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: