Happy Anniversary: The Doors, Waiting for the Sun

47 years ago today, The Doors released the first and only #1 album of their career, although the album's title track wouldn't turn up for another two years.

Waiting for the Sun is arguably best known for featuring one of the band's biggest hits, “Hello, I Love You,” but what's ironic is that the song in question is one of only two tracks that had been left loitering around unused since the band's original 1965 demo. Otherwise, the rest of the material was freshly written, including a track which was so fresh that it ultimately ended up not even being finished…well, at least not finished to its writer's satisfaction, anyway. That track was “Not to Touch the Earth,” which was really just a portion of a much longer work entitled “The Celebration of the Lizard” that Jim Morrison had envisioned as being an album-long piece, but they couldn't come up with a take that all four members liked well enough to move forward with it, so they went with the excerpt which appears on Side One.

Beyond that glitch in The Doors' original plan, however, Waiting for the Sun turned out to be a rather strong record, thanks to such tracks as the aforementioned “Hello, I Love You,” “Love Street,” “The Unknown Soldier,” “Spanish Caravan,” and the epic closer “Five to One.” Of course, critics didn't necessarily love it, mostly because of Morrison's artistic aspirations and self-destructive tendencies colliding, but it's still a favorite among fans because of its musical diversity.

Oh, and just in case you hadn't worked it out yet, the song “Waiting for the Sun” finally turned up on 1970's Morrison Hotel, which is a pretty good album in its own right.