Robby Krieger & Ray Manzarek

Manzarek, a classically trained keyboardist from Chicago, and Jim Morrison had met at UCLA’s film school, and when they met again on the beach in Venice, California, in the summer of 1965, they decided to form a band. Los Angeles-born Krieger, whose birthday is January 8, 1946, had studied trumpet and piano before taking up the guitar at 17, drawn to it by Spanish flamenco music. He and the drummer John Densmore joined soon after, and no bassist who auditioned could match the bass lines of Manzarek’s left hand. Named after Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception , they signed to Elektra Records after a gig at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Their self-titled debut, released in January 1967, opened with “Break on Through (to the Other Side)” and carried “Light My Fire,” which spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the first of the band’s 16 Hot 100 hits. Strange Days followed that year, and Waiting for the Sun (1968), with the Hot 100 number one “Hello, I Love You,” became the band’s only chart-topper on the Billboard 200. The Soft Parade , Morrison Hotel , and L.A. Woman completed six studio albums before Morrison’s death in 1971, and Krieger also wrote “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me,” and “Love Her Madly.” Manzarek’s playing fused rock, jazz, blues, and bossa nova, and Krieger brought bottleneck slide guitar to the records. Manzarek’s death came on May 20, 2013. “Light My Fire” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and the debut album followed in 2002, and The Doors received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007. “Light My Fire” appears at 310 on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2021). As a trio with Densmore, Manzarek and Krieger released two more albums as The Doors, and in 1978 they set music to poetry Morrison had recorded for the Grammy-nominated An American Prayer . Manzarek went on to produce and perform on five albums by the Los Angeles band X, and in January 2023 Krieger and the estate of Ray Manzarek brought their interests in The Doors to Primary Wave Music. Krieger, who also recorded as a jazz guitarist, published his memoir Set the Night on Fire in 2021 and released a self-titled album with his band The Soul Savages in 2024.