Doors guitarist Robby Krieger: 'The music will outlast the crazy Jim stuff'

[turbinetree]

Jim Farber
In the musician’s new memoir, he aims to tell the true, uncensored story of one of the greatest bands of all time while dispelling some long-running myths

This year marks half a century since the storied singer of the Doors, Jim Morrison, met his untimely death. Or at least that’s what most reasonable people believe happened. Due to a combination of denial, wishful thinking and some eagerly promoted conspiracy theories, however, some people believe that Morrison still lives. According to the Doors’ guitarist, Robby Krieger, that’s just one of many outrageous myths, misconceptions or outright lies that have clung to the band’s story. “To me, what happened to the Doors was pretty damn cool just the way it was,” Krieger told the Guardian from his home in Los Angeles. “This wasn’t a story that needed to be hyped.”

In order to represent his version of setting the record straight, then, Krieger has just published a memoir, Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying and Playing Guitar with the Doors. It’s a doorstop-thick attempt to retell an oft-told tale, this time informed by a desire to suck the hot air out of the more inflated earlier versions, aided by a hilariously flip tone that makes this late-arriving history perhaps the most reliable, and certainly the most entertaining, of all. The witty prose, fashioned by co-author Jeff Alulis, stands in marked contrast to the bitter tone of the two memoirs by the band’s drummer, John Densmore – the second of which focused on his protracted lawsuit against the two other surviving members of the band – as well as the pedantic, and at times pretentious, tone of the published reminiscences of keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

Krieger’s tome also aims to blow holes in the mega-selling 1980 book on Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, as well as Oliver Stone’s bloviated 1991 movie The Doors, which Krieger takes down in an entire mocking chapter. To the guitarist, Stone’s movie wins the prize for fostering the single most outrageous fallacy. “The scene in the film where Jim supposedly pushes a fan into a closet and sets it on fire is the worst,” Krieger said. “That is ridiculously untrue.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/dec/03/doors-guitarist-robbie-krieger-the-music-will-outlast-the-crazy-jim-stuff

[MagickMuffin]

1. Thank you Robby for setting the record straight

It appears there have been a lot of over hyped media driven falsehoods about Rockers. From the Beatles onward there have been fabricated stories.


I'm glad there are members of these bands speaking out and taking the fabricated stories and breathe new live into the truth.

[Chautauquas]

2. Very popular group the Doors

I never liked their music at all. Not even their hits, with the exception of L.A. Woman. I still listen to that one once in a while.

[marble falls]

3. Already has, Robbie!

[luvs2sing]

4. Always been a Doors fan..

also always hated Jim Morrison’ vocals, except for “Riders On the Storm”. I’d be a happy woman if they just erased his vocals and let the incredible musicianship take center stage.

Looking forward to reading this book.

[PlanetBev]

5. I was a Doors fanatic

Saw them twice in concert and have all their albums. They performed at my high school in Van Nuys, CA in May 1967, along with the Jefferson Airplane and a few other bands. Hard to believe, but the tickets were only $3.00. It was a fund raiser for modernizing our school, which was previously a WWII army rehabilitation hospital.

I also saw them at the Hollywood Bowl in 1968. Those concerts were great because Jim hadn’t gone off the deep end, yet.

[ElementaryPenguin]

6. Got to meet him - and Robby Krieger is a wonderful, very humble person.

In the late 80's I had the good fortune of meeting, and jamming with Robby once in L.A. - even got to sing "Light My Fire" and "Love Me Too Times" (both of which he wrote) with Robbie on guitar and a band. I could sing both of those songs pretty well, and he was very complimentary of my singing. It was truly surreal.

[PlanetBev]

8. Boy, that was a piece of luck, Penguin

That stuff only happens once in a lifetime.

[DFW]

9. Now THAT would have been one experience I would have killed for!

That is a memory only a select few share!

[LeftInTX]

7. Jim Morrison's sister has his writings and published them earlier this year

https://people.com/music/jim-morrison-sister-reflects-on-revelatory-new-book-of-his-writing/

When Jim Morrison graduated from high school in June of 1961, his parents offered to buy him a gift. Most teens would have asked for a car or maybe some new threads. Instead, the future Doors singer asked for the complete works of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Even as a teen, Morrison operated on a literary level above his peers. His evolution into one of the most arresting frontmen in rock was never an ambition but an unexpected detour. It began on a summer's day in 1965, when Morrison bumped into his UCLA classmate Ray Manzarek on Los Angeles' Venice Beach. As the friends stared off into the Pacific, Morrison began reciting some of his new verses. His voice was barely above a whisper, but Morrison's words were enough to send the musically minded Manzarek reeling. The core of the Doors - their name taken from a William Blake line via Aldous Huxley - was formed on the spot, thus derailing Morrison's potential future as America's answer to Rimbaud.

Classic Doors tracks like "Riders on the Storm," "L.A. Woman," "Break on Through" and "People Are Strange" are imbued with his imagery, but the enduring portrait of Morrison as the leather-clad electric shaman that's etched onto the popular psyche has the unfortunate consequence of eclipsing his reputation as a poet. The Doors may have brought him fame, but it was writing that brought him ecstasy. He wrote constantly throughout his all-too-brief life, producing screenplays, fragments of novels and three self-published poetry volumes.

When he died on July 3, 1971, at the age of only 27, he left behind a formidable library of notebooks and loose-leaf. One scrap bore the heading "Plan for Book," followed by a short outline for how to organize his original works. He never lived to finish the project, but now, 50 years after his death, his family has fulfilled his creative wish.

Jim Morrison was not a "nice guy", but I loved and still love their music!

[DFW]

10. My teenage group and I were TOTALLY into their music in 1967-68

I never got to see them live, though Robby Krieger was in a guitar tour that came through here (Düsseldorf) several decades ago. Leslie West and Randy Wolf ("Randy California" ) were part of that as well. It was called "night of the guitars," and it certainly was.

My group was called the "Clockwork Orange." It was 3 years before the film was made, and people always used to ask us where we got such a screwball name (it was a British book that came out in the early sixties). We were the only band in the DC area that played the long version of Light My Fire note for note off the record--we were THAT obsessed. I remember one gig we were playing and someone who had just arrived yelled to someone else (I could just barely hear it) as we were in the middle of the instrumental break, "when I heard them, I thought it was the Doors playing!" THAT little comment made my decade!