DON’T KNOCK THE DOORS
Lasting legacy of the 1960s band gets lift from surviving members
The door to the Doors is numbered 420. Technically, this is the entrance to the Doors Music Co., the licensed legal corporation in a fourth-floor suite in West Hollywood. Should you take 2,000 steps east, you’ll find yourself at the world-famous Whisky a Go Go, the nightclub where the Doors reigned a half-century ago as they became the sinistral emissaries of sex and death at the centre of the Summer of Love.
This air-conditioned shrine is consecrated with artifacts of the past and faint reminders of its perpendicular intersections with the present. Jim Morrison, dead since 1971, leers, taunts and preens from every angle.
In the conference room, Robby Krieger remains very much alive. For much of the past year, the lead guitarist has busied himself with the promotional cycle surrounding the self-proclaimed Year of the Doors, commemorating the semicentennial of the quartet’s self-titled debut and followup Strange Days, released nine months apart in 1967. Festivities included Los Angeles proclaiming a Day of the Doors, Krieger throwing out the first pitch at Dodgers Stadium, and the remastered vinyl reissues and re-packagings that have become pro forma around the anniversaries of iconic boomer bands.
It’s been 50 years since the first song Krieger ever wrote, Light My Fire, topped the Billboard charts, but he still mourns the loss of Morrison, who was interred at Paris’ Pére Lachaise Cemetery a short four years after the band’s career took off.
“It’s pretty tough to get away from it because pretty much every day something reminds you of him,” Krieger says, underscoring the sepulchral reality that has shrouded Morrison all these years.
Krieger, a native of Southern California whose earliest guitar playing was steeped in flamenco, was the band’s youngest member and just 25 when Morrison died. Now 71, grandfatherly and silverhaired, he’s dedicated almost his entire adult life to burnishing the legacy of his youth and attempting to transcend it. He still writes most nights.
Adopting a “one for all, all for one” mantra, the Doors split equal songwriting credit among the four members. But when Jim Morrison is your lead singer, it’s inevitable that less oxygen exists for the other members. Few know that Krieger wrote three of the band’s highestcharting singles (Love Her Madly, Touch Me, Light My Fire).
There’s a certain simplistic thrill to hear Krieger explain the spark behind the band’s biggest hit, inauspiciously composed late one night on the piano bench at his parents’ house.
“I asked Jim what should I write about and he said, ‘Write about something universal,’ so I decided to write about earth, air, fire or water,” Krieger says.
“I picked fire because I liked that song by the (Rolling) Stones, Play With Fire,” he says. “The words just came to me. I’d never heard anyone say those three words together before.”
Krieger was just 20 — this idea of youth is central to the mythology and perpetual vitality of the Doors, a group that sold you on the supernatural dream that permanent enlightenment was a short trip away, in any direction that deranged the senses.
Every generation of eighthgraders is seduced anew by the Doors’ autonomic rebelliousness, grandiosity and epic sweep that encompassed French Symbolist poetry, Bavarian beer-hall stomp, Athenian drama, alluvial Southern blues, Iberian guitar and the occasional indecent exposure charge.
For many, the Doors remind us of our worst selves. One pretentious boor in a dorm room convinced that he’s the reincarnation of Jim Morrison can ruin the band forever. Among their canonized peers, the Grateful Dead’s long, strange trip ended with the countercultural kings slowly being submerged into the corporate infrastructure they once existed in opposition to; the Velvet Underground turned obscurity in the ’60s into postbreakup notoriety as Ground Zero for the sneering rise of punk and alternative rock; and Jimi Hendrix remained frozen in tie-dye as a psychedelic sage, whose guitar is less easily ridiculed than some of Morrison’s more overwrought lyrics.
But this critical revisionism doesn’t square with the band’s sustained influence. Any artist in thrall to Iggy Pop, Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Nick Cave or Patti Smith owes at least a secondhand debt to the Doors. Lana Del Rey name-checked Jim Morrison on Gods and Monsters and once covered Roadhouse Blues. Morrison’s patrilineal heritage directly extends from Marilyn Manson to Lil Uzi Vert, a rapper whose emergence this past year has partially redefined the rock-star archetype for a new generation.
If you’re searching for the subversive streak that defined the Doors, band member John Densmore is where the journey ends. At 73, he’s retained a seeker’s curiosity, the poetic spirit that set them apart and the atavistic energy found in most great drummers.
“A lot of the time, I sit around depressed about the current situation with a few maniacs running the world and then I think, ‘How ... did I ever get through seeing a little girl napalmed on television every night?’” he says.
“It was just horrific, but our (generation’s) protests helped stop the war, and if we got through that, we can get through (Donald) Trump. So I try to look at him as the catalyst coalescing everyone who’s been semi-asleep — and that assuages my depression.”
In conversation, Densmore radiates a creative integrity that frequently feels endangered. Royalties have made him a multimillionaire, but he has also turned down more than most of us will make in this lifetime. If the fire still burns, it’s partially because he hasn’t lost the ability to stay outraged.
“In different stages of life, you do start to see (things) you didn’t see before. What makes me so crazy is we’re (hurting) the youth,” Densmore says. “Can’t we not only financially but emotionally invest in the youth? That’s what an elder is supposed to do. My friend Michael Meade, the mythologist, said, ‘Everybody gets older, but not everybody gets elder.’ That’s it, which means look around, help the youth, show gratitude, don’t just be an old prick.”
I asked Jim what should I write about and he said, ‘Write about something universal,’ so I decided to write about earth, air, fire or water.