The billboard hung over Sunset Boulevard like a rising sun, although not everybody grasped its importance. Anyone over the age of 20, for example, would have simply motored by, a little perturbed to see some hairies hoisted so high above the street, perhaps, but otherwise oblivious to what it might mean.

“The Doors break on through with an electrifying album,” it read, in bold letters alongside the portraits of four moody faces — one bespectacled and grimacing, one full lipped with a prominent nose, and two who just glowered like they were coming to get you. Which, Mr. Fat Cat Businessman, they probably were.

As for what it was advertising, though? Well, it was probably some new beat group.

“I believe the Doors billboard was the first rock billboard ever erected on Sunset,” recalls photographer Bobby Klein, and he remembers the very moment at which it was swung into place by the work crew — because he was the one charged with rousing all four band members from their beds, so that they, too, might be present at this historic moment.

“We were all really excited to see it go up,” Klein continues. “They weren’t even really doing movies at that time; it was all product merchandising. So this was a really big deal.”

Local radio was already planning to move out in force to cover the moment, “ ... and I’d got wind of it, so I went to the PR people at Elektra and said, ‘How about getting the Doors out there and photographing them?’”

Klein already knew the band. He was, in fact, the man entrusted with their first ever Elektra promo photos, out at Bronson Caves, at the end of Beechwood Canyon.

The hour at which he’d be collecting them was disturbing. But he was right. The opportunity to play a personal part in their own little bit of history was too good to pass up.

And so they clambered up the ladders and clustered on the scaffolding, looking down on the Strip while their own outsized faces looked down on them, and one of the most iconic photographs of the Doors’ short reign was in the can. And it was still only the first week in January.

NEW DAY DAWNING
1967 means a lot of things to a lot of people today, so much so that it’s difficult to believe (or even remember) that it started out just like any other year, with few suggestions whatsoever of how momentous it might become.

The potential for something was there, of course. The Monkees may have been the biggest band on the scene at the time, outscreaming even the Beatles and Stones in the pre-teen marketplace wherein all pop fans are birthed. But move up the age scale a little, to the generation who got their start wetting knickers at Elvis and swapping mean stares with Eddie, and everywhere you turned, somebody else was standing on the brink of something momentous — the Dead and the Airplane spreading Haight across America; Jimi Hendrix in England, preparing to unleash “Purple Haze;” the Beatles sequestered in the studio for months, planning “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

And in L.A., the Doors were chafing at the bit while Elektra Records readied their resources for the release of the band’s first album. But it was only their first, just as the Dead and the Airplane had still to release their second. Everything was up in the air right now; nothing was written in stone.

A few hip journalists were predicting something magical, the word “psychedelia’ was being whispered in dark corners. But it could as easily be a major bust, and not one of the new sounds would ever catch on. Even the fortune tellers really didn’t know. Elektra head Jac Holzman, however, was convinced that, whatever else might happen that year, the Doors would break on through — and he had the band’s debut single to prove it.

“Break On Through (To The Other Side)” it was called, and it was rising up the L.A. radio charts, even before it was released. The Doors completed work on their eponymous debut album, with producer Paul Rothschild, over the course of a couple of weeks in late August through early September 1966. So far as they were concerned, of course, it was already old news — songs like “Light My Fire,” “Soul Kitchen,” “Break On Through,” “Twentieth Century Fox” and “The End” had been around almost since the band’s inception in mid-1965; “Moonlight Drive” (which wouldn’t, in fact, make it on to the finished album) pre-dated even that.

But Holzman was not to be rushed. As early as the mixing stage, he recalled in his “Follow The Music“ autobiography, “I knew we had made an album that was historic." That was why he insisted on delaying it beyond its original November 1966 release date and holding it over to the new year.

“The record was so beautifully realized and important that I wanted to spotlight it free from the crush of year-end releases. Mid- to late-January was when albums would start being released again, after everything had been absorbed from Christmas. I wanted to slip it in on the first Monday in January.”

Even more importantly, The Doors would be the label’s only release that month.

Elektra, Holzman pledged, “ ... would focus exclusively on the Doors” throughout January.

It was not a purely altruistic decision. Although Elektra was already a successful label, its roster remained very much a bunch of cult acts. Arthur Lee’s Love was the closest the label had to a breakout act and had already rewarded the label with its first rock hit single, “My Little Red Book.”

But Love had a cerebral edginess that cut them out of the teen dreamboat running before you even saw their photographs.

The Doors, on the other hand … the Doors had Jim Morrison, leather pants and boyish curls, a rock ’n’ roll poet, Byron with bad attitude. Holzman loved the music that Elektra released — it was the only reason he released it in the first place. But he wanted everyone else to love it as well.

Holzman continues, “I took my L.A. distributor aside and insisted that the Doors were the best shot we were likely to have, a great West Coast band with an album that had no filler. If we could graft radio success in L.A. onto the rest of the country, we could break the Doors nationwide.”

An open letter to Elektra’s distributors continued in this vein. “[The Doors] is the finest rock LP we have ever heard, and the knowledgeable tradesters and insiders who have had the privilege of hearing [the] completed LP have been equally unstinting in their enthusiasm. Get behind the Doors. They are the most important sound in contemporary American music.”

OF MYTH AND MORRISON
Days after the billboard was erected, that sound was on its way up to San Francisco to witness the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, the biggest-yet gathering of the city’s young and hip, and to play the Fillmore, third on the bill behind Sopwith Camel and the Young Rascals.

It was scarcely the most glamorous booking the band could have landed, but the Doors were not looking for glamour. They were looking to make an impression, and that’s exactly what they did.

“Before the album was released,” Holzman recalled, “I phoned [Fillmore promoter] Bill Graham… and pleaded with him to book the Doors for the Fillmore before they broke wide.” It was not, he said, an easy task. “Although Bill and I trusted each other without question, selling him an unknown act was not going to be easy.”

Finally, Graham agreed, but on one condition. He could also rebook the band at the same low rate of pay ($350 per night) for a second date six months later. Holzman agreed.

The band was, in fact, booked to play three shows for Graham, the two nights at the Fillmore preceded by a one-off show in Sacramento. The gig never happened.

According to Graham, “All the guys in the band showed up on time, but there was no Jim Morrison. He never showed up at all, and no one knew where he was.” He finally appeared in Graham’s office the following afternoon, full of apologies but full of self as well. On his way to the venue, he passed a movie theater and saw “Casablanca“ was playing, so he went to see that instead.

“You should have called,” admonished Graham.

“Yeah, I could have called,” Morrison replied.

But he sat through the movie three times, instead. He was late again the first night at the Fillmore, arriving drunk and proceeding, once he was on the stage, to execute his favorite Roger Daltrey trick, spinning the microphone around by its cable. Except Daltrey always kept his spinning mic on a short lead. Morrison gave it all the slack he could, till it was slicing through the air 10 rows out into the audience.

Watching from the side of the stage, Bill Graham knew he needed to intervene before somebody got hit … and promptly got whacked on the side of the head by the very microphone he’d come to rein in. The next time the Doors played the Fillmore, a contrite Morrison presented Graham with a specially painted crash helmet. Graham forgave Morrison his excesses for the same reason that other people adored him for them. Because he was unique, because he was brilliant, and because — no matter how big a cliché it sounds — he radiated the kind of charm that made it impossible to remain mad at him for too long.

“I was a big fan of his,” Graham understated in his "Bill Graham Presents" autobiography. “Jim was James Dean, and he was Marlon Brando.”

The mythologizing that would first surround, and then devour, Jim Morrison was still a thousand lurid headlines away at that time. Through the first half of 1967, he was still the same Jim — sometimes a little intense, occasionally a little scary — he had been back in late 1964, when he and Ray Manzarek were simply two teenage UCLA cinematography students, united by their love of rock 'n' roll, but compelled by their fascination for the places where rock 'n' roll didn't ordinarily go.

But if he did not fully recognize the power that he was capable of exerting over other people, other observers weren’t only noticing it, they were reacting to it as well.

Journalist Howard Smith informed readers of the Village Voice that Morrison was set to become “[the] biggest thing to grab the mass libido in a very long time.”

And Morrison had no choice but to agree with him. Danny Sugarman, the one-time gopher who remained the band's manager until his death in January 2005 (and co-author of the still-definitive “No One Here Gets Out Alive" biography), was not exaggerating when he states that, at one point, the Doors were the biggest band in America. But he was also aghast at the cost of that success.

"If you want to know what fame did to Jim Morrison, look at a photograph of him at 22, then look at one at 27. The coroner thought he was 56 years old. He was 27."

Spiritually, too, Morrison would be shattered, exhausted by the effort of trying to live up to his legend. At UCLA, studying the art of image under film director Victor Von Sternberg, Morrison modeled his muse on Marlene Dietrich — Sternberg directed the best of her movies, turned a so-so actress into the goddess of glamour, and now he was happy to share his secrets with his students. “The Lizard King,“ “Mr. Mojo Rising,“ “Dionysus Reborn“ and “Oedipus-wrecked" — all developed from the seeds that Von Sternberg sowed.

But, Von Sternberg merely obscured the line that separates creator from creation. Morrison obliterated it, and Dietrich had long since waved auf wiedersehen. Bill Graham compared Morrison to James Dean and Marlon Brando. By the end of his life, he would be Judy Garland as well, and he hated "Over The Rainbow."

BIRTH OF A LEGEND
That dilemma was still a long way off, though. First he had to lay the groundwork for the legend, and, at the Fillmore in January 1967, the myth-maker was on fire.

Across two sets a night — the first opening with the single and peaking with “Light My Fire,” the second built almost completely around “The End” — the Doors completely ripped the rungs out from under the headliners and ensured that the following evening, no matter how many fans the other bands had mustered, the bulk of the audience was there to witness just one act: The Doors.

Fillmore staffer Paul Baratta recalled the Doors coming in.

“I saw them outside, and it was almost like a tableau, these four guys moving in unison. The spatial relationship between them changed, yet they moved together as a unit as they came across Geary Boulevard and up those two steps into the Fillmore and through the doors.” Even offstage, “There was something very charismatic about these people.”

Put them on the stage, and that charisma became an art form.

“Maybe two-thirds of the way through [‘The End’], [Jim] went down on one knee in front of the audience, really in a passionate, spontaneous gesture. And it was responded to by the people in the audience… [and] at that point, I knew this was theater.”

Graham promptly booked the Doors for a return engagement, third on the bill again, but this time behind the Junior Wells Chicago Blues Band and, most significantly, the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia and company were unassailable on their home turf … or so they thought.

But, once again, the Doors took no prisoners, and the headliners were left reeling beneath their assault. Danny Sugarman had grown accustomed to seeing the band destroy all comers on their home territory, and he could reel off a litany of bands who had tried following the Doors onstage at the Whisky a Go-Go, only to find there was no way of doing so — “the Rascals, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Animals, the Beau Brummels, Them, Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart.”

Even he never imagined that they could march into the heart of another band’s home territory and treat them with the same musical disdain. It would have been easy for Elektra to simply put the Doors on the road now and send them out across the United States to drum up support for the album. It needed it, as well. Sales, though encouragingly moving towards the 10,000 mark, were largely concentrated on the West Coast, and while “Break On Through” was bubbling under the Billboard chart, again it was its local impetus that kept it there.

Elektra, however, had no intention of simply dispatching the band out into the Heartland, of lining them up alongside all the other up-and-comers being thrust into the marketplace, to take their chances on the Midwest bar circuit. If the Doors were to make it (and they were; Holzman was adamant on that point), they would do so on their own terms.

The Doors were not going to go out to America. America had to come in to them. The band understood the logic, but they were unhappy with it nevertheless. They were a working band that came to life on the stage. Instead, the most excitement they were now being allowed was to sit around the Elektra offices, phoning up the local radio stations, requesting a spin for “Break On Through.”

Their efforts finally pushed the single to the edge of the local Top 10, but it never made the Billboard Top 100, and while Elektra had already decided on their follow-up single, nobody rated that one’s chances much higher. After all, if “Break On Through” couldn’t do it, the best imagination in the world could not see how radio was ever going to take to a seven-minute single by a band that no one had heard of.

FIRESTARTER
Holzman adored “Light My Fire,” and had already seen the full-length album cut make it onto FM radio. But it was AM that controlled the charts at that time, and the rules there were inviolable — three minutes, and not a bit longer.

Holzman suggested they cut the song in half, fading out after the required length, then letting it pick up again on the other side — “Light My Fire (Parts One and Two).”

The Doors suggested he do something unspeakable to himself. There was no way the song could be sliced up for a single. It was all or nothing.

But then Paul Rothschild presented them with an edit he’d worked up while they were elsewhere, slicing out the keyboard solo, but doing it so stealthily that even Ray Manzarek wasn’t certain whether he noticed the cut, and, to everybody’s amazement, the band approved it. “Light My Fire” was scheduled for release in May; in the meantime, the Doors were let off the leash. A handful of live shows around L.A. kept the Doors ticking over through February — a week at Gazzarri’s, on the Sunset Strip, a benefit for KPFK-FM, a one-off at the Hullabaloo, and a reminder for the fans who had already made the Doors their own that Morrison could be worshipped, but he could never be contained.

Hank Zevallos of Happenin’ magazine caught the show … and caught an incident that, no less than all of those “defining” moments that would litter the remainder of Morrison’s stage career, captures the true nature of the beast.

“Morrison tripped because of the mic and fell hard on the stage. But it happened with a musical climax, and it looked like this was how it was supposed to have happened. Girls screamed, rushed, pressing harder against the stage. Camera flashlights continued to strobe the intense scene wildly. Morrison got up, angry, picked up the mic stand, and began wildly swinging and throwing it about, hard, destroying it. The girls right up front were in very real danger of being accidentally but seriously hurt. And their faces showed the terror. But something else also showed. It looked as if they were having a frenzied orgasm, going insane with unbelievably wicked delight.”

The Doors returned to San Francisco, as well, for their first headliner in that city at the Avalon Ballroom (Sparrow and Country Joe & The Fish were also on the bill); they were back there again on March 7 for the Matrix Club shows that became one of the band’s best-loved bootleg releases. Co-owned by the Airplane’s Marty Balin, the Matrix was renowned (among other things) for an acoustic set-up that could have doubled as an echo chamber, an attribute that drew out some remarkable performances from the bands that touched down there. The Doors reveled in the venue’s acoustics.

MOVING FORWARD
The Doors was still new on the streets, but their minds were already turning toward its followup, and the wealth of songs that may or may not be in contention for inclusion were given a muscular work-out at the Matrix.

“Moonlight Drive,” “Crawling King Snake,” “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “I Can’t See Your Face In My Mind,” “Unhappy Girl,” “Summer’s Almost Gone” and a cover of Lee Dorsey and Allen Toussaint’s “Get Out Of My Life Woman” were all in place. And so was “People Are Strange,” one of the finest encapsulations of an acid trip ever set to music without first detuning all the instruments to stop the aardvarks from chewing your toes. The strange thing was, Morrison wasn’t tripping when he wrote it; he was simply walking up Laurel Canyon with Robby Krieger.

That second album, Krieger told Mojo Navigator journalist (and future Bomp Records founder) Greg Shaw, was understandably very much on the band’s minds at the time. Their debut “was just the skeleton of our material. There was no real production involved.”

It had been rushed, too, by the band’s own haste to get the music down on tape.

As Paul Rothschild put it, “There’s almost a kind of catharsis for the musicians to make their first album, because it frees them. It allows them to go to the other places they’ve been wanting to for so long, but they’ve been tied down.”

The second album would also allow them to take chances that they simply couldn’t afford the first time out. As Morrison told Rolling Stone’s Jerry Hopkins,

“On the first album, [the record company] don’t want to spend … much. The group doesn’t either, because the groups pay for the production of an album. That’s part of the advance against royalties. You don’t get any royalties until you’ve paid the cost of the record album. So the group and the record company weren’t taking a chance on the cost. Some of the songs [on The Doors] took only a few takes.”

Next time around, they already knew, things could be considerably more adventurous, a notion that was amplified after engineer Bruce Botnik turned up with a reference acetate of the still-unreleased Sgt. Pepper that he had borrowed from the Turtles.

“We were all totally blown away by such revolutionary creativity,” Botnik recalled. “As a consequence, we were technically inspired to shoot for the moon.”

That inspiration, however, would need to bide its time for a few months more.

THE DOORS TAKE NEW YORK CITY
Fresh from the Matrix shows, the Doors were then packed off to New York for a week at Ondine’s, the hip little disco by the 59th Street Bridge where they’d made their out-of-town debut the previous fall.

On that occasion, a lot of their free time had been spent either ironing out the last few details about the album (approving the cover photograph, signing their publishing agreements, approving the edit in “Break On Through” that expunged the word “high” from horrified earshot), or hanging around their Henry Hudson Hotel rooms, watching television and bemoaning their lack of cash that prevented them from plunging headfirst into the city nightlife.

This time, things were different.

“An intellectual poet rock star,” Ray Manzarek smiled. “He knocked New York on its ass.”

“I met Jim for the first time at Ondine's,” Andy Warhol superstar Nico recalled in a 1981 interview. “I had known him for a long time already, but that is where we met. He was my soul brother.”

Nico’s first solo album, Chelsea Girl, was on the eve of release, and her own New York fame was approaching its zenith — the Doors might have been thrilled to have placed a single billboard on Sunset Strip, but there were 20-foot-high Nico posters all over Manhattan.

“I think [Jim] was the first man I met who was not afraid of me in some way,” Nico later explained. “We were very similar, like brother and sister. Our spirits are familiar. We were the same height and the same age almost.”

They also had the same temperament. Drummer John Densmore recalls being sequestered in the room next door to Morrison’s at the hotel (the Great Northern this trip — a major step up from last time), “which turned out to be better than TV. The racket that was coming from next door one night was hard to miss. Jim brought Nico back … and I’d never heard such crashing around. It sounded as if they were beating the shit out of each other. I was worried but… Nico looked okay the next day, so I let it slide.”

“Jim Morrison had the best sex I ever had inside me,” Nico said years later. “He was involved in his dreams.”

Few people denied that the pair made an eye-catching couple; indeed, Danny Fields, working promotion at Elektra (to whom Nico would be signing later in the year), even hatched the notion of pairing them together as a performing unit, the Adam and Eve of the Summer of Love. “I thought they would make a cute couple. They were both icy and mysterious and charismatic and poetic and deep and sensitive and wonderful.”

“Danny said Adam and Eve,” Nico shrugged. “But I think he was imagining Sonny and Cher. Jim and I could have made beautiful music, but it was not music that anybody would want to hear.”

She dismissed the briefly prevalent rumor that Morrison was an uncredited co-conspirator on her Elektra debut album, The Marble Index.

“The only time we worked together was when I recorded ‘The End,’” she murmured cryptically — the title track to Nico’s fourth album was cut in 1974, three years after Morrison’s death. But she was also correct. If the singer’s spirit was ever channeled into a posthumous recording, more than any of the other tributes and traumas that have elsewhere been attributed to an undead Morrison, Nico’s take on “The End” is the one — as Creem’s Richard Cromelin pointed out when he reviewed the album itself.

“[‘The End’] is the soundtrack for the freefall to the bottom. It’s a totally mesmerizing performance … if Morrison sung it as a lizard, Nico is as sightless bird, lost but ever so calm … the pure, dead marble of a ruined Acropolis, a crumbling column on the subterranean bank of Morrison’s River Styx.”

“It’s rubbish,” Nico said of Cromelin’s words. “But it’s good, romantic rubbish.”

STRANGE DAYS AHEAD
Leaving New York and Nico behind them (the two singers would be briefly reunited in L.A. in July), the Doors returned to Sunset Strip for a show at Ciro’s nightclub, where Morrison’s now-standard performance was captured with poetic beauty by journalist Bill Kerby of the UCLA’s Daily Bruin.

“And there he was; a gaunt, hollow Ariel from hell, stumbling in slow motion through the drums. Robbie turned to look with mild disgust, but Jim Morrison was oblivious. Drifting, still you could have lit matches off the look he gave the audience. There was a mild tremor of excited disbelief as he dreamed that he went to his microphone.

“Morrison's clothes looked like he had slept in them since he was 12 and he just hung there on the microphone, slack. Just for a flash, his beautiful child's face said it was all a lie. All the terror, all the drugs, all the evil. Gone! The unhuman sound he made into the microphone turned the carping groupies to stone. And, in the tombed silence he began to sing: alternately caressing, screaming, terraced flights of poetry and music, beyond visceral.”

From Ciro’s, the band moved on to their biggest gig yet, opening for Jefferson Airplane at a high-school stadium in the San Fernando Valley. Some 10,000 people were there — most of them, it was assumed, for the headlining Jefferson Airplane.

Wrong.

According to Danny Sugarman, “It was a Doors audience. After the Doors played, a third of the stadium walked out.” Released on schedule at the end of May, the edited “Light My Fire” entered the Billboard chart on June 3 1967, “moving from west to east like a slowly gathering blaze,” said Holzman, and soundtracking the Summer of Love as it burst over America.

The Doors followed its course. In early June, they were back in San Francisco to play that return booking at the Fillmore which Bill Graham had insisted upon, but as headliners now. Then they flew to New York for a three-week season at the Scene, that most legendary of period New York nightclubs. It was not the most fortuitous timing.

The Doors were in New York, but a large part of New York was in California attending the Monterey Pop Festival — an event at which the Doors might more profitably have been employed. Festival director John Simon acknowledged that much, but his hands were tied; quite simply, the band had risen so quickly, and so unexpectedly, that by the time he thought of adding them to the bill, it was too late.

 And, as if to make it worse, the Scene itself would be closing for the entire Monterey weekend, leaving the band with nothing to do but accept a couple of out-of-town live shows on Long Island and down in Philadelphia. They also played a radio station benefit at the Village Theatre (soon to become Bill Graham’s Fillmore East) at the start of their visit; and, later in the trip, they would venture out again to headline a high-school auditorium in Greenwich, Conn., and share a bill with Simon and Garfunkel in front of a distinctly underwhelmed Forest Hills audience.

But it was at the Scene that they made the greatest impact, as Shaw recalled.

“I arrived at The Scene one night to find Jim Morrison and Paul Newman talking about the title song for a movie which Newman was planning to produce. And when I called the directors of the Central Park Music festival to arrange for passes for the Doors to the Paul Butterfield concert, I was told to have them enter the theater one at a time or they would be in danger of being rushed. Which I told them — but they came in together anyhow, and were rushed, and loved it.”

For, even as the Doors blazed a swath of rumor and legend through the Manhattan club scene, “Light My Fire” was burning an even brighter path up the chart. It hit the top spot at the end of July, and the Doors celebrated by heading back into the studio to start recording their second album, Strange Days.

They could not have known, but they might already have guessed that the strangest days were yet to come.