The Doors score their first #1 hit with “Light My Fire”

On July 29, 1967, The Doors' song “Light My Fire,” from their debut album, earns the top spot in the Billboard Hot 100, becoming their first bona fide smash hit and propelling The Doors from cult favorites of the rock cognoscenti into international pop stars and avatars of the '60s counterculture.

By the beginning of 1967, The Doors were well-established members of the Los Angeles music scene. As the house band at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip, they had built a large local following and strong industry buzz. Out on the road, they were fast becoming known as a band that might typically receive third billing, but could blow better-known groups like The Young Rascals and The Grateful Dead off the stage.

It would have been poetic if their popular breakthrough had come via their now-classic debut single, “Break On Through,” but that record failed to make the national sales charts despite the efforts of Jim Morrison and his bandmates to fuel the song’s popularity by repeatedly calling in requests for it to local L.A. radio stations. Instead, it was "Light My Fire."

As “Light My Fire” climbed the charts in June and early July, The Doors were out on the East Coast, still plugging away as an opening act (e.g., for Simon and Garfunkel in Forest Hills, Queens) and as sometime-headliners (e.g., in a Greenwich, Connecticut, high-school auditorium). When the group topped the charts in late July, Jim Morrison celebrated by buying his now-famous skintight black-leather suit and beginning to hobnob with the likes of the iconic model/muse Nico at drug-fueled parties held by Andy Warhol.

Attempting to keep Morrison grounded were not only his fellow Doors Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore, as well as the professional manager they had hired in part to “babysit” him. Also trying to keep him in check were his longtime girlfriend Pamela Courson, who according to Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s Doors biography No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980), greeted the sight of Jim Morrison preening in front of a mirror at home before a show in the summer of 1967 with, “Oh Jim, are you going to wear the same leather pants again? You never change your clothes. You’re beginning to smell, did you know that?”

In the end, of course, Morrison’s heavy drinking and drug use would lead to increasingly erratic behavior over the next four years and eventually take his life in July 1971. During that period, The Doors would follow up “Light My Fire” with a string of era-defining albums and songs, including “People Are Strange,” “Love Me Two Times” and “The End” in 1967; “Hello, I Love You” and “Touch Me” in 1968; and “L.A. Woman” and “Riders on the Storm” in 1971.