Hello, I Love You hits number 1 on Billboard charts
August 3rd 1968 The Doors Hello, I Love You hit number one on the Billboard charts. Almost exactly a year after “Light My Fire” attained the same watershed status.
“Hello, I Love You” wasn’t supposed to be on the third album. Originally titled “Celebration of the Lizard” the third album was supposed to include the title track on the whole second side of the album, and be The Doors biggest theatrical piece and epic song. When “Celebration” fell through, and The Doors realized they were going to need more material to fill out the album they automatically went back to Jim’s Venice journals and wrote songs in the studio, as opposed to their earlier method of a long period of working out the songs. The Doors scrambled to fill out the third album, with songs like “Summer’s Almost Gone,” “Wintertime Love,” and “Love Street” but no one had remembered “Hello, I Love You” that had been on one of the demos they had done when the band was still Rick and the Ravens. Until Adam Holzman, Jac Holzman’s ten year old son remembered the song from the demo and told his father it would be a hit song. In the demo version “Hello, I Love” has a blues roadhouse feel to it, heavy on the harmonica.
By the time of “Waiting for the Sun” The Doors were a much more polished band and gave it a slicker more professional feel to it. Although the lyrics were Morrison’s, the song lacked some of the darker tone and feeling that was usually applied to a Doors song. But Adam Holzman was right “Hello, I Love You” was a hit song and hit the pop audience right in the flower power psyche. “Hello, I Love You” was released in early June of 68 with the instantly elevator music of “Love Street” as the B-side.
There has also been a lot of conjecture or myth over the years that “Hello, I Love You” ‘borrowed’ a riff from The Kinks “All Day and All of the Night.” For comparison here’s The Kinks song. Do you think The Doors borrowed the riff?
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