I haven’t even mentioned the singer yet. For as much as anyone might try to argue otherwise, when it comes to great rock & roll, the singer makes the band. The Doors, for better or worse, lived and died with Jim Morrison. Jim Morrison, only 24 years old when this album dropped, was already a star-crossed, gorgeous, poetic and beautifully doomed mess. You can’t name a rock star who’s mattered in decades, that gives you the same feeling that Morrison did then, fifty years since way-back-when. Like many of the other ill-fated young poets who died too soon, from Arthur Rimbaud to Tupac Shakur, Jim Morrison was doomed. And like them, he recognized it. Sure, that early fate could, in hindsight, be their own doing. But what does that matter to you, when you hear someone reporting live from their own ruin? If for them it was real, to the selfish consumer, it gave us something we could feel.

The pain is great. Deep and wide. Break on through. To the other side. This was a band, ballsy enough, to attempt to break in with their first single, as well as their debut album’s opening song, “Break On Through,” being a bossa nova. Did it work? Depends on who you ask. If you check Billboard, it only ascended to #127 on the charts. If you ask anybody who arrived in the subsequent five decades since its release, you can bet they’ll know it long before they do “Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin & Pie” or “Ode to Billie Joe.” There’s time, and there’s timelessness. “Break on Through” checks off the latter box.

Then there’s a single on this album that does both: “Light My Fire.” This song, two years after Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” became one of the most unlikely, smash pop hits of its or any time. Unlike “Rolling Stone,” its length was edited to fit some pop-music formats as a single. Still it was the album version which became the enduring chestnut that most take for granted now on classic-rock radio. When heard in the context of this full album, it remains mind-blowing, particularly the way Krieger’s flamenco guitar weaves couplets alongside Manzarek’s electric-piano riffing, especially once Densmore puts a crushing stop to their fun, in order to usher in Morrison’s perfect farewell croon, around the six-minute mark before its seven-minute conclusion.