"So: a pretty catchy sex song from a band with godlike aspirations. But the Doors legend owes more to what they did with "Light My Fire" — refusing to licence it for a Buick ad, refusing to change the verboten "higher" line on Ed Sullivan — than with the song itself. The song itself is fine. It's not anything more than that."
— Tom Breihan
And so concludes the review of the original version of "Light My Fire" over on Stereogum. While the tale of The Doors agreeing to change the "girl, we couldn't get much higher" line only for them to go back on it is well known, I personally didn't know about the Buick commercial. Apparently, the others accepted an offer from the car company while Jim Morrison was in the UK getting laid. When the singer got word of what had gone down he used his veto power to quash it by threatening to smash a Buick.
The Doors sure had integrity. They fought back against network censors and refused to sell out to corporate dollars (well, one quarter of them did but one Jim Morrison is roughly equal to a Ray Manzarek, a Robby Krieger and a John Densmore combined). Way to sock it to the man, boys.
Among all this, they neglected to put the kibosh on José Feliciano's latin pop spin on the very same hit in which had been so precious to them that they wouldn't alter the lyrics. To be fair, they couldn't have known that the Puerto Rican singer would have a breakthrough smash with his cover, even if they must have known that it would be done in an easy listening style. Yet, they refused to distance themselves from Feliciano, no doubt appreciating the songwriting royalties and perhaps the mainstream approval. And even, perhaps, because the two versions really aren't all that different from each other. The Doors weren't quite as radical as they and their devoted fans seemed convinced of while Feliciano isn't quite the milquetoast pop minstrel.
Listening to it now, there's a sense that Feliciano was ahead of his time. The ironic cover version done in a different style from its source was something that didn't really become commonplace until the eighties or nineties. (I always think of Aztec Camera's acoustic pop version of Van Halen's "Jump" as the first example) On the other hand, it's just a bland, faintly pointless cover of a song that had been somewhat bland to begin with. It's not unlike very boring, very predictable carols that pop up on any random artist's contractually obliged Christmas album. Even still, flip side "California Dreamin" (yes, The Mamas and the Papas song) is even more lifeless and it is said that it had initially been meant to be the A side. It has grown on a bit me over the past few days but that only means it has gone from "ghastly shit" to "mildly irritating". Give it another week or so and I might regard it as "okay but nothing special" — not unlike The Doors' original in fact.
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