A DOOR FINALLY OPENS UP
Guitarist Robby Krieger, the last in the band to write a memoir, describes the real Jim Morrison and more
The Doors’ Robby Krieger thinks Oliver Stone’s 1991 film about the band is one of the best rock ’n’ roll movies ever made. That movie, and a popular 1980 biography of Doors singer Jim Morrison, rekindled interest in the band that endures today.
But now that the guitarist is 75, now that it’s been 50 years since Morrison’s death, Krieger says he’s ready to tell the iconic L.A. group’s story the way he remembers it and correct some of the sensationalized stories that have been told before.
That’s how Krieger found himself rehabilitating the public record of Morrison, the Doors’ charismatic lead singer.
“I saw another side of him quite often that most people didn’t,” Krieger says of Morrison and his empathetic portrayal in “Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with the Doors” (Little, Brown and Company, $29).
“That’s another reason why I wanted to get this out, because people have this vision of him as this crazy drunk, and that’s how he always was,” he says. “Which wasn’t true at all, you know.
“He could be the coolest guy you would ever want to hang out with at times. Especially in the early days when we were just getting going — the pre-Oliver Stone Morrison.”
And while Morrison may have written or co-written the majority of the Doors songs, he also was a generous collaborator, Krieger says.
“There was never any ego involved, you know, that was the cool thing,” he says. “He would take suggestions, and then he would always come up with cool stuff, like on ‘Light My Fire.’ ”
That song, the band’s 1967 breakout hit, was largely written by Krieger, but he credits Morrison with one key piece that made it even better.
“At the very end, we’re going, ‘Come on baby, light my fire, come on baby, light my fire,’ ” Krieger speaks and sings. “Then the chords change, and so he says, ‘What if we say, instead of ‘Light my fire,’ ‘Try to set the night on fire?’
“I said, that’s great. I might write a book about that.”
A memoir, at last
With “Set the Night on Fire,” Krieger is the last of the Doors to pen his memoir. Morrison died in a Parisian bathtub on July 3, 1971, his autobiography untold. Drummer John Densmore published his memoir in 1991 (and other books since), and keyboardist Ray Manzarek followed in 1998.
It was the bad feelings those last two books stirred between the three surviving Doors that convinced Krieger to put his book on the back burner at the time, he says.
“I’d started mine back then too,” he says. “John’s came out, and then Ray’s came out, and they each kind of put each other down in the books and it really caused a lot of problems.
“I don’t know who’s at fault there, but it ended up where John was suing Ray and I for using the name” of the band, Krieger says of the touring he and Manzarek did as the Doors. “All that is pretty much traced back to their books, I believe.
“So I kind of said, OK, I’m not going to do that; I better wait,” he says, and laughs. “I didn’t want to cause any more trouble.”
The outlines of the book sat on the shelf for decades until last year.
“I just never got up the nerve to finish it until the pandemic hit, and then I said, ‘Oh [shoot], I better do this before it’s too late,’ ” Krieger says.
On the Sunset Strip
Krieger decided to structure “Set the Night on Fire” as a series of vignettes, brief chapters that serve as snapshots of a specific moment that free his story from the chronological shapes of traditional memoirs.
Co-author Jeff Alulis excavated the past for Krieger, digging up names and dates and places to trigger deeper memories.
“He’s made friends with all of these weird Doors nerd-type guys,” Krieger says. “These guys seem to know everything.
“What was cool was he’d come up with, ‘OK, so let’s see, you had this gig in Vermont in 1969 and supposedly there was a riot there and the people came onstage,’ ” he says. “I totally forgot about a lot of this until a bit of research brought it up again.”
Most of the stories had never left him, though, such as the vivid details of life in the Doors when the band first gained notice on the Sunset Strip in the mid-’60s.
“London Fog, it had just started,” Krieger says of the now mostly forgotten club that gave the band its first steady gigs. “I think before that it was just a bar, and we were probably some of the first people that played there.
“And the Whisky was like famous already, just 200 yards down the street,” he says. “People like Otis Redding, the Temptations, all these internationally known acts would come and play there. So we knew we had no chance to get in there.”
But buzz about the band soon grew, and more and more people dropped by the London Fog to check out this band with the mesmerizing frontman and a unique psychedelic-meets-blues-rock sound. One night, Peter Asher of the British duo Peter and Gordon stopped by with the booker from the Whisky.
“From that, we got signed to play at the Whisky, which was, ‘Wow! We made it. The big time,’ ” Krieger says.
They quickly became the Whisky house band, opening for touring acts that came through town, and soon realized that armed with songs like “Light My Fire” and “The End,” they could hold their own with anyone.
“Our goal was to blow the main act off the stage every night,” Krieger says. “And it took awhile, but we started doing that. Pretty soon the crowds were really there to see us, depending on who the main act was.
“‘Light My Fire’ was the one that did it — every time,” he says.
An open book
The memoir focuses mostly on the seven or eight years the Doors were originally together, but Krieger also writes of his life before and after those magical, turbulent years. Chapters on his life as a young man growing up in Pacific Palisades and learning guitar feature early in the book.
Near the end, one of the bigger revelations arrives when Krieger writes of the heroin addiction he and Lynn Krieger, his wife of 50 years, struggled with in the ’80s.
“You know, a lot of people knew, but I never put it out in public before,” Krieger says of sharing that part of his life publicly. “In my mind, I was the last person that would ever end up being addicted to drugs, especially after seeing how it affected Jim and all that.
“It just shows it can happen to anybody, and it’s a disease and it’s not something people are aware of,” he says. “They look down on people that have that problem and they should be trying to help.”
Even in chapters that deal with hard memories, his addiction, the death of Morrison, the end of the band, Krieger often writes with a wry kind of humor as he looks back on his life.
“I think you have to have that in order to survive,” he says. “You can’t take yourself too seriously or else you’re going to get in trouble.”
As for the alchemy that brought the Doors together to make such magnificent music, Krieger laughs and says he can only wish he knew.
“If I knew, I’d have done it again,” he says. “But really, it was being in the right place at the right time for all of us. Just kind of like it was meant to be.
“I think it was the coolest thing. It was so different.”