Light My Fire

This morning, while puttering around my flat I was listening to Planet Rock, the only station I’ve just about ever listened to on my DAB radio.  For the uninitiated, it’s a UK “classic rock” station in the purest sense of the word - just about every major rock band you’ve ever heard of, especially if they were in the zenith of their success in the ’70s, ’80s, or ’90s can be heard here. While arguably a bit repetitive, it works well as a kind of comforting background music.  And to their eternal credit, they occasionally play some of the British Invasion ’70s/’80s songs (read Sex Pistols, The Stranglers) that I have very fond memories of.

Enough of the back story.

Planet Rock was playing “Light My Fire” by The Doors (you did know that, right?) and it occurred to me that it is probably the first real rock song that I can remember.  My parents had Beatles albums, but I never considered that to be rock, even as a wet-behind-the-ears 9-year old. More importantly, even at that tender age, I understood enough of male/female relations to realize that there was something qualitatively different about Jim Morrison’s going on and on about “set the night on fire”, calling the object of his desire, “baby”, and perhaps most importantly the interplay of desire and death in the song.

This was and is a song about being consumed by love and passion for another person, even if it meant dying for them.  And it pulled me in just as it does now, even if it immediately takes me back to the distant (yes, distant) years of my childhood.

The association I have with hearing the song for the first time is perhaps amusing in retrospect.  At the time, my family and I were living in a small town in Arkansas (!) and not long before that a family of Seventh Day Adventists had moved in next door.  They had 8 children and one of the boys was close to me in age, so we became de facto friends, even if the family’s religious views occasionally intruded in odd ways on our play. One of the older brothers, maybe 14 or 15 at the time, had a small portable cassette player and this is where I first heard the song. But, I realize now that the reason he used to bring it to my house to listen to, was presumably because their parents would have never tolerated listening to rock music a.k.a “The Devil’s Music” in their house.

After all, this was a family that declared “American Pie” was unacceptable to listen to on the grounds that it makes a somewhat irreverent reference to Christ.

“Light My Fire” ended up having a big impact on my musical tastes.  There is no doubt that Ray Manzarek’s hypnotic keyboard playing drove my desire to play keyboards in a band during high school and was one of the reasons I became a big fan of The Stranglers, also in high school.

And, there is no doubt that Jim Morrison introduced me to the notion of the hipster rock star who could sing about love, passion, and death all in the same breath.