The Doors, ‘Love Her Madly’

Boredom drove the Doors' guitarist Robbie Krieger to write would become the final hit of the band's time together. 'Love Her Madly' was penned in response to his girlfriend at the time. "I fixed on the idea of a guy whose girlfriend is his obsession but she keeps on walking out and giving him the runaround," Krieger told England's Classic Rock Magazine recently. "That was me. I wrote it about Lynn, now my wife."

While singer Jim Morrison is better recognized as the creative force behind the band's music, Krieger says he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics and 75 percent of the music. The band was in a cool-down period when he bought a new guitar and began strumming a riff that would eventually become the band's highest charting song. Gigs were hard to come by in those days, as Morrison was appealing a six month sentence for inciting a riot and indecent exposure in Miami. (The appeal lasted until his death in 1971. He was pardoned in 2010.)

Krieger brought the song to the band when they began recording the 'L.A. Woman' album in the fall of 1970. "It was an easy-listening song, but Jim loved that," he tells Classic Rock Magazine. "His favorite part was the line, 'All your love is gone, so sing a lonely song / Of a deep blue dream, seven horses seem, to be on the mark.' Jim always told me, 'Put something that makes the listener confused.' It didn't mean much - seven horses were like lucky omen. Jim liked horse racing from his Florida days."

"Don't ya love her madly / Don't ya need her badly / Don't ya love her ways / Tell me what you say / Don't ya love her madly / Wanna be her daddy / Don't ya love her face / Don't ya love her as she's walkin' out the door / Like she did one thousand times before."

Longtime producer Paul Rothchild famously refused to work on the album, calling 'Love Her Madly' and 'Riders on the Storm' "cocktail music." Krieger says there were bigger issues. "The story goes that he'd just finished Janis Joplin's 'Pearl' album, and she died in early October. A few days later he sees Jim in bad shape and thinks, 'This is all going the same way.'"

The band played the song twice in late 1970, and it was released in March, 1971. Krieger says he fought for 'Riders on the Storm' to be the album's first single, but was proven wrong when he heard it on a Los Angeles radio station. One week after the song was released, Morrison moved to Paris. Four months later, he was found dead in a bathtub.

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