The Best of The Doors (1973 album)
1973 compilation album by The Doors
The Best of the Doors is a compilation album by the American rock band the Doors, released in September 1973 by Elektra Records. It was the third compilation album to be released by the band and contains seven of the Doors' eight Top 40 hits.
Critical reception
Critic Robert Christgau gave the compilation a "B" rating, while AllMusic's William Ruhlmann rated it four and a half out of five stars. The latter commented that at the time of its release, "it was the best Doors greatest-hits collection on the market", but noted that most of the material is found on the more comprehensive The Best of the Doors first released in 1985.
Releases
The songs on the album were re-mixed for four channel quadraphonic sound and the album was originally released on LP in the CD-4 Quadradisc format. The album was also released on quadraphonic 8-Track tape and Reel-to-reel tape formats. In 1980, the LP was reissued in a two-channel stereo version through the Columbia House record club.
In 2015, Audio Fidelity released the original quadraphonic mix of The Best of the Doors in the hybrid Super Audio CD format. Steve Hoffman mastered the release at Marsh Mastering. This version also contains the same content in stereo.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Best of The Doors (1973 album)” is 1973 compilation album by The Doors. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Best, Doors and album, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1973 compilation album by The Doors” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2297771. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1985, 1980 and 2015.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Best of The Doors (1973 album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.