For a start, despite the fact that they were regular headliners at San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium in the hippie heyday, The Doors were never really a hippie band, though they might have looked that way to a casual observer. Hippies were a San Francisco phenomenon, and the Los Angeles equivalent, the freaks were creatures of a similar, but substantially different, hue.
San Francisco tended towards a fog and mist Victoriana collective beatnik sensibility. Bands mainly drawn from the ranks of the finger-picking folkie fraternity (see comments from the likes of Steve Miller and Paul Butterfield for confirmation) played dance concerts in ballrooms like the Fillmore and the Avalon. The Los Angeles music scene was a sunnier, poppier affair centred around Sunset Strip.
The Critical Reader might question the sunnier and poppier side of things when we're talking The Doors. A glance around the rest of the Los Angeles scene in 1966 and '67 will take in The Byrds, The Mamas & The Papas, Sonny & Cher, The Association, The Turtles and Buffalo Springfield, at which point I can possibly rest my case.
Those acts appeared in the market place on major record labels with fairly extensive pop and rock catalogues.
A couple of things set The Doors apart from much of the LA musical landscape after UCLA film students Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison teamed up with John Densmore and Robby Krieger in 1965.
After an early incarnation that recorded a six-song demo in September 1965, the band existed without an official bass player. Patty Sullivan (credited under her married name Patricia Hansen in the 1997 box set) filled in the bottom end there. Later, in the studio various session players, including Clear Light's Doug Lubahn, Larry Knechtel, Harvey Brooks, Lonnie Mack, Jerry Scheff, Chris Ethridge and Leland Sklar played bass. Live, they could get by with Manzarek's keyboards filling the role, but that didn't work quite as well in the studio.
That meant there was one less figure to draw attention away from the front man. With Densmore behind the drum kit, regardless of whether the kit was on a riser, and Manzarek seated behind the keyboards the visual focus was going to end up on Morrison or guitarist Robbie Kreiger, and that brings us to another distinguishing characteristic.