You mean you forgot? Things like the Doors’ 40th Anniversary have a way of sneaking up, especially when you were instead trying to track the anniversary of that other iconic Southern Cali band whose biggest hit was built around a Farfisa organ riff. Sorry to say, Iron Butterfly’s 40th was last year.

But there’s still time to ring in the Doors’—in fact, there’s a whole year of commemoration planned, starting Nov. 8 on what promises to be one busy freakin’ night on the Sunset Strip.

At the Whisky a Go-Go, where the Doors were house band until owner Mario Maglieri freaked out after hearing Jim Morrison’s Oedipal section of “The End,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will unveil a plaque denoting the club’s R&R historical signficance.

Journalist Ben Fong-Torres—with whom regular readers will recall I shared the stage at Bumbershoot—emcees; classic rock stalwart Jim Ladd broadcasts live on L.A.’s KLOS-FM; and Robbie Krieger hosts a listening party for Perception, the upcoming Doors boxed set.

Next door at the Cat Club, formerly the London Fog of Doors’ dues-paying legend, Ray Manzarek hosts a preview of the Hall of Fame’s upcoming Doors exhibit.

Finally, down the Strip at Book Soup, the former Cinematheque 16 where Jimbo read his poetry when the mood struck him, John Densmore hosts a reading of Morrison compositions by Perry Farrell and other worthies.

Somewhere in there the lads will find time to sign copies of The Doors by the Doors, co-written with Fong-Torres.

That’s a lot of commemoration. Still, for an L.A. band launched in a year when San Francisco was catching all the hype, the Doors were essential to dragging people’s imaginations back down the coast to where the real action was and, in fact, had always been. No other band of the day was so identified with, or wrote more passionately about, L.A.

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.