Image via Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
Thomas Hobbs is stoned, immaculate.
Standing in near darkness, Jim Morrison clutches his microphone for dear life. The Doors are performing “When The Music’s Over” at 1970’s Isle of Wight Festival. The only light is a sinister blood red glow. The lead singer Morrison is bloated and portly, barely moving more than a few centimetres, visibly exhausted after years of booze and chaos.
By the dawn of the new decade, Morrison’s demonic werewolf blues had become a little flat. On this 11-minute rendition of “When The Music’s Over,” some uncharacteristic fear creeps into his shaky vocal tone. After all, he’d recently been found guilty of indecent exposure during a Miami performance. He’s less the Shamanic, “Erotic Politician” of old, and more like a nervous cabaret singer.
But around the three-and-a-half minute mark, something special happens. An explosive guitarist deflects the attention from the gravity-bound Dionysus to his left. Robbie Krieger’s trademark 64’ Gibson SG Special bellows out a furious rumble that mimics a UH-1 propeller circling a jungle.
You can’t oversell the power of the loose, pulsating drumming from John Densmore and the fragments of wind-up toy organ from Ray Manzarek. This slab of gloomy, paranoid proto-funk song sounds like the soundtrack to a funeral service held in a burlesque club. But it’s Krieger who really gives this music its lift; it’s a microcosm for Kreiger’s overall role in the band. The L.A-raised guitarist was the quiet one at the back, whose rousing improvisational guitar solos kept the carnivorous rock-and-roll attitude alive in The Doors whenever things threatened to become too pretentious.
It would be easy for Robby Krieger to be arrogant. After all, not only is he regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of the last century, he quietly wrote most of the band’s biggest hits. But in conversation he seems more concerned with sharing the attention with his bandmates, particularly Morrison. It’s clear that he doesn’t possess the conventional ego of someone belonging to a band that’s sold more than 100 million records.
Raised in the Pacific Palisades, Krieger’s music obsessive record engineer dad pushed his son to listen and consider every layer of an arrangement. While Krieger was later taught the intricacies of the flamenco guitar by his mentor Frank Chin (who doubled as a novelist and pioneer of Asian-American theater). When he wasn’t making his fingers bleed like his heroes Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson, Krieger was trying to write down lyrics that channeled the romantic longing of early Bob Dylan.
While Morrrison remains the iconic face and lungs of the band, it was Krieger who actually wrote The Doors’ defining song. As a teenager sitting at his parent’s piano bench, Krieger penned “Light My Fire.” He balanced this knack for infectious pop simplicity with a love of avant-garde jazz (Miles Davis was another hero).
After The Doors, Krieger established an underrated solo career, experimenting with different genres like R&B, soul, bossanova, hard rock and even turning up for a cameo amid the nu-metal sonics of Woodstock ‘99. My personal favorite of his solo material is 2010’s “Russian Caravan”, where an icy harmonica attempts to capture the mystic bleariness of the infinite Russian plain.
Despite his individual achievements, Krieger is well aware that whenever he does interviews, the conversation will naturally turn to his experiences with the immortal Morrison, who succumbed to the endless night after a 1971 overdose in a Parisian bathtub. Though he counters: “Everyone was playing their part! The Doors were special in that way. But I get why people want to focus on Jim, because he was such a genius.”
When I interviewed Krieger for a Financial Times feature focusing on Jim Morrison’s poetic powers back in 2021, I knew the angle of the piece would forbid me from properly dissecting The Doors as a group. I often dreamt of returning to our interview when the time was right, so I could finally write a piece that celebrated Krieger’s often unsung role in the Electra-signed band. After all, Krieger tended to be the glue that held The Doors together, allowing their frontman to prance around on stage without fear while howling mystical gibberish about seeing you at “the back of the Blue Bus.”
Before any decision was ever made in The Doors, all four members had to say yes or it wouldn’t be approved; something representative of a band where everyone was responsible for the art. But given how much of a team effort their music was to create, I feared being asked about The Doors from the perspective of Jim Morrison for the 3000th time was going to be a tiresome experience. Thankfully, my interview experience with Robby Krieger was the opposite.
Carrying the brutally honest energy of the cool old uncle drinking whisky at the bar, who has vivid stories of taking acid on Venice Beach back in 1966, Krieger greeted every question about Morrison with a genuine sense of awe, even revealing the late singer and poet used to collect dead lizard skins for a laugh.
The following Q&A reflects the spirit of this conversation and how, when you strip away all the rock star mythology, what Robby (the only surviving member of The Doors alongside Densmore) really misses is being able to play music with his friends.
Whenever I watch videos of The Doors playing live, it feels like you guys were having this spontaneous musical conversation with one another. Did studying the experimental nature of jazz make you better prepared to play in The Doors… a band where the sound was always mutating?
Robby Krieger: Definitely. Although I’d say that [the free flowing nature of our styles] was just as much inspired by flamenco music as it was jazz. Me and John [Densmore] were students and we’d go to all the jazz spots across town. Great guys like Joe Pass or Miles Davis would be playing off each other; you’d study the way they were more like duelling swordsmen. Subsequently, as musicians, The Doors learned how to greet each other musically. We all knew that the best songs had to evolve in real time, and that’s what made it so much fun to be a part of!
When I started playing in The Doors I had only been playing electric guitar for a year or so. I had actually been in a couple of other bands before, but the chemistry just wasn’t the same at all! John, in particular, knew how to respond to Jim’s live energy with his drumming. Ray really was the basis of the band, though, keeping the mystique alive through creating the bass sound with his left [hand] and the organ sound with his right. And, because of how anchoring Ray’s overall sound was, this allowed me and John to be as loose as possible, responding directly to Jim’s rebellious spirit. Everyone was playing their part! The Doors were special in that way.
“Hyacinth House “is probably my favourite song of all time. There’s something so tender about your guitar playing, which descends a little like falling tears yet also feels like you’re playing this ocean floor dark funk at a funeral procession for Los Angeles itself. When you hear Jim sing about needing a “brand new friend” who doesn’t bother him too much anymore, was that a sign of him getting tired of living in L.A.? Why were things so sad sonically?
Robby Krieger: We all happened to be over at my house one night. It was my wife Lynn as well as Jim, who had just broken up with [his on-and-off partner] Pamela Courson. You know, Jim actually dated my wife before we got together… and I think he was trying to smooth talk her into a little reunion or something. She told him no! Maybe that’s why we were all so sad, because we made that song right around the same time. Jim sings about pleasing the lions, yeah? Well that’s because I had this bobcat at the end of my garden and he was always going over there to sing to it. A lot of The Doors’ best songs were made through simply reacting and jamming with the world around us. “Hyacinth House” is a good example.
When you first met Jim Morrison, was it immediately obvious that he was someone special?
Robby Krieger: Yes, because Jim always had this whole concert going on in his head! He’d wake up in the morning and there were new arrangements he had just dreamed about; he would instantly start writing them down onto the bar napkin and then these poems or notes became our best ever songs. It was amazing to witness. Look, I don’t know anyone else that could really do that ever, except for maybe Paul McCartney on “Yesterday.”
Morrison seemed to have a telescope that let him see into the future, too. There’s poems where he talks about human beings leaving “electric shadows” and they even contain prescient warnings of how climate change will mean one day we have to go to “weather theatres to recall the sensations of rain.” Did these grim predictions ever scare you?
Robby Krieger: I remember Jim used to always talk about how in the future musicians would make albums entirely with electronic instruments via rapping out the words, which is exactly what happened, right? His mind was, well, genius… I have to say! Unfortunately, there was also a screw loose in there somewhere. When Jim started getting money, he would order three or four dinners at once. He stopped caring about his looks completely! I am sure the looks would have come back had he stopped eating so much and drinking all that beer, but it was clear he was numbing pain [by indulging in all that stuff]. When I’m alone I often sit and think what he’d be coming out with at this point, had he not died and grown old. I know all the things he’d have done next [musically] would have been unbelievably good. Jim would have been the star of any era, and we were just lucky he arrived with us in the 1960s.
I wanted to talk more about the collaborative process within The Doors. A lot of people don’t realise it was you who wrote “Light My Fire,” which is obviously one of the biggest songs of all time. Yet Jim coloured it in with a few lines later on, right? As a collaborator was that Jim’s biggest strength? He could take a song that was innately smiley, add in a few cryptic metaphors, and then the arrangement was suddenly bittersweet and more intricately layered.
Robby Krieger: That was definitely one of his biggest strengths. For instance on “Light My Fire” I had already written out all the words, but then Jim came up with the second verse about the funeral pyre, which I hated for years. He also added in the line about “try to to set the night on fire.” I didn’t realise until fairly recently, when doing the research for my book, that Jim had actually written a poem during his high school years in a scrapbook, which said those exact words: “Try to set the night on fire.” I thought that was very cool to discover.
Jim was a walking contradiction in how he embraced those cliche rockstar excesses, but also rallied against capitalist forces and American greed. Do you think he was comfortable with the idea of being famous? Was he drifting through life as a hitchhiker in order to avoid accepting the reality of being rich, good looking, and all the moral contradictions this carried?
Robby Krieger: You nailed it. This was a man who never even had a house! He would always be staying with someone else, whether that was on a sofa or in a motel. He did have a car or two, sure, but nothing super fancy, and he almost didn’t care about money [as a concept]. Material things did not interest him one bit! What I don’t like is how people don’t give him that credit for being so funny with his words and lyrics. He used to have this leather jacket and it had real lizard skin attached to the back. That was his way of joking about the reputation. This was a man with a great sense of humour, but when Jim talked about being “The Lizard King” in the songs, they took every word literally and didn’t see any of the irony behind it.
When was the last time you saw Jim? And what did you sense his pilgrimage out to Paris in 1971 was really all about?
Robby Krieger: I can’t remember exactly the moment, sorry. I think the main point of the Paris trip was his girlfriend, Pam, who was already over there. There was also this other guy over there, a rich fucking heroin dealer, who he was nervous about her hanging around with. Jim wanted to save her! He also needed a break after the whole Miami public indecency trial, and Europe seemed like a good idea to escape to for a bit. Some say he didn’t want to be a rockstar anymore, but why then was he recording with a bunch of amateur bands in all those little Parisian clubs!? We actually have the cassette recordings they made together! Our last Doors’ show in New Orleans in 1970 was horrible, to be honest. Jim lost the energy for live performances right then and there, but I’d say he still loved creating music and liked the idea of The Doors becoming a strictly albums band. I know he definitely had plans to come back and continue with The Doors. L.A. Woman wasn’t supposed to be our end.
I heard death was something spoken about often in conversation by Jim, especially during the L.A. Woman sessions. Is that accurate?
Robby Krieger: He definitely was interested in death, yes. He talked about it all the time, in fact. You know, when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both died, Jim would say he was going to be “number three.” At that time, especially amid the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene, everyone in California was just very cool and very happy! Nobody was really thinking what Jim was thinking of in terms of something dark approaching on the horizon. I wouldn’t argue if you called him a prophet, no. That word sounds pretty right to me.
What’s the biggest thing you miss about Jim?
Robby Krieger: Jim was always doing something unexpected; that’s what turned him on! In America a lot of bands today, or even back then, just do the same songs every night, with the exact same old arrangements. But for Jim, and the rest of The Doors, that was the most boring thing you could ever do! We wanted to switch it up and that’s why we were more like a jazz band in how we played together. It was exciting as you never knew what was going to happen next. With Jim in particular, living was never ordinary. I just miss [being able to talk to] my friend.
I’m curious over how you rarely used a guitar pick when playing during The Doors’ golden period of creativity. For me that’s why your solos have so much feeling, as there’s this visceral connection from your bloodied fingernails, which are literally scratching out the blues from somewhere deep rooted! When it’s all said and done, is that how you’d like to be remembered? Someone who always kept it raw.
Robby Krieger: Did you know that Beck doesn’t play with a guitar pick, either? I think there is something to be said about using your fingers, 100%. Unfortunately my nails are not as strong as they were. If I am using a slide guitar, I will always use my fingers, though! For me rock music got completely off track with all the computerised stuff, which was the antithesis of what The Doors were trying to do. As a band, we just wanted to keep the raw essence alive. If we can be remembered as a musical group that showed it was possible to be freeform [in stadiums], I’d like that.
