Doors, The Vinyl Records
The Doors mark the moment when the American rock underground of the 1960s came crashing into the mainstream. The group's massive influence on the course of rock music may been overshadowed by decades of lionization of their late lead singer Jim Morrison, whose early death wound up being a pivotal part of their legacy. He seemed to loom larger in his afterlife than he did when he roamed the earth, his posthumous popularity cresting in the '80s as the Doors returned to radio airwaves in the wake of their magnum opus "The End" soundtracking pivotal moments in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. "The End" never appeared as a single but its Oedipal melodrama zeroed in on the Doors' appeal back in 1967: the group seemed otherworldly and dangerous, drawing from inspirations not normally heard in rock music.