50 years ago on September 17, 1967, Jim Morrison solidified his place as a poetic rebel. Before the band was to perform “Light My Fire” on The Ed Sullivan Show, Jim was specifically told he couldn’t sing the word “higher” on air.
As Robby Krieger explains, “We thought they were joking – who were they kidding? Wanting us to change the lyrics on the number one song in America? We decided to just do the song as-is and maybe they would forget all about it. What could they do? After all, it was live television! So, yeah, we never played the Ed Sullivan show again. But we didn’t care.”
John Densmore added that Ed fumed, “’You will never do this show again,’ after we’d directly disobeyed his censorship requirements. Jim turned to him and remarked, ‘Hey, that’s okay – we just did the Ed Sullivan show.’”
And the rest is Rock N Roll history.
Watch Ray Manzarek talk about the experience, here:
View the full performance here: