Once Upon a Time in the Top Spot: The Doors, “Hello, I Love You”

48 years ago today, The Doors sat atop the Billboard Hot 100 with a song they’d been sitting on for three years, little knowing that they’d had a future #1 on their hands.

Although “Hello, I Love You” was recorded during the sessions for The Doors’ third album, Waiting for the Sun, it was actually written back in 1965 and was one of the six demos the band recorded in their earliest days together, so early that Robby Krieger wasn’t even in the band yet. Although it wasn’t really what you’d call lost, it was rediscovered, so to speak, in the midst of the band members flipping through some of Jim Morrison’s old poems. The last verse was reportedly written while Morrison and Ray Manzarek were watching a girl taking a stroll on the beach: “Sidewalk crouches at her feet / Like a dog that begs for something sweet / Do you hope to make her see you, fool? / Do you hope to pluck this dusky jewel?”

Whenever “Hello, I Love You” was actually written, it was clearly a composition for the ages: after The Doors finally got around to recorded it, the song became one of their biggest hits, serving to raise both their profile and their mood.

“We were just going out on tour when ‘Hello, I Love You’ hit number one,” said Robby Krieger, in a 2000 interview with Alan Paul. “It really buoyed our spirits.”