The Doors emerged in 1965 as a Los Angeles quartet led by vocalist Jim Morrison, with Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger shaping a lean, keyboard-driven rock sound. Their early run of albums moved quickly from breakthrough singles to chart-topping releases, marking a moment when rock records could carry literary ambition and mass appeal at the same time. In New York, their legacy sits inside the city’s long habit of adopting West Coast movements and testing them on club stages. At Iridium, the material reads less like nostalgia than a study in how a band wrote pop structures around darker subject matter.