I mentioned yesterday not really caring much for Neil Young. The Doors, on the other hand, I positively loathe, to the deepest depths of whatever remains of my very soul. Mark Steyn begs to differ.

Ray Manzarek of the Doors died last week, and, having lived out his three score and ten, will be denied the posthumous celebrity of his prematurely departed bandmate Jim Morrison. But Manzarek played a critical role in the group’s most enduring song. This essay is adapted from Mark’s book A Song For The Season:

It was over 40 years ago today-ish that Sgt Pepper was going on about how it was 20 years ago today. That’s to say, the “Summer of Love” is 46 years old: It’s longer ago today than the summer of flappers and charlestons and bootleg gin was back in 1967. But, boomers being the most self-absorbed generation in history, we’re going to be living with boomer pop culture until the very last one keels over at the age of 130 singing “Give Peace A Chance”. So we might as well get used to it. And, to be honest, there’s one aspect of the Summer of Love I’m quite partial to. What was America’s Number One song in that bright new hazy psychedelic dawn? Oh, come on, baby…

Come on, baby, Light My Fire
Come on, baby, Light My Fire
Try to set the night on fire…

It set the summer on fire four decades back. The single was edited down to under three minutes, but the disk jockeys played the original seven-minute album track anyway, from the Doors’ eponymous album The Doors. And within a few years it was established as one of those iconic long-form works – “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Stairway To Heaven”, “A Day In The Life”, “Like A Rolling Stone”, etc – that are regarded as the acme of rock. The crude formula seems to be: Length + psychedelic lyric = art. “Light My Fire” comes in at big hit sound 35 on Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Songs of all time, and places similarly on other lists of all-time blockbusters. But “Light My Fire” can’t be confined to the long-form psychedelia category. For one thing, unlike “Bohemian Rhapsody”, it’s one of the most “covered” songs of the last 50 years. Once upon a time, that was the natural expectation of a hit tune: it would have seemed extraordinarily reductive to say, okay, some guy’s already sung “It Had To Be You” or “The Way You Look Tonight”, we better find something else to do. Yet, in an age of singer-songwriters, the idea of a song being particular to one artist became an iron law and deviations therefrom were regarded as “covers”, the very term indicating something less than an authentic experience. “Light My Fire” must rank as one of the most covered covers of the rock era, and oddly enough it was taken up by the same kind of singers who, a decade earlier, would have been singing standards: the easy listening crowd, the MOR set, the Europop VIP loungers. Who does “Light My Fire”? Everybody. Jose Feliciano. Astrud Gilberto. Jack Jones. Les Brown and his Band of Renown. Trini Lopez, Nancy Sinatra, Al Green, Minnie Riperton, Helmut Zacharias, Etta James, Woody Herman, Mae West, Johnny Mathis, Charo, Horst Jankowski, Edmundo Ros and his Orchestra, Ted Heath and his Orchestra, the Enoch Light Singers, the Burbank Philharmonic… As Mitteleuropean groovers like to say, “Gekommen auf Baby, mein Feuer beleuchten!”

My favorite “cool” version is by Julie London, who’s so blase about the whole business you get the feeling you could be rubbing sticks together all night and never get anywhere near to lighting her fire, notwithstanding the orchestral nudges she’s getting from the flutes and bongos. And my favorite live version is not the Doors in Boston but Shirley Bassey at the Royal Albert Hall in London a few years ago. Dame Shirl first sang it on her album Something back in 1970, and, while I’m not saying that inside every iconic psychedelic rock track is a faintly camp easy-listening classic trying to break out, for a select few of them that’s certainly the case. (By the same token, the all-time greatest version of Queen’s “We Are The Champions” was Liza Minnelli’s at the Freddie Mercury memorial concert at Wembley: unlike all the scruffy rockers, Liza was the only performer who had the size of the song, and of the performer. Likewise, if you’d stuck Freddie in black tights and a fedora, I’m sure he’d have done a passable “Cabaret”.)

Disagree again, sorry Mark: the all-time best version of “We Are The Champions” (another song I don’t much care for, by a band I have no use for whatsoever) has to be the one sung by the incomparable Paul Rodgers (of Bad Co fame, quite probably the best rock ‘n’ roll singer EVER), sitting in for the late Freddy-lad with the rest of the boys and absolutely fucking owning the bloated, overblown piece o’ shite song. To wit:

Another blast from the musical past, this one starring the incredible Leslie West singing and playing lead guitar on his own original classic, which revolves around probably the tastiest rock guitar riff of all time.

I will forever be haunted by two (2) terrible regrets from my NYC years: 1) Never checking out Leslie West at any of the frequent small-club gigs he played in NYC aprés his illustrious career fronting Mountain, and 2) Likewise never troubling my sorry butt to go out and pay due and proper homage to pioneering guitar icon Les Paul at his own weekly NYC appearances at the Iridium, to which premises proud Les Paul owners from all over the world would tote their axes and form up in surprisingly orderly out-the-door-and-down-the-block queues to have Les personally sign the back of the body, the top, the pickguard, the back of the neck, the headstock, basically any surface roomy enough for him to write his name—no-charge autograph sessions on which Paul graciously spent long, wearing hours after wrapping up his set, making nary a murmur of complaint the whole while.

For further info and bare-knuckles analysis on how profoundly the Leo Fender/Les Paul competition reshaped our world, do yourself a HUGE favor and check out this tome: “The Birth of Loud: Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ‘n’ Roll.” I’ve had the ePub version on my phone ever since it first became available on Amazon Kindle, and have read it e-cover to e-cover way more than just once. If a well-written chronicle of the little-known, behind the scenes story of the guitars, the amplifiers, the brilliant men who created them, and how the fortuitously-timed confluence of those three factors transformed a musical genre derided in its infancy as just another teenybopper fad which would have no lasting significance into a cultural juggernaut whose powerful, pervasive influence gives every indication of being permanent is of even passing interest to you, you won’t go wrong by giving “The Birth of Loud” a read your own self, I assure you.

I offer no excuses for my unforgivable lassitude re: those aforementioned two regrets. Another fascinating chapter from the Mountain man’s eventful biography:

The story  of Leslie West’s jam session with Jimi Hendrix
The guitarist Leslie West was a fundamental part of Mountain‘s sound, one of the most influential bands from the late 60s and early 70s. With famous songs like “Mississippi Queen” and “Never In My Life” they were the American response to the incredible Hard Rock movement that was happening in the United Kingdom.

During his career the guitar player had the chance to meet many incredible musicians, including Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970 at the age of 27.

West recalled this incredible experience in an interview with Classic Rock, after releasing his final album “Soundcheck” in 2015. “Jimi came into this nightclub in New York at, like, one in the morning. I happened to be there to see Steve Miller, who had finished and left. I’d already met Jimi in the studio at the Record Plant – we were doing Climbing! and he was doing Band Of Gypsys – so we knew each other. He came over to me and said, ‘Wanna jam, man?’ Just like that. We didn’t have any equipment there, but we had a loft about 13 blocks away, in a real deserted part of Manhattan, 36th Street, 11th Avenue.”

“So Jimi said, ‘Well, let’s get in my limo.’ My road manager lived in the loft, so we woke him up at two in the morning. He came down and opened the door and who’s standing there but Jimi Hendrix. He nearly had a heart attack. We went upstairs and we jammed, Jimi was playing bass and I was playing guitar. We just seemed to hit it off. But I think Jimi could have played with anybody. He just loved playing, and he was so cool as a guy. That’s my favourite memory of him.”

West covered a few Hendrix tracks during his career, including “Red House”. Mountain was formed in Long Island, New York back in 1969 by Leslie West, Felix Pappalardi, Steve Knight and N. D. Smart.

The article includes a video embed of said “Red House” cover—always one of my absolute favorite Hendrix tunes, which if I remember right may have been a cover its own self, an old blues chestnut copped by Hendrix and reimagined as only James Marshall Hendrix could bring off. Although this post says I’m all wet on that one.

Update! Oh, what the heck was I thinking, not going ahead and including this one also after mentioning it in such glowing terms?

This is the version I grew up listening to, off the album I had when I was but a wee bairn. There are lots of excellent live versions out there too, but I still like this rendition most. For one thing, having played and replayed the song myself so danged many times, on record and guitar both, hearing Jimi stray from the exact notes I’m accustomed to hearing him play during the opening solo is the aural equivalent of a Sykes-Fairbairn knife through the eardrum at this point.

Which, at least in all the Yew Toob vids of live “Red House” performances I’ve seen to date, the man never played that bit the same way twice; it’s different each and every time.

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