Monday morning. Time to watch a video of the Lizard King tearing through an absolutely live version of “Light My Fire” courtesy of the elves at YouTube.

Given the decent lighting, elaborate staging (doors, get it? I knew you would) and fancy dissolves and closeups, this would appear to be the band’s infamous perf on the Ed Sullivan show, wherein Jimbo promised a Sullivan lackey that he wouldn’t utter the “higher” lyric but went right ahead and sang it anyway, thereby getting the band banned from future Sullivan appearances, blah blah blah.

It’s worth nothing that even in a sterile TV-studio environ, Morrison could still scare the shit out of everybody—check out his I-forgot-to-take-my-meds psychotic howl at the end of the first chorus; the V.U. meters in the control room must have gone right off the charts. You can almost picture some IATSE geezer rip off his headset and bleat, What’s with this fucking kid?

Great song, great performance. Note that nothing about Morrison’s schtick—from the leathers to the leers—seems at all dated. Take heed, charisma-deficient lead singers of the 21st century.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 8:56 am and is filed under The Doors, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.