Jim Morrison wrote the lyrics while he was living on a rooftop in Venice Beach, California. At night everything was clear, so he would look into people's windows, study what they were doing, and watch their TV sets.
Jim Morrison recited this as a poem to Ray Manzarek when they ran into each other on a beach in Southern California in 1965. Manzarek, who knew Morrison from UCLA film school, thought it was great and convinced him to form a band.
This was the first song recorded by The Doors. It was left off their first album because they felt it wasn't good enough. Speaking with Gibson.com in a 2011 interview, Manzarek recalled there was chemistry straight away: "I knew instantly we had found 'it,' that indefinable, transcendent something that Kerouac refers to," he said. "I remember showing Robby the chord changes for a simple 'G' progression. He pulled out his bottleneck and said, 'I've got an idea for this, something sort of liquid-like.' A lot of The Doors music came to be like that – water-y. That came from living on the beach. We were actually there, whereas even The Beach Boys, for instance, didn't really live on the beach."
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