Remember When: The Cure Covered The Doors

Listening to The Cure and The Doors, superficially, you won’t find much shared between the two rock groups.

Jim Morrison—the Lizard King—and the goth introspection of Robert Smith seem a world apart. But they aren’t so different. You can easily trace the line between The Doors and the post-punk music scene from which Smith emerged.

So it’s not surprising to hear The Cure cover The Doors and to do so extremely well.

Soundcheck Song and The Kinks

Speaking to MTV Europe in 1991, Smith said The Cure often covered The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” during sound checks. He said they made it sound like The Kinks.

For the 40th anniversary of Elektra Records, the label asked The Cure to cover a song from its back catalog. Smith said they listened through the various artists, including Tim Buckley, before choosing The Doors. He also admitted he didn’t like The Doors—outside of a few songs—and “didn’t really get into the Jim Morrison thing.”

Added Smith, “I could never understand the whole Lizard King thing.” Still, Elektra thought The Cure covering The Doors would be a good match. Smith initially resisted the label’s efforts but gave in after the other attempted covers weren’t working.

“Hello, I Love You” first appeared on Waiting for the Sun, released by The Doors in 1968. It represented a departure into pop music for a band most associated with psychedelic blues rock and Morrison’s hazy poetry.

A Borrowed Riff

The Cure’s cover opens the Elektra compilation, released in 1990. Shifting the keyboard-heavy original to the garage rock of The Kinks isn’t exactly a stretch. Listening to The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night,” you notice similarities between the songs.

The Kinks’ Ray Davies told Mojo in 2012, “The funniest thing was when my publisher came to me on tour and said The Doors had used the riff for ‘All Day and All of the Night’ for ‘Hello, I Love You.’ I said, rather than sue them, can we just get them to own up? My publisher said, ‘They have, that’s why we should sue them!’ (laughs) Jim Morrison admitted it, which, to me, was the most important thing. The most important thing, actually, is to take [the idea] somewhere else.”

Davies told Rolling Stone an agreement was reached between the bands’ publishing rights holders but added he didn’t know the details.

Slight Return

The Cure also recorded a sped-up version for the Elektra compilation dubbed the “Slight Return Mix,” referencing the Jimi Hendrix classic “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” The “Slight Return” version is a noisy, punk rock take on The Doors’ hit. But it speeds by you in a whopping 13 seconds.

In 1991, The Cure performed “Hello, I Love You” on the British television show Tonight with Jonathan Ross. Meanwhile, multiple versions appeared on The Cure’s Join the Dots: B-Sides and Rarities, 1978–2001 (The Fiction Years).

On “Hello I Love You (Psychedelic Mix),” the band stretches the song into a six-minute ethereal dirge, similar to tracks on The Cure’s 1989 masterpiece Disintegration. For those keeping track of things like commas, the versions on Join the Dots do not include a comma, while the original, indeed, does.

A Final Thought on the Missing Comma

A comma separates things within a sentence. Thinking of punctuation like the rhythmic marks in music, the comma gives pause: Hello, (pause) I love you. However, with The Cure returning The Doors song to the spirit of The Kinks, and with its increased tempo, conscious of it or not, Smith’s exclusion of the comma makes sense.

If you’ve waited long enough to tell someone how you feel, there’s no time to wait.

Photo by Paul Bergen/Redferns