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.
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.
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