10 Greatest Pre-Metal Metal Songs
9. Not To Touch The Earth - The Doors
It's easy to overlook the Doors in the grand scheme of rock music. Compared to the other hippie idealism coming out of Los Angeles at the time, these artistic misfits set standards for rock and roll that most tend to take for granted. While Jim Morrison might get the title of being the immortal rock star poet, Not To Touch The Earth is where he transcends his typical songwriting structure.
On their third album Waiting for the Sun, Morrison wanted to try an experiment he had been working towards called Celebration of the Lizard, which would run across about 20 minutes of music. Though the only remnant of this jam was Not To Touch the Earth, the results were absolutely spellbinding, as the guitars and piano swirl around each other to put the listener in a sort of trance.
Much like the titular lizard, Morrison's baritone slithers around the song, as if to entice you into its groove. While this kind of song might not sound like metal exactly, it opened up the doors for other artists to go even more feral in their song construction, with members of Aerosmith and even Joshua Homme of Queens of the Stone Age singling it out as something special. After years of reinventing the idea of what rock and roll could do, Morrison's final words of "I am the lizard king...I can do anything" feels more prophetic than ever.