The original Alice Cooper group has reunited for the first time in over 50 years for the release of their forthcoming studio album, The Revenge of Alice Cooper, out July 25 via earMUSIC.

Featuring Alice Cooper, Michael Bruce on guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass, and Neal Smith on drums, the new album – their first since 1973's Muscle of Love – sees the shock rock legends reunite with longtime collaborator and producer Bob Ezrin, whom Alice Cooper previously described as “our George Martin.”

It promises to be “a high-voltage journey into vintage horror and classic ’70s shock rock,” recapturing the sound and energy that propelled the original Alice Cooper lineup to stardom.

It also includes a posthumous appearance by Glen Buxton, the band's original lead guitarist who passed away in 1997, on What Happened to You – a previously unreleased recording that features his original guitar part.

“Glen Buxton was so unique. He wasn’t the kind of player that could play a traditional 12-bar blues, but he could jam with someone like Pink Floyd’s original guitarist, Syd Barrett,” Cooper told Guitar World in a 2018 interview.

“Glen was very futuristic, and when he was on, he was as good as anybody. Michael Bruce, on the other hand, was a great rhythm and riff player. He laid the foundation, while Glen went into outer space.”

Additionally, one of the bonus tracks is a raw, alternate take of Return of the Spiders – another version of which appears on 1970's Easy Action – which was missing for 50 years. It was recently unearthed from the original multi-tracks and mixed by Ezrin in preparation for the album.

As for the recently released first single, Black Mamba, featuring Robby Krieger of the Doors, it was, as Cooper describes it to Billboard, “definitely an Alice Cooper, from-the-ground-up song.”

“When we started to play that it’s when I knew the spirit of the Alice Cooper group was back and that what we were making was very much an album that could’ve been in the ’70s when we were last together,” adds Ezrin, who, aside from being the producer, also co-wrote songs, played keyboards and percussion, and sang backing vocals.

“It had the psychedelia, it had the artful drumming and bass playing, the great atmospheric guitars. It has Alice telling a really fabulous story, in character.”

“We didn’t know where it was gonna go,” Cooper adds. “At the end, we looked at each other and went, ‘Oh, that’s pretty good!’”

In other Alice Cooper news, Nita Strauss recently rejoined the Godfather of Shock Rock on his latest run – after former Guns N' Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke replaced Orianthi due to injury.

Gene Simmons has told the story of a guitar solo merry-go-round, after revealing that Pearl Jam’s iconic Alive lead effort closely followed in the footsteps of a Kiss solo – which Ace Frehley had previously lifted “note-for-note” from another classic rock heavyweight.

Guesting on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast, the Kiss bassist pointed out Frehley’s plagiarism.

The track in question is Kiss' 1975 cut She, which found Frehley apparently so enamored with Robby Krieger's lead playing on The Doors' Five to One, from 1968's Waiting for the Sun, that he lovingly copied and pasted it onto the Kiss song.

Unaware of this, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready then followed a similar tact when piecing together the solo for Alive, only for Simmons to drop a truth bomb later down the line.

“I said, ‘Mike, I don’t know how to tell you this, but that’s a note-for-note guitar solo from the Doors,” Simmons tells Corgan. “Ace liked it so much, he just reproduced it. He goes, ‘No!’”

Discussing the genesis of some of his biggest hits with Guitar World, McCready now doesn't hide from this fact. All he has to say of the song is, “I copied Ace Frehley’s solo from Kiss’ She, which was copied from Robby Krieger’s solo in the Doors’ Five to One.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2014, McCready waxed lyrical about Kiss and the impact they had on him during his formative years.

“I remember being on a school bus in sixth grade in 1976, with my friend Rick Friel, who eventually played in my high school band, Shadow,” he said. “He had a lunchbox that had Kiss on it. ‘What is that?’

“Then he played me some music and I was hooked immediately.” So it's no surprise there's more than a little Kiss style sprinkled across Pearl Jam's discography.

Going off his comments on the podcast, Simmons seemingly picked up on She’s likeness to Five to One at the time. But he doesn’t see the solo-swapping saga as much of an issue.

“My point is, it’s always very appreciated when somebody says, ‘Loved your stuff,’” Simmons says. “Everybody’s got bits and pieces of stuff. Listen to Zeppelin songs, you’ll hear lots of blues, very recognizable, blues songs.”

McCready has also downplayed the drama to be drawn from their similarities, telling Chris Shiflett’s Shred With Shifty podcast, “I don't do the solo the same live all the time.”

In Oliver Stone's 1991 movie The Doors, the band staple Light My Fire was seemingly written very, very quickly.

As Rick Beato accurately describes the scene, “You [referring to Robby Krieger character] pull out a handwritten piece of paper with lyrics on it, and you start playing A minor, F sharp minor, and you sing your melody, and then the Jim Morrison character comes out, and he's like, ‘Yeah, that's good. And they start singing along.’”

However, Krieger is now setting the record straight – asserting that the songwriting process for what was to become one of The Doors' calling cards was not as rose-tinted as Hollywood made it seem.

“That was one thing I wanted to get right with Oliver,” Krieger tells Beato. “I went to his house and made sure he knew how that one had happened.” While drummer John Densmore quips that it was exactly what happened, Krieger jokingly claps back, “That's because you saw the movie!”

“What happened was, I had come up with the chords for that intro. When I first wrote the song, I wanted to use a lot of chords in my first song ever, so I used every chord I knew, which was about 14 chords,” he explains.

"I had all these chords and didn't really know where to use them in the song. We first did the normal song, ‘Baby light my fire…’ And then I said, ‘Oh, by the way, I've got this other part.’

He continues, “And so we ended up using it to get out of the instrumental break, back into the third verse. We played it that way at the Whiskey for a year. Then it was [producer] Paul Rothchild's brilliant idea to use those chords not only in the intro, but [also in] the outro, so it happens three times.

“As Ray [Manzarek, the Doors' keyboardist] played it every night at The Whisky, he would come up with more Bach[-inspired] parts. And it wasn't just, ‘Oh, I'll do this.’ You know, it took a long time.”

What's more, Krieger initially envisioned a more folk-rock approach to the song – whereas drummer John Densmore segwayed into more of a Latin rhythm. Further additions transpired every time they tried and tested the song live – which led to all the flourishes that the seven-minute oeuvre is known for.

“[The solos were] Ray's idea, because we love Coltrane. And those are the chords Coltrane used,” clarifies Krieger.

Considering how the song took a life of its own, Beato asks whether listening to it takes them back to that period – or it’s a quasi-surreal feeling, almost like coming across someone else's song.

To which Densmore proudly replies, “No, that's our song. I can't get enough of it!”

“It was hard living with Jim.”

Robby Krieger is talking about his days as guitarist with the Doors, reflecting on his role as creative sidekick to one of rock’s all-time great lyricists, singers, sex symbols, and extreme personalities, Jim Morrison.

“It would have been so great if we’d just had a guy like Sting,” says Krieger wistfully. “You know, a normal guy who’s extremely talented, too. Someone who didn’t have to be on the verge of life and death every second of his life.”

The guitarist laughs at his own fantasy. He knows better than anyone that it was Morrison’s inner demons, which surfaced all too frequently, that gave the Doors’ music its resonance and power. But while Morrison was undoubtedly one of rock’s great visionaries, the contributions of the other Doors to the band’s unique sound and success cannot be overlooked.

The blues-based, often hypnotic music created by Krieger, organist Ray Manzarek, and drummer John Densmore perfectly complemented Morrison’s commanding, sensual vocals and mesmerizing lyrics. And it was actually Krieger who penned many of the Doors’ greatest songs and biggest hits, including Light My Fire, Love Me Two Times, and Touch Me.

Remarkably, when Krieger joined the Doors in 1965 he was only 18 years old and had been playing guitar for just two years – electric guitar a mere six months.

“I really learned to play as a member of the Doors,” he asserts. “I just tried to sound like myself – I consciously avoided copying Chuck Berry or B.B. King, because that’s what everyone was doing. I tried to come up with the right part for the song and play something that would complement Jim’s singing.

“It must have worked,” he adds coyly. “I think we came up with a pretty good body of work.”

Pretty good, yes. Good enough to have gotten the Doors inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last January and to have inspired Oliver Stone’s reverential 1991 biopic. And, most of all, good enough to enthrall three decades of rock fans with music that remains as powerful and profound in the Nineties as it was in the Sixties.

Robby Krieger cannot escape his past with the Doors, even though the band essentially died with Morrison in 1971. Although he has remained active, touring regularly and recording seven solo albums dominated by instrumental music, Krieger says, “I realized pretty quickly that I would never again have another band like the Doors.

“Music has become more of a fun thing for me, much like painting is – something that’s personally rewarding. It’s what I do and how I identify myself: ‘I’m Robby Krieger, guitarist.’”

Most people would say: ‘Robby Krieger, Doors guitarist.’

What follows are Krieger’s recollections of the Doors’ career, from their 1967 self-titled debut to 1971’s brilliant swan song, L.A. Woman.

The Doors (January 1967)

What was your first impression of Jim Morrison?

“I first met him when he came to my house with John Densmore and he seemed pretty normal. I didn’t really get a sense that there was anything unusual about him until the end of our first rehearsal. Initially, everything was cool. Then this guy came looking for Jim. Something had gone wrong with a dope deal, and Jim just went nuts. Absolutely bananas. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, this guy’s not normal.’”

What were your impressions of Ray Manzarek?

“When I first met him, he was the ‘big man on campus’ at the UCLA film school. In fact, our first gig as a band was to provide music for one of his student films. Afterwards, Ray got up in front of an auditorium full of people and gave a speech. I remember it well, because he had them in the palm of his hand. He was downright mesmerizing.

“He was a major character, but Jim kind of kept him in his place. Jim was so out there that Ray’s personality was overwhelmed – which, oddly enough, created a good balance.”

And you were pretty much what you appeared to be: a nice, quiet guy who fit in between these two powerful personalities?

“Well, dealing with Jim kind of changed me, too, because I was pretty crazy myself. I was the first one at my school to try acid and I was always the one pushing things. Then I got into the Doors and I couldn’t hold a candle to Jim and Ray. [laughs] But I had already gone through acid and I was onto meditation by the time I joined the Doors – I actually met John at meditation class – so I had already mellowed out.”

When were the Doors thrown out of the Whisky-A-Go-Go for performing The End?

“Well, that’s overstating it a little bit. That whole incident has been blown out of proportion. There was a fight with the owner and we were thrown out, but I don’t think we were actually fired. We kept playing the Whisky after that.”

Jim’s antics are held in such reverence now. Were they funny at the time?

“It was always a bummer. We had this group which we all knew had the potential to be something really big, and Jim was trying to sabotage it by fucking up at every turn. We would call a rehearsal, Jim wouldn’t show, and we’d get a call from Blythe, Arizona, telling us that he was in jail.”

Yet you guys were amazingly productive. You produced six studio albums in three or four years. Were his work habits really that bad?

“No, the music was all he lived for. A lot of times he was at the office when we weren’t. He’d even live there sometimes, because that was his whole life. We all had lives other than the Doors, but he didn’t, and he kind of resented that. He felt like he was living it 24 hours a day, and we weren’t. And he was right.

“But the recording sessions really bored him. We had to hang around interminably until they got the drum sound down and all that shit, so I can’t blame him for going crazy. Paul Rothchild, our producer, was a real perfectionist.”

How important was Paul to your music?

“It really differed from album to album. On the first one, he just turned on the mic and stepped out of the way. The second album, when we actually had a budget, Paul really got involved in the sound.

“We were all kind of freaked out recording the first album because we didn’t know what it would be like. For example, it really bothered us that we couldn’t turn up as loud as we wanted.”

Yet it really sounds like you were all playing with total abandon.

“That’s because we had been playing those songs for so long that we really had the material down cold. Everything was cut in one or two takes.”

Your version of Back Door Man is really effective. Were there any debates about how faithful you should be to the original version?

“No. For one thing, we probably weren’t good enough musicians to do exact copies and we knew that Jim would never sing it anywhere near the original anyhow. So we just went on our own.”

For years it was a little-known fact that you wrote Light My Fire. That changed when Oliver Stone made it a point to show how the song evolved in his movie, The Doors. Was it as simple as pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of your pocket and offering it to the band like the movie suggests?

“It’s pretty close. Jim had been writing all the songs and then one day we realized we didn’t have enough tunes, so he said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys try and write songs?’ I wrote Light My Fire that night and brought it to the next rehearsal. It was my idea to have that scene in the movie, by the way. I wanted it there because it’s always kind of bugged me that so many people don’t know I was the composer.”

Your solo on Light My Fire is truly one of your shining moments as a guitarist. Was it improvised in the studio?

“It was the kind of solo that I usually did, but it was different every night. To be honest, the one on the record is not one of my better versions. I only had two tries at it. But it’s not bad; I’m glad it was as good as it was.”

Was the whole album recorded live?

“No. Jim always sang with us, but they rarely used the scratch vocal. The End was an exception.”

What do you think of the song now?

“I think that particular version of The End was nowhere near as good as the way we played it many other times.

“All the songs on the first album were like skeletons of how we really played them. It was just a combination of not having any studio experience and having to do everything so fast. I also think that studios are, by nature, limiting. You cannot get the sound of five big amplifiers on a little piece of tape.”

Did you ever think about how strange it was not to have a bass player?

“Definitely. We always thought about that. We wanted a bass player, and we auditioned a few – but we never could find one who was right. Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t, because the Doors’ sound was largely a result of the fact that Ray had to play really simple bass lines, which gave the music a hypnotic feel.

“And not having a bass player affected my guitar playing a lot. It made me play more bass notes to fill out the bottom. Not having a rhythm player also made me play differently to fill out the sound. And then, of course, I played lead, so I always felt like three players simultaneously.”

Light My Fire, the first song you ever wrote, was a number-one hit. It’s sudden success must have been mind-boggling.

“It wasn’t that sudden. It actually felt like forever to us. We started the band in 1965, and nothing happened for two years. We were going crazy. Finally, after being turned down by everyone in town, Elektra signed us. Our first single bombed, and it was another six months before Light My Fire hit. So it seemed like a long time. We felt like veterans.”

Did you use your standard gear in the studio? Were you playing an SG?

“Yeah, though the first red one I had was a Melody Maker. I had a few red SGs in the Doors, but they’re all gone now, mostly stolen or lost. Amp-wise, I usually used a Twin Reverb in the studio.”

You almost allowed Light My Fire to be used in a car commercial before Jim put an end to it. Did Jim do the right thing?

“Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, it’s been our policy to reject any subsequent offers – and we’ve had quite a few. I really hate it when I see other bands selling their music to commercials. And by the time a big corporation is interested in using your music, you don’t need the money. So there’s really no excuse.”

Strange Days (September 1967)

When the second album came out it was attacked by many critics as being a retread of the first. Do you think that was valid criticism?

“Only on one count. I’ll admit that When the Music’s Over was similar to The End in length and structure, but so what? Something works, so you do it again. It’s one of my favorite songs.”

I don’t think that Morrison’s poetry rap is quite as interesting on When the Music’s Over as The End.

“No, it’s not. How can you possibly top The End? What’s left once you’ve fucked your mother and killed your father? [laughs] The reason it’s my favorite song is my solo – I think it’s my best.”

That solo is composed of two solos being played simultaneously. Did you improvise both of them on the spot?

“Pretty much. In fact, I’ve never been able to reproduce them. That solo was really a challenge because the harmony is static. I had to play 56 bars over the same riff, which isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to play something over an interesting chord progression. But we did that a lot because we were really into [saxophonist] John Coltrane, who pioneered ‘modal’ jazz and soloed brilliantly over static harmonies and minimal chord progressions.

“I was always trying to play something that sounded like him – just totally out there in terms of tonality. I think When the Music’s Over is the closest I ever came.”

You recorded Strange Days less than a year after your debut. Did Elektra put a lot of pressure on you?

“No, we were ready. We had tons of material for the first two albums; the pressure came on the third album. We ran out of stuff and Jim was pretty fucked up on liquor by then, so it was hard to write with him, and that’s when I started writing more of my own songs. It was also difficult to write while we were touring, so we started writing a lot more in the studio.”

What was life on the road with the Doors like?

“Not as crazy as you would think. At first, it was mostly teenyboppers and groupies and a few local nuts hanging around. But a couple of years down the road, when people realized how weird we were, we really started drawing some creeps. We still do, I might add – Morrison wannabes show up on my doorstep all the time. And they always want to sing. [laughs]”

Speaking of weirdoes, People Are Strange has a great chord progression. Did you write that?

“Yeah. Jim came up to my house in Laurel Canyon one night, and he was in one of his suicidal, downer moods. So John said, ‘Come on, Jim, we’ll go see the sunset. That’ll get you out of this.’

“We went up to the top of Laurel Canyon and it was incredibly beautiful – we were looking down on the sun reflecting off the top of the clouds. Jim had a total mood flip-flop, and said, ‘Wow! Now I know why I felt like that. It’s because if you’re strange, people are strange.’ And he wrote the lyrics right there. Then I came up with the music and we went back down the hill.”

Why wasn’t Moonlight Drive, the first song you wrote and rehearsed together, on the first album?

“It wasn’t really the first song: Indian Summer was, and Moonlight Drive was the second. But we didn’t think the version that we cut was good enough, so we decided to drop it off the first album and try again next time.

“Unfortunately, we’ve never been able to find the damn master for the first version. I think we may have found it now, and I hope I’m right, because I always thought it was good. It was totally different than the one on Strange Days. It was real dark and laid-back, very spooky.”

Any strange memories from the Strange Days album?

“One time, we were getting ready to leave for the night and Jim didn’t want to stop because he was feeling good. He kept saying, ‘Man, I want to play all night.’ But we were all tired and wanted to go home.

“Jim finally left, but he came back half an hour later, climbed over the fence, broke into the studio, took out the fire extinguisher, and sprayed it into the piano and all over everything. It was quite a surprise in the morning. [laughs]”

Were you guys around when Jim recorded Horse Latitudes?

“Yeah. He said he had a poem he wanted to read and he wanted something real weird to back it. There were all these instruments in the studio from an orchestra session – harpsichords and pianos and timpani. We all started banging on them and fumbling around inside the pianos, and there were 10 or 12 people just screaming at the top of their lungs. After we laid that down, Jim overdubbed the poem.

“The funny thing was, as we were listening back at full volume and Jim was reading, the guys from the Jefferson Airplane came straggling in – high as kites, or course. They stared at us like we were out of our minds, but we just acted casual and said, ‘Oh yeah, this is one of our songs.’ [laughs]”

Were you friends with them?

“Sort of. We always played on the same bill, but we didn’t really hang out much. There was always a bit of competitive vibe – to see who could blow who off the stage.

“We didn’t hang out with other musicians that much – just Van Morrison when he came to town, and occasionally the guys in Buffalo Springfield.

“We didn’t get too close with the San Francisco groups – especially the Grateful Dead, who wouldn’t let us use their amps one night. We had a gig at Beverly Hills High School in the afternoon and then one about an hour up the coast in Santa Barbara, so we left our gear, figuring the Dead would let us use their stuff. You’d always let people use your amps in those days, but they just refused. I ended up playing through a Pignose or something equally ridiculous.

“Ray was aghast at the fact that Pigpen wouldn’t let him use his organ. He kept saying, ‘Pigpen? Someone named Pigpen won’t let me use his instrument? I could catch cooties from his organ.’ He couldn’t believe it.”

Waiting For The Sun (July 1968)

It seems like the band were in a creative lull and feeling a lot of pressure by the third album. Do you see a band like Pearl Jam going through a similar thing?

“Their situation is a lot different, but, yes, I see the similarities. I know Eddie [Vedder] – he sang with us at our induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year [1993] – and he wants to be like Jim. He was drilling me about Jim – asking me a million questions about how Jim would have reacted to various situations. And he is kind of a troubled person and a very serious guy, like Jim was. But I don’t think he, or anyone else in that band, is too fucked up to write good material.

“They may not be the straightest people in the world, but it’s not like our situation, where you have a guy who’s really out of control. Eddie’s not like that; he knows what he’s doing.”

Does it trouble you to see someone emulate a person whose self-destruction you witnessed?

“Yeah, it really does. I always tell people, ‘Don’t drink because Jim drank. That was a mistake. That’s what fucked him up.’ If it weren’t for the booze he might still be writing today.”

Had his drinking gotten seriously worse when you were recording Waiting for the Sun?

“Definitely. That’s when the liquor really started being a problem. Before that, everything was more or less fine. LSD was no problem because it was a creative thing. There’s nothing good about liquor – it just fucks you up – though at first it relaxes you, which is what you probably need after taking eight-zillion acid trips. [laughs]”

Hello, I Love You was a number-one hit and Waiting for the Sun topped the album charts. Can that kind of success get you through a creative lull?

“It helped a lot. In fact, we were just going out on tour when Hello, I Love You hit number one, and it really buoyed our spirits. People always think that we stole that track from the Kinks’ All Day and All of the Night, but we weren’t thinking of them at all. What I did steal was the drumbeat: I told John to play something like Sunshine of Your Love. So, we ripped off the Cream, not the Kinks.”

What specific recollections do you have of these sessions?

“A lot of very horrible ones. By that time, Jim was being taken advantage of by various hangers-on. He would bring them to the studio and Rothchild would go crazy – all these drunken assholes would be hanging around, fucking in the echo chamber and pissing in the closets. It was a mess.

“Jim would drink with anybody because we wouldn’t drink with him. He would take on all these assholes, who used him: ‘Hey, we’re hanging with Jumbo.’ And they wouldn’t care how fucked up he got – they’d leave him on somebody’s doorstep in his own puke.”

At what point did you guys refuse to drink with him?

“I never drank with him because I didn’t like to drink to excess and he loved to go until he couldn’t see. I knew what was coming and hated to see it, so I would usually be gone by that point. John and Ray felt the same way.”

Were you three using a lot of drugs at that point?

“No. Not at all. And the fact that Jim was using so much made us use even less. The romance was definitely gone. Once in a while he would talk me into taking acid – just like you saw in the movie – but not often.”

The Soft Parade (July 1969)

The Soft Parade features several heavily orchestrated, intricately arranged songs. Were you compelled to go into this direction because of the Beatles?

“Yeah, totally. In those days you had to try to keep up with the Beatles! But, to be honest, I didn’t really like orchestrating the songs. It definitely wasn’t my idea – it was Paul Rothchild’s. I never would have done it.”

Does it sound better to you now?

“Actually, it does sound better with time. But I never thought it sounded bad – I just thought it didn’t sound like us. The Doors were lost. It was Jim and the orchestra.”

This was the first album where you had individual songwriting credits.

“Right. Jim originally wanted everything to say ‘written by the Doors,’ to keep things mysterious. But everybody just took it for granted that he wrote everything. I think he realized that wasn’t fair and wanted to give others credit.”

Did he actually write the music on those songs where he alone is credited?

“No. He would hear the song in his head. But he didn’t play anything, so he would sing a vocal melody, and we would have to figure out what to do. But a lot of times he just had a poem on paper and I would come up with something. Other times I would come up with a melody, and he’d put words to it.”

What about the Soft Parade sessions sticks out in your mind?

“The endless mixing sessions. That was a very long, drawn-out album. We spent more money on it than we did on any other album. And Jim was hard to find. All the mixing bored the hell out of him. But I think his drinking problem wasn’t as bad as it was on Waiting for the Sun, because he had started making a film, which kept him busy.

“There was one funny thing that happened. This crazy guy appeared and apparently he thought that The Celebration of the Lizard [a Morrison poem which appeared on Waiting for the Sun] was written about him. He was yelling, ‘How did you know that I’m the Lizard King, goddamn it! That’s me. You wrote a song about me!’ And he smacked Ray right in the eye because he thought Ray was Jim. Ray had his glasses on and they just crumpled. It was a mess.”

Before the poem appeared had you ever heard Jim refer to himself as the Lizard King?

“He was always obsessed with lizards – he loved that kind of stuff because he’d seen it on acid a lot. But I don’t know when he came up with ‘I am the Lizard King.’ I think he wished he had never said that. It was just another thing he had to live up to.”

During the Soft Parade tour, your Miami concert erupted in pandemonium and was canceled. Later, Jim was charged with indecent exposure. What do you remember of the concert?

“Well, first of all, Jim did not pull it out. But it was bedlam, just total craziness. The place was oversold, thousands of people swarmed the stage, and it collapsed. I remember Jim just rolling around in the midst of all those people and I was wondering if we would ever get out of there. It was very much like in the movie – they did a real good job on that one.”

But you had no sense that the incident was going to turn into such a big thing?

“No, hell no! Okay, the concert was fucked up, and we didn’t finish, but nobody was angry, nobody asked for their money back. And the cops were friendly – they sat around drinking beers with us after the show. Nothing happened until a week later, when somebody decided to make a stink about it.

“Some politician decided to make their career at our expense. Then it fucked everything up. We couldn’t play anywhere for a year. The Hall Managers’ Association basically banned us.”

Did Jim feel very persecuted?

“I’m sure he did. But he wasn’t surprised. He knew he was pushing authority as far as it could go. We really did have the sense that we had pushed the system to the edge, and finally they were pushing back.”

Morrison Hotel (February 1970)

Roadhouse Blues and a couple of other songs on Morrison Hotel hinted at the changes to come on L.A. Woman – heading in a bluesier, more bare-bones direction.

“I think it was a reaction to the overproduction of The Soft Parade. We wanted to get back to basics. Roadhouse Blues is one of my personal favorites. I was always proud of that song because, as simple as it is, it’s not just another blues. That one little lick makes it a song, and I think that sums up the genius of the Doors.

“I think that song stands up really well as an example of what made us a great band. And the session was really cool – one of my fondest memories of the band. We cut the tune live, with John Sebastian playing harp and Lonnie Mack playing bass – he came up with that fantastic bass line.”

How did Mack end up on there?

“He just happened to be hanging around. I think he had a contract with Elektra and wasn’t recording so they gave him a job at the studio. We just said, ‘Hey, why don’t you play bass?’”

You co-wrote Peace Frog with Jim.

“Yes. I had written the music, we rehearsed it up, and it was really happening, but we didn’t have any lyrics and Jim wasn’t around. We just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s record it. He’ll come up with something.’ And he did. He took out his poetry book and found a poem that fit. But it always seemed kind of forced to me, to tell you the truth.”

The legend has Ray and Jim being very tight, but you’re the one who wrote with him a lot.

“In the very early days Ray was very close with Jim; Jim actually lived with Ray and his wife. He was almost like their son, and he was great for a while – he wasn’t drinking or anything. The problem was that Ray became a father figure, so Jim rebelled.

“He fucked their house up – trashed it on more than one occasion – and took advantage of them in many ways. Then I joined the band and sort of latched on to Jim, and we hung out a lot.

“Ray worked up all the early songs with Jim – everything on the first album. Then I wrote a lot with Jim – before I started really writing on my own – and those songs went mostly on the second and third albums.”

Did you ever talk about lyrics with Jim?

“Not much. He didn’t like to explain lyrics because he wanted people to interpret them themselves. But he thought about that stuff a lot. He was also somewhat into pure impressionism – which I think is what he liked about my songs. I always tried to write something that just fit the music, even if it didn’t especially mean anything.”

L.A. Woman (April 1971)

Legend has it that L.A. Woman was cut entirely live.

“Not entirely, but a lot of it was live, and the song L.A. Woman was completely live. I think that could be the quintessential Doors song, and the way we came up with it was amazing.

“We just started playing and it came together as if by magic. Jim made a lot of it up as he went along, which is amazing because I think it’s one of his most poetic songs. I can remember Jim sitting in the bathroom with the mic singing and all of us just having a great time.”

That album was the first time you had a rhythm guitarist – Marc Benno.

“That was basically just so we could do it live. It freed me up. And we thought it might add a different flavor. I actually enjoyed it, and I didn’t have to do as much overdubbing.”

You still did some overdubbing; it sounds like there are at least four guitar tracks on I’ve Been Down So Long.

“Yeah, there probably are. Ray played a guitar and Benno played, and I probably overdubbed one, too. I think I also overdubbed two or three slide parts.”

That slide solo is one of your craziest.

“Definitely. I was just trying to capture a mood without worrying about technique.”

The beauty of your slide playing – and your blues playing in general – is you don’t mimic the originators. And you never really cleaned your blues up – you left it a little messy. Some white guys tend to be very anal.

“That’s right. That’s what I didn’t like about Mike Bloomfield – too perfect. I always just tried to do my thing. I could play traditional blues slide, but all the other guys reacted more enthusiastically to my untraditional slide playing. In fact, that’s what got me into the band. Jim always loved my slide playing – he wanted me to play it almost exclusively.”

Did Jim ever critique your playing?

“He would always tell me that I was the most underrated guitar player around. What’s funny is that the four of us hardly ever criticized the others’ playing – or even suggested anything. We worked so well together that we hardly ever had to talk about it. Everybody just played the right part in the right place at the right time.”

Cars Hiss By My Window is a rather unusual blues.

“Yeah. That was our Jimmy Reed piece. Jim was really getting into the blues at that time and he loved it when I would just play straight blues. He’d sit there and make up songs on the spot. He just wanted to play all night. It’s too bad because I really think that had we done another album it would have been a lot more straight blues stuff, which I always loved.”

How did Riders on the Storm develop?

“We were fooling around with Ghost Riders in the Sky one day and somehow it turned into Riders on the Storm. It just happened.”

Another change on L.A. Woman is the absence of reverb, particularly on Jim’s voice, which was so heavily reverbed on your first few albums.

“Well, Sunset Sound, where we recorded the first two albums, had one of the best echo chambers in the world. It was a live chamber, which they don’t make anymore. And it sounded so great that we used it a lot more than we might otherwise have. We piped everything through there.

“But L.A. Woman was recorded on an eight-track in our rehearsal space and Paul Rothchild was gone, which is one reason we had so much fun. The warden was gone.”

So, even after all your success, you still had that sort of relationship with the producer, where he was cracking the whip?

“Yeah, we just kind of took it for granted that he would produce and we would do things his way – you stick with success. And, finally, he was like a rat deserting a sinking ship. I think he figured it was time to bail.”

So there was a sense that the Doors were a sinking ship?

“Yeah, definitely. We couldn’t play anywhere, we were fucked because of the Miami incident. Morrison Hotel didn’t do that well, Jim looked bad and was getting fat… All things considered, I thought it was pretty cool that L.A. Woman did well.

“I think we came up with something so loose because there was no pressure. We figured we were already screwed, so we were having fun again. We were so far gone that it was like our first album.”

Just weeks after the album entered the top 10, Jim was dead. Do you remember finding out?

“Yeah. I got a phone call and I didn’t believe it because we used to hear shit like that all the time – that Jim jumped off a cliff or something. So we sent our manager off to Paris, and he called and said it was true.”

People often talk about the inevitability of him dying young. Do you buy that?

“No! I thought he would never die. I thought he’d outlive everybody, like one of those Irish drunks who’d drink a fifth of whisky a day and live until they’re 80. He seemed invulnerable, the way he would do things and jump out of windows without getting hurt. I never saw those things, but I would hear about them the next day. For some reason, he was fairly well behaved around me. Somehow our relationship developed where he stayed fairly calm around me, thank God. [laughs]”

After Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, Jim supposedly told people that he would be the third to die at 27. Did you remember him saying such things?

“Yeah. He was definitely obsessed with death. He talked about it all the time.”

There’s always been talk that he’s not dead, and Ray has occasionally fueled that idea. Have you ever thought that?

“Yes and no. I’ve allowed myself to fantasize at times, but I’m sure that if he wasn’t dead he would have gotten hold of us by now. But then again, if there’s anybody who could pull off something like that, it was him. I still think about him quite a bit. I always have dreams that he’s alive, and we’re playing together again. Wishful thinking.”

This feature was originally published in Guitar World in 1994.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Robby Krieger is the latest Cardboard Sessions artist to prove his guitar chops on a cardboard-built Telecaster, as he puts his own spin on blues standard Little Red Rooster – which was also part of The Doors' live repertoire.

His accompanying band, The Soul Savages, includes Ed Roth on keyboard, Franklin Vanderbilt on drums, and Kevin Brandon on bass. Throughout their individual careers, they have worked with artists like Lenny Kravitz, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan.

Additionally, Krieger's son, Waylon, joined the session on a matching cardboard-built Strat, trading blues-fueled licks and solos with his father.

“Music, I think, is the only thing that can mend the world and I hope we can do that before it’s too late. It’s starting to get to me, but like I say, music is the answer so let’s keep playing,” comments Krieger at the end of the six-minute-plus, one-take performance.

The session follows those by artists like Billy Gibbons, J Mascis, Keanu Reeves' Dogstar, and LP, who have also tried their hand at playing these cardboard-built guitars, which are master-built at Fender's Corona, California facility. However, there's a slight difference, as this is the first time the purpose-built Telecaster is making an appearance.

“A lot of artists will see the cardboard guitar for the first time and joke, ‘You guys just took some pizza boxes and started stacking them together to make a guitar!’” Cardboard Sessions' Dave Lee told Guitar World.

“You have these fun, creative ideas and all of a sudden they become something. No-one’s played legit cardboard instruments before, like a Fender Strat or a real drum set made out of cardboard. It just keeps growing!”

In other Robby Krieger news, The Doors guitars recently shared why slide guitar is the ultimate way to express yourself as a player.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp has just announced a new camp, The Masters of Rock: 2025, taking place February 20-23 in Los Angeles. As the name suggests, it features top rock veterans, including Robby Krieger of The Doors, Skunk Baxter of The Doobie Brothers, session bass great Leland Sklar, and The Police's Stewart Copeland.

Attendees get the unique opportunity to learn from these music legends through masterclasses, jam sessions, and Q&A panels.

Campers will also join bands led by a cohort of rockstar counselors that includes Derek St. Holmes (Ted Nugent), Vinny Appice (Black Sabbath, Dio), Mike Kroeger (Nickelback), Monte Pittman (Madonna, Ministry), Janet Robin (Lindsey Buckingham), and more.

The camp's jamming songbook includes hits like The Police's Message in a Bottle and Roxanne, The Doors' LA Woman and Light My Fire, and The Doobie Brothers' Listen to the Music and Long Train Runnin’.

To wrap up the four-day experience, attendees get the rare chance to perform on the Sunset Strip at the iconic Viper Room and Whisky A Go Go.

The camp is open to guitarists of all levels, with additional tiers customized for beginners as well as 11- to 16-year-olds.

Its announcement comes hot on the heels of the third annual women-only camp, which is taking place this December and features Nancy Wilson (Heart), Sheila E. (Prince), Nita Strauss (Alice Cooper), Lita Ford (The Runaways), and Rhonda Smith (Jeff Beck).

Rock ‘n’ Roll Fantasy Camp has been running for over 25 years. It’s also been the subject of the documentary Rock Camp The Movie and has been featured in The Simpsons.

Spots are limited, so interested guitarists are encouraged to book early. See RockCamp.com for more details.

Robby Krieger's legendary status is assured, having recorded six classic albums with The Doors between 1967 and 1971, starting with their eponymous debut and concluding with L.A. Woman, due to the untimely death of singer Jim Morrison. Krieger’s unique finger-picked, slide stylings are all over the records, becoming as much a part of the band’s signature sound as Ray Manzarek’s keyboards.

Krieger’s writing was equally vital to the success of the band, coming up with many of their most loved songs. The Doors made two more albums, Other Voices (1971) and Full Circle (1972), after Morrison’s death, working as a three-piece – both strong albums that are often overlooked due to the absence of the charismatic Morrison. 

Krieger had two short-lived bands – Butts Band and Red Shift – through to the end of the ’70s before moving into the jazz-fusion arena in the ’80s with his self-titled album released in 1985. By 1991, he had formed his own touring band, the Robby Krieger Band.

With interest in the Doors’ catalog always strong, Krieger succumbed to the inevitable in 2002, hooking up with Manzarek to temporarily reform the band under the banner Doors of the 21st Century with Cult frontman Ian Astbury on vocals.

Krieger has continued to record intermittently, with Cinematix in 2000 and Singularity in 2010, but he remains a fairly constant fixture on the live circuit, both as a solo artist with his own band and as a special guest with numerous rock legends, including Gov’t Mule and Alice In Chains.

Krieger has just released his first album since 2020’s The Ritual Begins at Sundown. The self-titled debut album for the newly formed Robby Krieger and the Soul Savages sees Krieger returning to the all-instrumental, jazz-fusion vibe of his earliest solo work. The warm, organic feel of the record harks back to the golden age of fusion.

How did the album come about?

“I’d just gotten over a cancer scare, and a good friend of mine, Kevin Brandon, who’d played bass on Singularity in 2010, had just escaped near death. He’d been in bed for a year. He wanted to play, so we got together with another couple of friends, Dale Alexander on drums and Ed Roth on keyboards, and we started jamming for fun at my studio in Glendale, California.

“Pretty soon, Dale had to go back to Minneapolis, so we ended up with Franklin Vanderbilt on drums, who plays with Lenny Kravitz, and that became the group.”

Had you written anything beforehand, or was everything created in the studio?

“We went into the recording process without any set ideas. I find that to be the most fun way to do it. Even way back with The Doors, when we recorded L.A. Woman, that’s how we did that record. We’d just start playing in our rehearsal space and the songs would come out somehow. 

“We have a pretty cool setup in my studio, including some great state-of-the-art plug-ins combined with some really good old-school equipment. The idea was to try to keep the process and the sound as old-school as possible. We mainly played live together as we recorded it.”

There’s a cinematic feel to a lot of the tracks. A lot of them sound like they could have come from ’70s detective shows. 

“You’re right, a lot of the stuff did sound like it could’ve been from soundtracks, but we didn’t think, as we were creating the album, 'Hey, let’s make it like a TV show or something.' It just seemed to come out that way. I’d definitely like someone to pick up the tracks for something like that. [Laughs] A Day in L.A. sounded to us like it could have come from a cool comedy score.”

There are great guitar tones all over the album. What are the main guitars and amps we’re hearing?

“Pretty much my ’67 Gibson SG with a 4x10 Fender Blues DeVille. There’s also a bit of electric sitar on a couple of tracks. Most of the delays were added after I’d laid down the guitar tracks. I prefer to record with a fairly straightforward sound and then, if I want to add something, that’s an option. But I’m not stuck with one particular effect in case I change my mind later on.”

The album feels like a throwback to the golden age of jazz fusion, with a good chunk of funk in the mix. What sort of stuff influenced you?

“I like all kinds of music, but for this album, Kevin Brandon had played with Aretha Franklin for years, and the other guys had played with a lot of great jazz and blues artists. I think that’s probably a large part of what drove the overall feel of the record.”

The trademark of the great albums from that era is that all the musicians had great chops.

“Exactly, and that’s what was so great working with the guys on this record, the way they can push you to another level because they’re all at the very top of their game.”

The record has a bright, summery feel, which is ironic as it came out in January!

“I never actually thought about that – that’s funny. Maybe if it takes a while for the album to catch on, it’ll be just in time for the summer. [Laughs]”

You come up with a lot of strong melodies, some which could be vocal lines. Do you ever think in terms of vocals when you’re coming up with melodic ideas?

“Mostly, the melodies come to me without any notion of words in mind. If I do come up with lyrics, it would be later – that’s the way I always did it with The Doors. My greatest wish is to be able to have one of those all-time great instrumental hit records, like [Santana’s] Samba Pa Ti or something.”

In terms of the production of the album, there’s a lot of space around the instruments. What’s the secret to that?

“You’re right about that, and it’s not easy to do as these days everybody wants to fill every space. I call it 'dentist’s syndrome' – the need to fill every hole. [Laughs] These guys are all seasoned pros, and they know when to play and when to lay back, and I think, if there is a secret, it’s the ability to know when to let the music breathe. There’s a real art to that, so I’m glad you noticed that.”

Your slide playing is unusual in that you tend to avoid the traditional blues clichés in favor of a more fluid, microtonal approach.

“Yeah, ever since the Doors’ Moonlight Drive. I don’t think anybody would have thought of doing the slide part like that. I always wanted to have my own sound. I do think my slide playing is kind of different, even though I can’t help being influenced by Duane Allman and some of the greats of slide.

“I think slide playing is the ultimate way to express what you want to play, as you’re not bound by the frets. Hopefully, if you don’t mess it up [Laughs], if you’re careful, you can really find some interesting, expressive nuances.”

Ricochet Rabbit goes down the Wes Montgomery route of voicing the melody in octaves. 

“You can’t really play octaves without people thinking of Wes or George Benson. That’s actually one of my favorite tracks on the album. I was just fooling around with the part and one of the guys said it sounded like something we can work with. The slide solo takes it to another place, though, which I think is cool.”

Blue Brandino finds quite a different approach to the rest of the record, with a grittier, hard-edged blues sound to your guitar. Have you ever thought about a straight blues album?

“I wouldn’t mind trying something like that. I love blues, but I think it’s hard to come up with something a little different when you’re restricted to playing blues.”

What are the standout records when you look back over your playing with the Doors?

“Definitely the first, self-titled album [from 1967], as we’d had months and months of playing the stuff every night at the Whiskey. I think L.A. Woman is probably my next favorite, mostly because of the way we recorded it, as I say, as we were jamming on a lot of the tracks until they became songs.

“Riders on the Storm started off as a surf tune – then it somehow morphed into what it became. After Jim passed, we did a couple of albums with John, Ray and me. I think there were some great songs on those albums, although they don’t get a lot of attention.”

Do you ever listen to the Doors’ albums?

“No, not really, unless I’m planning to include a song in one of my live shows that I haven’t played for many years. I hear a lot of our stuff on the radio all the time anyway. I think the songs still hold up pretty good.

“What makes me say that is when I look at the people who come to my live shows and you’ve got original fans, plus a big percentage of younger people who’ve also discovered the band. They really seem to be into what the Doors did.”

What do you think of your own playing from back then? Do you wish you’d done things differently?

“No, I don’t do that. In fact, I think it’s actually probably more the other way around, where I’ll think, ‘Wow, how did I do that?” [Laughs] I never actually sit down and practice as such these days, unless I’ve got some shows coming up, when I will maybe do that to a degree. [Laughs]

“I think I always learn more new stuff when I’m playing gigs. It seems that the pressure to create in the moment can be very inspirational.”

Do you still have many guitars from the ’60s?

“No, very few. I have about 30 guitars, but only one is from when I was in the Doors, and that’s my ’54 Les Paul Black Beauty, which I used on the first couple of albums. My original SG was stolen. I got another ’67 years later that I still use.

“I don’t know what I did with all the guitars I had. They weren’t collectable in those days, so I sold them or gave them away or whatever. I wish I hadn’t. [Laughs]”

What keeps everything fresh and stimulating for you after 60 years of playing and touring?

“In some ways it’s more exciting, because in those days I was more in the background. Jim was out front, and John, Ray and I were in the background, in the shadows. Nowadays, it’s the Robby Krieger Band, and I’m expected to talk to the audience and all that stuff, which is fun, but I kind of wish I was still hidden away. [Laughs]”

What’s coming up for you?

“I’ve got another album recorded and ready to go – I’m just looking for a label. It’s an instrumental reggae album. Phil Chen was a good friend of mine; he played bass in the Butts Band, which I formed with Ray Manzarek and John Densmore in 1973. We recorded our first, self-titled album in Jamaica, which thrilled Phil, as he got a chance to see a lot of his family members who lived there. 

“He was a great bass player, playing with Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart and other artists. He became very ill and passed away at the end of 2021. Before he passed, we had discussed and recorded an album of instrumental reggae tracks. I’m looking for a label to release the record toward the end of summer, so that will be my focus once the promotion of the current album finishes.”

• Robby Krieger And The Soul Savages' debut album is out now.

This month on Cover Models we have the one and only Robby Krieger checking in to take a trip down memory lane. 

No, he's not here to talk about the Doors. Instead he'll be telling us why he was holding a 1968 Barney Kessel – not his customary Gibson SG – when Michael Curtis shot him for the cover of GW's December 1983 issue and what exactly makes the guitar special.

Where and when did you buy this guitar?

“I got it at Norman’s Rare Guitars in Los Angeles in the early ’80s. The guitar would have had to be from the ’60s; as I recall, it was a ’68. I’d never buy one from the ’70s because I’ve always felt that there’s no such thing as a good guitar from that decade.”

Why did you choose it?

“I had been looking for a Gibson L-7 from the ’50s or ’60s, but I didn’t find one I liked. Then I came upon the Barney Kessel and was immediately drawn to it because it was a double-cut, which I liked, and it was a good jazz guitar. I always loved Wes Montgomery and felt that Sunburst would be the perfect tool for that style.”

Did you use it on any notable recordings?

“I might have, but honestly, I didn’t buy that guitar to record with. I liked messing around with it in my free time, and around that time, I was playing a lot of jazz guitar at home, so the [Gibson] SG wasn’t what I’d be using for that.”

What did the Barney Kessel allow you to do that the SG didn’t?

“It was easier to get that Wes Montgomery sound. I liked how the octaves sounded, which I guess is one of many differences between a hollow-body guitar and an SG.”

Why did you choose this particular guitar for your GW cover shoot?

“Because I liked how it looked! That would have been the driving force since it wasn’t being used to record. I’ve always been into jazz, and people always talk about the SG, so I wanted to have a different look.”

Do you still own this guitar?

“I do. I just saw it the other day, coincidentally. It’s been forever since I played it; I should get it out and play it again. I remember it being a great guitar, which is probably why I bought it!”

Some very trivial trivia: Inside the January 1983 issue (pictured above), Robby is misspelled “Robbie,” and his guitar is misidentified as a Gibson 355. Come on, vintage GW – get your facts straight!

• If you’d like to nominate a particular Guitar World cover for the Cover Models page, let us know. Please be as specific (with the issue date/cover star) as you can.

Orianthi has joined forces with blues powerhouse Joe Bonamassa for her latest single, First Time Blues, and it blends soulful melodies and hotter-than-the-sun lead playing.

It’s the first single from Orianthi’s upcoming sixth studio album, slated for release later this year, and follows on from 2022’s Rock Candy, an album where she wanted the verses to focus on storytelling and aggression.

The track was written and produced by the former Alice Cooper guitarist and recorded in Robby Krieger’s Los Angeles studio. Bonamassa’s longtime studio partner Kevin Shirley, meanwhile, handled the mix, making for a star-studded quartet.   

The track sees Orianthi leaning heavily into her blues and Americana roots – styles of music she says resonate with her more than any other – as its rolling, highpass filtered riff gives way to fat, steam-training grooves. Its verses are stripped back, a low-gain guitar quietly tucked beneath its drums and swathing keys, as it rises to its riff-iced chorus.

All the attention, of course, is on the song's pair of solos. Orianthi's up first, and with a clear but rasping tone she flies through finger-blurring runs, screaming string bends and a neat octave chord run taking her up to the higher frets for its finale.

In the video, she's seen ripping her signature PRS, complete with floral fretboard inlays and her O logo at the heel.

Bonamassa's solo is a little more reserved, sitting back into the pocket of the groove, building slowly to a fluid but breathless run across the fretboard of his sunburst Les Paul, set to the bridge humbucker.

Speaking to 96.1 KLPX DJ, Larry Mac, Orianthi dismissed claims that the new album is a “complete redirection,” rather saying that it's “going more in the blues-rock sort of Americana vibe, sort of less poppy than the stuff I put out before.

“I love all sorts of genres of music, but I think what connects with me the most is the blues,” she expanded [via Blabbermouth].

“It resonates with me more than anything. So I'm just kind of going back to that; even my first record, Believe, had quite a bit of blues in it. So, with this new album and the singles that are going to be rolling out, people are gonna hear more of that, a bit more of an edge, and a bit more of the music I'm gonna be playing for the rest of my life.”

Reflecting on her time in the Doors guitarist’s studio, she adds: “We had a blast in the studio. He's a dear friend of mine for many years and a legend. And I'm a big Doors fan, so having the opportunity and the honor of recording at his studio and Robby coming in and giving the thumbs up, that means the world.”

The track’s release comes after Joe Bonamassa visited Andy Timmons in the studio, lending his solo skills on a track set to feature on his forthcoming album. The resulting shred wars saw “an absurd amount of talent” on display.

The band performing on First Time Blues is completed by guitarist Nick Maybury (Perry Farrell, Scott Weiland), bassist Justin Anders (Eric Burdon, Billy Ray Cyrus), keyboardist Carey Frank (Bruce Springsteen, Social Distortion), and drummer Elias Mallin (Kill Hannah, Kesha).  

Adelaide-born guitarist Orianthi first rose to prominence as Carrie Underwood's guitarist, before becoming Michael Jackson's lead guitarist for the This Is It tour, rehearsing with the pop legend before his death. She also enjoyed three years in Alice Cooper's band. 2024's solo record – her sixth in total – continues a trend of a new record every two years, which started with 2020's O.

First Time Blues is available to stream and purchase now.

In January 1983, Guitar World featured Robby Krieger on its cover, wielding a jazz box instead of his usual Gibson SG, and the headline “The greatest guitarist you’ve never heard of.”

Today it’s hard to imagine that the man who helped build some of the greatest blues-meets-acid-meets-psych rock ever created could be thought of as underrated – but back then it was true.

Four decades on there’s nothing but reverence showered upon the 77-year-old rocker, who played alongside Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore in The Doors. Stars like The Cult’s Billy Duffy and Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell have name-checked Krieger, noting his tone, feel, and ability to blend blues and psych into something dark, without ever going full-on metal.

Asked about if he ever imagined he’d be named as an influence by such players, Krieger smirks. “No, I never could have. But to be honest, I never thought about it! It’s been cool to have all these bands tell me that The Doors and what I was doing influenced them.

“But there’s no secret to what I do: I keep trying to do something different. And as far as The Doors go, we were lucky to have four people that came together, fit well, and made music that was just different enough to be remembered.”

Krieger is at it again with his latest project, Robby Krieger & the Soul Savages, who release their self-titled debut record on January 19 via Mascot Label Group. Has he changed his approach? 

“No, not much,” he says. “I still love the blues. I think, at least in some way, every guitar player does. But the biggest thing for me beyond inspiration – no matter where I get it from – is that I never try and copy anybody.

“I still love the blues, jazz, reggae, soul, and anything with a guitar. The most important thing is to always sound like me – whatever that means!”

How did Robby Krieger & the Soul Savages come into being?

“I built a studio in the Glendale, California, area about five years ago, and I met some musicians who also lived there. There’s one guy called Ed Roth, a great keyboard player who has played with Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. Ed knew a bass player named Kevin ‘Brandino’ Brandon, whom I’d used on some of my albums in the past, so it made sense.

“We started jamming and it was great. That’s when we met Franklin Vanderbilt, who plays drums. He’s played with Lenny Kravitz; he’s a great drummer and he rounded out the band. From there it was a matter of working out the songs together, jamming some more, and figuring out some sounds that sounded pretty neat.”

Has your general approach to riffs and solos evolved?

“On this new album with the Soul Savages, the basic process is that we’d lay down a track, and once we got the song dialed in I’d try to put the rhythm part down. After that, I’d sometimes put a lead on at the same time; other times, it was later.

“If I did put a lead down simultaneously it would leave a hole in the rhythm section, so the ideal way is to do the solo after the fact. Often, we’d do the track at one studio, and then I’d bring it home, go into my studio, and that’s where I’d work on my solos.”

How does your current process compare to your days with The Doors?

“The main change is I’m using a pick more nowadays. Back in the Doors days, I never used a pick; I’d always play fingerstyle. I didn’t get into using picks until the ‘70s, but even then I still used my fingers on the old right hand often. The main difference would be using a pick and trying to get the right speed going with it.”

What led you to primarily play fingerstyle back then?

“Fingerstyle is still the most comfortable. I initially played flamenco guitar, and Wes Montgomery, who I loved, never used a pick – well, he didn’t use one early on. But later I read an article on him, and by then he’d started using a pick. 

“He was asked why and said, ‘If I had to do it over again, I’d use a pick because it’s easier on the fingers.’ I felt bad for him when I read that, but I also understood what he meant because fingerstyle can leave your fingers and thumbs all thrashed up and your nails ragged. 

“So at that point I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m going to try and use a pick too.’ It wasn’t easy for quite a few years; but eventually I became comfortable enough to where I’m not actually comfortable, but I can do it just the same.”

Your dabbling with flamenco can be heard in your playing and compositions, along with your classical and jazz leanings.

 “Yeah, that’s most definitely true. But you also have to remember that Ray Manzarek was very into classical music, which affected the composition too. All of that definitely was a significant product of me in those styles; there’s no doubt about that.”

 Did the transition from fingerstyle to pick impact your tone? 

“People ask me about the secret to my tone… for starters, there’s no secret! Everyone has their own sound; and with me, a lot of that definitely came from me playing fingerstyle. But my viewpoint on tone has always been that I have my own sound, and everybody else should too. If your mother can’t recognize you when she hears your sound on the radio, then you don’t have your own sound.”

You’re well-known for using a Gibson SG, but are you deploying any other gear now?

“I think you can tell that there are a few cuts on the new album that have an electric sitar on them – I’ve been messing around with that quite a bit. I also have a few Gibson ES-355s, but to this day I mostly keep to my SG.”

And your original SG was stolen at some point, right?

“That’s right. But I was lucky enough to find another like it. I’m still looking for my original SG, though. If anyone out there knows anything about that, please call me. Seriously! But I was lucky to find another that’s pretty much the same, which is a ’67 Gibson SG. It’s pretty much my main guitar.”

What first drew you to the SG?

“There was just something about it. Back when I was playing flamenco, I didn’t have an electric guitar. Then, one day, I saw Chuck Berry play at the Santa Monica Civic Center, and he played this beautiful cherry red Gibson ES-335. 

“Next day I decided to trade in one of my flamenco guitars for an ES-335. But as it turned out, the ES-335 was too expensive, and the only guitar I could afford was a Gibson SG. I guess what drew me to it was that it looked kind of cool, you know? I liked the look of it with the double cutaway and the horns. I also liked that you could play it easily and get high up on the neck.

“But now I think of it, the first one wasn’t an actual SG; it was a Les Paul Jr. with the black pickups. It looked cool – especially when you took acid… those horns looked like the devil!”

How did the SG impacted your guitar sound with The Doors?

“Well, this is in retrospect – I wouldn't have known as it was happening – but I think the sound has more to do with how I played the SG than the actual SG itself. It’s always about how you play rather than what you play. 

“I think the SG had a smoother sound compared to the Fender guitars of the day. The Fender stuff was twangier, and I never was a fan of that. I always have gone for smoother sounds, which I could get with the Gibson.”

Do you have a favorite solo or riff from your Doors days?

“There are so many that I love. But When the Music’s Over from Strange Days has long been one of my favorites. That song is long, so it has two solo; and if you notice, one pans to the left and one pans to the right. I didn’t plan it that way – what happened was I did four or five solos and kept overdubbing, and the engineer, Bruce Botnick, mistakenly played two of them at once. We all loved it! 

“But it’s always been hard to execute live, and my son has been helping with the other part lately. I've been on the left-hand side lately, so maybe that’s my favorite side. But to this day, replicating the solos in When the Music’s Over is a massive challenge in person.”

• Robby Krieger and the Soul Savages is available for pre-order now.

The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger has asked for the guitar community’s help in tracking down a very special stolen guitar: his prized early-’60s red Gibson SG Special.

The electric guitar was used throughout his early years with the Doors, before it was stolen from the band’s rehearsal space around 1967. Now speaking to Guitar World, Krieger has repeated his call for assistance in finding the instrument.

“I was lucky enough to find another like it,” Krieger tells GW. “[But] I’m still looking for my original SG... If anyone out there knows anything about that, please call me. Seriously!”

As such, the Doors man is asking any owners of ’63/’64 Gibson SG Specials to check the back of their headstocks for the serial number 88779. Anyone with potential leads can reach out on FindRobbysGuitar@gmail.com.

While Krieger has been more fortunate in holding on to the replacement SG – a 1967 model, also in red, that he picked up after it went missing – he still holds out hope of one day buying back the original. 

The guitarist’s call-out reprises an appeal first made in 2021, when Krieger posted a video describing the guitar’s distinguishing features and history – and incorrectly listed the serial number as 952727.

“It was a red Gibson SG Special, it had the P-90 pickups, the black ones and I bought it from the Ace Loans pawn shop in Santa Monica,” Krieger said in the clip. 

“This was the guitar I auditioned for the Doors with. It was also the guitar I wrote Light My Fire, with it, I played it at the Whiskey [A-Go-Go], at the London Fog, I played it on The Ed Sullivan Show and used it on the first two Doors albums. Then one day, it’s gone – somebody stole it out of our rehearsal place.”

The guitarist reportedly put it out of his mind until he came to work on his biography Set the Night on Fire when, as part of the research, a Doors fan supplied him with the manifest from an old tour.

The document listed a serial number for the SG Special, which Krieger had not kept on record. That detail has since proven to be incorrect and Krieger has now learned the actual number is 88779.

As he explains in his new GW interview, Krieger’s relationship with the SG actually dates back to a show in which the young guitarist, then a classical player, saw Chuck Berry perform at the Santa Monica Civic Center – on an ES-335.

“He played this beautiful cherry red Gibson ES-335,” recalls Krieger. “Next day I decided to trade in one of my flamenco guitars for an ES-335. But as it turned out, the ES-335 was too expensive, and the only guitar I could afford was a Gibson SG.”

Krieger was first attracted to its horned design and upper-fret access but says the full-throated (but not abrasive) rock tone would go on to form an essential component in The Doors’ sound.

“It’s always about how you play rather than what you play,” reflects Krieger. 

“But I think the SG had a smoother sound compared to the Fender guitars of the day. The Fender stuff was twangier, and I never was a fan of that. I always have gone for smoother sounds, which I could get with the Gibson.”

Keep a look out for our full Robby Krieger interview, in which the guitarist discusses his days with The Doors, studio accidents and how, over time, he’s taking a big step away from his signature fingerstyle.

In the meantime, keep an eye out for Krieger’s SG and perhaps with your help, the two of them will one day be reunited…

While Krieger’s loss has no doubt been keenly felt over the decades, spare a thought, too, for Guitar House of Tulsa, which needs help in tracking down $80,000 worth of stolen vintage guitars.

Billy Gibbons celebrated his 73rd birthday on December 16 and took to stage the night before to perform with a rotating cast of talented performers, among them The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and Joe Bonamassa.

The relaxed show took place at The Troubadour in Hollywood, Los Angeles and featured a number of other big names, including brass players Joe Sublett and Richie "La Bamba" Rosenberg, drummer Joel Taylor and actor/musician Paul Hipp, among others.

The set took in ZZ Top classics, such as La Grange, along with a Doors cover, Roadhouse, led by Krieger and Hipp and a boozy rebranding of Ben E. King classic Stand By Me to Drink With Me. 

In addition, Joe Bonamassa – in blistering form – reprised an old favorite in the form of Further On Up The Road, tipping the cap to Gibbons’ origins with the skittering Texas blues standard beloved by Eric Clapton. 

Bonamassa, like all of the assembled, is otherwise content to play sideman – for instance, you can spot him helpfully signing a ‘C’ to Hipp as the latter steps in for a solo on the La Grange jam in the wrong key. For his part, Hipp immediately pulls it out of the bag and offers a great vocal on Roadhouse, to boot.

It seems most of those present, including Gibbons himself, were happy to mingle in and out of the onstage lineup throughout the set, which appears to have been largely strung together on the fly. 

Of course, fan footage has emerged in a steady stream, documenting the event for posterity. Check out the clips above for a fans‘ eye view of the night.

The event is becoming something of a tradition. Gibbons hosted a similar party at The Troubadour last December, inviting Joe Bonamassa along for a note-perfect cover of Foxy Lady – a lick Gibbons was famously taught by Hendrix himself.

Two members of rock royalty, Alex Lifeson of Rush and Robby Krieger of The Doors, came together at a recent benefit concert to jam Santana’s 1969 classic, Evil Ways.

The event, the Scott Medlock-Robby Krieger Golf Classic and All-Star Concert, took place on Monday (October 24) at Bogie's Westlake Village Inn in California to honor artist Scott Medlock, a friend of Krieger’s who passed away last year aged 53 following a battle with cancer.

In new fan-shot footage, the pair of electric guitar legends serve the six-string goodness in an eight-minute jam, in which they regularly trade the track’s abundance of Latin-inspired lead lines alongside Santana vocalist Andy Vargas. Check it out below.

Robby Krieger and Scott Medlock launched their benefit concert and accompanying golf tournament in 2008, first in aid of the Pat Tillman Foundation, which provides academic scholarships for veterans and their partners, and later St. Jude Children’s Hospital, which helps treat childhood cancer and other pediatric diseases. 

Proceeds from this year’s event went to the Pat Tillman Foundation and the Colontown/PalTown Development Foundation & Cancer Support Community.

Since its foundation 14 years ago, the Scott Medlock-Robby Krieger Golf Classic and All-Star Concert has raised over $3 million for various causes.

Alex Lifeson has participated in the event numerous times over the years, his most recent appearance being in 2018.

2022’s been a busy year for the Rush guitarist. Back in January, he launched his new band, Envy of None, through which he has released songs written shortly after Rush’s breakup in 2018.

“After the last Rush tour in 2015, I made sure I started writing immediately,” he told Guitar World back in May. “I didn’t want to lose it; I didn’t want to feel like that was the end. So I continued to write, just for my own benefit. A few of those tracks are on my website, some of them are on the Envy of None album.”

The guitarist also made appearances alongside his former bandmate Geddy Lee at the two Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts last month, which took place at London’s Wembley Stadium on September 3 and LA’s Kia Forum on September 27.

The duo reunited to perform Rush classics 2112 Part I: Overture, Working Man and YYZ, the latter of which Hawkins himself had performed with the pair during a Foo Fighters gig in 2008.

The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore sat down with Rick Rubin recently for an interview on his podcast, Broken Record, and discussed the band’s acid-laced live career. 

The main thing we have learned, is that if you thought your first live performance was bad, you can always take heart from The Doors. During their conversation with Rubin, Krieger and Densmore describe the band’s first show at Hughes Aircraft Company, which employed the father of keyboardist Ray Manzarek. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it seems it was not your usual corporate gig. 

“They needed a band for some occasions,” says Krieger. “So we got together and, I can't remember the bass player then, but he only had one string on his bass! Then Ray was on acid and totally freaked-out. He was on a bummer acid trip and I don't know how he even played.”

Densmore is then prompted for his recollection but says he doesn’t even remember the gig, expect for “the big warehouse.”

“Well the gig was pretty weird,” continues Krieger. “We played some Mingus – I think – and Jim tried to sing a couple of things, but we didn't we didn't really have any songs worked up yet. Jim and I both took speed. I remember that.”

If nothing else, it puts fluffing chords into perspective.

The pair recalled their years playing all kinds of shows, from small shindigs at Krieger’s parents’ place to massive gigs such as their 1968 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. That event was filmed and recorded for posterity, but was ultimately regarded as pretty disastrous. Again, LSD was involved…

“Jim took acid and didn’t tell us” says Densmore. “I remember saying to you [Krieger], coming off stage, ‘What’s [going on?]’ And he said, ‘He took acid!’ It was like, ‘Great, just great…’”

“Sometimes when he took acid he was great,” reasons Krieger. “But this time he got real introverted and he kind of just kind of didn’t move around much.”

“He saw a moth on the astro turf and picked it up and was examining it,” adds Densmore. 

“And it didn’t help that his girlfriend Pam was sitting with Mick Jagger on the front row,” says Krieger. The chance to impress Sir Mick was not lost on them, but it seems the Rolling Stone man may have caught the wrong show.

“Jagger went out for dinner with us right before,” recalls Densmore. “We wanted to be really good for him and... damn it! Somebody asked about it and he said in Melody Maker, ‘The Doors are nice chaps, but they went on a bit long…’”

To be fair to Rubin, the rest of the interview goes much deeper than tales of psychedelics – the duo discuss frontman Jim Morrison’s ‘gifted’ approach to writing, why they opted against a bassist and “why we need a new 60s”, so check out the full interview on Broken Record’s YouTube channel.

If you’ve already ventured into what many regard as the mysterious world of modes, the name Mixolydian may be familiar to you. If not, no problem. My own approach to modes has always been intuitive, rather than methodical, but whichever way you choose to proceed, there should be something in this article for you. 

I think we can agree that when soloing over a 12-bar blues in the key of A major, the A major scale would not be conducive to cool-sounding blues solos. Try this yourself over the backing if you’re not convinced. Yes, it’s possible to come up with a phrase here and there, but the overall impression is that the A major scale (A B C# D E F# G# A) is not a great fit.

One of the reasons for this is the way the grouping of notes leads us in an unhelpful direction – more Sailor’s Hornpipe than Stormy Monday… Another is that the I-IV-V progression of the standard 12-bar sequence (and I think it’s fair to say blues chord sequences generally) leans heavily on the dominant or b7th; think A7 rather than Amaj7. 

If we take a look at the A major pentatonic (A B C# E F# A) and then A Mixolydian (A B C# D E F# G A), you’ll see they have most of their notes in common. Thinking of the Mixolydian as a couple of extra notes we can add to give a ‘deluxe’ version of the A major pentatonic is probably the easiest way for the non-theoretically-inclined to relate to this and expand their options, especially if you apply this approach to all five shapes of the major pentatonic! 

In the example solo, I’ve tried not to be too ‘studied’ about this and only play strict Mixolydian lines as I think this would miss the point. However, you’ll notice lots of G: the flat/dominant 7th and key ingredient of Mixolydian in A. Hope you enjoy and see you next time!

Example 1

This opening phrase gets straight to the point, sliding from C# to E then adding a ringing G (dominant/b7th) to clearly state our Mixolydian intentions! Sliding briefly up two frets adds a little variety – some might call this a partial D chord, though the F#, A and open E are all part of the A Mixolydian mode. 

In any case, we head straight back to the original position, before switching to a more single-note approach but remaining within the Mixolydian mode.

Example 2

A couple of quick slides between positions lands us at shape 3 of the A major pentatonic, between the 9th and 12th frets. Adding in the G from the Mixolydian opens up the possibility of an arpeggio style run that comprises the main part of this phrase. 

As with any grouping of notes, there are many ways it could be phrased – I’ve gone with a triplet feel, but this is not the last word!

Example 3

Starting from where I finished at the end of Example 2, there is then a shift in position – and tonality – down to the A minor pentatonic. This fits because the backing track is very ‘modal’-sounding and riff-based, rather than a selection of straight up major or minor chords. 

This minor pentatonic remains a feature until the end of the solo, though at this point the feel has been established as not a ‘straight’ blues solo.

Example 4

Moving to a low register for some riff-style phrases, both the minor 3rd (C) and major 3rd (C#) feature here. We could discuss whether the G (minor/dominant 7th) appears as part of the Mixolydian mode or the A minor pentatonic, but I’m not sure how productive that would be… Perhaps the ultimate goal would be to recognise that there is an overlap here and get on with making some cool music!

Hear It Here

The Doors – Morrison Hotel

This album features a bold mix of blues and psychedelia, with Robby Krieger’s unique twist on the blues all over tracks such as Waiting For The Sun, Blue Sunday (featuring a major 7th, rather than dominant 7th/Mixolydian feel) and Indian Summer, which really epitomises the mix of styles happening everywhere at the time (1970). Note the lack of distorted solos and how the lines are woven in and out of the chords themselves.

Cream – Royal Albert Hall 2-3-5-6 2005 (Live)

Taken from Cream’s reunion/farewell concerts, these recordings show that the spirit was still strong in this trio, with that trademark exploratory approach from the turn of the 60s and 70s. 

Check out I’m So Glad (a Mixolydian chord progression by virtue of including a D major chord), Rollin’ and Tumblin’ and, of course, Crossroads – a very Mixolydian-style riff, with the bonus of alternative solos to the classic original.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Are You Experienced

Dating back to 1967, it’s probably fair to call this a benchmark of the collision between blues and psychedelia that was happening at that time. Check out the very Mixolydian Love Or Confusion, Fire (which isn’t the most obvious example at first, but try a D Mixolydian over this for a perfect fit), and the title track for another very psychedelic approach to the Mixolydian (backwards solo optional).

Though not as much of a household name as the likes of Hendrix or Jimmy Page, Leslie West was a towering figure in hard-rock guitar.

His death last December provoked an outpouring of tributes from guitarists across the musical spectrum, a testament to the enormous influence of West's work with 70s hard-rock titans Mountain.

Another testament to West's enduring influence is Legacy, a newly-announced tribute to the guitarist with one of the greatest tribute album lineups we've ever seen.

You can check out a preview of the album, a rabble-rousing cover of Mountain's Blood Of The Sun by Zakk Wylde, below.

About that lineup, though. Aside from Wylde, Legacy features contributions from: Dee Snider, Slash, Randy and Tal Bachman, Martin Barre, Joe Lynn Turner, Charlie Starr, Elliot Easton, Robby Krieger, George Lynch, Marty Friedman, Steve Morse, Eddie Ojeda, Marc Labelle, Yngwie Malmsteen, Mike Portnoy, Bobby Rondinelli, and Rev Jones.

The album is set for a March 25 release via Provogue / Mascot Label Group, and can be preordered via Leslie West's website.

You can examine the album's cover art and tracklist below.

“Nobody in this world has ever made me feel loved as much as Leslie, and I feel so honored and grateful that I could give him this gift," said West's widow, Jenni, in a statement. “He would often say, ‘If it doesn’t make my balls rumble, it’s not right.’ And I think there’s some balls-rumbling tones on this record. 

"When you’re listening to it, you might even think it’s Leslie playing – and that’s a good thing. He really believed that adage of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.  Even when some of the players do their own twists on the music, they’re still doing it in a way that’s authentic and respectful, and Leslie would have appreciated that.”

Legacy: A Tribute to Leslie West

1. Blood of the Sun (feat. Zakk Wylde)
2. Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin) (feat. Joe Lynn Turner, Marty Friedman)
3. Theme for an Imaginary Western (feat. Dee Snider, Mike Portnoy)
4. For Yasgur's Farm (feat. Joe Lynn Turner, Martin Barre)
5. Why Dontcha (feat. Steve Morse, Ronnie Romero)
6. Sittin' On a Rainbow (feat. Elliot Easton, Ronnie Romero)
7. Never in My Life (feat. Dee Snider, George Lynch)
8. The Doctor (feat. Robby Krieger, Ronnie Romero)
9. Silver Paper (feat. Charlie Starr)
10. Money (Whatcha Gonna Do)/By the River – medley (feat. Randy Bachman & Tal Bachman)
11. Long Red (feat. Yngwie Malmsteen & Teddy Rondinelli)
12. Mississippi Queen (feat. Slash, Marc Labelle)

Although the Doors were formed less than a year before recording their debut album at Sunset Sound in August and September 1966, the band quickly developed its unique sound and advanced chops from playing four to five sets a day during a residency at London Fog and as the house band at the Whisky A Go Go on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. 

Guitarist Robby Krieger immediately earned praise for his sophisticated, jazz-inspired playing, a style that he remarkably developed quickly after making the transition from acoustic flamenco and folk to electric, also about a year before recording The Doors. 

After the band’s debut single, Break On Through, failed to do just that, the Doors released Light My Fire as a follow-up, which quickly shot up the charts before hitting Number One on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart.

The album version of Light My Fire remains an iconoclastic classic, with its unusual blend of a baroque-inspired organ figure, Jim Morrison’s charismatic vocals that range from lounge lizard crooning to aggressive screams and, especially, Krieger’s deftly melodic and jazzy solo.

Thanks to Krieger’s flamenco background, he avoided the usual pentatonic blues scale clichés that defined mid-'60s rock guitar. Krieger played fingerstyle without a pick, which, coupled with his lightly overdriven tone, gave his guitar a rich, warm tone that had more in common with players like Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell than Eric Clapton or Mike Bloomfield. 

His guitar was a 1964 Gibson SG Special solidbody with a pair of P90 single-coil pickups, which he plugged into a rented Fender Twin Reverb amp. Beyond his fingerstyle technique, another key to Krieger’s warm tone is the fact that he preferred the sound of old, dirty strings. 

“I never change my strings,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “The older they get, the better they are for me. Sure, they go dead, but I like a dead sound. The dirtier, the better.”

Original Gear

GUITAR: 1964 Gibson SG Special (neck pickup), Volume: 10,  Tone: 10
AMPS: c. 1965-66 Fender Twin Reverb (Input: Vibrato Channel 1, Bright: On, Volume: 7, Treble: 8, Middle: 5, Bass: 2, Reverb: 2, Speed: 0, Intensity: 0) with unknown pair of 12-inch speakers, probably Jensen C12N or Oxford 12T6  
EFFECTS: None  
STRINGS/TUNING: Ernie Ball Slinky .010-.046/Standard
PICK: None

Get the sound, cheap!

Epiphone SG Special P-90

Fender Tone Master Twin Reverb

Tone Tip: The narrow placement of the SG Special’s P-90 pickups, with the neck pickup closer to the middle than usual, provides a slightly sharper attack critical to this song’s guitar tone. Get your chops up, too, as the bulk of the sound lies in the fingers.

Robby Krieger, who played electric guitar with The Doors, has announced his first-ever memoir, titled Set The Night On Fire: Living, Dying, And Playing Guitar With The Doors.

Due out on October 12 via Little, Brown and Company, the upcoming offering will take a deep dive into Krieger’s life, and promises to shed new light on the band’s meteoric career.

A description of the book’s contents reads, “Through a series of vignettes, Robby Krieger takes readers back to where it all happened: the pawn shop where he bought his first guitar; the jail cell he was tossed into after a teenage bust [and] his parents’ living room where his first songwriting sessions with Jim Morrison took place.”

The book will also explore “the empty bars and backyard parties where The Doors played their first awkward gigs; the studios where their iconic songs were recorded and the many concert venues that erupted into historic riots."

The 432-page book is set to be filled with never-before-told stories from the most pivotal points in The Doors’ career, and will offer up fresh perspectives on the band’s most celebrated and infamous moments.

Robby Krieger’s Set The Night On Fire is available to preorder now in digital and hardback formats for $13.89 and $24.49. The audiobook version, on CD, is also available to preorder for $39.73.

“I didn't play Doors music for a long time after Ray Manzarek passed away,” sighs Robby Krieger. Instead, when Manzarek, his longtime friend and keyboard foil in the Doors – the group in which both musicians became rock legends in 1960s alongside drummer John Densmore and late singer Jim Morrison – passed away in 2013 from cancer, Krieger took a break from performing Doors material for the next half-decade and threw himself into the jazzier side of his musical personality. 

He deepened his alliance with Frank Zappa bassist/arranger Arthur Barrow – not to mention Zappa alumni like keyboardist Tommy Mars and trumpeter Sal Marquez. 

The result, honed over several years of live gigs and studio dates, is the bebop- and fusion-infused instrumental LP The Ritual Begins at Sundown, which boasts an original Krieger abstract painting on the cover and the kind of altered-scale-tinged melodic heads one might associate with players like John Scofield, Kurt Rosenwinkel or even Zappa, whom Krieger pays homage to on a blazing cover of Chunga’s Revenge.

It features wicked horn/guitar harmonies and a wild free-form solo that recalls Zappa’s SG through-a-parked-wah tone and the almost-dissonant flurries and fuzz arcs of Krieger’s solo on the Doors’ When the Music’s Over.

“It was very collaborative on Ritual,” Krieger says. “Much more so than my earlier solo albums, like [1989’s] No Habla or [2010’s] Singularity. I might start something off, and Arthur would come in with some ideas; Tommy would add melodies, too.” 

Horns and guitars work off each other in funky syncopation on The Hitch or play in bebop-approved unison on the long mixolydian-flavored lines of Dr. Noir. 

When his turn comes to blow, I ask, is Robby thinking in terms of particular modes, chord tones, scales or arpeggios?

“I tend not to think about that stuff,” he explains. “For me, it just gets mechanical when I do that. I just like to see where the music takes me. A lot of the solos on Ritual were overdubbed, and I have a certain way of doing that, which is playing into the solo as far as I can go, deciding if I want to keep what I’ve got so far, then punching in at that point. 

“I keep that process going until I finish it. It’s not exactly comping – I don’t really care for the results when you comp together, like, five or six different takes of a solo and pick the best parts. That doesn’t really work for me.”

Comping of a kind certainly worked for Krieger – though in an unexpected way – when he recorded the landmark guitar solo on 1967’s When the Music’s Over, from Strange Days, at L.A.’s Sunset Sound, tracking the guitar solo several times, standing directly in front of his Twin Reverb and early Gibson Maestro Fuzz-Tone pedal. 

“I always like to be really near the amp, to keep the dynamics going between guitar and amp,” he says. “Engineers are always trying to stick the cabinets in an iso [isolation] booth, but that never works for my sound.” 

When the sound “still wasn’t happening,” Krieger says, he asked producer Paul Rothchild if there was “some way to make it sound almost like a violin” – total sustain.

“Paul opens his briefcase,” Krieger recalls, “and he pulls out this little diode, or some fucking thing, and he says, ‘Wait 10 minutes.’ He solders the thing into one of the channels on the board, and that was it. That’s what created that sound. I wish I could have bottled that. I’ve been trying to reproduce that sound ever since!” 

That wasn’t the only bit of magic-in-a-bottle on Krieger’s solo. 

“So, after I cut maybe four or five versions of the solo, when we were listening back, Bruce Botnick, the engineer, had left two of the solos up [on the mixing board] by accident. Bruce goes, “Oh, sorry, I had two of them going there. Wait a minute…” And we said, “No! Leave that right alone! That might work!” And it did; it worked fucking perfectly.”

As with the Doors, Krieger’s playing still retains flashes of his early flamenco heroes like Sabicas, rock, jazz and blues giants like Chuck Berry, Wes Montgomery and Albert King, folkies from Dave Van Ronk to Bob Dylan, and world-music avatars like Ravi Shankar.

On last year’s 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition of the Doors’ 1969 album The Soft Parade, Krieger added terrific new solos to stripped-down alternate mixes of Touch Me, Wishful Sinful and Runnin’ Blue, replacing those songs’ heavy orchestrations with his lithe licks and a grittier “Doors only” sound.

Krieger remains a huge admirer of his late Doors bandmates’ musicianship, pointing to Manzarek’s lyrical piano playing on the Krieger original Yes, the River Knows, [from 1968’s Waiting for the Sun] which is covered on Ritual with Robby playing the vocal lines on slide. 

“That’s one of the best parts Ray ever played,” he beams. “People usually think about Ray on Light My Fire or Riders on the Storm, but I wish they’d recognize Ray for that one.”

After so many years of myth-making and misunderstanding about Jim Morrison, what does Krieger wish people would remember best about Jim from a musical point of view?

“Jim had the most amazing vocal range I’ve ever heard,” Krieger says. “And not only the range, but the power – and he was never out of tune. Jim was a total natural. It’s amazing how many people think they can sing like Jim but can’t really do it. 

“Jim had this incredible power in his voice, and I don’t know where it came from, because he definitely didn’t have it at first, but it developed really fast. At our first gigs, Jim sounded like a kid, which, I suppose, he was. But, man, he turned into the most amazing singer.”

The Gear Parade, with Robby’s Tech: Wild Child’s Forrest Penner

“Forrest knows my parts better than I do!“ laughs Robby Krieger, talking about his longtime guitar tech, Forrest Penner, who’s also been the axman for L.A.’s premier Doors tribute act, Wild Child, since the mid Eighties.

“One of the first times we played together on stage,” recalls Penner, “Robby invited me up to play the double solo on When the Music’s Over with him, and after it was done, he turned to me and said, ‘Now, that’s how it’s supposed to sound!”

Penner, who’s also teched for Jefferson Starship, Doyle Bramhall and others, was so well-versed in Krieger’s vocabulary, that he even subbed for Robby on some huge Manzarek/Krieger Band shows in Mexico and South America when the Doors guitarist fell ill in 2011. 

“I was a little stressed, because after each of the first few songs, the audience was cheering, and chanting, “Rob-BY, Rob-BY,’ so Ray had to explain who I was, and why Robby himself wasn’t there. But the audience was great about it.”

Krieger’s main ax, says Penner, is a brownish-red 1967 Gibson SG, which Krieger bought used about 25 years ago. (His original SG Special with P-90s from the first few Doors albums was stolen many years back.)

“It plays magnificently,” says Penner, with a thin neck profile, and a Gibson Maestro Lyre Vibrola tailpiece. Krieger also plays a circa-2000 Gibson SG RK-1 Robby Krieger Signature model set up for slide in either open-G or open-D. Penner strings both guitars with Ernie Ball 2221 Regular Slinky Nickel Wound strings, .010-.046.

Live, Krieger typically plays through a Fender Hot Rod DeVille 4x10 combo amp, though he was best known for using Magnatone, Fender Twin Reverb, and Acoustic 260 amps in the Sixties.

When Krieger, who’d been using a BOSS ME-10 multi-effector, expressed an interest in Penner’s more boutique-leaning board with Wild Child, Penner built Robby a similar custom board, using a Pedal Train Classic chassis and a Tru-Tone 1-Spot Pro power supply.

From the guitar, using a Cordial Encore braided High Copper Series cable, Krieger’s SG hits a Boss TU-2 tuner, Dunlop Mini Cry Baby Wah, Boss CE-B Bass Chorus (for Love Her Madly), Boss TR-2 Tremolo (for Riders on the Storm, Strange Days and others), a vintage Ibanez TS-808 Tube Screamer with light gain, a reissue TS-808 Tube Screamer with heavy gain, an Xotic Effects SP Compressor for clean boost, a TC Electronic Flashback Delay, and a BOSS DD-7 Digital Delay, with an expression pedal to modify the wet/dry mix. An Ernie Ball VP Jr Volume Pedal rounds out the board.

“Robby’s parts are interesting,” Penner says, “because at first they might seem easy to play, but they’re very hard to play accurately. A lot of people wouldn’t guess, for instance, that Robby played the riff to Roadhouse Blues with his fingers, not a pick. 

“He also plays with his fingers on Love Me Two Times, 20th Century Fox and many more. For those parts, I use a hybrid pick/fingers technique myself – but using your fingers is the only way to really get the Robby sound.”

The Doors were many things. They played rock. They played jazz. They played blues, too. And the LA group’s charismatic singer Jim Morrison, inheriting the Beat Generation’s countercultural posture, wrote poetic lyrics oscillating between the psychonautic free-lovin’ spirit of the '60s and a foreshadowing of the darkness that would consume that decade’s end. 

There was light and shade in The Doors’ sound. There were psychedelic pop hooks, proto-funk rhythms, morbid visions, sex and death.  

As a guitar player, Robby Krieger pushed the envelope. He developed a hybrid jazz-blues style, was red-hot with a slide, and had flamenco chops gleaned from lessons with the late theatre actor Frank Chin. 

This flamenco hot sauce often found itself spicing up The Doors’ compositions because... well, why not? There was an element of chance to The Doors’ writing and no rules, a dynamic that felt entirely in keeping with an era riven with chaos - when everything was up for grabs.

The escalating war in Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Manson Family murders; The Doors’ discography came together as America’s social fabric came apart.

Of course the '60s cataclysmic denouement would take its toll on The Doors. Morrison’s drinking worsened with a thunderhead of external crises gathering overhead – sex and death in life and in verse. Yet their songwriting lost little of its prescience in charting the emotional cadences of the decade’s bloom and ultimate rot.

But, perhaps most of all, The Doors were a state of mind. Taking their name from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 hallucinatory observations from his experiments with mescaline, The Doors Of Perception, how could they be anything else?

As Robby Krieger tells it over the soft clipping of a lo-fi Skype line, the expansion of their minds – chemically, musically and otherwise – was a crucial staging post in The Doors’ evolution.

Krieger is going to be telling us about his new album, The Ritual Begins At Sundown, a work of freewheeling instrumentals written and recorded with his old friend and Frank Zappa collaborator Arthur Barrow, among others, but all in good time, because the story of The Doors’ sound and Krieger’s guitar methodology is inextricably linked.

And so, back to the mid-'60s and mind-altering creative epiphanies, as Krieger, drummer John Densmore and keyboard player Ray Manzarek bonded over an interest in transcendence, and finding a natural alternative to LSD...

Perhaps it was kismet that such a headspace would draw three acid freaks together for an audience with the father of Transcendental Meditation and The Beatles’ spiritual consigliere, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

As Krieger recalls, chuckling: “John and Ray and I had taken acid quite a bit before The Doors. I think we had taken too much acid, so we were looking for something different!

“And that’s how the three of us really met, in a meditation meeting the first time the Maharishi came to LA. It was at my friend’s house and it just so happened that three out of the four Doors were at that meeting.”

The fourth Door, meanwhile, was beating his own path to transcendence, and it was a route familiar to Krieger.

“Jim was just getting into acid at the time,” says Krieger. “He was all excited about it, and it was great because it kept him from getting drunk which was his normal thing in college, and which I don’t think helped his creativity or anybody else’s that much.”

Like Manzarek, Morrison was a graduate from UCLA film school. Both studied under the likes of Josef von Sternberg, viewed cutting avant-garde films and pursued a bohemian lifestyle. Dropping acid and smoking pot helped Morrison dial in his mojo.

“With the acid and the marijuana, I know it really helped him to write songs,” says Krieger, “because the first five or six songs that he wrote, Jim was living at a friend’s and was on a rooftop, and he smoked this Acapulco Gold and he said it was like a concert playing inside his head and all he had to do was write it down.”

Ideas came easy. By 1966, the Doors had residencies at the London Fog and Whisky a Go Go, workshopping their sound onstage. If there was freedom in how The Doors shared ideas, there were practical considerations to work around.

The likes of Doug Lubahn, Harvey Brooks and Lonnie Mack would become studio pinch-hitters on bass, but, live and when writing, Krieger and Manzarek had to fill the space in the mix. Manzarek used his Fender Rhodes Piano Bass.

Krieger, for his part, adjusted his playing style accordingly. “We never really planned it or talked about it much,” he says. “It just kinda happened. That was really where I developed my style, because we didn’t have a bass player.

“So Ray would play left hand on the piano bass, and because of that it would make him play a certain way with his right hand, and it would make me play a certain way, too. And Densmore. It was just a very odd group of musicians who came together but the results were pretty good.”

In a taste of things to come, Morrison’s confrontational presence got the band fired from the Whisky, his Oedipal ad-libs while performing The End were considered beyond the pale. But The Doors were going places, signing with Elektra in 1966 and entering Sunset Sound to record their eponymous debut.

Paul A. Rothchild was hired as producer, Bruce Botnick as engineer. Krieger couldn’t have been happier.

“We loved Paul,” says Krieger. “When I learned that he was going to produce us, I was really excited. I thought that was amazing. In fact, he was my favorite producer way from before The Doors, because I had been listening to the stuff he produced when I was in high school, like the Paul Butterfield Band, the Even Dozen Jug Band and there was an album called The Blues Project that he did with all kinds of cool and unknown players – at least to us on the west coast.

“He was from Boston. It was a whole different scene going on there. When I was at Menlo School, this private school up in Menlo Park [in San Francisco Bay Area], a lot of the kids were from back east and they brought all of this music that I had never even dreamed about.

“A lot of it was produced by Paul. He really did help us on the first three or four albums because we had never recorded before. He taught us a lot. By the time we did [1971 album] LA Woman, we all knew how to produce a record, pretty much.”

In the studio, recording the debut album, there were tantrums and magic. Having been distracted by its glow while tracking Light My Fire, Jim Morrison launched a TV set at the control room window, ending Botnick’s chances of sneaking a peak at the LA Dodgers game between takes.

On another occasion, Morrison nearly destroyed the studio with a fire extinguisher after a bad trip. But the music was coming together. Krieger had few options when it came to choosing stompboxes to place between his guitar and his trusty Fender Twin Reverb, but that sort of restriction can be liberating, and besides, Sunset had some good stuff on-site.

“The only one I had was a fuzz pedal, which was a Gibson [FZ-1 Maestro] fuzz pedal, the first one they had,” says Krieger. “Yeah, it was pretty good but I didn’t really use it that much, especially for recording. I used it live more. But, yeah, in those days you couldn’t rely on effects to do much.”

Krieger did make full use of Sunset Sounds’ echo chamber. “We had this great echo chamber for the first two or three albums,” he says. “It was a real room, and it had the hard walls. You’d put a microphone in there and it made an echo.

“Some were better than others. Up at Capitol, they had some really great ones, too. But this one at Sunset was really a nice sounding echo. If you go back and listen to that first record, I might have overdone it on the echo! [Laughs] But it was so nice. We couldn’t help ourselves.”

When the album was wrapped, The End, the most debauched epic of the '60s, had made it onto the record. Butnick’s TV was swept up and Light My Fire was completed, becoming the Doors’ biggest hit. The Doors were established.

With Krieger’s unorthodox phrasing trading classical and Muddy Waters licks with Manzarak’s Vox Continental, Densmore’s touch-sensitive drumming and Morrison’s total conviction as the poet-singer, there was no band like the Doors.

What can we learn from them? What did Krieger learn? Maybe the biggest lesson is you’ve got to listen, you’ve got to give your songs space to breathe.

“Well, if you notice in the Doors’ music there are a lot of silences,” he explains. “We weren’t the type of band that had to fill up every little gap. Not only that, there were dynamics, which you don’t tend to find today at all. That was a jazz thing. People who really listen to each other when they play more than just shredding.”

Much of the Doors was a ‘jazz thing’. Krieger and Densmore – a high-school jazz band alumnus – would hit jazz clubs and immerse themselves in it. It opened Krieger’s mind to the potential of in-the-moment composition. Jazz seemed to count out infinite possibilities.

“It was definitely a factor in our music. Definitely,” says Krieger. “If you listen to Light My Fire, that part in the middle, the instrumental part, that was inspired by Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. It is the same chord structure.”

And it has so many chord changes. “When I wrote that, I said to myself, ‘Okay, I’m going to put every chord I know into this song! [Laughs] So yeah, the way it starts off, I think there’s seven chords just in that intro. G to D to F to Bb, Eb, Ab, A. People don’t realise how many chords are in that song.”

The Ritual Begins At Sundown continues in this trajectory, loosely orbiting jazz, fusion and funk. The lineup features a number of Zappa alumni; Barrow on bass, Jock Ellis on trombone, Sal Marquez on trumpet and Tommy Mars on keys.

And they’re joined by Joel Wackerman and Joel Taylor on drums, AeB Byrne on flute, and saxophonists Vince Denim and Chuck Manning.

Krieger painted the album cover, an abstraction of a sunset. When asked, he describes his painting as “very free-form” but isn’t that true of his approach to the guitar, too?

“Well, I never thought of it that way, but yes, for me, painting and playing music is very similar,” he says. “There’s an element of chance to it. I try not to be constrained by your normal verse/chorus kind of thing.”

There’s a version of Yes, The River Knows, one of Krieger’s favorite Doors tracks, on the record. “If you listen to Ray’s part, it really is one of the best piano parts he ever did,” he says. It features Krieger’s slide guitar sitting in for Morrison’s vocals.

Krieger would typically use his Gibson SG or Les Paul "Black Beauty," but not this time.

“I was over at Arthur’s house and he has this cheap, old Kay guitar and for some reason it sounds good on the slide, so I used that,” laughs Krieger. “I used that quite a bit for my slide in the last five years or so.”

Is that another lesson in there – that you don’t need a $2000 guitar? “The first guitar I had when I first was in The Doors was a cheap Gibson Melody Maker, a $180 Gibson, and that sounded pretty good, y’know? Not even a real SG, just a Melody Maker with those single-coil pickups, and it worked. I always say it is not the guitar that matters.”

• Robby Krieger's The Ritual Begins At Sundown is out now via Mascot.

What was the last guitar you bought and why?

“I didn’t really buy it, I traded it. I was doing some recording with Alice Cooper and the guitar player had a ’61 Les Paul Junior. I always liked those. I’d just had a [Gibson] signature model made of my SG, so I traded him for that. It had the wide, flat neck of a Les Paul Junior from ’61. Gibson did a run of 100 of those. It came out good. They also did my ’54 Les Paul Black Beauty.”

What was the first serious guitar you bought with your own money?

“It wasn’t my own money, it was my dad’s money. He was going over to Spain on business and I told him, ‘Listen, you’ve got to go to this guitar shop called Ramirez in downtown Madrid and pick up a Flamenco guitar for me and I’ll pay you back.’ And for $200 he got this beautiful ’63 Flamenco guitar, which I still have. 

"I wrote Spanish Caravan on it. Flamenco was the first lesson I took that I was serious about, especially since I had this cool guitar. Actually, I had a pretty cool Flamenco guitar before that one that was made in Mexico by Ramirez’s nephew. Mexico make some pretty high-end guitars if you look for them.”

What’s your best guitar-buying tip?

“I wouldn’t buy a guitar sight unseen on the internet. I like to make sure they sound good and I like light guitars - I don’t like them too heavy. If you’re a collector or something like that it might be okay, but I don’t have a lot of guitars just sitting around in a warehouse; I use them.

"I’ve got about 35 guitars. I went over to Richie Sambora’s house one day and he’s got quite a few. Although no one compares to Joe Bonamassa.”

What’s the most incredible find or bargain you’ve ever had when buying guitars?

“Well, the one that’s worth the most is my ’60 Les Paul Sunburst that I picked up about 15 years ago. This friend of mine who is a real Les Paul freak saw it down at the Guitar Center and told me about it, so I went there and got it.”

What’s the strongest case of buyer’s remorse that you’ve ever had?

“Years ago, I had a chance to buy the best Les Paul I’d ever seen. It was the most flame-y ’Burst ever. It almost looked painted. It was like the guitar was on fire or something. The guy said he wanted $3,500 for it and I said, ‘Are you kidding? No guitar is worth $3,500 dollars!’ It’d be worth at least half a million today. Should’ve bought that one [laughs]!”

Have you ever sold a guitar that you now intensely regret letting go of?

“My first guitar that I used in The Doors - a Gibson Melody Maker - got stolen. But I didn’t even care. I just went and got another one. In those days there were no collectable guitars. Today, that guitar would be worth a lot... 

"About 20 years ago, I sold a ’59 dot-neck 335 for some reason. I wish I still had that one. I bought it a few years before that and I don’t know why I sold it. I think I had my eyes on a 355 that I bought and thought, ‘I don’t need that any more.’”

Are there any common design features on electric guitars that are an instant turn-off when you’re auditioning potential new guitars?

“All I know is how it sounds and how it plays. And I can tell right away if a guitar plays good or not, and if it sounds good. It sometimes takes me a while to get used to a guitar. Sometimes, after a month of playing, it’s not as good as I thought it was... 

"I just don’t see why people like Telecasters so much. It’s not my style. To me, a Strat is a lot better and more playable than a Tele.”

When was the last time you stopped to stare in a guitar shop window and what were you looking at?

“I go into the Guitar Center every once in a while, but, to tell you truth, I haven’t really seen anything that I would want to buy that would be better than what I’ve already got. My number one is the one I always use on stage - a ’67 SG Standard, similar to the one I had back in The Doors days. For some reason, it just plays really, really nice. It has a skinny neck, but I’m more into wide necks.

"I think it’s more about the sound. I got that about 25 years ago. Before that, I used a 335 mostly, like Larry Carlton.”

If forced to make a choice, would you rather buy a really good guitar and a cheap amp - or a cheap guitar and a top-notch amp?

“A cheap amp, I think. You can always get another amp, but it’s not so easy to find a good guitar. I like the [Fender] Blues DeVille with the 4x10s. I really like those. I seem to get what I need out of them. I really like the old ’59 Twin, but they’re hard to find. I’ve been looking for one and Joe Bonamassa said he’s got a bunch of them. 

"He said he’d sell me one, but every time I call him, he’s on tour [laughs].”

If you could only use humbuckers or single coils for the rest of your life which one would you choose and why?

“Humbuckers. Even though my guitar on the first two albums was a single-coil Melody Maker. It sounded pretty good! But they buzz so much, you know. I didn’t really think about it that much when that Melody Maker got stolen and the next guitar had humbuckers on it. 

"I just kind of got used to it... I bet someone has my [guitar] but just doesn’t know it.”

What’s your favorite guitar shop and why?

“My favorite one was a pawn shop called Ace Loans in Santa Monica. It’s not there any more. It eventually became just a guitar shop, because they became so famous for selling guitars. 

"There was a guy called Hank there and he was a wheeler-dealer kind of guy. I used to make a deal with him. That’s where I got my first Melody Maker for $180 - and that was brand-new. They had old ones, too.”

Even as the weather heats up, and more folks begin to poke their heads out from their coronavirus-induced self-isolation periods, here at GW, we’ve still got our ears sharply to the ground for the best in new guitar music.

Fortunately, even as the industry’s release schedule has slimmed down, as it does at the onset of every summer, we’ve managed to collect a wonderfully diverse bundle of new pieces of music.

From an experimental, avant-garde guitar blast from Bill Nace, to an all-too-timely, politically-charged hip-hop/metalcore crossover from I Prevail and Joyner Lucas, to a powerful, riff-heavy beast from Black Star Riders, we’ve got an embarrassment of riches this week.   

So take a breather, disengage for a few minutes and enjoy some killer new tunes!

Behemoth - Evoe

Earlier this year, Behemoth mastermind Nergal teased new music, telling us “we are really at the peak of our career: great shape, fucking hungry and ready to go”, and judging from Evoe, his bravado is well-deserved.

Evoe is taken from the sessions for I Loved You At Your Darkest, and marries past and present Behemoth perfectly, with devilishly atonal leads, groove-led chorus refrains, and a whopping great alt-picked solo from lead guitarist Seth (aka Patryk Dominik Sztyber). (MAB)

I Prevail - DOA (feat. Joyner Lucas)

In a reimagining of a track from their latest album TRAUMA, Michigan metallers I Prevail unveil a new version of DOA - this time featuring rapper Joyner Lucas. It’s a fiercely political track in message, with impactful and potentially disturbing images in the video (viewer discretion advised).

Musically, the track features big riffs and a solid arrangement all-round. Evoking strong nostalgia for the nu-metal heyday of the early 2000s, it’s a stylistic knockout and a perfect example of why the mixing of genres creates some of the most powerful results. (SR)

Bill Nace - Both, Part 8

A legend of avant-garde guitar who's made his name with challenging, varied but deeply-rewarding collaborations with the likes of Steve Gunn and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon, Bill Nace has done just as much to push the guitar's boundaries in recent decades as any headline-grabbing, arena-headlining rock star. 

His latest solo effort, Both, is an immersive collection of beautifully constructed, form-evading guitar improvisations - with the eighth and final piece on the record standing out as one of its most accessible and fascinating moments. Jagged, effects-washed riffing weaves beautifully with mournful cries of feedback, creating a desolate but spellbinding guitar soundscape. (JM)

Black Star Riders - Candidate for Heartbreak

One of classic-leaning hard-rock’s premier bands take a political turn with their latest single - Candidate for Heartbreak was first released on the deluxe edition of 2019’s Another State of Grace, but its message seems particularly prescient given the current state of the world.

The guitar work is exemplary as ever, given the pedigree of the band’s two players - the solo section sees Scott Gorham and Christian Martucci get busy with some trademark Lizzy-esque twin-guitar harmonies, before Martucci brings the leads home with some slick legato work. (MAB)

Robby Krieger - Hot Head

The Doors’ iconic Gibson-toting six-stringer releases The Ritual Begins At Sundown, his ninth solo album - and first in a decade - this year, and Hot Head points towards one seriously searing fusion release.

While Hot Head’s main, erm, head is very much steeped in trad-jazz melodically, Krieger’s overdriven tone, bathed in a rich analog delay, contributes to a more contemporary psychedelic feel. (MAB)

Slaves - Wasting My Youth

The American post-hardcore five-piece strikes again with Wasting My Youth, the fifth single from their upcoming studio album, To Better Days (expected August 2020).

It has to be said that the production on this track is damn-near perfect, and with all elements cutting through with great clarity, it puts the explorative guitar lines on full display. This one’s a true listening pleasure. (SR)

Painted Zeros - I Will Try

Painted Zeros, the band led by Brooklyn-based musician Katie Lau, are finally releasing their sophomore effort, When You Found Forever, a full five years after their solid 2015 debut, Floriography. From the sounds of it, the wait has been more than worth it. 

The third single from the album, I Will Try, details Lau's renewed lease on life after three years of sobriety. During such a dark, unsettled time in the world, Lau's lyrical candor and triumphant outlook are incredibly refreshing - while bold 'n' loud guitars hammer the song's towering chorus home with authority. The twisty, math-indebted solo at the end wraps it all in a perfect bow. (JM)

Within Temptation - Entertain You

Dutch symphonic metallers Within Temptation have honed their craft over the last near-quarter-century, and each release seems to get better and better. Take Entertain You, the group’s first track since 2019’s Resist: a headbang-inducing riot with an earth-shattering guitar riff and an undeniably catchy chorus.

And it looks like we’re in for regular new music from the band, too, with vocalist Sharon den Adel stating: “We’re going to release a few singles every year – at least this year and next year, and then we’re going to drop the album.” (SR)

Hater - Sift

The latest single to land from Swedish indie-pop upstarts Hater was intended to support their now-postponed US tour with Radio Dept, but we’re glad they released it regardless.

Sift starts saccharine sweet, all chiming single coils and arpeggiated chords, but takes a darkly beautiful turn at the track’s close - it’s a brooding, contemplative sound that will please alt- and post-rock fans alike. (MAB)

Over the past few weeks of self-quarantining we’ve witnessed Brian May teach Bohemian Rhapsody, Kiss’ Paul Stanley do Love Gun and Johnny Marr demonstrate how to play several Smiths classics.

Now Doors electric guitar legend Robby Krieger has jumped into the video-lesson waters with a new clip demonstrating how to play the band’s classic 1970 song, Roadhouse Blues, filmed in his home studio.

“It’s been the request of the guitar-lesson-fan crowd,” Krieger explains, ever-present cherry red Gibson SG in hand.

Krieger begins the video by running through the song’s prominent sections, including the iconic single-note opening riff, the chorus vamp (“it’s just a regular old blues kind of A”) and the ending lead lick.

Krieger then puts on the original recording and plays through the entire song.

“And that’s it!,” he says. “Hope you liked it.”

Thankfully, there’s more to come, with Krieger promising upcoming videos covering Spanish Caravan and Moonlight Drive.

One he still hasn’t decided to tackle, however, is Light My Fire. 

As Krieger signs off, the iconic song begins to play in the background. Which leads the guitarist to yell at his sound system, “Not that one yet! Shut up!”

It's Friday, so you know what that means... This week's essential guitar tracks! Here's where the Guitar World team collate our favorite guitar tracks from the past week, delivering the best six-string listening material that's been hitting our collective eardrums. And given the restrictions placed upon many people at the moment, now might just be the time to expand your musical mind.

This week we’ve got everything from progressive groove-djent metal to contemporary R&B licks and even a new track from veteran rockers Deep Purple. Enjoy!

Melanie Faye - It’s A Moot Point

We’ve been keeping a close eye on this Nashville R&B prodigy since she first went viral back in 2017. In that time, Faye's career has seen her work with the likes of Mac DeMarco, Willow Smith and Hayley Williams, while she’s also appeared as the face of Fender’s Player Stratocaster.

All that experience is showcased in new single It’s A Moot Point, a laid-back R&B groove complete with Hendrixian rhythm work, jazz-inflected chord changes, and rapid-fire bursts of the most exquisitely phrased soul licks outside of Mateus Asato. This is the sound of guitar in 2020 - more of this, please. (MAB)

Devin Townsend - Quarantine

Canada’s favorite mad prog scientist was one of countless guitarists who saw their touring schedules wiped out by the coronavirus outbreak over the past few weeks. Following the launch of a GoFundMe campaign, which quickly amassed the $50,000 goal required to offset the costs of the cancelled tour, Townsend uploaded the aptly named Quarantine to say thank you.

The ethereal, pared-down recording recalls Pink Floyd at their most contemplative, but a high-gain middle-eight modulation serves as a comforting reminder that Hevy Devy ain’t going anywhere. (MAB)

Deep Purple - Throw My Bones

This four-to-the-floor rocker is the lead-off track from the Brit-rock stalwarts’ 21st album, Whoosh!, which lands on June 12 and, rather confusingly, follows the band’s recent Long Goodbye Tour.

Although Don Airey’s synth stabs dominate the track, Morse’s percussive rhythm playing provides the unshakeable backbone - and when he gets his chance to shine, the virtuoso thrusts his Ernie Ball Music Man into epic territory, with wide, vocal bends, taken up a notch by by some cunningly employed chromatic passing notes. (MAB)

Paradise Lost - Fall from Grace

Kicking off with a characteristic slow-tempo riff, Paradise Lost’s latest single Fall from Grace develops slowly into a somber epic of melody and doom in which the guitars take center stage.

Guitarists Greg Mackintosh and Aaron Aedy showcase their fretboard dominance, trading riffs, licks and solos throughout the track’s near six-minute duration. This is gothic metal at its finest - and what a timely release. (SR)

Robby Krieger - Slide Home

Jim Morrison was always going to be the most iconic member of The Doors. With an electric stage presence, tabloid-ready on- and offstage antics and (for their time) radical, apocalyptic lyrics, he made The Doors much larger than life. Without the impeccable six-string skills of bandmate Robby Krieger, though, Morrison’s psychedelic poetry wouldn’t have had a fraction of its power.

Just one listen to Krieger’s new single, Slide Home, is enough to prove that - more than half a century after The Doors’ heyday - Krieger’s still got it. His slide playing on this instrumental gem is beautifully melodic, evoking a place far more blissful than our current, troubled reality. (JM)

Caligula’s Horse - The Tempest

And now, for the best of contemporary Aussie prog-metal. Brisbane five-piece Caligula’s Horse conjure a storm with The Tempest, a time signature-shifting guitar masterclass that’s tastefully interspersed with classical instruments throughout. Guitarists Sam Vallen and Adrian Goleby lock in tightly with drummer Josh Griffin for the track’s almost five minutes, delivering some serious six-string ear candy.

The Tempest comes ahead of the band’s fifth full-length studio album Rise Radiant, which the band have dubbed the “culmination of their artistic development.” Should be good, then. (SR)

Sasami - Mess

Sasami Ashworth’s 2019 debut album was one of the year’s best. Packed to the brim with perfectly minimalist guitar playing - there was hardly a note on the record that felt out of place - tight, powerful arrangements and uncompromisingly personal, deeply affecting lyrics, it was an album with true staying power in our age of constant media and information bombardment.

Sasami’s new, non-album single, Mess, is no different. If the no-time-for-bullshit lyrics and dreamy, almost country-ish leads that dot the first verse don’t pull you in straight away, the tasty, fuzz-drenched solo that injects itself into the song less than a minute in certainly will. (JM)

Upon A Burning Body - Built from War

Texan four-piece Upon a Burning Body's Built from War is a driving metal freight train that’s certain to whet the appetite of any rock-inclined guitarist. 

Resident axeman Ruben Alvarez puts on a furious display of fiery fretwork in the form of face-melting guitar solos and pounding drop-tuned riffs, instrumentally bolstering the song’s lyrical call-to-arms and solidifying the track as a true heavy-metal home run. (SR)

Shattered Skies - Born of Solder

Progressive groove-djent metal makes a welcome appearance in this week’s list, courtesy of British quartet Shattered Skies. Born of Solder features some of the most impressively tight playing we’ve heard in a while, with guitar and bass riffs in perfect synergy, mind-bending beats and a catchy melodic chorus vocal that fits surprisingly well with the instrumental section.

Tap-happy guitarist Ian Rockett uses a Strandberg to deploy his arsenal of leads - a brand that’s, to say the least, well-regarded amongst the community’s more prog-inclined players. (SR)

Alice In Chains were joined by Robbie Krieger at their sold-out show at the Hollywood Palladium in L.A. on Wednesday, August 29. The Doors guitarist came out to accompany the band on “Rooster,” from Alice in Chains’ 1992 album Dirt.

Also in attendance at the sold-out show were director Cameron Crowe, comedian George Lopez and Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan.

Jerry Cantrell wrote on his official Instagram page: 

“Robby Krieger was kind enough to join us to close the show on Rooster at the palladium tonight. One of my musical heroes , friend and occasional golf partner.... what an honor especially in LA.”

Wrote Alice in Chains co-vocalist William Duvall on his own Instagram page: 

“Yes, that’s Robby Krieger of THE DOORS jamming onstage w/ us at the Hollywood Palladium tonight. And, yes, he is playing one of my @framuswarwickofficial Talisman guitars (which he told me he loved). And, no, I still can’t believe it actually happened. Robby Krieger is one of my absolute heroes - a rocker with the heart of a jazzman. He introduced Coltrane/Ravi Shankar-style improvisation to rock guitar while also being a great pop songwriter for the Doors. Robby wrote some of their biggest hits, including “Light My Fire,” which was the first song he EVER wrote (talk about comin’ in hot), and “Love Me Two Times.” He’s a truly great all-around musician and it was a tremendous honor to share the stage with him tonight.”

Alice in Chains’ new album, Rainier Fog, was released on Friday, August 24. Earlier this year, Cantrell described the sound of the album to Guitar World: 

“It’s a record we haven’t done yet, I can tell you that,” he said. “But it’s also a record that has all the elements of anything you would expect from us. It’s got our fingerprint. And we’re really proud of the material that we wrote and the performances we captured. There’s some really heavy shit, some really ugly stuff, some real beautiful stuff, some weirdo trippy shit… it’s good!”

The band recently resumed the third leg of their international headlining tour. All upcoming tour dates can be found here.

Robby Krieger played some memorable electric guitar parts during his time with the Doors. These include a trunk load of "singable" or hummable solos—"Light My Fire," "Twentieth Century Fox," "Love Her Madly" and "L.A. Woman"—and catchy, imaginative riffs—"Roadhouse Blues," "Love Me Two Times," "Break On Through," "Riders on the Storm" and so many more.

But in the context of what other rock guitarists were playing and recording in the late Sixties, it's one of Krieger's acoustic performances that has truly resonated throughout the decades. Yes, we're talking about "Spanish Caravan," an impressive flamenco-style track from the band's 1968 album, Waiting for the Sun.

While the composition is officially credited to the Doors—Krieger, Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore—and sung by Morrison, the flamenco-style guitar intro is pure Krieger and features his reworking of a melody from "Asturias," a classical piece by Isaac Albéniz. Of course, Krieger also blazes his way into electric-fuzz-guitar nirvana on the same recording—all of which melds to form a very unique late-Sixties masterpiece.

Anyway, Krieger still performs "Spanish Caravan" on tour; in fact, it's one of the highlights of his solo shows.

"I really missed playing flamenco and had been getting back to it little by little," Krieger told Guitar World in 2010. "Ray [Manzarek] and I started doing 'Spanish Caravan' during our Doors [reunion] shows, and I would perform a longer and longer intro to it as I got more comfortable with the technique and better at it. What I play now is quite similar to what I recorded on 'Russian Caravan,' the intro to the first track on [my 2010 album, Singularity]."

Below, check out a fan-filmed Hollywood performance of "Spanish Caravan" by Krieger and a quartet from the LA Philharmonic on June 7, 2015. It even features his son, Waylon Krieger, on vocals. The famous "Asturias" section starts at 2:56; the vocals kick in at 3:31.

For your listening pleasure, we've also included the original Doors version of "Spanish Caravan" and a performance of "Asturias"—the classical piece mentioned above—by classical guitarist John Williams. As a little bonus, we've thrown in a "Spanish Caravan" lesson video. Enjoy!

To keep up with Krieger in 2018, check out his website, robbykrieger.com.

The Doors’ Jim Morrison lit the world on fire, but it was guitarist Robby Krieger who supplied the matches. In 2008, the legendary axman shed light on one of rock’s most mysterious bands for Guitar World.

“It was hard living with Jim.”

Robby Krieger is talking about his days as guitarist with the Doors, reflecting on his role as creative sidekick to one of rock’s all-time great lyricists, singers, sex symbols and extreme personalities, Jim Morrison.

“It would have been so great if we’d just had a guy like Sting,” says Krieger wistfully. “You know, a normal guy who’s extremely talented, too. Someone who didn’t have to be on the verge of life and death every second of his life.”

The guitarist laughs at his own fantasy. He knows better than anyone that it was Morrison’s inner demons, which surfaced all too frequently, that gave the Doors’ music its resonance and power. But while Morrison was undoubtedly one of rock’s great visionaries, the contributions of the other Doors to the band’s unique sound and success cannot be overlooked.

The blues-based, often hypnotic music created by Krieger, organist Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore perfectly complemented Morrison’s commanding, sensual vocals and mesmerizing lyrics. And it was actually Krieger who penned many of the Doors’ greatest songs and biggest hits, including “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times” and “Touch Me.”

Remarkably, when Krieger joined the Doors in 1965 he was only 18 years old and had been playing guitar for just two years—electric guitar a mere six months.

“I really learned to play as a member of the Doors,” he asserts. “I just tried to sound like myself—I consciously avoided copying Chuck Berry or B.B. King because that’s what everyone was doing. I tried to come up with the right part for the song and play something that would complement Jim’s singing.

“It must have worked,” he adds coyly. “I think we came up with a pretty good body of work.”

Pretty good, yes. Good enough to have gotten the Doors inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last January and to have inspired Oliver Stone’s reverential 1991 biopic. And, most of all, good enough to enthrall three decades of rock fans with music that remains as powerful and profound in the Nineties as it was in the Sixties.

Robby Krieger cannot escape his past with the Doors, even though the band essentially died with Morrison in 1971. Although he has remained active, touring regularly and recording seven solo albums dominated by instrumental music, Krieger says, “I realized pretty quickly that I would never again have another band like the Doors. Music has become more of a fun thing for me, much like painting is — something that’s personally rewarding. It’s what I do and how I identify myself: I’m Robby Krieger, guitarist.”

Most people would say: Robby Krieger, Doors guitarist. What follows are Krieger’s recollections of the Doors’ career, from their 1967 self-titled debut to 1971’s brilliant swan song, L.A. Woman.
THE DOORS
Released January 1967

GUITAR WORLD:What was your first impression of Jim Morrison?

I first met him when he came to my house with John Densmore and he seemed pretty normal. I didn’t really get a sense that there was anything unusual about him until the end of our first rehearsal. Initially, everything was cool. Then this guy came looking for Jim. Something had gone wrong with a dope deal, and Jim just went nuts. Absolutely bananas. I thought, Jesus Christ, this guy’s not normal.

What were your impressions of Ray Manzarek?

When I first met him, he was the “big man on campus” at the UCLA film school. In fact, our first gig as a band was to provide music for one of his student films. Afterwards Ray got up in front of an auditorium full of people and gave a speech. I remember it well, because he had them in the palm of his hand. He was down-right mesmerizing. He was a major character, but Jim kind of kept him in his place. Jim was so out there that Ray’s personality was overwhelmed—which, oddly enough, created a good balance.

And you were pretty much what you appeared to be: a nice, quiet guy who fit in between these two powerful personalities?

Well, dealing with Jim kind of changed me, too, because I was pretty crazy myself. I was the first one at my school to try acid and I was always the one pushing things. Then I got into the Doors and I couldn’t hold a candle to Jim and Ray. [laughs] But I had already gone through acid and I was onto meditation by the time I joined the Doors—I actually met John at meditation class—so I had already mellowed out.

When were the Doors thrown out of the Whisky-A-Go-Go for performing “The End”?

Well, that’s overstating it a little bit. That whole incident has been blown out of proportion. There was a fight with the owner and we were thrown out, but I don’t think we were actually fired. We kept playing the Whisky after that.

Jim’s antics are held in such reverence now. Were they funny at the time?

It was always a bummer. We had this group which we all knew had the potential to be something really big, and Jim was trying to sabotage it by fucking up at every turn. We would call a rehearsal, Jim wouldn’t show, and we’d get a call from Blythe, Arizona, telling us that he was in jail.

Yet you guys were amazingly productive. You produced six studio albums in three or four years. Were his work habits really that bad?

No. the music was all he lived for. A lot of times he was at the office when we weren’t. He’d even live there sometimes, because that was his whole life. We all had lives other than the Doors, but he didn’t, and he kind of resented that. He felt like he was living it 24 hours a day, and we weren’t. And he was right.

But the recording sessions really bored him. We had to hang around interminably until they got the drum sound down and all that shit, so I can’t blame him for going crazy. Paul Rothchild, our producer, was a real perfectionist.

How important was Paul to your music?

It really differed from album to album. On the first one, he just turned on the mic and stepped out of the way. The second album, when we actually had a budget, Paul really got involved in the sound.

We were all kind of freaked out recording the first album because we didn’t know what it would be like. For example, it really bothered us that we couldn’t turn up as loud as we wanted.

Yet it really sounds like you were all playing with total abandon.

That’s because we had been playing those songs for so long that we really had the material down cold. Everything was cut in one or two takes.

Your version of “Back Door Man” is really effective. Were there any debates about how faithful you should be to the original version?

No. For one thing, we probably weren’t good enough musicians to do exact copies and we knew that Jim would never sing it anywhere near the original anyhow. So we just went on our own.

For years it was a little-known fact that you wrote “Light My Fire.” That changed when Oliver Stone made it a point to show how the song evolved in his movie, The Doors. Was it as simple as pulling a crumpled piece of paper out of your pocket and offering it to the band like the movie suggests?

It’s pretty close. Jim had been writing all the songs and then one day we realized we didn’t have enough tunes, so he said, “Hey, why don’t you guys try and write songs?” I wrote “Light My Fire” that night and brought it to the next rehearsal. It was my idea to have that scene in the movie, by the way. I wanted it there because it’s always kind of bugged me that so many people don’t know I was the composer.

Your solo on “Light My Fire” is truly one of your shining moments as a guitarist. Was it improvised in the studio?

It was the kind of solo that I usually did, but it was different every night. To be honest, the one on the record is not one of my better versions. I only had two tries at it. But it’s not bad; I’m glad it was as good as it was.

Was the whole album recorded live?

No. Jim always sang with us, but they rarely used the scratch vocal. “The End” was an exception.

What do you think of the song now?

I think that particular version of “The End” was nowhere near as good as the way we played it many other times. All the songs on the first album were like skeletons of how we really played them. It was just a combination of not having any studio experience and having to do everything so fast. I also think that studios are, by nature, limiting. You cannot get the sound of five big amplifiers on a little piece of tape.

Did you ever think about how strange it was not to have a bass player?

Definitely. We always thought about that. We wanted a bass player, and we auditioned a few—but we never could find one who was right. Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t, because the Doors’ sound was largely a result of the fact that Ray had to play really simple bass lines, which gave the music a hypnotic feel.

And not having a bass player affected my guitar playing a lot. It made me play more bass notes to fill out the bottom. Not having a rhythm player also made me play differently to fill out the sound. And then, of course, I played lead, so I always felt like three players simultaneously.

“Light My Fire,” the first song you ever wrote, was a number-one hit. It’s sudden success must have been mind-boggling.

It wasn’t that sudden. It actually felt like forever to us. We started the band in 1965, and nothing happened for two years. We were going crazy. Finally, after being turned down by everyone in town, Elektra signed us. Our first single bombed, and it was another six months before “Light My Fire” hit. So it seemed like a long time. We felt like veterans.

Did you use your standard gear in the studio? Were you playing an SG?

Yeah, though the first red one I had was a Melody Maker. I had a few red SGs in the Doors, but they’re all gone now, mostly stolen or lost. Amp-wise, I usually used a Twin Reverb in the studio.

You almost allowed “Light My Fire” to be used in a car commercial before Jim put an end to it. Did Jim do the right thing?

Oh yeah, absolutely. In fact, it’s been our policy to reject any subsequent offers—and we’ve had quite a few. I really hate it when I see other bands selling their music to commercials. And by the time a big corporation is interested in using your music, you don’t need the money. So there’s really no excuse.
STRANGE DAYS
Released November 1967

When the second album came out it was attacked by many critics as being a retread of the first. Do you think that was valid criticism?

Only on one count. I’ll admit that “When the Music’s Over” was similar to “The End” in length and structure, but so what? Something works, so you do it again. It’s one of my favorite songs.

I don’t think that Morrison’s poetry rap is quite as interesting on “When the Music’s Over” as “The End.”

No, it’s not. How can you possibly top “The End”? What’s left once you’ve fucked your mother and killed your father? [laughs] The reason it’s my favorite song is my solo—I think it’s my best.

That solo is composed of two solos being played simultaneously. Did you improvise both of them on the spot?

Pretty much. In fact, I’ve never been able to reproduce them. That solo was really a challenge because the harmony is static. I had to play 56 bars over the same riff, which isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to play something over an interesting chord progression. But we did that a lot because we were really into [saxophonist] John Coltrane, who pioneered “modal” jazz and soloed brilliantly over static harmonies and minimal chord progressions. I was always trying to play something that sounded like him—just totally out there in terms of tonality. I think “When the Music’s Over” is the closest I ever came.

You recorded Strange Days less than a year after your debut. Did Elektra put a lot of pressure on you?

No, we were ready. We had tons of material for the first two albums; the pressure came on the third album. We ran out of stuff and Jim was pretty fucked up on liquor by then, so it was hard to write with him and that’s when I started writing more of my own songs. It was also difficult to write while we were touring, so we started writing a lot more in the studio.

What was life on the road with the Doors like?

Not as crazy as you would think. At first, it was mostly teenyboppers and groupies and a few local nuts hanging around. But a couple of years down the road, when people realized how weird we were, we really started drawing some creeps. We still do, I might add—Morrison wannabes show up on my doorstep all the time. And they always want to sing. [laughs]

Speaking of weirdoes, “People Are Strange” has a great chord progression. Did you write that?

Yeah. Jim came up to my house in Laurel Canyon one night, and he was in one of his suicidal, downer moods. So John said, “Come on, Jim, we’ll go see the sunset. That’ll get you out of this.” We went up to the top of Laurel Canyon and it was incredibly beautiful—we were looking down on the sun reflecting off the top of the clouds. Jim had a total mood flip-flop, and said, “Wow! Now I know why I felt like that. It’s because if you’re strange, people are strange.” And he wrote the lyrics right there. Then I came up with the music and we went back down the hill.

Why wasn’t “Moonlight Drive,” the first song you wrote and rehearsed together, on the first album?

It wasn’t really the first song: “Indian Summer” was, and “Moonlight Drive” was the second. But we didn’t think the version that we cut was good enough, so we decided to drop it off the first album and try again next time. Unfortunately we’ve never been able to find the damn master for the first version. I think we may have found it now, and I hope I’m right because I always thought it was good. It was totally different than the one on Strange Days. It was real dark and laid-back, very spooky.

Any strange memories from the Strange Days album?

One time, we were getting ready to leave for the night and Jim didn’t want to stop because he was feeling good. He kept saying, “Man, I want to play all night.” But we were all tired and wanted to go home. Jim finally left, but he came back half an hour later, climbed over the fence, broke into the studio, took out the fire extinguisher and sprayed it into the piano and all over everything. It was quite a surprise in the morning. [laughs]

Were you guys around when Jim recorded “House Latitudes”?

Yeah. He said he had a poem he wanted to read and he wanted something real weird to back it. There were all these instruments in the studio from an orchestra session—harpsichords and pianos and timpani. We all started banging on them and fumbling around inside the pianos, and there were 10 or 12 people just screaming at the top of their lungs. After we laid that down, Jim overdubbed the poem.

The funny thing was, as we were listening back at full volume and Jim was reading, the guys from the Jefferson Airplane came straggling in—high as kites, or course. They stared at us like we were out of our minds, but we just acted casual and said, “Oh yeah, this is one of our songs.” [laughs]

Were you friends with them?

Sort of. We always played on the same bill, but we didn’t really hang out much. There was always a bit of competitive vibe—to see who could blow who off the stage.

We didn’t hang out with other musicians that much—just Van Morrison when he came to town, and occasionally the guys in Buffalo Springfield. We didn’t get too close with the San Francisco groups—especially the Grateful Dead, who wouldn’t let us use their amps one night. We had a gig at Beverly Hills High School in the afternoon and then one about an hour up the coast in Santa Barbara, so we left our gear, figuring the Dead would let us use their stuff. You’d always let people use your amps in those days, but they just refused. I ended up playing through a Pignose or something equally ridiculous.

Ray was aghast at the fact that Pigpen wouldn’t let him use his organ. He kept saying, “Pigpen? Someone named Pigpen won’t let me use his instrument? I could catch cooties from his organ.” He couldn’t believe it.
WAITING FOR THE SUN
Released August 1968

It seems like the band was in a creative lull and feeling a lot of pressure by the third album. Do you see a band like Pearl Jam going through a similar thing?

Their situation is a lot different, but, yes, I see the similarities. I know Eddie [Vedder]—he sang with us at our induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year—and he wants to be like Jim. He was drilling me about Jim—asking me a million questions about how Jim would have reacted to various situations. And he is kind of a troubled person and a very serious guy, like Jim was. But I don’t think he, or anyone else in that band, is too fucked up to write good material. They may not be the straightest people in the world, but it’s not like our situation, where you have a guy who’s really out of control. Eddie’s not like that; he knows what he’s doing.

Does it trouble you to see someone emulate a person whose self-destruction you witnessed?

Yeah, it really does. I always tell people, “Don’t drink because Jim drank. That was a mistake. That’s what fucked him up.” If it weren’t for the booze he might still be writing today.

Had his drinking gotten seriously worse when you were recording Waiting for the Sun?

Definitely. That’s when the liquor really started being a problem. Before that, everything was more or less fine. LSD was no problem because it was a creative thing. There’s nothing good about liquor—it just fucks you up—though at first it relaxes you, which is what you probably need after taking eight-zillion acid trips. [laughs]

“Hello, I Love You” was a number-one hit and Waiting for the Sun topped the album charts. Can that kind of success get you through a creative lull?

It helped a lot. In fact, we were just going out on tour when “Hello, I Love You” hit number one, and it really buoyed our spirits. People always think that we stole that track from the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night,” but we weren’t thinking of them at all. What I did steal was the drumbeat: I told John to play something like “Sunshine of Your Love.” So, we ripped off the Cream, not the Kinks.

What specific recollections do you have of these sessions?

A lot of very horrible ones. By that time, Jim was being taken advantage of by various hangers-on. He would bring them to the studio and Rothchild would go crazy—all these drunken assholes would be hanging around, fucking in the echo chamber and pissing in the closets. It was a mess.

Jim would drink with anybody because we wouldn’t drink with him. He would take on all these assholes, who used him: “Hey, we’re hanging with Jumbo.” And they wouldn’t care how fucked up he got—they’d leave him on somebody’s doorstep in his own puke.

At what point did you guys refuse to drink with him?

I never drank with him because I didn’t like to drink to excess and he loved to go until he couldn’t see. I knew what was coming and hated to see it, so I would usually be gone by that point. John and Ray felt the same way.

Were you three using a lot of drugs at that point?

No. Not at all. And the fact that Jim was using so much made us use even less. The romance was definitely gone. Once in a while he would talk me into taking acid—just like you saw in the movie—but not often.
THE SOFT PARADE
Released January 1969

The Soft Parade features several heavily orchestrated, intricately arranged songs. Were you compelled to go into this direction because of the Beatles?

Yeah, totally. In those days you had to try to keep up with the Beatles! But, to be honest, I didn’t really like orchestrating the songs. It definitely wasn’t my idea—it was Paul Rothchild’s. I never would have done it.

Does it sound better to you now?

Actually, it does sound better with time. But I never thought it sounded bad—I just thought it didn’t sound like us. The Doors were lost. It was Jim and the orchestra.

This was the first album where you had individual songwriting credits.

Right. Jim originally wanted everything to say “written by the Doors” to keep things mysterious. But everybody just took it for granted that he wrote everything. I think he realized that wasn’t fair and wanted to give others credit.

Did he actually write the music on those songs where he alone is credited?

No. He would hear the song in his head. But he didn’t play anything, so he would sing a vocal melody, and we would have to figure out what to do. But a lot of times he just had a poem on paper and I would come up with something. Other times I would come up with a melody, and he’d put words to it.

What about the Soft Parade sessions sticks out in your mind?

The endless mixing sessions. That was a very long, drawn-out album. We spent more money on it than we did on any other album. And Jim was hard to find. All the mixing bored the hell out of him. But I think his drinking problem wasn’t as bad as it was on Waiting for the Sun, because he had started making a film, which kept him busy.

There was one funny thing that happened. This crazy guy appeared and apparently he thought that “The Celebration of the Lizard” [a Morrison poem which appeared on Waiting for the Sun] was written about him. He was yelling, “How did you know that I’m the Lizard King, goddamn it! That’s me. You wrote a song about me!” And he smacked Ray right in the eye because he thought Ray was Jim. Ray had his glasses on and they just crumpled. It was a mess.

Before the poem appeared had you ever heard Jim refer to himself as the Lizard King?

He was always obsessed with lizards—he loved that kind of stuff because he’d seen it on acid a lot. But I don’t know when he came up with “I am the Lizard King.” I think he wished he had never said that. It was just another thing he had to live up to.

During the Soft Parade tour, your Miami concert erupted in pandemonium and was canceled. Later Jim was charged with indecent exposure. What do you remember of the concert?

Well, first of all, Jim did not pull it out. But it was bedlam, just total craziness. The place was oversold, thousands of people swarmed the stage, and it collapsed. I remember Jim just rolling around in the midst of all those people and I was wondering if we would ever get out of there. It was very much like in the movie—they did a real good job on that one.

But you had no sense that the incident was going to turn into such a big thing?

No, hell no! Okay, the concert was fucked up, and we didn’t finish, but nobody was angry, nobody asked for their money back. And the cops were friendly—they sat around drinking beers with us after the show. Nothing happened until a week later, when somebody decided to make a stink about it. Some politician decided to make their career at our expense. Then it fucked everything up. We couldn’t play anywhere for a year. The Hall Managers’ Association basically banned us.

Did Jim feel very persecuted?

I’m sure he did. But he wasn’t surprised. He knew he was pushing authority as far as it could go. We really did have the sense that we had pushed the system to the edge and finally they were pushing back.
MORRISON HOTEL
Released March 1970

“Roadhouse Blues” and a couple of other songs on Morrison Hotel hinted at the changes to come on L.A. Woman—heading in a bluesier, more bare-bones direction.

I think it was a reaction to the overproduction of The Soft Parade. We wanted to get back to basics. “Roadhouse Blues” is one of my personal favorites. I was always proud of that song because, as simple as it is, it’s not just another blues. That one little lick makes it a song, and I think that sums up the genius of the Doors. I think that song stands up really well as an example of what made us a great band. And the session was really cool—one of my fondest memories of the band. We cut the tune live, with John Sebastian playing harp and Lonnie Mack playing bass—he came up with that fantastic bass line.

How did Mack end up on there?

He just happened to be hanging around. I think he had a contract with Elektra and wasn’t recording so they gave him a job at the studio. We just said, “Hey, why don’t you play bass?”

You co-wrote “Peace Frog” with Jim.

Yes. I had written the music, we rehearsed it up, and it was really happening, but we didn’t have any lyrics and Jim wasn’t around. We just said, “Fuck it, let’s record it. He’ll come up with something.” And he did. He took out his poetry book and found a poem that fit. But it always seemed kind of forced to me, to tell you the truth.

The legend has Ray and Jim being very tight, but you’re the one who wrote with him a lot.

In the very early days Ray was very close with Jim; Jim actually lived with Ray and his wife. He was almost like their son, and he was great for a while—he wasn’t drinking or anything. The problem was that Ray became a father figure, so Jim rebelled. He fucked their house up—trashed it on more than one occasion—and took advantage of them in many ways. Then I joined the band and sort of latched on to Jim, and we hung out a lot.

Ray worked up all the early songs with Jim—everything on the first album. Then I wrote a lot with Jim—before I started really writing on my own—and those songs went mostly on the second and third albums.

Did you ever talk about lyrics with Jim?

Not much. He didn’t like to explain lyrics because he wanted people to interpret them themselves. But he thought about that stuff a lot. He was also somewhat into pure impressionism—which I think is what he liked about my songs. I always tried to write something that just fit the music, even if it didn’t especially mean anything.
L.A. WOMAN
Released June 1971

Legend has it that L.A. Woman was cut entirely live.

Not entirely, but a lot of it was live, and the song “L.A. Woman” was completely live. I think that could be the quintessential Doors song, and the way we came up with it was amazing. We just started playing and it came together as if by magic. Jim made a lot of it up as he went along, which is amazing because I think it’s one of his most poetic songs. I can remember Jim sitting in the bathroom with the mic singing and all of us just having a great time.

That album was the first time you had a rhythm guitarist— Marc Benno.

That was basically just so we could do it live. It freed me up. And we thought it might add a different flavor. I actually enjoyed it, and I didn’t have to do as much overdubbing.

You still did some overdubbing; it sounds like there are at least four guitar tracks on “I’ve Been Down So Long.”

Yeah, there probably are. Ray played a guitar and Benno played, and I probably overdubbed one too. I think I also overdubbed two or three slide parts.

That slide solo is one of your craziest.

Definitely. I was just trying to capture a mood without worrying about technique.

The beauty of your slide playing—and your blues playing in general — is you don’t mimic the originators. And you never really cleaned your blues up—you left it a little messy. Some white guys tend to be very anal.

That’s right. That’s what I didn’t like about Mike Bloomfield—too perfect. I always just tried to do my thing. I could play traditional blues slide, but all the other guys reacted more enthusiastically to my untraditional slide playing. In fact, that’s what got me into the band. Jim always loved my slide playing—he wanted me to play it almost exclusively.

Did Jim ever critique your playing?

He would always tell me that I was the most underrated guitar player around. What’s funny is that the four of us hardly ever criticized the others’ playing—or even suggested anything. We worked so well together that we hardly ever had to talk about it. Everybody just played the right part in the right place at the right time.

“Cars Hiss By My Window” is a rather unusual blues.

Yeah. That was our Jimmy Reed piece. Jim was really getting into the blues at that time and he loved it when I would just play straight blues. He’d sit there and make up songs on the spot. He just wanted to play all night. It’s too bad because I really think that had we done another album it would have been a lot more straight blues stuff, which I always loved.

How did “Riders on the Storm” develop?

We were fooling around with “Ghost Riders in the Sky” one day and somehow it turned into “Riders on the Storm.” It just happened.

Another change on L.A. Woman is the absence of reverb, particularly on Jim’s voice, which was so heavily reverbed on your first few albums.

Well, Sunset Sound, where we recorded the first two albums, had one of the best echo chambers in the world. It was a live chamber, which they don’t make anymore. And it sounded so great that we used it a lot more than we might otherwise have. We piped everything through there.

But L.A. Woman was recorded on an eight-track in our rehearsal space and Paul Rothchild was gone, which is one reason we had so much fun. The warden was gone.

So, even after all your success, you still had that sort of relationship with the producer, where he was cracking the whip?

Yeah, we just kind of took it for granted that he would produce and we would do things his way—you stick with success. And, finally, he was like a rat deserting a sinking ship. I think he figured it was time to bail.

So there was a sense that the Doors were a sinking ship?

Yeah, definitely. We couldn’t play anywhere, we were fucked because of the Miami incident. Morrison Hotel didn’t do that well, Jim looked bad and was getting fat… All things considered, I thought it was pretty cool that L.A. Woman did well.

I think we came up with something so loose because there was no pressure. We figured we were already screwed, so we were having fun again. we were so far gone that it was like our first album.

Just weeks after the album entered the Top Ten, Jim was dead. Do you remember finding out?

Yeah. I got a phone call and I didn’t believe it because we used to hear shit like that all the time—that Jim jumped off a cliff or something. So we sent our manager off to Paris, and he called and said it was true.

People often talk about the inevitability of him dying young. Do you buy that?

No! I thought he would never die. I thought he’d outlive everybody, like one of those Irish drunks who’d drink a fifth of whisky a day and live until they’re 80. He seemed invulnerable, the way he would do things and jump out of windows without getting hurt. I never saw those things, but I would hear about them the next day. For some reason, he was fairly well behaved around me. Somehow our relationship developed where he stayed fairly calm around me, thank God. [laughs]

After Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died, Jim supposedly told people that he would be the third to die at 27. Did you remember him saying such things?

Yeah. He was definitely obsessed with death. He talked about it all the time.

There’s always been talk that he’s not dead, and Ray has occasionally fueled that idea. Have you ever thought that?

Yes and no. I’ve allowed myself to fantasize at times, but I’m sure that if he wasn’t dead he would have gotten hold of us by now. But then again, if there’s anybody who could pull off something like that, it was him. I still think about him quite a bit. I always have dreams that he’s alive, and we’re playing together again. Wishful thinking.

Robby Krieger’s 1954 Les Paul Custom became a constant writing companion, workhorse, performing partner, muse and musical soul mate all rolled into one right from the time he acquired it used in 1968.

Nicknamed “L.A. Woman” after its use on that classic track by the Doors, it contributed to many unforgettable hits, and remains in Robby’s possession to this day, a tried and true companion to a career that has continually evolved and inspired over decades.

Now, through a close collaboration between Robby and Gibson Custom, a very limited number of hand-crafted replicas of the Robby Krieger 1954 Les Paul Custom will be made available to discerning collectors and players. Full and unrestricted access to the original guitar has yielded Gibson Custom’s luthiers the means of precisely recreating the feel, look and tone of this legendary instrument.

And to take it all over the top the first 50 guitars—hand aged by Gibson—will also be played, approved and signed by Robby himself. A further 100 hand-aged guitars will be produced, with the final 150 of the run treated to Gibson Custom’s proprietary VOS process.

Every Robby Krieger 1954 Les Paul Custom is recreated based on hands-on examination, digital scanning, intimate photography, measurement, and study of Robby Krieger’s 1954 Les Paul Custom to insure a playing experience that’s as close to the original as humanly possible.

Notable details include the closely matched dish carve and neck profile carve, the accurate ebony fingerboard with aged pearl block markers, accurate vintage multi-ply binding, after-market Seymour Duncan neck pickup, and painstaking hand aging (150 examples) to match every ding, scuff and check line found in Robby’s guitar. In short, the Robby Krieger 1954 Les Paul Custom puts a guitar that would normally be untouchable into the hands of a limited number of discerning players. Reserve yours now at your authorized Gibson Custom dealer.

For more about this guitar, including photos and specs, visit gibson.com.

Robby Krieger of the Doors chooses and discusses the record that changed his life.

Bob Dylan
Bringing It All Back Home (1965)

“This guy from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who I knew in school named Bill Phinity turned me onto Bob Dylan.

"We had a jug band called the Back Bay Chamberpot Terriers. This was the same time that Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir and Pigpen were playing in a jug band before they formed the Grateful Dead, but they were a lot better than us. Our only gig was for the Ladies Auxiliary. We played a bunch of Dave Van Ronk stuff.

“I was 19 and attending [The University of California] Santa Barbara when Bringing It All Back Home came out. I was taking a lot of acid in those days, and everything Dylan said just really connected with me. There are a lot of great songs on that album—‘Maggie’s Farm,’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’ ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is one of my favorites. That was actually the first rap song as far as I’m concerned. Dylan used the words like notes. He didn’t really care what they said, just how they sounded.

“I always liked the way that Dylan played guitar, although I never tried to copy the way he played.

"I was always amazed by how he could play guitar and sing or play harmonica at the same time. But the spirit of Dylan’s music has always stayed with me through everything I’ve done with the Doors and the Robby Krieger Band.”

The Doors are once again poised to break on through with a first-of-its-kind iPad app, The Doors, available exclusively on the App Store.

Released by Warner Music Group’s Rhino Entertainment, the app brings the band’s story to life with an unprecedented immersive experience that delves deeply into every aspect of the Doors’ career with interactive content, unpublished band images and artwork, rare videos, music and more.

The Doors was conceived and produced by Elektra Records founder and Warner Music legend Jac Holzman, who signed the Doors to the label in 1966, and Robin Hurley; along with the participation of drummer John Densmore, guitarist Robby Krieger and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and the estate of Jim Morrison.

“The genesis of this project began with a desire to digitize the boxed set, to use new technology to improve upon a much-loved fan experience. It made total sense to choose the Doors. They have always been ‘ahead of the curve’ artists and their story is one of the great sagas in rock,” Holzman says. “Together with the band, we tell a compelling tale using materials from the Doors’ own archives and the Warner Music vault plus the hundreds of other sources we chased down — a wealth of treasures including previously unseen photos, fresh interviews, and behind the scenes insights and reflections."

An intimate portrait of the band enjoying a drink at the Hard Rock Café — taken by legendary photographer Henry Diltz during a shoot for the Morrison Hotel album — greets visitors on the home page and guides them on a journey through the living history of one of rock’s most fascinating and incendiary groups.

The Doors app is divided into several sections, with the The Story button leading to the true centerpiece, proving endlessly intriguing for both veteran fans and new initiates with hundreds of photos, videos, and interviews. All six albums recorded by the original Doors foursome, as well as the two albums recorded later by the Doors as a trio, are spotlighted here through essays from counterculture icons including Patti Smith and Hunter S. Thompson, Doors historians such as David Fricke, Greil Marcus, and archivist David Dutkowski.

Among the other centerpieces of The Story section is a graphic novelization of the notorious Miami Incident, where Morrison was falsely accused of exposing himself during a 1969 concert. The infamous episode comes to life here through drawings by award-winning comic book artist Dean Haspiel, words by Adam Holzman (son of Jac), and rare audio of Morrison recorded during the show.

The app features more than 500 images including band photos, album art, singles, international releases and memorabilia (posters, ticket stubs, advertisements, press releases, contracts, and related correspondence).

The Doors app costs $4.99 and is available at the App Store or at this location.

On October 23, Eagle Rock Entertainment will release a remastered version of The Doors' July 5, 1968, performance at the Hollywood Bowl.

The Doors Live At The Bowl '68 will be released as a Blu-Ray ($19.98), DVD ($14.98), digital video ($12.99), CD ($18.98), digital audio ($11.99) and double-LP ($34.98).

This concert, which is believed to be the band's finest show caught on film, has been restored by using original camera negatives. The audio has been remixed and mastered from original multi-tracks by the group’s engineer, Bruce Botnick.

The Doors Live At The Bowl '68 also will include three previously unreleased tracks from the performance; they weren't released in the past because of technical issues with the recording. Those tracks are “Hello, I Love You,” “The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)” and “Spanish Caravan.”

The DVD, Blu-Ray and digital video each feature a 16x9 high-definition digital transfer with a stereo and 5.1 audio soundtrack. There is more than an hour of bonus material, including "Echoes From The Bowl”; “You Had To Be There” and “Reworking The Doors,” an in-depth look at how the film was restored.

LIVE AT THE BOWL ’68 Track Listing

• 01. Show Start/Intro
• 02. “When The Music’s Over”
• 03. “Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)”
• 04. “Back Door Man”
• 05. “Five To One”
• 06. “Back Door Man” (Reprise)
• 07. “The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)”
• 08. “Hello, I Love You”
• 09. “Moonlight Drive”
• 10. “Horse Latitudes”
• 11. “A Little Game”
• 12. “The Hill Dwellers”
• 13. “Spanish Caravan”
• 14. Hey, What Would You Guys Like To Hear?
• 15. “Wake Up!”
• 16. Light My Fire (Segue)
• 17. “Light My Fire”
• 18. “The Unknown Soldier”
• 19. The End (Segue)
• 20. “The End”

The Doors were at a low point in December 1970, when they gathered to begin recording their sixth studio album.

They had been banned from performing after singer Jim Morrison’s prosecution for exposing himself at a Miami concert on March 1, 1969, effectively killing their stage career.

Their previous album, Morrison Hotel, released in February 1970, had failed to break out. The group was enveloped in a general sense of doom and decline.

“We were pretty far down. People were saying we were over,” guitarist Robby Krieger recalls. “We couldn’t play anywhere. Morrison Hotel hadn’t done much. Jim was getting fat. Nothing really seemed to be happening, and we didn’t have much material when we started the sessions.”

Then things really started to get bad. “Before we even started recording, our producer walked out on us,” Krieger says.

That was Paul Rothchild, who had been behind the boards for each of the Doors’ first five studio albums. During preproduction in the band’s rehearsal space—where they would record the album to maintain a more informal feel—Rothchild, frustrated by what he heard, determined that the Doors were running into creative dead ends. He wished them well and walked out. Engineer Bruce Botnick took over the reins, and that low moment became a catalyst for one of the band’s landmark albums: L.A. Woman.

In celebration of the disc’s 40th anniversary, Elektra has released a new two-CD version of it that includes alternate takes of album tracks like “Love Her Madly,” “Riders on the Storm” and the title song, as well as a never-before-heard original, “She Smells So Nice,” recording during the sessions. Much to the surprise of Krieger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore, Botnick discovered the track, a loose blues jam that segues into B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” while reviewing the L.A. Woman tapes for the reissue.

“I think we came up with an album so loose and cool that it has stood up for 40 years because there was no pressure,” Krieger says. “We figured we were screwed, so we started having fun again. We were so far gone that it was like a weight was lifted when Paul left. He was a great producer, and you can’t argue with the stuff we did with him, but he was always a very difficult guy to work for. He was a perfectionist, and we were looking forward to having the dictator off our back and just having some fun recording for once, which is exactly what happened.

“Before that time, we probably weren’t ready to do something like that—we really needed Paul. But after five albums we all knew how to record and what a good take sounded like, and we ended up recording everything in a couple of takes, maintaining a very loose vibe and energy throughout. It was great the way it came together, with everyone chipping in and contributing.”

L.A. Woman was released in April 1971, but what might have been a new start proved instead to be a farewell. Just three months later, Morrison died while in Paris. “It’s just too bad that what we tapped into on L.A. Woman didn’t last longer,” Krieger says. “Jim had been pretty uninvolved in some of the albums, but he was right in there with us on this, and that’s a big part of what made it so special.”

To commemorate L.A. Woman’s anniversary and reissue, Krieger shared his memories of some of the album’s greatest moments.

“L.A. Woman”

“I’ve always considered this the quintessential Doors song. It’s just magical to me, and the way it came about was fantastic. We just started playing and Jim started coming up with those words, and it just poured forth. Jim was sitting in the bathroom, which we were using as an iso booth, singing. I don’t know how he came up with that whole concept on the spot like that, but he did. You would think that would have been a poem that he had written before, as many of our songs were, but it’s not. That was just written on the spot.

“It’s very natural and sums up a lot of our best qualities. All the interplay with Ray just happened. We really understood each other at that point. We could anticipate where one another were headed and just play.”

“Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”

“Marc Benno played second guitar on four of the songs on this session. The idea was I’d be able to play the parts live and not have to overdub the solos, and it really worked. We recorded this live, with Marc playing the rhythm, so I could just play the leads, fills and slide. I kind of get embarrassed when I hear it now, because it’s so loose; it would be hard for me to leave something this sloppy on a record now, but I’m glad I did. It’s part of the charm of the song and of the Doors.”

“Cars Hiss By My Window”

“That was really done on the fly, all live. We wanted to pay homage to [bluesman] Jimmy Reed. I started playing in E, and this song just happened. I love it.”

“She Smells So Nice”/“Rock Me”

“It’s amazing that we found anything new after all these years and all these reissues. We keep looking in those vaults, and I guess we’ve never done a thorough job—we always seem to find something. Bruce Botnick found this, and I was glad he did. It was a lot of fun to listen to, because it’s really typical of the kind of jams we used to do to warm up and get ready for a session.

“It’s also interesting to hear Jim use the ‘Mr. Mojo Rising’ line that he used so famously in ‘L.A. Woman,’ and which I had not recalled him pulling out in a jam like this. There are different stories about where he came up with it. That witch [Patricia Kennealy, who is said to have married Morrison in a Wiccan ceremony] claims to have told him about anagrams, and apparently they came up with that one night at her place, but I have never known whether or not that was true.”

“Riders on the Storm”

“We had some practice sessions and took along a couple of demos when we started recording. This was one that Paul heard, and he hated it. It was one of the things that led him to walk out. The song had come about quite naturally. We were fooling around, getting loose by playing the Ventures’ great guitar instrumental ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky,’ and it just kind of morphed into something else through jamming and Ray playing off me. I was playing with this cool tremolo sound that the Ventures favored, and kept it going once ‘Ghost Riders’ became ‘Riders on the Storm.’

“I really feel that if you’re a real band, jamming can be the best way to write songs. You discover things and latch onto great riffs and interlocking parts, and we were doing that more and more with Jim becoming more involved in these sessions. I truly believe that if he had stuck around a little longer we would have continued in that direction.”

“L.A. Woman”/“Love Her Madly”/“Riders on the Storm” (alternate versions)

“It’s fun to hear different version of these songs. When we searched our vaults for the box set, we found alternate takes of ‘Roadhouse Blues,’ including one that I really preferred and wished we had used. Ever since, we’ve been searching for outtakes, and when Bruce called and said he had heard outtakes, I was really excited.

“It’s nice to hear them but hard to say that I prefer any of them over what we used. It’s not as simple as that, because after you pick a take, then you end up refining and overdubbing and it becomes almost a different song.”

“The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)”

“This just has all kinds of weird things in it. In fact, Ray hates to play it, because he always forgets it. When you try to play it with people, they always say, ‘That doesn’t make sense. Why do you do this here and not go here?’ There’s no explanation. We just kind of knew when to come in, when to get out, when to make the changes and what one another was going to do. Generally, Ray set the pace and we had to follow or it would all fall apart. He just did what he wanted.

“A lot of these songs seem easy to play, but they’re not. They have extra bars in them or inconsistent turnarounds—things I would never do, now that I know more about music, but which helped make them memorable and relevant to this day. At the time, the simplest things could amaze me, like a minor chord going to a major chord.”

“Hyacinth House”

“I had a little house up in Benedict Canyon, which is near Laurel Canyon. Jim and John and a couple other people came over there one night, and we were just fooling around, taping some stuff. The song makes a reference to some hyacinth flowers right outside the window. And in that line about the bathroom, Jim was talking about this friend of ours who was there who kept hogging the bathroom all night. Jim wanted to go to the bathroom, and he couldn’t. Finally, the guy got out of the bathroom, and Jim goes, ‘I see the bathroom is clear,’ which is the line in ‘Hyacinth House.’ He wrote the song on the spot, and I think that was how some of the best Doors songs were written.

"Then we just recorded it on my little Sony four-track, which was a real nice, high-quality tape recorder. To call it a home studio is kind of funny, but it was a pretty revolutionary piece of home machinery at the time.

“At the time, I had a pet bobcat, which would mostly stay outside. That’s where Jim got that line in the song about the lions. I saw her in a pet store when she was a cute little kitten and said, ‘She looks just like a bobcat,’ and the guy said, ‘She is a bobcat.’ She was a great pet for about three years and then she got a little bit nasty.

"She was getting real big, and kind of dangerous, so I didn’t let people pet her or anything. I gave her to this weird guy who loved jungle cats and specialized in taking people’s pets that had gotten too big and releasing them into the wilds in the Ventura County mountains. But he claimed that she attacked him and he had to shoot her. Poor kitty. But at least she is remembered forever as the ‘lion’ in ‘Hyacinth House.’ ”

At noon EST Monday, January 9, Doors fans can check out a newly discovered song by the band -- "She Smells So Nice," an outtake from the band's 1971 album, L.A. Woman -- on the band's official Facebook page.

The blues-tinged original track represents the band's first new, previously unreleased studio recording in 40 years. It features all four members of the band -- keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, drummer John Densmore and singer Jim Morrison.

Bruce Botnick, who co-produced the album with the band, recently made the discovery while reviewing the L.A. Woman session tapes.

After debuting on the band's Facebook page on Monday, the song will be serviced to radio the following day.

You can check out 34 seconds of the song below:

In joint celebration of the legendary Doors guitarist’s vast achievements and the 50th Anniversary of the Gibson SG, Gibson USA presents the 50th Anniversary Robby Krieger SG. It features a pair of humbucking pickups with phase switching and a Maestro Vibrola with vintage-style “Lyre” tailpiece.

According to Gibson.com: "During his time with The Doors, and beyond, Robby Krieger proved himself one of the most inventive guitarists in rock. His lithe, flamenco- and jazz-influenced licks and solos took the electric guitar in directions that no other popular rock artist was exploring, and constituted one of the main ingredients in a band that stood out as totally unique not only in its own time, but for all time. And throughout his career, Krieger chose a Gibson SG Standard to launch his sonic explorations."

For the full report, and the specs on the guitar, click here.

Originally published in Guitar World, October 2010

Robby Krieger’s tells how his love of Miles Davis inspired his new album, Singularity.

GUITAR WORLDSingularity is your first solo recording in 10 years and it is quite different from your previous efforts. What was the origin of these songs?

ROBBY KRIEGER About 15 years ago, I started working on a tribute to Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain with Arthur Barrow, the bassist from Frank Zappa’s band. It involved flamenco guitar work and orchestration. We started to record it, but the project got bogged down, and we gave up. Then a couple of years ago, I found the tapes and realized we had the start of something really good, and little by little we started replacing all the original MIDI instruments with the real stuff. The first thing we recorded was the drums, which was really difficult, because in the first piece on the album—“Russian Caravan”—there are probably 10 time changes. Vinnie Colaiuta, who Arthur played with in Zappa’s band, was the only guy we could think of who could do it, and he nailed it in two takes. After that, we were off and running.

GW How do you think the recording would have been different had you completed it 15 years ago?

KRIEGER Not as good. I think the end result is a lot better than we ever imagined it being. We never really thought we would actually do it. It was more or less just an exercise and something fun to work on, inspired by our love for Miles Davis. If we had known then how it would turn out, I don’t think we would have believed it.

GW Several songs on Singularity have extended solo flamenco intros, which is fascinating to Doors fans that know your background. Is it more satisfying for you to play flamenco today, now that you’ve built up the skill for it?

KRIEGER Yes. I hadn’t played flamenco for years, so I had a long way to go. I practiced very seriously for about six months before I felt I was able to play that stuff well enough. I knew I was ready when I heard something I had recorded two weeks earlier and mistook it for a real flamenco player I had been stealing licks from.

GW It must have felt nice to complete the circle like that.

KRIEGER Yeah, definitely. I really missed playing flamenco and had been getting back to it little by little. Ray [Manzarek, Doors keyboardist] and I started doing “Spanish Caravan” during our Doors shows, and I would perform a longer and longer intro to it as I got more comfortable with the technique and better at it. What I play now is quite similar to what I recorded on “Russian Caravan,” the intro to the first track on the new CD.

GW You’ve improved as a guitar player since the days when you cut the original Doors recordings. Now when I hear you play those songs in concert, it sounds as if you’re able to take them to their natural conclusion—to fully execute all the very cool ideas that you laid out in the original versions.

KRIEGER Yeah, exactly, man. Back then, I never practiced in a regimented way or thought about how proficient I was, guitar-wise. As time went on, I did want to get better, but you have to put the time in, and we didn’t have that in the Doors’ heyday. If I knew then what I know now, I definitely would have done some things differently. Then again, when I listen to that old stuff, I recognize that it has something that I probably couldn’t do now. I think I touched some special magic just from being naïve and playing the best I could—from not actually knowing what a Mixolydian scale was.

There’s a fine line between what you want to do in music and what you can do. A lot of guys tell me with great excitement, “Oh I’m going to Berklee School of Music or the Guitar Institute of Technology.” I always respond, “Oh, that’s great, but you have to be careful not to get caught up in being too technical, ’cause that can really mess up your songwriting.”

Songwriting is what connects your music to people. It’s everything. Back in the Doors, discovering a minor chord would excite me, but the public for the most part does not know enough about music to care about something like that. They just want to be moved and drawn in by the music, and when you’re writing songs you have to feel that, too. You can’t lose sight of the wonder of a simple but cool-sounding chord or riff.

When their psychedelic-rock excursion finally ran out of gas, the Doors got their music back on track with the blues-influenced Morrison Hotel. On the 40th anniversary of the classic rock milestone, guitarist Robby Krieger tells the story behind its creation.

Robby Krieger had already made four albums with the Doors by the time the group got together in November 1969 to cut Morrison Hotel. Over the course of those earlier records, Krieger had demonstrated his talent for flamenco-style guitarwork, exotic leads and avant-garde psychedelic-rock workouts. But he’d never really had a chance to properly show off his blues chops as so many other electric guitar greats of the period had. That changed with Morrison Hotel.

“I never even considered myself a rocking guitar player,” says Krieger, who had been playing electric guitar for only six months when he joined singer Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore to form the Doors, in 1965. He’d started out as an acoustic player. “I first learned flamenco and then a lot of folk and folk blues,” Krieger says. “That’s why I played with my fingers and just adapted it to what we were doing. I really learned to play as a member of the Doors. I just tried to sound like myself and play something that would complement Jim’s singing.”

With Morrison Hotel, though, Krieger came into his own. Not only is the guitar more to the fore than on previous Doors releases but he attacks his solos with newfound intensity on tracks like “Roadhouse Blues” and “Land Ho!” The album was transformative both for Krieger and for the Doors. With it, the San Francisco–based psychedelic rock group recast itself as a down-and-dirty blues-rock quartet.

Emerging from San Francisco’s vibrant psychedelic rock scene in 1966, the Doors had quickly become one of the biggest-selling practitioners of the genre, with hits like “Light My Fire,” “Hello, I Love You” and “People Are Strange.” Krieger’s sinewy guitar playing, Manzarek’s classical-influenced electronic organ and harpsichord work, and Densmore’s jazzy drumming provided a trippy and exotic musical bed onto which Morrison could lay his sonorous vocals and work his shamanistic persona. The resulting sound was fresh and wholly original.

But by the time they released 1969’s The Soft Parade, the Doors were clearly running out of ideas. Though the album downplayed the group’s stronger psychedelic tendencies, the four-part title track was a rambling journey through disparate musical styles, and the brass and string arrangements throughout the album did little to lift what was—with the exception of the radio hit “Touch Me”— mostly weak material. Moreover, the album’s progressive musical pretensions were hopelessly out of date at a time when acts like Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones and the newly formed Led Zeppelin were cutting a path back to blues-based music.

It was clear that the Doors needed to find a new direction. They did it by stripping away their sonic excesses and indulging themselves in blues-based rock. The result was an album that blew away all expectations: Morrison Hotel. “Roadhouse Blues,” the album’s raunchy, harmonica-driven opening track, sets the tone for what follows, as the group works its way through funk workouts like “Peace Frog” and the driving blues rock of “Queen of the Highway.”

Whereas Manzarek had traditionally handled bass duties in the past with a keyboard bass, for Morrison Hotel the Doors decided to work with a real bassist to give the music a truer blues feel. To that end, they recruited blues-rock guitarist Lonnie Mack, who had a hit with the instrumental “Wham!” in 1963, to play bass on “Roadhouse Blues” and “Maggie M’Gill,” while Ray Neapolitan handled bass for “Peace Frog” and “Ship of Fools.” In addition, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian contributed harmonica work under the alias of G. Puglese on “Roadhouse Blues.”

Released in February 1970, Morrison Hotel reestablished the Doors as a vital group for their times. Even though the album generated no singles, it sold well, reaching Number Four in the U.S. The album also proved to be a crucial setup for the Doors’ next album (and last with Jim Morrison), L.A. Woman, on which they would dig even deeper into the blues, with more commercially successful results.

Krieger has spent the ensuing decades working at his craft, something that is abundantly clear on his new solo CD, Singularity, where he displays sharpened flamenco licks and a technically adept, jazz-fusion virtuosity. His expanded repertoire of techniques is also on display in his continuing work with Manzarek. The two have been playing together regularly since 2001, when they reformed as the Doors of the 21st Century. A subsequent lawsuit by Densmore forced them to drop the use of the Doors name, but they continue to perform as Manzarek-Krieger.

By any name, the music of the Doors remains relevant decades after it was recorded. Krieger believes that is especially true of Morrison Hotel. “I feel like Morrison Hotel has really stood the test of time,” he says. “For us, it was going back to basics and just having fun. And I think you can still hear that 40 years later.”

GUITAR WORLDMorrison Hotel represented a back-to-basics approach for the Doors after all the orchestrations of The Soft Parade. It seems that a lot of bands were doing similar things in 1970. Was there something in the air?

KRIEGER I think what happened is the Beatles had done Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967, and everybody felt like they had to do that, too. Then everyone said, “What are we doing? Let’s get back to basics.” That’s certainly how we felt, and I really feel like that was the feeling in the air. That’s what caused so many of us to become more grandiose and experimental between 1967 and 1969, and afterward to scale back and go back to our roots.

GW The standout track on Morrison Hotel is “Roadhouse Blues.” Were the blues the “roots” you’re referring to?

KRIEGER Yeah, I loved the blues, and so did Jim, who was really getting deeply into it at that point. He was also going down to the Whisky [A Go Go] or the Troubadour and jumping onstage with whoever was performing. He just loved Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters. So did I, but what pissed me off is Jim would never bother to learn all the words from the blues songs. He’d do one verse, then go off and do his own stuff, which sometimes was better. But that could also be really frustrating.

GW Was everyone in the band on the same page when it came to the blues?

KRIEGER No! John hated playing the blues. [laughs] Being the drummer or bass player in a blues band can be boring, because you have to play the same thing over and over. John wanted to play some things that were not just a regular blues, so a lot of our blues had something different going on. And I loved the way he played the blues.

GW In a way, his dislike of playing the blues made you a better blues band.

KRIEGER Exactly. [laughs] That is true even on “Roadhouse,” which is as basic as you can get. What John plays there is really cool. It’s a total two-beat backbeat thing, which is especially evident on the chorus. It’s the type of thing that you don’t hear anymore, but which John picked up from listening to some real old blues. It’s the kind of little, subtle thing that has gotten lost, and it was so old even then that it sounded new.

GW I would contend that more than John’s drumming makes “Roadhouse Blues” a standout track.

KRIEGER [laughs] Oh yeah. It is one of my personal favorites. I was always proud of that song, because as simple as it is, it’s not just another blues. That one little lick makes it a song, and I think that sums up the genius of the Doors. I think that song stands up really well as an example of what made us a great band. And the session was really cool—one of my fondest memories of the band. We cut the tune live, with John Sebastian playing harp and Lonnie Mack playing bass. He came up with that fantastic bass line.

GW Mack was a guitar legend. How did he come to play bass for the Doors?

KRIEGER He was working in the studio after quitting the music business to sell bibles. Someone found out and told him to go to Elektra and ask for a job. I loved his stuff and was amazed that he had quit playing and tickled that he was around, so it was a natural to ask him to play on something. He was a nice guy. He always used to get mad because I would call him a “bass player,” and he would say, “I’m not a bass player. I’m a gee-tar player.”

GW For the fourth disc of The Doors: Box Set [1997], you, Ray and John chose your five favorite songs. One of your selections was Morrison Hotel’s “Peace Frog.” What makes that song so special for you?

KRIEGER I had written the music to that without any lyrics. I was trying to cop a James Brown feel. I kind of messed up on it, but it came out sounding really cool. I wrote the music, including those breaks, in their most basic forms, and then it was given the Doors treatment by the three of us and Ray Neapolitan, who was playing bass. Jim couldn’t figure out words for it, and I didn’t have any, so we just cut it as an instrumental track. Later, he got out his notebook and he and [producer] Paul Rothchild found this poem called “Abortion Story,” which had all the stuff about blood in the streets. Then the two of them came up with a vocal line to fit the music. That was extremely unusual, because usually we wouldn’t record something until he knew what he was going to sing on it. And the lyrics usually came with the music, not in two separate packages. I actually always thought the fit here was a little uncomfortable, but it’s still one my favorites.

GW Your solo on there has a really cool and very different sound. What were you playing through?

KRIEGER It was a Fender Twin Reverb played real loud, and the echo was done with tape delay.

GW The album took its name from a real hotel in L.A. There is also the famous picture on the album of the Doors hanging out at the Hard Rock Cafe [a Los Angeles bar from which the popular restaurant chain later took its name]. How did you find these places?

KRIEGER Ray found the hotel, which was a skid-row flophouse, while driving around downtown Los Angeles. It seemed a natural place to do a photo shoot, given its name, so we went there with [photographer] Henry Diltz. We were already recording the album, and once we took that picture, the album had a name. While we were there doing the shoot, someone in the group stumbled onto the Hard Rock Cafe, a wino bar. We stopped in to have a beer and take some more pictures. Those places were both in the heart of wino country.

Jim loved it down there. He loved talking to those guys. There was one guy who claimed that if you gave him 50 cents, he could whistle louder than anything you’ve ever heard because Jesus would whistle through him. And it was incredibly loud.

GW By the time you cut Morrison Hotel, Jim had already been arrested in Miami and was facing obscenity charges and possible jail time [over the Doors’ controversial performance at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, on March 1, 1969]. Did you all feel worried and desperate about the future of the band?

KRIEGER No more worried and desperate than on the other albums. [laughs] We were always kind of on edge. We couldn’t get gigs anywhere and had just come off The Soft Parade, where everyone had knocked us for overproducing—and some of us kind of agreed with the criticism. So I think we were just having fun getting back to the basics and playing music together. And when it came out and got great press, that felt great.

GW You obviously have a real fondness for John’s drumming and a tremendous history together. Has it been hard to be split up by a lawsuit?

KRIEGER Yes, it is difficult. I think John kind of painted himself into a corner. He said he didn’t want to play with anyone unless Eddie Vedder was singing. We want John to play, and I know the fans want him to play and… It’s just frustrating. There are a lot of issues that need to be worked out there. This happens with a lot of groups, where one guy doesn’t want to play and the others want to use the band’s name, and it ends up in court, which is really stupid. The only thing that happens is the lawyers make a lot of money.

GW So where does it stand now? Can you pick up the phone and call him and discuss other things, or is it too far gone?

KRIEGER It’s tough, man. It’s really tough. I really believe that we’ll get back together at some point, but we haven’t actually talked since the lawsuit was filed, to be honest. We send emails and stuff, and we do get together for Doors business. It could have been worse, because we can still collaborate on business deals and Doors issues and keep some cool stuff coming out, which is good.

GW You’re still playing Doors material with Ray. Does it feel very different playing with him than any other keyboard player?

KRIEGER Yes, it does. I’ve had many different keyboard guys over the years, and it’s pretty tough to find the right guy to play Doors music. It’s just as tough for me as finding the right singer. I want them to play the right notes when we play Doors songs, but it’s impossible to duplicate Ray’s sound.

GW I don’t believe it’s as hard as finding a singer who can nail Jim Morrison without going over the top. Have you had trouble with guys who think they need to behave like Jim—drinking to excess, being unreliable and so on?

KRIEGER Oh, yeah. And, you know, we already lived through that once, and the last thing we want is to deal with it again. It’s true that finding a singer to sing Doors songs is probably the toughest thing. And our fans can be picky in unpredictable ways. We were working with [the Cult’s] Ian Astbury, who kind of looked like Jim and tried to act like Jim. He had a great voice, which wasn’t really like Jim’s voice, but it worked because he brought his own thing to it. I thought it sounded great, but a lot of people didn’t like that he tried to look like Jim. You can’t please everyone, but when Ian went back to play with the Cult, we had Brett Scallions from Fuel come in. He looked nothing like Jim and acted nothing like him. But he sounded good, and we got fewer complaints.

Now we have Miljenko Matijević, who came from Steelheart. The guy doesn’t look like Jim or try to act like him in any way. His stage thing is more metal, I guess. But he nails the vocals incredibly well—he has, like, a six-octave range—and so far we’ve had a great response. People really dig him. So we’re going to keep going out there and having fun with the music of the Doors.

Gibson Custom has announced the introduction of the new Inspired By Robby Krieger SG — a limited edition replica guitar that combines features from Doors guitarist Robby Krieger’s most cherished SGs.

Whether it’s the SG Special Krieger played when he first joined the band or the dozen or so he’s owned since, Gibson SGs have played a part in all of Krieger’s work, including such classic rock staples as “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Love Her Madly” and countless other songs that remain as relevant today as they were popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Taking the Best of the Best

The new Inspired By Robby Krieger SG from Gibson Custom blends several features from some of Krieger’s favorite SGs. Made of traditional solid mahogany, the body of the Krieger SG is typical of the thin SG bodies from the mid 1960s, complete with traditional beveled edges and the distinct dual sharp cutaway horns that give players complete access to the guitar’s full 22-fret rosewood fingerboard. The body is then finished in Krieger’s personal favorite Aged Dark Heritage Cherry finish, which is very similar to the finish of his beloved 1967 SG Standard, and historically accurate right down to the tiniest scratches, dings and belt rash. The neck is also a typical SG one-piece mahogany neck, but with a hybrid neck profile modeled after the neck on a 1961 Gibson SG owned by a close friend and the neck on his personal ’67 SG Standard.

Gibson’s ’57 Classic Pickups Deliver

In order to duplicate Krieger’s signature sound on song’s like the Doors’ classic “Roadhouse Blues” and its easily identifiable opening guitar lick, Krieger chose a pair of Gibson’s renowned ’57 Classic humbucker pickups. Gibson’s original “Patent Applied For” humbuckers of the mid- to late-1950s — some of the most sought after pickups in the world — were wound using imprecise machines, resulting in pickups with slightly different output and tone, and desirable to players who wanted to mix and match and explore a complete spectrum of tonal possibilities. The ’57 Classic pickups are the result of Gibson’s drive to capture and recreate this renowned characteristic. Krieger’s signature sound comes through clearly in a warm, full tone with a balanced response, packing all the tremendous “PAF” humbucker crunch expected from a Gibson humbucker.

Limited Run of Only 150 Guitars

Everything else on the new Inspired By Krieger SG is classic Gibson SG Standard, including the ABR-1 Bridge and Maestro tailpiece tremolo system, nickel hardware, 22-fret rosewood fingerboard with figured acrylic trapezoid inlays, and vintage tulip tuners. The new Inspired By Robby Krieger SG Standard is destined to become of the most popular SGs ever produced by Gibson Custom, but it will only be produced in a very limited run of only 150 guitars — 50 aged to look exactly like Krieger’s, and 100 with Gibson Custom’s V.O.S. finish treatment. Each guitar will come with its own Gibson Custom case, custom care kit, and a certificate of authenticity signed personally by Krieger.

Click here for more information about the Gibson Robby Krieger SG.

Robby Krieger delves deep inside the Doors’ 1997 box set, telling previously untold tales of unreleased live recordings, B-sides and other rarities.

In March 1969, during a performance by the Doors of the song “Five to One,” at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, Jim Morrison looked down at the crowd and asked a question that many believe led ultimately to the destruction of one of the greatest rock bands of all time.

The question: “Do you wanna see my cock?”

While Robby Krieger, the Doors guitarist, still maintains, “I never saw him pull it out, and I still don’t think he really did,” Morrison was arrested and charged and convicted of indecent exposure. The episode opened the door, so to speak, to the band’s demise, as Morrison’s action led to a virtual blacklisting of the Doors for a year by concert promoters across America. Things “were never quite the same again,” according to Krieger.

Now, nearly 30 years after Jim Morrison allegedly waved his flag in Miami, fans of the Doors will be able to hear the actual sound of the great overexposure. The very first track of The Doors Box Set, the new four-CD compilation assembled by surviving members of the band and soon to be released by Elektra, is the Doors’ 1969 Miami Dinner Key Auditorium rendition of “Five to One.” The song is one of many in a set which appears to have been designed to appeal to curiosity seekers as much as mainstream fans.

“The record company has wanted us to do a box for years now,” explains Krieger, “but we put it off until we could come up with something really good—and different.”

And different it is. Four years in the making, The Doors Box Set was meticulously and imaginatively conceived. Taken as a whole, the set adds depth and shading to the band’s short but prolific career. (The Doors managed to squeeze in six studio albums, plus a live album, in the five years between their debut and Morrison’s death in 1971.) Included in the collection are dozens of rare outtakes, b-sides, soundcheck recordings and an entire 1969 performance held at New York’s Madison Square Garden. There is also “Orange Country Suite”—a new tune featuring a recently recorded instrumental backing track to a Jim Morrison demo dating from 1970. But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the set is that only the last disc of the four, entitled “Band Favorites,” includes any previously released material. Clearly, this is no ordinary greatest-hits collection.

“Everyone in the band had different ideas of what to put on the fourth CD, so we arrived at the idea that each of us would be allowed to pick our five favorite songs,” says Krieger. “We didn’t want to create a ‘best of,’ because that had already been done.

But it is no surprise that Krieger and company placed a premium on crafting such a unique product; the Doors were always true originals. Though their first album arrived in 1967, during the heyday of flower power, the band’s music was dark and apocalyptic. While the Beatles chanted “all you need is love,” Morrison fantasized about killing his father and fucking his mother

The Doors were full of contradictions and riddles. They were a rock trio with a jazz drummer and no bass player (Ray Manzarek filled in the bottom by playing murky, hypnotic ostinatos on the Fender Rhodes keyboard bass he placed on top of his organ). Lead singer Morrison was both a strikingly handsome teen pin-up type and a deeply tormented alcoholic who died at the age of 27. And then there was Krieger.

Krieger joined the Doors in 1965, when he was only 18. At the time, the sum total of his experience on electric guitar was six months. His only real background was in flamenco guitar—two years—for which he used a nylon-stringed instrument. As a result, he played his Gibson guitars with his fingers, producing a spidery, sensuous tone that is unique in the annals of rock.

“I brought Robby to the band,” says drummer John Densmore, still displaying pride in his discovery 32 years later. “I wanted him in because he was my best friend and could play some cool leads. Little did I know that he had this phenomenal melodic sense and innate understanding of song structure. It’s impossible to imagine where we would have been without him. He wrote perfect melodies for Jim to sing: Jim couldn’t have written them more appropriately himself.”

Krieger not only collaborated with Morrison on countless tunes but also penned on his own many of the Doors’ best songs and biggest hits, including “Light My Fire,” “Touch Me” and “Love Me Two Times.”

“Robby’s playing in the Doors displayed as much passion as anyone ever has,” adds Bruce Botnick, the band’s longtime engineer who co-produced the box set with Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek. Botnick joined the project after the death of Doors producer Paul Rothchild, who had catalogued over 40 hours of the band’s music. “That struck me all over again as I went through the archives. There were many nights when he just transcended himself, went inside and rose to extraordinary levels of inspiration.”

Late last summer, just days after the band members recorded “Orange County Suite,” Krieger sat down to go through the four discs of the box set song by song. His assessments are— in the finest tradition of the Doors themselves— insightful and brutally honest.

GUITAR WORLD The box set starts with one of the most controversial moments of your career—the Doors’ performance of “Five to One” at Miami’s Dinner Key Auditorium, in 1969, during which Jim allegedly exposed himself, leading to his arrest and ultimate conviction of indecent exposure. Why did you want to start there?

ROBBY KRIEGER It’s a very revealing track. It shows you where Jim was at the time, and where the band was as well. It’s a very visual track—you can listen to it and imagine what’s going on. The quality, of course, is pretty bad, but it is way better than the bootlegs which have long been out there. Besides, we figured that the poor sound quality is offset by the content.

That was truly a crazy night. Jim was very late getting to the show, and by the time he got there, he was pretty drunk. He had just had a big fight with his girlfriend and future wife, Pam. And not only that, but just before leaving Los Angeles, he had seen a performance by this theater group, the Living Theater. They were the first somewhat legitimate stage ensemble to use total nudity. It was very groundbreaking stuff, where the people in the cast would run out in the audience and get everyone involved. They’d rile everyone up and get in their faces. It was pretty cool, and Jim really dug it. He brought all of us to see it. He saw that again just before he left for Miami, and I think he was pretty affected by it; he was getting more into the idea of being very confrontational with the audience.

GW Right before the Doors recorded L.A. Woman you cut the demo of “Hyacinth House” at your home studio. What do you remember about it?

KRIEGER I had a little house in Benedict Canyon, which is near Laurel Canyon, California. Jim and John and a couple of other people came over there one night. We were just fooling around, taping some stuff. I had this pet bobcat at the time…

GW A pet bobcat?

KRIEGER Yeah, yeah. It would mostly stay outside, but sometimes it would come inside. But by that time it was getting real big and kind of dangerous, so I didn’t let people pet it or anything. And that’s where Jim got that line about the lions. And “hyacinths” referred to some hyacinth flowers that were right outside the window. And in that line about the bathroom, Jim was talking about this friend of ours who was there and kept hogging the bathroom all night. Jim wanted to go to the bathroom, and he couldn’t. Finally, the guy got out of the bathroom, and Jim goes, “I see the bathroom is clear.” He wrote the song on the spot, and I think that was how some of the best Doors songs were written.

GW “Who Scared You,” a b-side to “Wishful, Sinful,” has been something of a “lost” Doors song, one I’ve never seen on any bootleg. Yet it’s a great song. What made it pop back into your consciousness?

KRIEGER Actually, I always liked that song, and I don’t know why we never put it out on an album. Maybe it was a little bit dark, but we should have put it on The Soft Parade, which is when we cut it. I’ve always thought that the Doors were lost on that album because of the orchestration, and it became Jim and the big band. “Who Scared You” is one of the few songs that I feel was enhanced, rather than overwhelmed, by the horns. I think it’s up there with “Touch Me” and “Wishful Sinful.” I’m happy to get it out there, really.

GW “Black Train” is a medley of “Crossroads,” “Mystery Train” and “Away in India,” recorded at a 1970 concert in Philadelphia. It sounds pretty cohesive and flowing. Is that something that you guys often played, or was it a one-time jam?

KRIEGER We played it quite a few times for about a year. I always liked that song a lot. There was a bootlegged version from a show in Seattle that I really liked, which we were going to use. But then we found this version, which seemed a little better. That’s another one I’m happy to get out.

GW “Whiskey, Mystics and Men” is a Morrison Hotel outtake.

KRIEGER Right. That’s a very cool track. We overdubbed a bunch of stuff on it when we were doing An American Prayer [the 1978 recording of Densmore, Krieger and Manzarek backing some 1970 Morrison poetry readings], but we never used it for some reason. It’s unusual: Ray played Mellotron, and it had Fritz Ritchmond, the jug player in the Kweskin Jug Band, the great bluegrass mandolinist Jesse McReynolds and some people chanting. Very interesting stuff. That’s another one that probably should have made it onto an album but for some reason never did.

GW The set includes the band’s first five demo tracks, recorded in 1965, before you joined the Doors, including a version of “Moonlight Drive,” which is followed by another take from a year later, with you on it. It’s interesting to hear what your addition meant to the band.

KRIEGER Oh yeah, definitely. It sounds a lot better. [laughs] The truth is, it wasn’t just me, of course. Everybody was playing a lot differently, and a lot better, by that time. You have to realize that when they did those first demos, it wasn’t really a band. It consisted of Ray, Ray’s brothers playing guitar and harmonica, Jim and John, and this lady bass player. And it was just an early demo, the kind every musician has. We just thought fans would find those tracks interesting. What I brought to the band were just some different musical ideas. Ray’s brothers were good musicians, but they were like a surf band. I came from a different place. I had learned flamenco classical guitar, so I played with my fingers. I had the slide thing, and I was into New York urban blues, and maybe helped the band develop its own sound.

But I think what I really added is the writing aspect, which pushed things in a different direction. When I joined the group, those songs on the demo were about all they had. And when I got in with them, Jim and I just started writing a lot. And that’s where most of the material on the first and second albums came from.

GW Did you have a strong impact on Jim’s writing?

KRIEGER Yeah, I really did, actually. Jim and I started hanging out a lot and jamming and writing, but it wasn’t only that. The four of us just started jamming more and doing different things, getting more musically adventurous and unusual. Even on the first album, there are a lot of odd songs, like “Take It As It Comes,” “Light My Fire” and “The End”—stuff that’s very different from surf music and blues. Stuff that made it more musically complex, more interesting.

GW Ray and John are generally regarded as the band’s jazz influences, but some of your material, in particular “Light My Fire,” shows a strong modal jazz influence, reminiscent of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue period.

KRIEGER I think we all were equally influenced by that. John and I used to listen to jazz all the time, long before we were ever in the Doors. And Ray was into it, too. John actually played with jazz bands in high school and had some friends who were into it heavily and played some very good jazz. Whereas I never played jazz at that time, but I didn’t know how to play guitar very well yet. I had enough trouble playing rock and roll, so I couldn’t worry about playing jazz. [laughs] I knew my limitations as a player, but I always loved the music and was influenced by its ideas.

GW “Rock Is Dead” is probably going to be one of the more talked-about songs on the set.

KRIEGER That was recorded while we were in the studio doing The Soft Parade. We went out to dinner one night, got really drunk, came back and just started jamming. There was a Mellotron in the studio, which we wanted to use and had been trying to figure out what to do with. We were all drunk, and Ray started playing it, just for fun. And it became that jam, through much of which he plays that thing. That weird organ sound goes in and out of tune is the Mellotron.

GW Where did Jim fit in in that kind of spontaneous improvisation?

KRIEGER We would start playing something first; he wouldn’t just start singing. He would react to us, and then we would try to follow him wherever he was going. So that’s usually how it went; first he followed us, then we followed him.

GW As far as his vocal there goes, it could be argued he was right about rock being dead, because so many rock giants did start dying not too long after that.

KRIEGER Yeah, for sure. First Jimi and Janis, then Jim himself. And then rock really was sort of dead. It really seemed that way to me, though I didn’t know for sure that rock was dead until disco started up a few years later. [laughs]

GW Another interesting piece of music is the last track of the first album, “Albinoni,” a symphonic piece tacked onto the end of “Rock Is Dead.” Where did that come from?

KRIEGER That was a piece of music that we all liked a lot. We were gonna use it for The Soft Parade, at the end of the song “The Soft Parade”; I honestly forget why we didn’t. I think we all decided that it was just too heavy or something, but we had gotten a full string section in, and they nailed a really great rendition. Actually, what happened was someone had the idea to do that, and Bruce Botnick’s father was a string contractor, the guy who puts string sections together, so he called all these guys and they came down and made this beautiful piece of music, which we stupidly never used, until now. I added some guitar to it a couple weeks ago, which I think came out real nice, and John added some very cool percussion.

GW Did you do much overdubbing on the rest of the songs?

KRIEGER Oh, a couple of things, but they are almost all overdubs on the live album. I touched up “Blue Sunday,” “Roadhouse Blues” and “The End” just a little bit. It’s basically stuff that was out of tune and easily fixed. These weren’t like major multitrack recordings, so everything is leaked all over each other, and there’s no way to fix that, which is fine. I mean, a live album is a live album. I just couldn’t resist tweaking a few things that were easily accessible.

I love the version of “The End” because it just really hits a mood, but unfortunately the guitar was out of tune for quite a bit of the song. Which happened pretty frequently by the end of the night. We didn’t have tuners, and I didn’t have a guy on the side of the stage getting my guitars ready. And, in any case, I played just one guitar, an SG, for straight playing and another one, a black beauty Les Paul, for slide. I detuned both E strings to D for “The End,” and it would be pretty tough to keep it in tune. I managed to edit out most of the really bad stuff while retaining the great feel.

GW Do you still have your Doors SGs?

KRIEGER No. The first one was actually a Melody Maker, and after that I had several red SGs. They’re all gone now, mostly stolen and a few lost. To be honest, at the time, I didn’t really care. I just got new ones. They were more or less just tools to me. In the studio I used Fender Twin Reverb amps, and I don’t think I have any of them, either. I do still have my Black Beauty, though.

GW Once you decided that you wanted to do a live disc, how did you come to select this particular New York performance?

KRIEGER We thought it would be nice if we could present one show rather than throw together stuff from a whole bunch of different, unrelated shows. We started going through all our live tapes, and it turned out that we had pretty good tapes of the shows from New York which we didn’t use at all on Absolutely Live, or anywhere else. We used stuff from a couple of shows during the same stand at the Felt Forum and structured them to run like one live set.

GW You’ve always said that Absolutely Live, while good, was not representative of the Doors at their best.

KRIEGER Yeah, and, to tell you the truth, I don’t think we ever recorded anything that was, including this live set on the box. But this version of “The End” does come close for me. There’s just some excitement, some of the feeling that caused the hair on the back of your neck to stand up. That’s the kind of thing that’s so hard to capture on a studio record, but possible at a live show. That’s what we looked for here, and we got it on “The End.” I definitely like that version better than the one on the original album, which I always thought was really just a skeleton of how we played it live. I feel that way about almost everything on the first album. We had no studio experience and had to do everything so fast. I also think studios are by nature, limiting. So I’m happy about having more good live stuff come out.

I believe that the performances of “Ship of Fools” are really good, also “Celebration of the Lizard.” I like that a lot. The audience was pretty cool, and Jim was in an especially good mood. You can tell because of the way he talks to the audience beforehand and gets them in the right mood. There’s also a nice version of “Gloria” and an excellent take of “Crawling King Snake,” which could be our definitive version. The guitar solo is very weird. [laughs] In those days, I probably would not have wanted that heard because it’s very off the wall. But now I like it.

GW Playing “off-the-wall” solos in traditional blues formats was one of your trademarks with the Doors. The slide solo on “I’ve Been Down So Long” comes to mind. Was that the result of spontaneous improvisation? Or did you think, Okay, I’m going to play something weird tonight?

KRIEGER It was spontaneous. I would never play weird just to play weird. I did, however, try to approach things a little differently because, at the time, everyone was imitating Chuck Berry, B.B. King or Michael Bloomfield. Of course, I loved those guys; I listened to Bloomfield’s first Butterfield album [The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 1965] for hours on end, but I wanted to do something different, to establish my own sound.

GW Why do you think you weren’t able to capture more performances of the band at its best?

KRIEGER In those days, unfortunately, they didn’t really have good microphones and great live recording trucks sitting at the backstage door like they do nowadays. And you didn’t have a soundman running a DAT tape of every performance, giving you a great catalog to choose from. When you decided to record, it was really a big undertaking. The reason so much stuff from the Matrix gig [San Francisco, March 10, 1967] has been bootlegged is that they just happened to record everything there. There is some nice music from there, and we used the best on this set [“The Crystal Ship” and “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind”], but these weren’t necessarily the best performances ever. They just happened to have a tape recorder down there. And thank God for that, I guess.

GW The version of “The Crystal Ship” recorded there is particularly good.

KRIEGER Thanks. I do like that Matrix material, which was recorded shortly after we had done the first album and were playing really well. And we played some of those songs every night, too, and really just kept polishing them.

GW You guys were known for playing very loud in clubs—and John and Ray always blame you.

KRIEGER [laughs] Yeah, I’ll admit that I always thought, The louder the better, especially on heavy guitar songs like “When the Music’s Over.” You have to play at a certain level to get a certain sound, especially in those days; before they had overdrives you had to be at 10 in order to get the speakers vibrating right, to get that breakup happening. John would get so pissed ’cause he would get these big blisters on his hands from playing so loud. [laughs] He was always bugging me to turn down, but I really felt I had to go to that volume to get the sound I wanted, and felt we needed, and also to fill up the room with sound as just a three-piece. But we didn’t just play loud; there was a lot of attention paid to the music fitting together like a puzzle. In large part, that goes back to the jazz influence. There was a lot of listening to the other guys and having that determine what you’d play.

GW Albert King appears on two songs, “Money” and “Rock Me,” recorded at a show in Vancouver, Canada, on June 6, 1970. How did that come about?

KRIEGER Well, he was opening for us, and we asked him if he wanted to sit in. He was real cool about it. And we had a good time. I really enjoyed playing with him because he was one of my guys. I always loved listening to him, and Jim and everybody else really dug him, too. Everyone was excited to have him out there. I played slide and he played lead. He played, you know, Albert King licks.

GW The third disc of the box set, The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be, opens with “Hello to the Cities,” which is a clever splicing of two tracks—one of Ed Sullivan introducing the Doors “doing their latest hit record,” and one of Jim saying hello to what seems like every city in America.

KRIEGER Using the Ed Sullivan intro was Bruce Botnick’s idea, I think. We put that on there as kind of a joke. “Hello to the Cities” was kind of a silly thing that Jim did to put the audiences off guard, to keep them from becoming too comfortable. He’d go, “Hello, Detroit,” which was where we actually were. And they’d scream back. Then he’d go, “Hello, Chicago.” [laughs] And they’d start thinking, What is he talkin’ about? Then he’d go, “Hello, Pittsburgh,” and just keep going. They’d all think he was nuts by the time he’d done a few of those. And so would I. [laughs]

GW “Break on Through” is from the Isle of Wight Festival, August 1970, which was one of your last live performances, and which took place while Jim was going through his legal proceedings.

KRIEGER That was the last taped performance of the Doors, I believe, and certainly the last filmed performance. The movie of that festival was recently re-released, and anyone who’s seen it knows that our performance was kind of mess. Not just our performance, really, but the whole thing, which was really captured in the movie: people breaking down the walls and running in, everyone arguing about money, and just lots of bad vibes. Now, that was the death of rock and roll. [laughs] It really was the end of everything, the source of all bad things about the whole scene, all rolled into one show.

Jim was just in terrible shape. He had just come from court in Miami and had lost another legal battle, and he had to go back right afterward. In fact, three weeks later, he was convicted. We were supposed to go on tour right after the festival but couldn’t do it because he had to go back to Miami. All of that was taking its toll, and he was just fucking zonked. He just stood there and sang, didn’t move a muscle or do anything. Actually, though, all things considered, it’s surprising how good he sounds.

GW “Mental Floss,” recorded at the Aquarius show, is another Jim monolog.

KRIEGER Right. It’s him talking to the audience. I wanted to have that on there to show a little bit of Jim’s humorous side, along with the crazy asshole side that the movie [The Doors] showed, and which everyone seems to know.

GW Do you think awareness of Jim’s sense of humor has been lost over the years?

KRIEGER Oh, yeah. It’s something that’s never even been talked about. It certainly was not even hinted at in the movie, and most of the books don’t allude to it either. But he could be a real funny guy. He definitely was not a mopey kind of a guy with no sense of humor.

GW Then there’s “Adolph Hitler,” another spoken word piece.

KRIEGER There you go. There’s Jim at his funniest.

GW You recently held an online chat where someone asked if Jim had multiple personalities, and…

KRIEGER …I responded, “No, only two. Biggest asshole in the world and greatest guy in the world.” [laughs] That was really true. He could be either, and you never knew which one it was gonna be.

GW “The Soft Parade,” taken from a 1970 performance on PBS, is your only recorded live version of that song, I believe.

KRIEGER That could very well be. For what it was, it was really good. It’s kind of hard to get into playing rock and roll to just a camera, with no audience. Plus, it was like eight in the morning, and we were asleep. But I think it’s good; we played real well.

GW The three of you composed and recorded some new tracks for the song “Orange County Suite.” How did it feel to make music with John and Ray again?

KRIEGER Well, we’ve gotten together before this a few times, like for An American Prayer, and then “Ghost Song” [a new track recorded for the 1995 CD release of An American Prayer]. Playing with those guys feels the same as it always did; it feels good. But, you know, this is not 1968. It’s just that…well, in those days, that was all there was. I didn’t know anything else, and now I do. So that makes it different. But it’s the same as ever in the sense that we definitely haven’t lost any of our ability to play together.

GW The only previously released songs on the set are on the fourth CD, which is comprised of the three surviving Doors’ favorite band tracks. That’s an interesting concept.

KRIEGER Yeah, it is. The thing is, everyone had different ideas of what to put on the fourth CD, so we arrived at the idea that we could each pick five. At first my idea for this CD was to do The Doors’ Wildest Songs, featuring all of the epics: “The End,” “When the Music’s Over,” “The Soft Parade” and a few others. So when it came to choose my five favorites, I figured, Well, I’ll just choose those five wild songs. But they toned me down a little bit. [laughs] I had too many long ones, so John said, “Well, I’d like to pick ‘When the Music’s Over,’ ” which was fine with me. As long as it’s on there, I don’t care who picked it. That’s my favorite guitar solo.

It was really a challenge because the harmony is static. I had to play 56 bars over the same riff, which isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to play something over an interesting chord progression. But we did that a lot, and that’s the Miles Davis/John Coltane influence again. I mean, Coltrane soloed brilliantly over minimal chord progressions, and I was always trying to play something that sounded like him—just totally out there in terms of tonality. I’d say “When the Music’s Over” is the closest I ever came to nailing it.

GW Let’s talk about the songs you did pick, starting with “L.A. Woman.”

KRIEGER To me, that’s perhaps the quintessential Doors song. The way it came about was fantastic. We started playing, Jim began coming up with those words, and it just poured forth. I don’t know how he created that whole concept on the spot like that, but he did. You would think that would have been a poem or something that he had written before, but it’s not. That was just written on the spot. I remember Jim sitting in the bathroom singing, and all of us playing together and just having a great

The whole album was, really. We were pretty far down. We couldn’t play anywhere because of the fallout from the indecent exposure; Morrison Hotel hadn’t done that well, and people were saying we were over; Jim looked bad and was getting fat; our longtime producer walked out on us. [Rothchild quit early in the L.A. Woman sessions and Botnick, his engineer, stepped up to co-produce with the band.—Ed.] So, all things considered, I thought it was really cool that the album came out so well and did so well. I think we produced something so loose because there was no pressure. We figured we were screwed, so we started having fun again. We were so far gone that it was like a weight was lifted.

GW Your next selection, “Light My Fire,” was, remarkably, the first song you ever wrote. Ray told me that your songwriting ability was completely unknown to your bandmates, and a wonderful surprise.

KRIEGER I know. [laughs] But look, I didn’t know I could write like that, so how could they? And I don’t know that I ever would have written any songs, much less something like “Light My Fire,” had I never been in the Doors.

When I first started writing songs, I figured I’d write about earth, air, fire or water in order to keep with a concept Jim had of writing about universal subjects, things that wouldn’t go out of style in a week. How much more solid can you get, I figured, than the four elements? Musically, I was trying to get a “Hey, Joe” kind of feel for the chord structure. I didn’t want it to be a blues. I wanted it to be folk rock, more or less.

GW A lot of your writing seems influenced by folk music.

KRIEGER Yeah, I think that is correct. Ironically, I became exposed to a lot of my influences via some albums that Paul Rothchild had produced for Elektra. They were New York urban blues albums by guys like Geoff Muldaur, Danny Kalb, and Koerner, Ray and Glover, all guys who had drifted in New York’s Greenwich Village in the early Sixties and put out these white urban folk blues albums on Elektra. I loved that stuff. In fact, the musical idea for “Love Me Two Times” came from a Danny Kalb lick.

GW Well, you put both your folky and jazz influences to spectacular use on “Light My Fire.” Without that song the Doors’ entire career would have been vastly different. I think you might have been like the Velvet Underground, a great band that became popular only years after their recording heyday.

KRIEGER It’s impossible to say for sure, but having that Top 40 hit definitely puts you in a whole different ball game. Somehow though, despite having Top 10 hits, the Doors still tended to be thought of as an underground band.

You know, I don’t even know if we would have ever recorded all our albums if “Light My Fire” hadn’t hit, because our first single, “Break on Through,” didn’t really do much and several months went by before they edited “Light My Fire” [the single version, from which much of Krieger’s memorable guitar solo was edited—Ed.] and put it out. The album was starting to look like a failure, and who knows whether Elektra would’ve even picked up our option after two albums if we haven’t had some sales success.

GW Getting back to your five selections for the fourth CD, what about “Peace Frog”?

KRIEGER Well, I had written the music to that without any lyrics. I kind of messed up on it, but it came out sounding really cool. Jim couldn’t figure out words for it, and I didn’t have any, so we just cut it as an instrumental track. Later, he got out his notebook, and he and Rothchild found this poem that seemed to work with it. And that’s how that came about. That was extremely unusual, because usually we wouldn’t record something until he knew what he was going to sing on it. And the lyrics usually came with the music, not in two separate packages.

GW “Take It As It Comes” is next.

KRIEGER That was a favorite saying of the Maharishi [Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, teacher of transcendental meditation—Ed.]. Most people I know think I wrote that song, but I didn’t. I wrote the music, but Jim wrote the words. And he knew nothing about meditation, either. Kind of weird.

But, actually, what makes it one of my favorites is the music. I was trying to stay away from a Chuck Berry sound and come up with something that was not blues, not folk rock, but just the Doors, identifiably ours. And, looking back, I think we succeeded at this tremendously on this song.

GW The last one is “Wishful Sinful.”

KRIEGER Again, that’s one of the only songs from The Soft Parade where I really think the orchestra actually added something to the song that wasn’t there to begin with. Getting back to the elements idea, this was a water song.

GW The Doors still seem to resonate with young music fans. How do you account for this?

KRIEGER I get asked that a lot, and I wish I had some snappy answer, but I don’t. I think it’s that they hear a certain honesty in the music, and in Jim’s voice, which is just not there in today’s music, because it’s gotten to be such a business. Money rules the music industry now. It may have always ruled the executives, but not the musicians. And that’s changed, I’m afraid; it’s just gotten so commercialized. I think people realize that the Doors were not about that. They hear it in the music, and they like it.

But it is amazing how many young kids, even 10-year-olds, are into the Doors. And it’s not always because of their parents either. They hear us on the radio, or their friends have our CDs, or they read one of those books about the band. Then they get obsessed. It’s really amazing, and it just doesn’t seem to slow down, which is great.

GW Great for you.

KRIEGER Yeah. [laughs] Great for me.

A new door opens for Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek

Considering all the tumultuous legal battles that Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek have endured over the past three years, the name they recently chose for their current band—Riders on the Storm—fits like pair of skintight leather pants.

The band, which consists of Krieger, Manzarek and former Cult singer Ian Astbury, began giving enthusiastically welcomed performances of classic Doors songs in September 2002, working under the name Doors of the 21st Century. Unfortunately, former Doors drummer John Densmore (whose tinnitus prevented him from joining the group) balked when he learned of the band’s suggestive name. Along with Morrison’s estate, he successfully convinced a U.S. court this past August to issue a permanent injunction that bars Krieger and Manzarek from employing the word “Doors” in their group’s name, although they can still perform the Doors’ music.

Densmore isn’t the only drummer feeling litigious toward his onetime band mates. Former Police drummer Stewart Copeland had been performing with Doors of the 21st Century but bowed out after he broke his arm in a bicycle accident. When the group announced it had hired Ty Dennis as his replacement, Copeland sued for breach of contract. The lawsuit was settled quickly and amicably under confidential terms.

For now, anyway, the road ahead looks clear for Riders on the Storm. The band’s arduous journey began in early 2001, when Krieger, Manzarek and Densmore reunited for VH1’s Storytellers, with a variety of guest singers filling in for Jim Morrison. The program’s success convinced Krieger and Manzarek that the time was right to perform the Doors’ most beloved material on the road once again. Impressed with Astbury’s performances of “Whiskey Bar” and “Backdoor Man” on the VH1 program, the duo invited him to handle vocal duties. “I knew it was going to be difficult because Morrison is such a sacred icon,” Astbury told Billboard. “My take on it is more we’re performing a classic body of work in the same way that a classical body of work of a dead composer would be performed by musicians of the day.”

In addition to touring almost nonstop for the past three years, Riders on the Storm have also started work on a new album of original material. Poets Michael McClure and Jim Carroll contributed lyrics, and the band recently introduced a new song, “Eagle in a Whirlpool,” featuring lyrics penned by McClure, to their live sets. In August, VH1 taped “A Tribute to the Doors,” the first episode of their brand-new program, Decades Rock Live. The show aired on October 8 and featured performances by Riders on the Storm, Perry Farrell, Macy Gray, Pat Travers, John Sebastian and members of Antigone Rising and Vanilla Fudge. With their legal battles behind them, Krieger and Manzarek look forward to continuing their work with Riders on the Storm without further obstacles. Although a door was closed on use of their old band name, as a popular statement of wisdom notes, an entirely new door has opened. Robby Krieger brought Guitar Legends along on the band’s journey as it entered its latest portal.

GUITAR LEGENDS What influenced you and Ray to get together with Ian Astbury and start performing classic Doors songs again?

ROBBY KRIEGER We taped a VH1 Storytellers special back in early 2001, and we had a bunch of different singers join us, like Scott Stapp from Creed, Scott Weiland, Pat Monahan from Train, Perry Farrell and Ian. After we did the show, Ian expressed a desire to do the reunion. All the other singers had their own deals going, but Ian was getting tired of singing with the Cult. It was perfect timing, plus he was great. He was one of the better singers on that show.

For years Ian was a friend of Danny Sugerman, who was our manager. The two of them had always plotted to get us together. Ian came to some shows I did with the Robby Krieger Band and sat in with us. It was the logical conclusion to choose him.

GL You and Ray have worked together for a while on a few collaborations, such as the tracks you both recorded for your Versions album in 1983. What took you until 2002 to revisit the Doors?

KRIEGER It was just the right time. I had my own band and Ray was doing things with his poet friends. More and more we had people asking when we were going to get together and do something. We figured we’d waited long enough, especially because it seemed like a lot of people wanted to see us do it. Then we got an offer from Harley- Davidson to play at their 100th Anniversary celebration in Los Angeles. We thought that would be a good way to start the reunion.

GL Since then you haven’t stopped. The band has played shows almost every month with just a few short breaks.

KRIEGER We’ve always figured that as long as people want to see us play, we’ll do it.

GL The band went into the studio in May 2005. How are things progressing on new material?

KRIEGER We did some work at Ocean Way with producer Ken Scott. We recorded maybe five or six songs and they turned out pretty good. The thing is we’ve got to make sure that they’re all incredible because it’s going to be compared to the Doors, of course. If it’s not incredible people will complain, so we’ve got to do our best. We’re taking our time with it, and we won’t put out an album until we’ve completed something that lives up to what we’ve previously done as the Doors.

GL The band debuted a new song, “Ea GLe in a Whirlpool,” in July. What is that song about?

KRIEGER Michael McClure wrote the words to that song. It’s about America. You’ll have to ask Michael what it’s really about because it’s pretty esoteric. It’s like a lot of other Doors songs where you’re not really sure what the hell it means and you have to make your own judgments.

GL With the Robby Krieger Band you usually played a Gibson ES-355, but I noticed that you’re playing Gibson SG guitars again, just like you used with the Doors.

KRIEGER My road manager Marco Moir talked me into trying the old SG again. He found a ’67 SG in a pawnshop and I really liked it. I could get a pretty similar sound to the 355 with it. Plus, I think people like to see you play the guitar that you used to play in the old days. It worked out pretty good. I have three SGs now. I found an old SG Special with P-90 pickups in my closet. I bought it about 20 years ago for 100 bucks, and it was in new condition. I just put it away and forgot about it. When the band got back together, I was looking through my guitars and found that thing, It sounded incredibly sweet for slide, so that’s what I’m using it for. I’m also playing a flamencostyle Renaissance Series guitar that Rick Turner made for me. I use it for “Spanish Caravan.”

GL Are you still using a Fender Twin Reverb amp like you did in the Sixties?

KRIEGER I’m using a Fender Blues DeVille with 4x10 speakers. I play through two of them in stereo.

GL When the Doors performed live, Ray played the bass lines on a keyboard. On this tour you guys are playing with a bassist. What influenced that decision?

KRIEGER Ray wanted to have both of his hands available to play other things. In reality, the piano bass sounds kind of clunky. The piano bass added to the Doors sound by making Ray play very hypnotically because he kind of had to be on automatic pilot with his bass lines. That made the whole band sound more hypnotic as well. We make sure that Phil Chen plays that way on the bass guitar, playing the exact same patterns that Ray did.

GL How do you feel about being forced to stop using the name Doors of the 21st Century?

KRIEGER It’s ridiculous, but I don’t think that fans really care what the name is at this point. Everybody knows who is playing with the band and who is not. Obviously Jim Morrison is not going to be there. Most people realize that. Maybe there’s one person in the audience who might think otherwise, but that’s not our fault. This whole legal mess has been really stupid. A lot of time was wasted and a lot of feelings were hurt. I don’t mind not calling the band the Doors, but I don’t see what’s wrong about putting the word “doors” somewhere in the name. I think that the fans know what’s going on and they know who they’re going to see onstage when they come to see us play.

GL You and Ray have often performed “The End” with your own bands, but you haven’t performed it yet with Riders on the Storm. Why not?

KRIEGER Ray felt that it was Jim’s song, that it was personal and that we should probably stay away from it. I’ve played it a couple of times with my band, and it always turns out great. We also played it on the VH1 special with Travis Meeks singing it, who also recorded a version of it for the Stoned Immaculate tribute album. John Densmore and I played on that recording along with Rob Wasserman on bass, and we thought it turned out really good. I wish we could play it. I’m sure we will at one point.

GL What other songs does the band shy away from playing?

KRIEGER I’ve always wanted to perform “Soft Parade” but I think Ray is reticent to do it because he’s too lazy to learn how to play it. [laughs] The other guys and I have already worked on it, but now we just have to convince Ray.

GL The music of the Doors still sounds as fresh as it did when it came out during the late Sixties and early Seventies.

KRIEGER I think you’re right. It’s amazing that people are still listening and the music still seems to work. We get a lot of young people at our shows. Our audiences are very mixed, but we get a lot of younger people there, especially when we’re not playing 21-and-over venues.

GL Do you find it ironic that the band is back and the U.S. is once again at war on foreign soil, just like we were in the late Sixties?

KRIEGER We just try to put some good music out there and encourage people to make love, not war. I saw this show on television the other night about some musicians in Afghanistan and those guys are so happy now that they’re able to write songs about the government or whatever they want to. They’ve been stifled for so long over there. It’s something we all take for granted. Music is one of the most pure forms of expression known to man, and no one should be allowed to stop people from making music.

Guitarist Robby Krieger takes a look back at the unique sound he helped create.

Robby Krieger was the quiet Door. Much like “the quiet Beatle,” George Harrison, whose graceful guitar was frequently forgotten amidst the Lennon-McCartney juggernaut, Krieger was all too often overshadowed by an ultra-charismatic bandleader. Onstage and in the media, the low-key guitarist couldn’t compete for attention with the Lizard King, Jim Morrison. Even today, 20 years after Morrison’s death, Krieger seems content to let psychedelic keyboard whiz Ray Manzarek speak for the band.

But the Krieger who stood silently by his amplifier as Morrison slithered across the stage was, in fact, as crucial to the band’s style as anyone. His sinuous, bluesy guitar lines wound their way through the Doors’ music, driving it on and lending it much of its distinct flavor. Listen closely to the tremendous sustain of “When the Music’s Over.” Tune in the overdriven lead line on “Five to One.” Or turn on to the true blues grit of “Roadhouse Blues” and “L.A. Woman.” Using only minimal effects, Krieger created a wide-ranging, extremely distinct, guitar style.

He al so penned some of the group’s most memorable songs. Though all tunes were credited to the Doors, it was Krieger who wrote “Light My Fire ,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me” and other celebrated Doors compositions inextricably associated with Morrison and his legend.

“I think it’s very important for a band to use collaborative credits, ” Krieger says from his Los Angeles home. “It helps hold the group together and, if you’re a real band, you’re working stuff out together, particularly the arrangements. That’s how it should be —and I think we were one of the only bands to do it. ”

Krieger has not been idle since the Doors’ 1972 dissolution, recording several instrumental albums [1977’s Robby Krieger and Friends, 1982’s Versions, 1985’s Robby Krieger and 1990’s No Habla], scoring a few movies and sharpening his jazz chops. He now tours with a group that includes his son Waylon on rhythm guitar and vocals, bassist Berry Oakley, Jr. (son of the late Allman Brothers great) and Wah Wah Watson, who owes his name to the effecthe pioneered as a Motown session player.

The Doors have always remained in the public eye, garnering intense attention from rock fans and gossip-mongers alike. Now with Oliver Stone’s new film elevating Doors consciousness to its highest level in years, guitarists are rediscovering Krieger’s contributions. And they learn that the Quiet Door actually spoke volumes.

*****

GUITAR WORLD Ray Manzarek recently said thathe considered the Doors an extension of the California cool jazz scene. Do you agree?

ROBBY KRIEGER I think that’s true, in a way. The Doors’ music was more like jazz in the way it fit together. It wasn’t just guys playing as loud as they could with fuzz and giant amps and stuff. Although we did often play as loud as we could, there was more attention to the music fitting together like a puzzle, which I think happens in jazz more than in rock. There’s more listening to the other guys and having that determine what you play.

GW I’ve read that “Light My Fire” and “Love Me Two Times” were the first songs you ever wrote. Is that true?

KRIEGER Yeah. That’s not a bad beginning, huh? I had no thoughts of writing songs at first, because Jim was the writer. Then one day he said, “Hey, we don’t have enough songs. You guys try writing some.” Well, okay. Who knows if I ever would have even written songs in another situation? Just being with Jim made me write a certain way, because I knew I had to compete with his songs, which were pretty heavy. And he taught me some things about writing about universal topics.

GW But he was open to other people writing lyrics?

KRIEGER Yeah, he didn’t care. It was amazing. You’d think that a guy of his caliber would have only wanted to do his own stuff. Can you imagine going up to Bob Dylan and saying, “Hey, Bob, I wrote this tune for you”? That shows you something about Jim. He wanted it to be the Doors, not “Jim Morrison and the Doors.” He was adamant about that.

GW The End,” with its dropped-D tuning, tremendous length and strange lyrics, was some thing completely different, distinct from everything else.

KRIEGER Yeah, and it’s funny because that started out a s just a cute little love song : “This is the end, my friend, my beautiful friend.” And I got the idea to do an Indian tuning because I was into Ravi Shankar in a big way. From there, it started getting longer and more weird. And every time we’d play it, Jim would add more weird stuff to it.

GW Did the fact that your earliest training was on classical guitar have a big influence on your electric style?

KRIEGER Probably. I played flamenco for a couple of years before I touched an electric. The main influence of that is that I didn’t use a pick. But I think the main thing that influenced my style was just being in the Doors. The fact that we didn’t have a bass player or a rhythm guitar player made me pl ay a certain way in order to fill certain holes. And the fact that Ray had to play bass and organ at the same time made him play a certain way, which I think really made the Doors sound.

GW You’re one of the few modern players who plays with his fingers.

KRIEGER That’s true, but in the last 10 years or so I have started to use a pick. I read an article by [jazz great] Wes Montgomery, who didn’t use a pick either. He said that if he had had a chance, he would have learned how to use one. So, I figured, Well, maybe I should grab a pick.

GW In songs like “Waiting for the Sun” and “Soul Kitchen” you played riffs that have become particularly identified with you—signature riffs.

KRIEGER That wasn’t a conscious thing—it just happened that way. I didn’t sit down and say, “I need a signature lick here, this is what it will be.” Certain people play a certain way and other people—writers, critics —categorize it as such.

GWWhile your playing always h ad a lot of bluesy feel, you didn’t seem concerned with copping blues licks note-for-note like many of your contemporaries. Did guys like [Paul Butterfield Band guitarists] Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop have an influence on you?

KRIEGER Oh yeah, I listened to the first Butterfield album [The Paul Butterfield Blues Band] for hours on end. But everybody either played like Chuck Berry or Mike Bloomfield so I just said, “Well, I’m going to play differently,” and went a different route. Koerner, Ray and Glover were some other guys I was really into—I thought those guys were really hip.

To be honest, “Love Me Two Times” came from one of their songs. The lick is very similar to one that Koerner does on “Downbound Train.” I told him that and he didn’t see it, didn’t think they sounded alike, but that was what inspired me. In fact, those guys inspired a lot of my licks.

And the idea to do “Back Door Man” came from John Hammond, Jr., another guy I really dug at the time. I heard his version and thought we could really do it great. But I still wasn’t trying to sound like anyone but me.

GW You started using a fuzzbox a lot on Waiting for the Sun—particularly on the title cut and “Hello, I Love You.” What were you using?

KRIEGER It might have just been a Gibson Maestro fuzztone, or it might have bee n these Acoustic amps we had with a built-in fuzz. Actually, I think it was a combination of those things. But there definitely was some heavy fuzz on that stuff—maybe too heavy.

GW But you didn’t really use much, effects-wise.

KRIEGER No, hardly any thing. I had the old Gibson and sometimes an Echoplex.

GWWaiting for the Sun also marked the first time you played slide extensively, for instance on “Hello, I Love You” and “Summer’s Almost Gone.”

KRIEGER I always loved playing slide and I think that’s the reason I got into the band in the first place: the guys liked the way I played slide. It’s funny that there’s not more slide on the first two albums, because I did play it a lot. But it seemed to keep getting passed over when song selections were made. I still play slide a lot.

GWSoft Parade was very heavily orchestrated, which was a real de parture for the band. Why did you go in that direction?

KRIEGER I don’t know, but it definitely was not my decision. I think it was because the Beatles did it, and everyone has to keep up with the Beatles. [laughs] That was an excuse, and it is sort of fun to get 30 guys in the studio and blast away. But it was a very difficult album to make. At first I hated it because it didn’t sound much like the Doors at all. But some of the stuff I really love, like “Wishful Sinful” and “Touch Me.” I think it worked really well on those songs.

GW MTV has been showing the “Touch Me” clip from the Smothers Brothers show, in which your eye looks a little worse for the wear. What happened?

KRIEGER Everyone asks me that. I usually say that Jim slugged me, but the truth is I was in an auto accident. I could have had makeup on it, but I thought, Maybe 20 years from now, people will ask me about it. [laughs] I really did think it looked kind of cool.

GW Having different names— “Morrison Hotel” and “The Hard Rock Cafe”— for the two sides of Morrison Hotel was an interesting idea. Was there a concept at work there?

KRIEGER Nah. That just came about after we finished the album and were thinking about the cover. Someone was downtown and noticed the Morrison Hotel. We saw the place and thought it would be a good album cover. Then we saw the Hard Rock Cafe, which was practically next door, and said, “Hey, let’s put that on the back.” Next thing we knew, there was a place in London cal led the Hard Rock Café. But both of those original places are gone now.

GW You started getting into the wah-wah on songs like “Peace Frog.” Were you influenced more by Motown or Sly and the Family Stone?

KRIEGER Well, I never really thought about that. To tell you the truth, that wasn’t a wah wah pedal on “Peace Frog.” It was a reverse pickup. We were just working on that last night—I haven’t done it in years. Wah Wah plays a wah wah on it now.

GW Was “Roadhouse Blue s” recorded live in the studio? KR IEGER Yes, it was. Not a lot of the stuff was, except on the first album and on L.A. Woman. As time went on, we had more money and started using more of the available tracks until the last album, where we wanted to get back. For the Doors, I think live was the best.

GW How did Lonnie Mack end up playing bass on “Roadhouse Blues”?

KRIEGER He just happened to be working in the Elektra studio that day, and I had always loved the way he played. So I asked him to play bass and he said, “Well, I’m not really a bass player, but I’ll try.” And after that, I always called him a bass player, which made him mad. He’d say, “I’m a guitar player, goddamit!”

GW Are you satisfied with Absolutely Live as the definitive live Doors document?

KRIEGER Fairly much so. I wish they had recorded more shows, because I know we did a lot better. But it’s not bad. There are some songs that could have been better.

GW Are there any secret live tapes around?

KRIEGER Not really. There’s some bootleg things but their qualities aren’t good and there aren’t any other well-recorded shows.

GW Do you think the Doors were a very different band live and in the studio? KRIEGER For the first couple of albums, the live shows and the records were pretty similar, mainly because we had played the stuff for a couple of years and were able to enter the studio and put it down quickly—especially the first album, which only took like five days. But as time went on, we slowed down a lot in the studio. Also, much stuff that’s on the records we rarely even played live. I think the only thing we ever played from Morrison Hotel was “Roadhouse Blues.”

GW The song “Hyacinth House” has some of the eeriest rock vocals ever recorded. It almost sounds like Jim died when he finished the song. Did you ever feel that way?

KRIEGER [laughs] It was a very odd vocal—a very, very odd vocal. I didn’t know what to make of it then, and I still don’t. We wrote that one night when Jim was over at my house and we were watching these raccoons in my backyard.

GW Does any of the Doors s tuff make you cringe now?

KRIEGER Sure, there’s always stuff like that. I won’t tell you which ones, but it’s nothing really bad. I’m not really embarrassed by anything. I’d like to change things here and there, but nothing major.

GW The use of “The End” in Apocalypse Now seemed to spark renewed interest in the Doors.

KRIEGER Oh yeah, that was very noticeable. They had the right to use any Doors song they wanted, and originally planned to use a whole bunch of them. They ended up only using the one.

GW Did it seem strange to have the song become so identified as a Vietnam anthem ?

KRIEGER Yeah, a little, because it was never meant to be that. But it worked so well that you can’t fault the guy. When I sat down to watch that movie in the front row of the big Cinerama dome in Hollywood , and the first thing I heard was my guitar, I just thought, Yeah! This is great! I dug it and I dug the remix too. It mad e me a little nervous that they were remixing it, but I think they did a g re at job.

GW Do you have any apprehensions about people’s perception of the Doors being determined by the ne w Oliver Stone film, The Doors?

KRIEGER Not really. I felt a little funny about the whole thing but it’s also very exciting.

GW Does the movie strike you as fairly accurate?

KRIEGER There are things that weren’t right, but overall, I would say it’s very right—amazingly so. I was worried that it would give a wrong impression of Jim or the Doors or what we were all about, but I think Oliver captured the essence of things very well—better than I thought possible.

GW How did it feel to see an actor portray you?

KRIEGER [laughs] It was a very strange thing, but I think he got me down really well. I hung out with the guy—Frank Whaley—and he’s an excellent actor. Just by hanging around together, he figured me out and did a great job.

GW Do you have any project s under way right now?

KRIEGER I’ve been working with Wah Wah Watson and Eric Burdon for the past couple of years. Both albums look like they might happen, but we’re still working on the songs. I think it’s going to be a real interesting combination.

GW What are you playing these days?

KRIEGER A Gibson ES- 35 5.

GW Do you use the same guitar for slide?

KRIEGER I have been lately, because I don’t feel like dragging my old Les Paul around. Ideally, I’d use my old Black Beauty.

GW What do you use for a slide?

KRIEGER Just a glass slide, but I can use anything if I have to. I used to use a broken champagne bottle— cheap California champagne.

GW When you hear these questions over and over, do you get tempted to just make stuff up?

KRIEGER [laughs] Sometimes, yeah. Only if I’m really bored.