After Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman saw The Doors at the Whisky in May 1966, it took until July before he was able to sign the group that would change the course of Elektra. Within a month, they were in Sunset Sound recording one of the great debut albums of all time.

Robbie Krieger, John Densmore , Jim Morrison, and Ray Manzarek at Whisky-A-Go-Go in 1966 [Michael Ochs // Getty]

But first, Jac Holzman had to convince Paul Rothchild to produce the band. Rothchild was enamored with The Paupers, a Canadian group who would eventually sign to Verve/Forecast. Despite the backing of impresario Albert Grossman, they flopped miserably. Rothchild was still on parole, and it took some convincing to get permission for him to leave the New Jersey area to work in sinful California. Holzman had to guarantee Rothchild’s good behavior to his parole officer before he could leave for California.

“Rothchild rehearsed The Doors for two solid weeks,” recalls Holzman, “running the material so as to make it second nature when the band got into the studio. They could lay down just a few takes and not drain their enthusiasm or energy. You take the song to 80 percent of where it has to be, and the extra 20 percent comes from the excitement and pressure of recording. When the album was completed, I took the tapes home and listened to them through headphones. I grinned the whole way through. Neither I nor anyone else had heard its like before.”

Paul Rothchild

Rothchild knew exactly how to capture their unconventional sound. “I didn’t want a Doors record to sound like any other. If you have something special, the best you can do is to keep it as pure as possible.”

Engineer Bruce Botnick says: “We nailed the sound on the first day. And after that, no one touched a knob, an amplifier, or a microphone. It was all recorded live. Even tape delays on the voice were done in the moment.”

The band’s work in the clubs had given them enough prepared material for two albums. Guitarist Robby Krieger knew his band was ready. “All they had to do in the studio was turn on the tape recorder. We knew those songs so well: we’d been playing them three sets a night for a year at least. That album came naturally. What else would open the album but ‘Break On Through’? What else would close but ‘The End’?”

“The joy of that first album comes from the whole point of putting a rock & roll band together, which is to make a record,” said keyboard player Ray Manzarek. “To actually be in a recording studio for that first time is an existential moment. It only happens once in your life, and if that doesn’t energise you nothing will. You’ve got a beat Southern gothic French symbolist poet who joins with a classical jazz-blues keyboard player, a jazz marching-band drummer, and a bottleneck American-folk-blues flamenco guitarist. Take those four disparate types and play Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, Willie Dixon, plus our own songs. The Doors combines all those elements.”

The Doors was a devastating debut with a new, dramatic sound and confrontational, controversial lyrics about sex and death, all of which introduced America’s first adult rock band. There were outstanding songs, knife-edge drama, and inspired performances from all four members of the band.

“One day, Jim said, ‘We don’t have enough material, so why don’t you guys write something?’” Krieger recalls. “I went home, and the first thing I came up with was ‘Light My Fire’. It’s been downhill ever since…

“Jim admired songs rooted in universal subjects. So I figured I would write about the base elements. I loved the Stones’ ‘Play With Fire’, so I chose to write about fire, using folk-rock chords. There was a version of ‘Hey Joe’ by The Leaves and I was drawn to the chord sequence. On the solo I wanted my guitar to sound like Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’.”

Krieger also wrote the songs ‘You’re Lost Little Girl’ and ‘Love Me Two Times’ for the first two albums, and these marked him out as the only regular songwriter in the group apart from Jim Morrison.

Holzman discovered immediately that they were instinctively smart about issues that had broken up other groups. “All monies from performing, writing, and publishing were split equally,” he says, “and all copyrights were listed in the name of the entire band. When it came to their visual image, The Doors knew what needed to be done — they put their personal egos aside and Jim up front. During the photo shoot for the first album cover they said to Bill Harvey, ‘Let’s make Jim a little bit bigger.’ They knew he was the draw.”