJ of Los Angeles Dave Diamond to convince the band to release “Light My Fire” as a single telling them that when he played it his listeners loved the full version.