June 1968.

This is, quite possibly, the most famous song about a random girl on a beach since Astrud Gilberto’s The Girl From Ipanema in 1963.

Written in 1965 by Jim Morrison, this was literally about a girl he saw walking on the beach. The song was recorded for an early six track demo in 1965 but didn’t appear on an album until Waiting for the Sun in 1968 when the band were looking for extra material to include.

At the time Morrison’s drinking was causing problems and making recording difficult so the other band members began looking through Morrison’s poetry, hoping to find something to engage him, and came across this.

The single was released as a stereo 45 rpm, something unheard of at the time, and was promoted as being the first single recorded in stereo. It is now regarded as one of the songs that initiated the move to stereo within the recording industry.

On its release the song spent two weeks at the top of the US charts, as well as reaching number one in Canada. Here in the UK it spent twelve weeks on the charts and peaked at number fifteen.