Love Me Two Times

You’re locked into THE ZOO, the station that still believes a song can walk in like a stranger and leave the room different. Right now the needle is on “Love Me Two Times,” the second single pulled off The Doors’ second album, Strange Days, and if you only know the band from the long, dark poems, this one is the proof that Venice Beach also knew how to write a blues that swung. Robby Krieger wrote it. Jim Morrison sang it like a man already halfway out the door. Ray Manzarek answered him on a harpsichord, of all things, and John Densmore kept the pocket tight enough that the whole thing still sounds like a bar band that somehow got an eight-track machine and a producer who knew what to do with it.

Krieger has been plain about the subject for years. He wrote it about leaving. Vietnam was the backdrop, and so was the life of a working band: you ship out, you go on the road, you leave the old lady behind, so take what you can while she’s still standing there. “Love me two times, baby, love me twice today.” Manzarek, never one to leave a double meaning on the table, later said the lyric could be about lust and loss, or about multiple orgasms, and he wasn’t sure which. That is the whole Doors trick in one shrug. The words are simple enough for a jukebox. The room they open is not.

Strange Days hit the racks on September 25, 1967, on Elektra, produced by Paul A. Rothchild and engineered by Bruce Botnick at Sunset Sound in Hollywood. The debut album was still sitting in the Top Ten. The band had written a pile of these songs around the same time as the first record, and the second sessions gave them something the first album did not: an eight-track Ampex, real echo chambers, and the nerve to use them. Botnick has said the band was listening to a pre-release copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band while they worked, and you can hear the itch to make the studio another instrument. “Love Me Two Times” did not need the Moog that Paul Beaver laid over other tracks. It needed grease, a riff, and that harpsichord.

Manzarek called the harpsichord a most elegant instrument that one does not normally associate with rock and roll, and then he played it like he was trying to prove the point wrong. The solo is baroque and nasty at the same time, plucked notes sitting right on top of Krieger’s guitar, which stays cleaner here than on a lot of Doors sides, less fuzz, more bite. Session bassist Doug Lubahn, borrowed from Clear Light, held the low end. Onstage Manzarek’s left hand usually did that job on the Fender Rhodes bass. In the studio Lubahn rehearsed with them and, by Krieger’s own account, came up with ideas that made “Love Me Two Times” and “You’re Lost Little Girl” sit heavier. Densmore plays it straight and swinging. Morrison does not over-sing it. He leans in, almost conversational, then opens up on the title line like he means both readings at once.

Elektra edited the album cut, about three minutes and sixteen seconds, down to two minutes and thirty-seven for the single, and shipped it in November 1967 with “Moonlight Drive” on the flip. “People Are Strange” had already gone out in September and climbed to number 12. “Love Me Two Times” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in December, peaked at number 25 in January 1968, and then dropped. Billboard had called it a strong folk-rocker that could not miss the top of the chart. Cash Box heard solid Chicago blues with a punch of its own. It did not miss because the song was weak. It missed, in Krieger’s telling, because America got uptight in a hurry.

On December 9, 1967, in New Haven, Connecticut, a police officer found Morrison with a young woman in a backstage shower stall before the show at the New Haven Arena and hit them with a can of mace. Morrison came out and told the crowd what had happened. He was arrested onstage, the first time a rock singer had been hauled off in the middle of a performance, charged with inciting a riot and related offenses. The charges were later dropped. The single was yanked in that market, and stations that already thought the lyric was too frank for family radio used the bust as cover. Krieger has said it should have been a bigger hit, and that the record disappeared almost as soon as the headlines landed. Banned in New Haven for being too controversial. The band was not amused. The song, of course, outlived the ban.

That is the short version of the track. The longer version is the band that walked into Sunset Sound already famous and already in trouble with their own success. The Doors formed in Los Angeles in 1965 after Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, both out of the UCLA film school, ran into each other on Venice Beach and Morrison sang a few lines of what became “Moonlight Drive.” Manzarek heard a whole group in that voice. John Densmore and Robby Krieger came over from a band called the Psychedelic Rangers. They had met in a meditation class. Four pieces, no bass player, organ and guitar and drums and a singer who treated the microphone like a dare. They ground it out at the London Fog, then landed the house-band slot at the Whisky a Go Go, got fired for the Oedipal blow-up in “The End,” and got signed by Jac Holzman at Elektra anyway.

The first album arrived in January 1967. “Light My Fire,” another Krieger composition, went to number one in a shortened single edit and turned a club band into a national act before they had finished learning how to be one. Strange Days followed before the year was out and peaked at number three on the Billboard 200, platinum in the long run, shadowed the whole time by that debut still hanging around the chart. “Love Me Two Times” is the handshake on that second record: the most straightforward rock tune on an album that also holds “When the Music’s Over,” “Horse Latitudes,” and the title track. Sal Cinquemani later called out the virtuosic harpsichord solo and one of the band’s grooviest guitar riffs. Richie Unterberger heard it as jerkily rhythmic. Both of them are right. It struts, then it stings.

Morrison was dead in Paris by July 3, 1971, twenty-seven years old, the official story a heart attack in a bathtub, the myth already bigger than the report. The other three carried on for two more albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, then closed the book. Manzarek died on May 20, 2013. Krieger and Densmore are still here, still arguing in public sometimes, still playing the songs. The catalog never really left the radio. A later generation met “Love Me Two Times” again through covers, through Aerosmith’s take, through the simple fact that a harpsichord solo in a blues does not age the way a costume does.

On THE ZOO we play it for the riff, for the joke inside the plea, and for the reminder that album rock was never only the long cuts. Strange Days is a dark record. This is the moment the lights come up in the bar and everybody remembers they have somewhere else to be. Love me two times. I’m going away.

More of the deep cuts, the airchecks, and the stories behind the songs live at THE ZOO. The band’s own house is thedoors.com, with the official pages on Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the long timeline and the collector’s paper trail, the fan archives at doorshistory.com and Mild Equator are still the rooms where the faithful keep the set lists.