The Doors played the Hollywood Bowl on July 5, 1968 — one of the best-documented concerts of their career, filmed and released.

The Bowl is a natural amphitheatre in Bolton Canyon that has been Los Angeles's outdoor concert home since 1922, and its banded concentric shell, in the form Lloyd Wright designed in the late 1920s, is among the most recognisable stages in America. For most of its existence it belonged to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the summer symphony season; from the mid-sixties it also took rock, and a Bowl booking marked an act that had outgrown clubs entirely. The Beatles played it in 1964 and 1965.

For the Doors it came almost exactly a year after "Light My Fire" reached number one, and thirteen months after the Fillmore Auditorium run this chronicle records on BG-75 — where they had taken over the second half of a poster from the Yardbirds and played to a room of a couple of thousand. The distance between those two bookings, in one year, is the whole trajectory of the band.