Talking Psychedelics and The Doors with Robby Krieger and John Densmore

 

 
For many. The Doors are the psychedelic band par excellence, but they are also partly responsible for my first bad trip. It happened by chance, during a mushroom trip guided by a random shuffle on my iPod. When “The End” came up, I knew that it would be an intense experience. I had always assumed that the song was about the end of a relationship, or a meditation on the inevitability of death. The song famously begins with a haunting raga composed by Robby Krieger; I had always loved the interlude, but on this occasion, the raga bled into me, and before I realized what was happening, I embodied all the melancholy emotions of the song. Before long, I was on the floor in the fetal position. After the song was over, I remembered that it’s desirable to change your activity when you are in the middle of a bad trip, so I decided to take a bath. As the hot, cleansing water poured over me, the painful residue of the experience seemed to evaporate in the bubbles that filled the tub. All in all, I guess the bad part of the trip lasted some 45 minutes, but as with all bad trips, it felt like an eternity.
 
A few days after my visceral experience with “The End,” I realized that some bad trips are necessary because they purge the negative emotions lodged in the psyche. I also had immense respect for the Doors and their capacity to evoke such powerful emotions. During my trip, I was a conduit for the raw power of the band’s music: “The End” and its raga interlude — dreamlike and enchanting — conveyed an unconscious language that was at once foreign and familiar to me. I marveled at the song’s artistry and its ability to transform my entire emotional state. I had never had a musical experience like this one before.
 
When I arranged to interview Robby Krieger for Los Angeles Review of Books, I knew it would be a special occasion because I would be meeting the man who had composed the raga for “The End” some 50 years ago. In a strange way, Krieger and I had a musical bond: I was interviewing him some 15 years after my intensely visceral experience with “The End.” During my interview, I wanted to understand how exactly psychedelics had influenced the musical DNA of the Doors, so I decided that my approach would involve a pharmacological reading of the band. I would avoid the standard geek questions (which guitar did you play when you wrote “Light My Fire”?) in favor of questions about psychedelic drugs and their effects. To what extent did various chemicals — cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, alcohol, etc. — influence the music of the Doors and the overall trajectory of the band? As has been well established by music critics, the early albums were heavily influenced by LSD and often contain lyrics that valorize the experience of expanded consciousness — “Break On Through (To the Other Side),” for example. But I also noted a distinct chemical shift in the blues-rock trajectory of their last two albums, Morrison Hotel (1970) and L.A. Woman (1971); Jim Morrison’s frayed vocals reveal the lead singer’s unmistakable devotion to alcohol.
 
To prepare for my interview, I read Krieger’s recently published memoir Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with the Doors (2021) with great interest. Until that book appeared, Krieger was the only member of the Doors who had not written about his experiences in the band; the acclaimed guitarist was reluctant to publish the memoir in the 1990s because he feared that it might cause further division within the surviving group. Drummer John Densmore’s Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors (1990) had deeply angered the band’s keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, who was offended at being accused of recycling the myth that Morrison might still be alive. Manzarek returned the favor, skewering Densmore in his own memoir, Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors (1997). By contrast, Krieger’s Set the Night on Fire does not attempt to settle scores, but it does offer some provocative revelations that might surprise many fans and music critics.
 
Unlike Manzarek’s somewhat hyperbolic approach to the band’s history in Light My Fire, Krieger’s memoir has a distinctly anti-mythic thrust. For example, he is willing to concede that the Doors were never fired from the Whisky a Go Go when Morrison sang the profane Oedipal verses from “The End” (“Father, I want to kill you / Mother, I want to …”). Krieger is similarly candid about a wide range of topics: his experiences with heroin and cocaine (speedballs), the mental illness within his family history, and the ubiquity of sexually transmitted diseases during the 1960s. Set the Night on Fire reveals that drugs, for better or worse, played a crucial role in the guitarist’s creative development and his personal life. His memoir’s candor is matched by its generosity as it attempts to repair the remaining schisms within the Doors and also heal the wounds that linger from his personal struggles with addiction. As rock memoirs go, Set the Night on Fire is certainly a compelling one; Krieger and his talented co-writer, Jeff Alulis, have created a nonlinear narrative that sheds light on the epiphanic moments from the guitarist’s intense and topsy-turvy life.
 
Krieger, who turned 76 this year, still tours and frequently plays music with two bands, the Robby Krieger Band and Robby Krieger & the Soul Savages. When the guitarist met me at his hillside home in Benedict Canyon, we exchanged greetings before he ushered me to into his musical inner sanctum. I was amazed to see him dash up the stairs to his studio; it is clear that playing music has sustained his youthful energy. In his musical hideaway, acoustic and electric guitars were everywhere, though he graciously removed a few from his couch so that I could sit down.

 
 
JAMES PENNER: One of the things that is refreshing about your memoir is its remarkable candor — you definitely don’t gloss over the more difficult and fraught moments of your life. Was this on purpose?
 
ROBBY KRIEGER: I think so. When I read Keith Richards’s Life [2010], I noticed that he kind of glosses over his drug addiction and his use of heroin. I didn’t want to make this mistake. People want to know about that stuff firsthand rather than hear about it from some unknown source.
 
JP: Along those lines, your memoir often reads like an extended confession. Were you worried that some of your friends or family members might be upset by what you chose to reveal?
 
RK : Yeah, I worried about it a little bit. But at my age, you don’t really care about that. This was another good reason to wait and not write my memoir in the 1990s. Waiting until your seventies gives you the freedom to say everything.
 
JP: The other thing that was really interesting about your memoir was its anti-mythic thrust. I noticed that you wanted to deflate certain myths about the Doors, especially the ones propagated by Oliver Stone’s movie (The Doors, 1991) and Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman’s book, No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980). Was this a conscious choice?
 
RK : Yeah, because it’s so easy to just believe that stuff. And, you know, even I start believing the myths. I mean, the movie — I just saw it again the other night, and there’s so many little parts that seem more and more true. And even I started thinking that they might have happened because it’s 50 years ago. You forget about many details from your life, but in a movie it’s there forever. And people all over the place see it every day. It creates new myths, and some of the myths are really seductive.
 
JP : So right from the beginning of the memoir, you wanted to deflate the myths in Stone’s movie, as well as Ray’s memoir, Light My Fire?
 
RK : To me, the truth is more interesting than fiction.
 
JP : In one of my favorite passages, you openly admit that your memory is flawed and that your “brain is old, and always getting older.” So, how reliable is your memory of the past?
 
RK : Well, I think I remember the past more than I do yesterday. My memory is still pretty good, but I do forget a lot of stuff.
 
JP : For example, when everybody thinks that the Doors got fired from the Whisky because of Jim singing the profane lyrics from “The End,” you point out in your memoir that that’s not what happened. You suggest that Stone’s movie created this myth. How do you know that your memory of this event is reliable?
 
RK : I mean, I could be wrong, you know, but I think I would have remembered if the owner said, “You guys are fired!” Playing “The End” wasn’t that big of a deal. When we did the song, it was kind of weird because we started the set with “The End,” which we never had done before. So I think people were kind of interested in that because a lot of those people were there every night because we were the house band for the Whisky. And when Jim said, “Father, I want to kill you. Mother, I want to …” — to me, it was just poetry. It wasn’t like everybody at the Whisky was shocked and slack-jawed and just couldn’t believe what they were hearing. That didn’t happen. I am sure that the owners of the Whisky didn’t give a shit.
 
JP : There was one subject that you didn’t talk about too much in your memoir: the significance of Los Angeles. I found it really interesting that Los Angeles was so important to your life. I’m just thinking about all the places you’ve lived — Pacific Palisades, Venice, Laurel Canyon, Malibu, Topanga Beach, and Benedict Canyon. Can you talk about your relationship with the city and how it influenced the trajectory of your life and the music of the Doors?
 
RK : Well, that’s a good question. If I had grown up somewhere else, would I ever have been the same? I doubt it. The whole L.A. scene was so important to me. Guys like Jan and Dean — they went to my high school. I really liked their stuff compared to a lot of other music at the time. And the whole surf scene was also really cool.
 
JP : What makes the Doors a West Coast band and an L.A. band?
 
RK : Well, me and John. The other guys weren’t from Los Angeles. Jim was a Navy brat who grew up everywhere and Ray was from Chicago, which was a good thing because he brought the blues into the band. He had an amazing record collection at his house. That was where we came up with the idea of doing Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song”; I mean, none of us had ever heard of Kurt Weill. And there was being in Hollywood and the whole Hollywood scene, especially the Capitol Records Building. One of the coolest parts about Los Angeles was the record business. Even Elektra was here. They were actually based in New York when we started, and then, right after we hit it big, they moved out here because they saw the writing on the wall.

 
JP : I think another key element of the Doors has got to be psychedelics. In your memoir, you talk about how doing psychedelics was one of the pivotal moments in your life. Why were psychedelics so important to you?
 
RK : Sure, I think psychedelics just showed me that there was something else out there. There were other possibilities than what I had previously thought. It opens your mind up to the possibility of a religious experience. Before I did psychedelics, I didn’t believe in the religious experience because my parents were Jewish, but they were trying to pass for white. My family never went to temple. They just didn’t believe in it, probably because their parents were trying to push it on to them when they were growing up.
 
JP : So psychedelics kind of opened up this whole new way of looking at life and existence?
 
RK : I began to believe that there’s something else going on and you don’t know what it is. That’s why I liked Bob Dylan so much. He was able to tap into that. He was Jewish too. I’ll bet you psychedelics probably did the same thing for him. When I listened to his music, I could tell which songs he was writing on acid.
 
JP : Really. Which songs?
 
RK : The early stuff: “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Songs like that. You can just tell that he was tripping. Take acid and check those songs out. In “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the words really don’t mean anything. It’s just that they go together somehow, and they give you these powerful images. And that’s exactly what happens when you take psychedelics. And Jim [Morrison] was able to write stuff when he was on acid. I couldn’t do it, but he could. Jim was at his best with psychedelics. The problem was that he would do what he always did — overdo everything. He took way too much acid and then it made him want to come back down. I guess that’s when he started drinking — drinking alcohol was his ruination.
 
JP : When I’ve listened to music while I’m tripping, I hear the music so differently and on a much higher level. I feel like I’ve had wax in my ears for my whole life, and when I’m tripping, suddenly the wax is gone and I can hear all these things that I normally don’t hear. Did you ever have that experience?
 
RK : Sure. And you don’t really know whether it’s something in the music that you’ve been missing or whether it’s just you adding something else to the music. I think it’s both. I used to listen to Paul Butterfield’s first album. I heard it before and liked it, but when I heard it on acid, it was so amazing and different. And the same thing happened when I listened to Bob Dylan’s music.
 
JP : Would you say that psychedelics were crucial for the Doors?
 
RK : It’s true. Who knows whether we would have come together if it hadn’t been for psychedelics? In 1964 or 1965, I was getting kind of tired of psychedelics because we ended up doing them every weekend. It was like a ritual. This period was before the Doors. And the same thing happened to Ray, except it was even worse. He had started having bad trips, and that’s why he decided to try Transcendental Meditation. And that’s kind of why I had to try TM as well. People were saying, “Oh, TM is going to be the next big thing after LSD.” That’s when I got John [Densmore] to come with me to meet the Maharishi [Mahesh Yogi].
 
JP : So your interest in Transcendental Meditation was a way of cutting down on acid?
 
RK : Exactly. Meditation was a way to alter your consciousness and still be able to transcend reality, but for me it didn’t really work because it took too long.
 
JP : Meditation is more difficult. It is hard work.
 
RK : You might have to wait 80 years for it to work. So, you are still taking psychedelics?
 
JP : Yeah, I have had some wonderful experiences. I mean, I don’t do it all the time, but I’ve had really good trips for the most part.
 
RK : That’s great. For me, I don’t take LSD anymore.
 
JP : Was it in 1965 when you stopped?
 
RK : No. I’d taken it off and on for, you know, another 20 years or so, but I finally gave it up.
 
JP : And why is that?
 
RK : I don’t know. It just didn’t seem as good. It’s probably because you couldn’t get the real thing anymore. You know, we used to get Sandoz LSD in the early ’60s. And so I would tend to just do peyote and mushrooms, or morning glory seeds. I have never had a bad trip on psychedelics. The only bad trips that I have had have been from smoking too much weed or taking edibles. They made me paranoid.
 
JP : So if you’ve had really good trips and you’ve never had a bad trip, why give up psychedelics?
 
RK : It just didn’t seem like it was “real” anymore. You know once you’ve been to that place that you can never really get back to the same place, and you’re always trying. It’s like when you reach a state of enlightenment.
 
JP : Do you mean samadhi?
 
RK : Yes, like the first time you took acid, or if you’re meditating and you get the white light, or whatever — you know — then that’s it. You’ve done it. And no amount of doing it again is ever going to get you back to that state. You get from that place of not knowing to the place of knowing.
 
JP : I also wanted to discuss your experience with opioids. I have to say, your “Chasing the Dragon” chapter, which describes your struggles with addiction, was really powerful. I mean, you go from weed to LSD to cocaine, heroin, and, eventually, speedballs. How do you explain that trajectory? It’s like you are a poster boy for the gateway theory of drug addiction.
 
RK : Yeah, it’s funny because I never thought that I would be the one to get hooked on hard drugs. I never even drank or smoked cigarettes. And after seeing my parents — my mom was hooked on codeine — and then Jim and Pam Courson. I never saw myself doing it, but even then — in the back of my mind, I always wondered, why did all of my heroes do heroin? Coltrane and Miles Davis. Who knows, if they hadn’t done it, they might be still doing great things. It took me too long to figure that out.

 
JP :  You had that one passage where you talk about your addiction. Perhaps I should just read it:
I loved playing and collaborating with new musicians in the seventies and eighties, but it was repeatedly made obvious that I would never achieve what we did with the Doors. Accepting that fact drove me deeper and deeper into an unacknowledged depression and left me wide open to any chemical that could lighten the emotional load.
 
Does this seem like a good explanation for your addiction?
 
RK : I didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, I think that this could be one of the reasons. I mean, how do you top something like the Doors? Do you know what’s the worst part of this? My best song ever — “Light My Fire” — was the first one I wrote.
 
JP : That’s one way of looking at it, but I wouldn’t look at it like that.
 
RK : I don’t really look at it like that, but I don’t know, there’s got to be a reason for my addiction. Maybe I was too sensitive. I think, in Jim’s case especially, that’s one of the reasons why he became addicted to alcohol. Jim just was so vulnerable to everyday stuff that most people would just shrug off, so that made him open to escaping. And these geniuses like Davis and Coltrane — both of those guys tried heroin. It just makes you feel like you don’t notice anything.
 
JP : How did you arrive at speedballs? A good friend of mine actually really got into them as well.
 
RK : When people start doing heroin, it kind of makes you too sleepy. And then you want to go the other way. What’s the other way? Cocaine, because it wakes you up. But those two together make you feel really good. Too good. In fact, it’s so good that you can’t stop doing it. You buy some and it’ll be gone right away because you can’t wait to start doing them. You don’t save any for the next day. It’s like a double addiction. And doing it at the same time multiplies the effect.
 
JP : How is it that you were able to get off it without going to rehab or Narcotics Anonymous?
 
RK : It was because they did an intervention. John [Densmore] did it. It was his idea. And it just makes you really embarrassed. You can’t believe that you did such a stupid thing.
 
JP : You don’t seem embarrassed by it now. You seem to be okay with writing about it.
 
RK : I was embarrassed at the time, some 30 years ago. But yeah, the interventions were just getting started at that time.
 
JP : I’m really glad you included that chapter in your memoir. It’s a really powerful statement about addiction.
 
RK : I hope it will stop people from going down that road. However, the worst thing is that my chapter might give some people the idea to try speedballs.
 
JP : You can never be sure how people will read a text — or misread it.
 
RK : Hopefully, people will learn that it’s not the right thing to do.
 
JP : My final question is about what makes the music of the Doors so unique. The interesting thing about the band is that each of you came from the margins, the peripheries of rock music. You were into flamenco, Indian music, and John Coltrane. You thought rock and roll was boring because it only used three chords. Ray was a classically trained pianist who was really into the blues. John was a jazz drummer who idolized Elvin Jones. And Jim wasn’t a musician at all; he was a poet. How on earth did the four of you end up creating rock and roll?
 
RK : Why did we want to play rock in the first place when none of us were rockers? I think it’s a good question. I think because the Beatles had just come out with some really innovative records. And the Rolling Stones. Some of the English bands were just getting started, so I think rock started to have a more experimental sound. Had it been two years earlier, maybe we never would have been in a rock band. The music of the Doors, from the start, was a step up from the early rock and roll that existed in the ’60s. It was exciting to try to evolve the music — to take out the boring parts and try to put in something new.
 

This interview is the first of two interviews with the remaining members of the Doors. The interview with John Densmore will appear on January 6, 2023.
 
The Psychedelic Genesis of the Doors: A Conversation with Robby Krieger. By James Penner.Los Angeles Review of Books, December 16, 2022.

When Jim Morrison died in a Paris bathtub in the summer of 1971, the event had a ripple effect on each remaining member of the Doors. The iconic lead singer’s untimely death meant that they would have to wrestle with the loss for the rest of their lives. Like guitarist Robby Krieger, John Densmore, the band’s mercurial percussionist, knew it was inevitable that he would miss the peak experience of playing live music for thousands of people; he also instinctively knew that rock stars in his position were uniquely susceptible to addiction and various forms of self-destruction. He thus made it his personal goal to “stay out of trouble” by pursuing various art forms throughout his life.
 
For Densmore, art has functioned as an antidote to self-destruction. In the decades following Morrison’s death, he has acted in plays, written memoirs, and read poetry while playing hand drums. Each new art form he has discovered has fed his psyche, staving off depression and the destructive urges that consumed Morrison and Krieger. Although Densmore still plays live music occasionally, writing has been equally important to him. In the last four decades, he has published three memoirs: Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors (1990), The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison’s Legacy Goes on Trial (2013), and The Seekers: Meetings with Remarkable Musicians (and Other Artists) (2020). The most recent of these works is a rhapsodic tribute to the musicians and artists who have fed his imagination and influenced him throughout his life: Elvin Jones, Van Morrison, Patti Smith, Jimi Hendrix, Ravi Shankar, Gustavo Dudamel, and, of course, Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison. Writing the chapter on Manzarek was particularly emotional for Densmore because the two band members had been adversaries in a million-dollar lawsuit over the right to use the band’s name while touring.
 
As I drove to Densmore’s hillside abode in the Santa Monica Mountains on a warm September morning, I wondered about his current relationship with Krieger. What did he think of Krieger’s confessional memoir Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with the Doors (2021)? Did he approve? Or did the book simply open up old wounds from the trial? I also wanted to continue my own pharmacological reading of the Doors’ music (developed in my previous Los Angeles Review of Books interview with Krieger); specifically, I wanted to understand how psychedelics had influenced the band.
 
As I parked my car and walked to the house, I encountered a majestic set of wooden doors facing the street and knew that I had found the place. I imagined that these beautiful doors were probably what had attracted Densmore to the property when he bought it in the mid-1970s. As I walked through the portal, Densmore greeted me from his porch. A youthful 78 with a thin physique, he was wearing his gray hair long and sporting a mustache and an earring. He guided me through his art-filled house, ushering me to a sunlit breakfast nook where I could put down my books, notepads, and recording devices. Densmore, who is gregarious by nature, was eager to get started. Much like his books, he struck me as remarkably open and unguarded about his life. He was more than willing to field any question I had about any topic: his divorces, his psychedelic experiences, and his occasionally tumultuous relationships with Morrison, Manzarek, and Krieger.
 
 
JAMES PENNER: Most people know you as a musician. Can you talk about John Densmore, the writer? You were the first member of the Doors to write a memoir.
 
JOHN DENSMORE: Yeah. And I write my books, dot dot dot.
 
JP : You mean that you don’t have a co-writer or a ghostwriter?
 
JD : Right. [Un]like the other guys.
 
JP : How did you discover writing? And did you ever imagine that you would write three books?
 
JD : So, I’m looking on the downside of a giant peak called “The Doors,” which kills people. It’s so steep. What do you do after that? Some people turn to drugs. And so, I get the idea that you zigzag, and I zigzagged into an acting class. I met Peggy Feury, a legendary acting teacher, and I sense that she’s a real mentor, you know, just like Coltrane. She’s feeding me, so this will keep me out of trouble. Plus, I am more nervous doing this. I didn’t have my drums. That’s my security blanket. In acting, your body is the instrument, you know; it’s really close to the skin. Eventually, I realized that I would like to write the words that I’m speaking, so that was my segue into writing. I started writing little articles and short pieces, and then I decided to write my autobiography, Riders on the Storm.

 
JP : What’s the difference between making an album of music and writing a memoir?
 
JD : Well, writing you do alone. You don’t depend on fucked-up musicians. But it’s a collaboration — making music. So, that’s fun, and you know, hanging out and bullshitting, but it’s tedious as well. Writing is also tedious, however. I remember Michael Blake. He wrote Dances with Wolves. He is an old pal of mine who passed [seven] years ago when I was just starting out. He’d say, “John, just put in an hour a day. When writing a book, don’t look at the pile of pages, just put in an hour.” And then Michael Ventura, an old friend who wrote “Letters at 3AM” [a column in LA Weekly and, later, The Austin Chronicle], had an article on writing that said, “I don’t care about talent. Can you stay in the room?” So, I would increase it to two or three hours a day for a few months. And then I’d take a break, and then I’d look at the pile, and I had 50 pages. With music, you’re in the studio and the danger is trying to find the balance between how perfectionistic you should get.
 
JP : I noticed in your writing that you’re very candid. In Riders on the Storm, you don’t gloss over the uncomfortable and fraught moments in your life. When you wrote that book, were you worried that your friends or family members might be upset by what you chose to reveal?
 
JD : Yeah, I was worried about revealing my brother’s suicide, and my sister was quite upset. This was a long time ago. Now, the subject is more accepted because it’s more rampant in our society via the Iraq War and kids being on their media and not connecting with anyone. So, I got letters from people saying, “You know, I felt suicidal and you’ve helped me.” I sent them to my sister and said to her, “Yeah, I’m sorry that I exposed the family secret, but there is something about celebrities discussing their problems. Like we all have to go to the bathroom and get divorced.” When I showed her the letters, she understood that it’s a form of public service. I dedicated Riders on the Storm to John Lennon for revealing his personal life in his art and music. So, there it is — I mean, John and Yoko were photographed nude.
 
JP : Talk about being vulnerable.
 
JD : Jesus Christ, you know, Lennon’s wonderful primal scream albums: “God is a concept by which we measure our pain […] I don’t believe in Jesus […] I just believe in […] Yoko and me.” I mean, that was as vulnerable as you can get and very inspiring.
 
JP : And you’ve continued to write in this kind of confessional style?
 
JD : Is that what it is? I’m still a Catholic.
 
JP : Except in Catholicism, the confession is private. Your writing is public. That’s what is different about it.
 
JD : Well, I mean, I’m hopefully not a blatantly confessional writer; otherwise, that’s exploitative and sensationalistic. When the moment is correct, I’m thinking, “Okay, Jim kind of committed slow suicide through alcoholism. My brother did it quickly.” So, there’s a connection here, and this should be explored. That’s when a confessional style is correct.
 
JP : Riders on the Storm was written in 1990, some years ago. It’s very emotional and in some ways vulnerable. But The Doors Unhinged is a polemical book about the dangers of selling out, and it has some outrage and anger. How is The Seekers different from those two books? The Seekers feels like it comes from a different place.
 
JD : I am 78, and one mellows with age, so The Seekers is a little more introspective and mellow. It’s a tip of the hat to people who fed me. It feels good to do this, and I try to figure out why they fed me. I never thought I’d write a book with my mom and Lou Reed. But, you know, she fed me. I go on and on about “the first drum beat all of us heard was in the womb, the heart, our mother’s heartbeat.” The Seekers contains an eclectic group. Ram Dass, Ravi Shankar, Patti Smith. It’s all over the map, but that’s what has fed me my whole life. I’m just voracious for whatever genre of art, the highest level of the people doing it. It’s fuel for me.
 
JP : What connects all the musicians in the book?
 
JD : I think it’s the love of sound. Filmmakers and painters see the world; we hear the world. That’s our main modus operandi, so that is what connects Gustavo Dudamel, Elvin Jones, and all the musicians who appear in my book.
 
 
JP : What did you learn from acting and performing in theatre?
 
JD : With theatre or music, being onstage is a dance. It could be a duet or an acting troupe of 10 or Gustavo Dudamel’s 80-piece L.A. Philharmonic — that’s one person, metaphorically. And the audience could be 10,000 people at Madison Square Garden, or 10 people at Beyond Baroque. When I do poetry readings — and maybe I will again when it feels better — I play hand drums when I read. And that’s the other person — that audience element. So, there’s two people. And what’s so exciting about live theatre or music or whatever is that it’s instant community, which we’re all aching for during this pandemic. And you’re going to dance tonight, metaphorically. And the excitement is that you don’t know whether it’s going to be a waltz or a salsa.

 
JP : So, it’s about being on stage and feeling vulnerable … and the fact that it’s unpredictable?
 
JD : Well, you’re in the theatre, I mean, you’re feeling the audience. You can tell if it is working or not, and it’s teaching you, and it will get real quiet — it’s a dance to pauses. Then, later on, you think, “Wow, that song really worked.” Or: “Shit, the phrasing in that section of the play felt really flat.” Therefore, the work is teaching you that you’re never done. That’s what I learned. I did a benefit at Beyond Baroque that Viggo Mortensen put on. And the people I love and respect were there — Exene [Cervenka] and John Doe — and I did my thing, and I got off on that as much as playing in front of thousands at Madison Square Garden. It’s not the size, and it’s not the goal — it’s the road … the process.
 
JP : There were two Doors books that came out over the past year [2020–21]. There was The Seekers and also Robby’s book. What was your impression of Set the Night on Fire?
 
JD : Talk about being vulnerable. Jesus, I had no idea Robby was so fucked up in the ’80s. Blood splattering on the bathroom walls from shooting up. Wow, that made me want to puke. God, he kept that quiet at the time.
 
JP : It’s an amazing chapter. I was shocked as well.
 
JD : What was your impression of his drug-use chapter [“Chasing the Dragon”]? Was that a drug warning to the reader?
 
JP : I definitely think it was a really intense cautionary tale and one that was told with lots of humour. I know you have played music with Robby in recent years. Is the trial in the past? Do you feel closer to Robby now?
 
JD : First, Ray got sick, and I called him and, thank God, he picked the phone up and we did talk. We talked about his illness. We didn’t talk about the lawsuit or any of that shit. And it was a shorty, but we hung up, and I felt so much better. I felt better to catch him before he checked out, so then when he did check out, I called Robby. “Hey, you know, man, death trumps everything. Do you want to jam at LACMA?” You know, just me and him. And we hadn’t played together in 10 years, or I don’t know how long. When you work on material for so long together and play it live in a few minutes, we were back. You know, it just takes a few bars.
 
JP : So, have you considered writing about Robby? Because I noticed that you didn’t write a chapter about Robby in The Seekers. He obviously had a profound influence on you.
 
JD : People ask me that. I don’t know. I didn’t do it consciously. I didn’t go, “Oh, fuck, Robby’s missing,” until you all started telling me. Maybe that’s The Seekers, Part Two. Writing is in my blood now, like playing music. I know I could write a really good piece on Robby. I’m getting my watering can out …
 
JP :  I want to talk about your experiences with psychedelics now. The Seekers is a book about gratitude as well as a book that elucidates your lifelong commitment to art and creativity. Where do psychedelics fit into the picture? Could you have written a chapter about psychedelics for The Seekers?
 
JD : You’re a provocateur. I am with Ram Dass. Like him, psychedelics jump-started and opened the door to my spirituality. Or maybe it was Meher Baba, the silent guru, who said, “Now, if it’s brought you to me, now close the door.” So, in the ’60s, I was in this select little group that was experimenting with legal LSD. But there’s an incubation stage for everything creative. It is pure, and it’s really important. Margaret Mead said that it’s always a small group of people that change the world, and she didn’t mean that arrogantly.
 
JP : Tell me about your first LSD trip.
 
JD : I hadn’t even smoked pot, so I was a total virgin. It’s an interesting story. I was at a jam session with Bert, this sax player in a wheelchair; his improvs had a lot of anger, maybe reflecting his physical situation, but he came over one day. I was there with my best friend, Grant, who is a great keyboard player. And then Bert spreads this white powder out on the table, and I didn’t know what it was. The word “psychedelic” wasn’t in my vocabulary.
 
JP : Was this around 1964?
 
JD : Yeah, I think so. And Bert said, “When I take this stuff, I can walk in my mind.” Oh, my God! Wow! And so, Grant and I got into it. Grant was my roommate, and during the first five minutes or so, I’m sitting on the couch, and suddenly I get paranoid. I’m looking down into the void, the pit, you know, and then Grant starts playing the piano and laughing, and he pulls me right out of it. And then I have eight hours of seeing God in every leaf. It was really wonderful; it jump-started my spiritual life. I was raised a Catholic, but this experience had a lot more impact than the communion wafer. I took it a few more times, and then I read about Art Linkletter’s daughter falling out of a tree.* And then the word “bummer” came into my vocabulary, and I cooled it. But it’s still with me. I know there is a reality other this one right here [pointing to the table].
 
JP : How were psychedelics crucial for the music of the Doors? Could the Doors have existed without psychedelics?
 
JD : Psychedelics were a communal bond. They are like that. We stumbled upon each other and found out we were sharing this sacrament in our private lives. A song like “Moonlight Drive” is directly influenced [by psychedelics], and I have often described it as a psychedelic love song. You know, “Let’s swim to the moon, / Let’s climb through the tide. / Penetrate the evening that the / City sleeps to hide.” I mean, that’s pretty direct, that one. And then, Robby … well, I brought him to an audition with Ray and Jim, and I said, “Play bottleneck guitar.” And Ray and Jim went, “Wow, let’s have it on every song!” Bottleneck guitar is so liquidy and psychedelic. Could the Doors exist without LSD? I have this line, “You can’t just wear leather pants and be Jim Morrison instantly.” You have to do your homework because acid can be shattering to the nervous system. You can’t just keep taking acid. That’s not going to make you creative.
 
JP : In one part of Robby’s chapter on his addiction, he mentions his realization in the late 1980s that he would never come close to creating the music that he did with the Doors, and this made him susceptible to “any chemical that could lighten the emotional load.”
 
JD : That’s really good. Yeah, I mean, him more than me. I mean, I miss Jim. You know, like I said, I’ve been into his poetry. I’m getting into it further. I perform some of his poetry live, but Robby had this gorgeous baritone as a vehicle for his lyrics, and that’s gone, and I know that hurt him so badly.
 
JP : So, you were different from Robby because you had other ways of coming down from the peak of the Doors? You were always acting, performing, writing, et cetera?
 
JD : On a much smaller scale, obviously. But I sensed that — just be creative. I’m an artist, and no matter how big or little it is, that’ll fill you up and you won’t miss that peak as much. I mean, there was nothing like it, like Jim used to say. It was after our first few giant concerts, where the audience rioted and we had the experience of mass adulation. And Jim was like, “Well, okay, great, we did that. Now what? Let’s go to an island and start over.” And Ray was like, “No, we can’t do that!” Now, the more mature version of me thinks, “Wow, that’s noble and smart. Jim wants to keep the pure, deep creativity alive. That’s the sign of a great artist.”
 
This interview is the second of two interviews with the remaining members of the Doors. The first interview, with Robby Krieger, appeared on December 16, 2022.

 
A Giant Peak Called “The Doors”: A Conversation with John Densmore. By James Penner.Los Angeles Review of Books, January 7, 2023. 

Fifty years after Jim Morrison’s mysterious death in Paris, enough books on the Doors have been published to fill several shelves at your local bookstore. John Densmore and the late Ray Manzarek wrote their memoirs, numerous biographies are on the market, and a few months ago, a coffee-table volume of Morrison’s lyrics, poetry, and musings arrived. The one band member who’s resisted relaying his version of events is guitarist Robby Krieger, but that silence ends with the publication of Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying and Playing Guitar With the Doors, co-written with Jeff Alulis. The book hits shelves on October 12th.
 
In the memoir, Krieger unearths his memories on the rise of the band, Morrison’s notorious arrest for public exposure in Miami, the recording of the band’s albums — including the final, L.A. Woman — Morrison’s death, and how the surviving band members coped. Krieger addresses various myths and legends, including the band’s controversial appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on September 17th, 1967. At the time, way before MTV and YouTube, Sulivan’s weekly variety show was a major outlet for pop acts looking to reach as many people as possible. But was it the calamitous appearance that legend (and Doors movies) have had it? Read on for an exclusive excerpt from Krieger’s book.
 
The Ed Sullivan Show was an American institution — a signpost for entertainers that read, “You Have Arrived.” Or at least that’s what it was when Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones made their first appearances. By 1967, Ed seemed corny and out of touch. It was a show your parents watched. But it was still an institution, and still a signpost we wanted to pass.
 
On the outside, we played it cool, but in the privacy of our dressing room we were giddy. We were in New York City, in the CBS studios, on Broadway, about to be transmitted into millions of living rooms. We had done TV before, but only local channels. This was our first national broadcast. For some reason, I channeled all my pent-up excitement into entertaining my bandmates with my impression of Curly from the Three Stooges. I dropped to the floor and did that thing where Curly makes whooping noises and “runs” in a circle on his side. That’s when Ed Sullivan happened to walk through our dressing room door.
 
We had done a rehearsal earlier; Ed was stopping by to wish us luck before going on the air. Ed caught the Doors in a rare moment when our guard was down and we were all laughing. Seeing our lighter side inspired him to tell us how good we looked when we smiled, and that we should wear those same big smiles when we went live.
 
”Live” was what made our Sullivan appearance stand out. Most of our previous TV performances had been lip-synched, which was lame, but it was just how music shows were done back then. And all of them had been recorded ahead of time, which came in handy when Jim didn’t show up to a taping of a short-lived show called Malibu U, hosted by Ricky Nelson. Ray, John, and I were sitting on Leo Carrillo State Beach, surrounded by actors and crew members staring at us and checking their watches. A fire truck had been brought in as a backdrop and all our instruments were set up on it, but we had no lead singer. Being on TV was a big deal for us back. We couldn’t believe Jim had stood us up. After a while we faced the reality that Jim wasn’t coming, so we played “Light My Fire” while my brother Ronny faced away from the camera and did his best impersonation of Jim Morrison’s back. The next day the crew tracked down Jim and filmed him singing while wearing Ronny’s shirt. The whole incident seems more absurd every time I think about it. Can you imagine Mick Jagger not showing up for a TV taping and the Stones filming Keith Richards’s brother from behind instead?
 
We had also done Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which, like Sullivan, was struggling to stay hip as the Summer of Love changed the cultural landscape. Dick greeted us in our dressing room before the taping, and he was friendly and welcoming. But he swore like a sailor. He wasn’t angry or bitter; it was his awkward attempt to seem cool. Being on Bandstand was, overall, a surprisingly forgettable experience. But I’ll always cherish the memory of hearing Dick Clark repeatedly say “fuck.”
 
Since Clark and Sullivan were the old guard, we were more excited about appearing on The Jonathan Winters Show. Jonathan hadn’t built up a legacy like Sullivan or Bandstand, but we loved his frantic, unpredictable comedic style. Which is maybe why our frantic, unpredictable lead singer launched himself into a piece of scenery and tangled himself in a bunch of rubber webbing at the end of “Light My Fire.” But Jim was out-crazied that night by our host. At the end of the show, Jonathan came out and improvised a monologue for the studio audience. Among other things, he took out a folding carpenter’s ruler and bent it into different shapes like it was a balloon animal, pretending it was a puppy dog or a machine gun. It was cool to see him do some unpolished comedy, but he went on and on, and soon the crowd started to thin out. For over an hour he never let up, even though people kept leaving. We hung out and watched him out of morbid curiosity to see how long he could go. Eventually, the entire audience had disappeared. The cameras were off. He was making jokes to literally no one. I don’t even remember him stopping. As far as I know, he stayed there talking until the next week’s taping.
 
Our episode of Jonathan Winters aired later that month when we had a gig at the Winterland Arena in San Francisco. Back then, of course, there was no way to record a show and watch it later. So in the middle of our set, Bill Siddons brought a TV onstage. We stopped playing, put a microphone up to the TV speaker, and sat down to watch ourselves. We thought it would be a treat for the audience, but the screen was only about 19 inches wide. I doubt anyone past the first few rows could see or hear anything, so we just awkwardly watched the show and then awkwardly resumed our set. This was only a couple of weeks after our New Haven show when our fans had learned to expect the unexpected from the Doors. I don’t think any of them expected that!
 
When we played “Light My Fire” on Sullivan, we didn’t trash the set and we didn’t swear and we didn’t use my brother as a stand-in for Jim, and yet it was the most controversial TV appearance of all. The narrative, according to the supposedly canonical Doors biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, is that a producer told us not to sing the word “higher,” and we all conspired to contravene the order after the producer left the room. According to Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors, Jim mugged for the camera and over-enunciated the word “higher” on-air to protest the attempted censorship. According to Ray’s autobiography, the producer shouted at us after the show and told us we’d never play Sullivan again, and Jim coolly replied, “Hey, man. So what? We just did the Ed Sullivan Show.”
 
But in the dressing room, we weren’t offended by the suggestion to change our lyrics: we thought they were joking. “Light My Fire” had been number one for weeks, playing on every major radio station around the country. We had performed it on half a dozen other TV shows. No one cared about the word “higher.” They couldn’t possibly be serious. As for Jim’s delivery, the original footage is out there and you can see for yourself how he hardly moved for most of the song. Jim never moved on TV the way he did at our concerts. The bright lights and the cameras and the artificial atmosphere of a TV studio always made him feel self-conscious. We never conspired about not changing the lyric ahead of time, and we never talked about why he didn’t change it afterward, but my guess is he was just nervous. It was Sullivan. It was national. It was live. He went into autopilot and sang “Light My Fire” the same way he had a million times before. He may not have even been listening when they suggested the change, but if he did do it on purpose, it was probably because he didn’t think it would be a big deal. [Doors Manager] Bill Siddons might’ve gotten scolded by the show’s staff when we weren’t around, but I don’t remember anyone yelling at us or telling us we’d never play Sullivan again, and I definitely don’t remember Jim’s perfectly scripted badass response to the frazzled, square producer. The way Ray told stories, I’m surprised his version didn’t end with us strutting in slow motion down Broadway while the CBS studios exploded in the background.
 
The other thing the retelling of the Sullivan Legend always gets wrong is my smirk. After Jim sang “higher,” the camera cut to a shot of me and Ray, and people have since interpreted the look on my face as a sly grin in reaction to Jim’s act of defiance. In truth, I was just the only member of the band who took Ed’s preshow advice to smile. It wasn’t until long after the show aired that I was finally able to see a clip of our performance. Ray, John, and Jim all looked so cool, playing on that historic stage with their serious, stoic faces. And there I was . . . smiling like an idiot.
 
Robby Krieger Debunks Mythology Behind the Doors’ Notorious ‘Sullivan’ Performance. By David Browne. Rolling Stone, October 5, 2021. 

Doors drummer John Densmore discusses his musical and personal relationship with the band’s keys maestro Ray Manzarek in this new excerpt from the drummer’s upcoming book, The Seekers: Meetings With Remarkable Musicians (And Other Artists), out November 17th.

 
The book, as its title suggests, is less a straight memoir or autobiography than an exploration of the creative life and process. Inspired by Greek-Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff’s 1927 book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, Densmore says in the intro to The Seekers that his goal was to assemble “my own group of what I would call musical masters who achieved their mystical destiny through sound.” He adds, “Like my colleagues, I ‘hear’ the world. The one constant thread through my life so far is that I have been constantly fed and nourished by music.”
 
Densmore’s book features reflections on an array of musical peers and predecessors, including Elvin Jones, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Ravi Shankar, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith; he also writes about his mother’s influence on his creative life and his high school music teacher. And, of course, the book touches on two of his Doors bandmates, Jim Morrison and Manzarek.
 
The chapter about Manzarek is fittingly titled “Improvisation,” and Densmore uses that spontaneous musical connection to anchor a deeper exploration of spirituality and oneness. Densmore recalls locking into the pocket with Manzarek the first time they played together and describes how the Doors’ unique rhythm section evolved after they decided not to hire a traditional bass player, and instead let Manzarek’s left hand elicit the low-end on a keyboard bass while playing lead riffs with his right hand on an organ.
 
“Playing with Ray’s left hand as the bass player was more challenging than having a separate mind working the groove (as bass players and drummers do),” Densmore tells Rolling Stone via email. “When Ray would take a solo with his right (on organ), sometimes he would get excited and rush (speed up a little). I had to pull back the reins somewhat.”
 
 
In the chapter, Densmore revels in what made Manzarek’s playing so singular, highlighting classic moments like “Light My Fire” and “Riders on the Storm.” He shared two more deep cut favorites with RS, describing Manzarek’s solo on “Love Street” as “not flashy, but gets me off every time because the phrasing is so strong, precise, and simultaneously relaxed.” And of “When the Music’s Over,” Densmore says: “Ray understands dynamics (loud, soft, and everything in between) as I do. We ride those crescendos and pianissimos together as a tight duo… and it pleases me very much.”
 
Densmore is also frank about how his relationship with Manzarek grew tumultuous during the years when they squabbled over the best way to honor the Doors’ legacy (Densmore chronicled this feud extensively in 2013’s The Doors: Unhinged). But he writes movingly about their reconciliation before Manzarek’s death in 2013, and Densmore says his respect for his former bandmate’s musicianship has only deepened in the years since.
 
“Our mutual love of jazz informed our spirituality,” Densmore says. “We had the same jazz mentors. Jazz musicians are spiritual by nature… they are constantly searching (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme). That we made something bigger than the four of us in the early garage rehearsals is a very strong bond that has been our through-line. The Fab Four are connected, even though two have ‘broken on thru,’ (same with the Doors), and if you’re one of the Fab Doors, it’s a private club that transcends time, and is forever grateful of its fans.”
 
Chapter Nine
 
Ray Manzarek: Improvisation
 
A slew of books on The Doors have been published— including not one but two memoirs of my own—but none of them have focused on that bespectacled organ wizard Ray Manzarek. You see, Ray came with two musicians inside his one frame. Let’s go back to the beginning.
 
After meeting Ray at the Maharishi meditation class in 1965, I ventured down to his parents’ Manhattan Beach house to attend a jam session. I drove up the alley where I heard rock ’n’ roll coming from the garage. Ray came out of the front house, walking down the narrow passageway between these beach cottages. He wore a blue long-sleeved dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top unbuttoned halfway. His white pants were also rolled up to reveal flip-flops on his feet. In a buttonhole of his shirt he had placed a daisy.
 
Ray broke into the warmest smile as he directed me where to park. He certainly looked more relaxed than at the meditation class the previous night. That had been a follow-up meeting after we were all initiated, and Ray was complaining about not getting the instant “bliss” that was promised, he thought, by Jerry Jarvis, the instructor. I knew meditation wasn’t going to have effects as instant as LSD, so I was willing to try it for a while and see how it went.
 
Ray and I broke the ice when we started talking about our mutual love of jazz. I told him that I had seen all the greats at the Manne Hole in Hollywood: Miles, Coltrane, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, and so on.
 
“Bill Evans!” Ray exclaimed. He was jealous.
 
“His genius is in his touch,” I waxed.
 
“Yeah,” Ray agreed, adding, “Miles got crap for having this mellow white guy in the band, but he knew how good he was.”
 
“Yeah, man. Miles doesn’t take shit from anybody! Do you know All Blues?” I prompted.
 
“Let’s do it!” Ray said enthusiastically.
 
Now we would break the musical ice. The tune is in ¾ time, a waltz tempo that is a good test of whether a musician can “swing.” Ray and I locked immediately. That felt good.
 
A major component of jazz is improvisation, which forces you to stay in the moment because you never know what will be coming up. There’s a lot of freedom and space available as you improvise around the chord changes. In jazz improvisation or in a rock guitar solo, mere speed doesn’t guarantee the most creative solo (thank God). It’s a balance between sound and space, between lyricism and virtuosity. It’s about breathing in and breathing out. Sometimes it’s cool to show your shit (demonstrating how fast you can play), but when it comes organically out of an entire solo, it’s better. Kinda like being human: sometimes we have to run, sometimes we get to chill.
 
You can read about what happened after that jam session in all those other Doors books. The extremely important thing to know is that Ray was the first to see the magic in Jim Morrison. He even received flak from some of his fellow UCLA film students for hanging out with Jim. They thought Jim was too crazy. The first set of lyrics Ray gave me—I think intentionally— was for “Break on Through (to the Other Side).” He had immediately resonated with Jim’s connection to the world behind this world—or, to quote the mythologist Michael Meade, “the world where this world came from”—just as I did.
 
Another extremely important musical moment happened a month later. We had been auditioning bass players and didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. Ray said that he’d seen a Fender electric keyboard bass he wanted to try. I went with him to Glenn Wallichs’s Music City in Hollywood to check it out. After parking, we passed the display window of the musical instrument department, and there it was, sitting on top of a stand. It looked like a couple of octaves (twenty-four black-and-white keys) with a silver chrome top.
 
“Let’s go through the record department quickly,” I said, “because if we look at all, we’ll never get to the instrument department.”
 
Ray knew what I meant. Years before, I got stuck listening for hours in the record booths. What a great store! You could actually play something before you bought it. Started by Glenn Wallichs and songsmith Johnny Mercer, Music City was mecca for all southern California music junkies. “I drooled over all of Coltrane’s LPs in that booth,” I said as we passed the brown mahogany listening section and entered the musical instruments department.
 
Ray asked if he could play the keyboard bass, and the rep plugged it into an amp. Ray began doing those repetitive lines he was experimenting with on our new songs. “I’m thinking of playing this with my left hand and the organ with my right.”
 
“It sounds like it has enough punch,” I said. We didn’t want the bass to sound mushy, which could have been a trap without a separate bass player plucking a string. (Remember, this was before the advent of synthesizers and computers, which eventually could duplicate almost any sound in the world.)
 
The keyboard bass was a few hundred bucks, significant money then, but we bought it. This was a pivotal moment in the formation of our sound. It forced Ray to play the keys more sparsely with his right hand only, and it also made him simplify his left-hand bass lines.
 
Now in rehearsals I concentrated on connecting with Ray’s left hand. Bass players and drummers are like brothers, working in the basement, cooking up the groove. If they don’t lock together with the feel, the ensemble will suck. You can have a brilliant drummer and bass player and a lousy guitarist and the band will survive, but if the rhythm section (bass and drums) is lousy, it won’t fly, no matter how brilliant the guitarist is.
 
You see, for drummers one beat is extremely long. Let me quote my second memoir (The Doors: Unhinged):
 
“The space between one beat and the next is extremely important, since the space implies the feel of the entire composition. If you play on the front of the beat, as in military music, Irish music, polkas, etc. (the style I learned in my high school marching band), the feel is rather controlled. I used this style way back when I played bar mitzvahs. On the other hand, if you perform with the accent on the back of the beat (if you don’t hit the next beat until the last second), the feel is very laid-back as in the blues, R&B, ballads, etc. I certainly got this style down from performing for years in bars.
 
“When The Doors got started, we covered the blues a lot until we had enough originals, so our foundation was first built on a laid-back feel. If you wait until the last mini-second to come in with the second beat, you’re playing the blues . . . leaving as much room as possible for the “sadness” to enter. Then the originals, with Jim’s percussive lyrics, pushed the pulse forward a little. Thank God Ray and I were in the same arena when we wrote the music to these words.”
 
Simply put, if Ray and I had not felt the pulse for Jim’s lyrics the same way, there would have been no Doors. I don’t mean to be self-congratulatory here. What I do mean to stress is that the rhythm section is the foundation of any ensemble, whether it’s a quartet or a forty-piece orchestra, and without a strong foundation, the structure will crumble.
 
It eventually turned out that with Ray and me as that foundation, Robby could build the walls for Jim to sit on top of as the roof . . . or up front as the lead singer. The walls were formidable because of Robby’s gifted songwriting skills. If there is mutual respect, the structure will have balance and be very solid. So I credit the pairing of Ray’s left hand and my drumming as a blessing from the muse.
 
Now let’s talk about Ray splitting his brain in two. He simultaneously had to lock into a repetitive bass pulse with his left hand and support Jim’s lyrics playing chord changes with his right. To do this, he said, he thought of playing boogie-woogie bass lines that he learned as a kid in Chicago. If that wasn’t enough, he occasionally came up with the most memorable keyboard hooks (musical segues) in popular music.
 
Think of the intro to “Light My Fire.” It’s a circle of fifths, played in a baroque (Bach-like) style. This keyboard part is permanently stamped on everyone’s brain. We will never forget it. Or take what he created in “Riders on the Storm,” the mysterious sound supporting Jim’s dark lyrics. It was an incredible extended piano solo that I rode with him up and down the full arc of human emotions. From pianissimo to fortissimo and everything in between, that solo of Ray’s will also be stamped on all our brains forever.
 
You only need to hear a couple of bars of music from a great artist and you can identify who it is. Elvin Jones, Ravi Shankar, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, Van and Jim Morrison . . . practically every chapter of this book is about someone whose work is instantly recognizable. Read a couple of sentences of Joseph Campbell and you know it’s him. You hear Ray’s hand on a Vox organ and you know who it is in three seconds.
 
Maybe it’s sadness over losing Ray—my early father figure has crossed over—but these days I aspire to having an even better relationship with my old keyboard player than before. I make a joke about this over and over concerning my deceased mother, but maybe it’s not really a joke. An even bigger space can open up in the wake of a significant person’s departure. My mind tends to go to my mother and to Ray more often now, because I know that I can’t reach them on a physical level. As Maharishi said before he passed, “I will be available anywhere, instantly!”
 
For instance, having dinner in a French restaurant, I flip my fork over like Europeans do and immediately think of Ray. He and his wife Dorothy always ate that way, looking like sophisticated continental diners. As a twenty-year-old, I was intimidated by their sophistication. I felt clumsy with my less refined manners.
 

My self-esteem did get a lift when we toured France, where my pidgin French served me well while Ray and Dorothy retreated into silence. When I was young, I aspired to be like the extremely cultured ivory tinkler in our band, and I’m still working on it. Back then, Ray was exceptionally well read, and now I’m catching up. He is still my teacher, now more than ever. I’ve recently had some medical issues around my abdomen (burst appendix), the same area of the body that took Ray out. My compassion for him has increased twofold now that my own experience has made me more aware of how he must have suffered.
 
Okay, I’m sure some of you readers right now are thinking: it’s sweet that John is talking to the dead (Ray), but let’s get real—there’s no actual communication once people you knew “Break on Through to the Other Side.” All I can say is, it’s more than just mental candy, this expectation that I’m going to jam again with Ray in that big band in the sky. Musicians are serious when they talk about all the incredible musicians now playing in God’s orchestra. There’s a very deep bond between “melody makers.”
 
Check out Ray’s masterful solo album Golden Scarab to see clearly into his metaphysical side. “The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten—that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.” So said the great Indian poet Kabir.
 
Or as George Harrison put it in speaking of his connection to John Lennon: “We saw beyond each other’s physical bodies. If you can’t feel the spirit of some friend who’s been that close, then what chance have you got of feeling the spirit of Christ or Buddha or whoever else you may be interested in?” So I’m coming out of the closet right now and admitting that I’ve had several conversations with George since he passed, and I’m surely going to keep talking with Ray. I talk to Jim all the time.
 
I’m starting to worry that I now sound like my devoted Catholic mother, who is “gonna see all her friends in Heaven.” I don’t see things quite that literally. I feel that when the body passes, the spirit continues, but in what form that energy manifests I haven’t a clue. It’s a mystery to me . . . a great mystery. That’s why when asked if I believe in God, I answer, “I believe in the Mystery, with a capital M.”
 
Maybe that’s why Ray had a giant art deco poster with a big “M” in the middle. Of course, the “M” stood for Manzarek, which implies he had a large ego. When I challenged Ray in my first memoir that he might be working the Willy Loman beat a little too hard (the selling of The Doors), he got back at me by saying in his own book that Jim had hated me “as a human being.” Jim might very well have said that, probably while tripping, and maybe because I didn’t do as many drugs as he did. But you see, Jim and I are okay with that now. I sacrificed over five years of my life trying to preserve Jim’s legacy through a brutal court battle. It’s amusing (or prophetic) how in Riders I used what I thought was just a technique to communicate with Jim: writing him a continuing letter in the first person, as if he could hear me even though he had passed. Now I feel the love energy not only with Jim but with Ray too.
 
Toward the end of our career, a philosophical gap grew between Ray and me. You can read all about it in The Doors: Unhinged, but here it suffices to say that I was so angry at him I felt it would take several incarnations to forgive him. Writing Unhinged helped. As I wrote in the last chapter of that book, how could I not love Ray? We had created magic together in a garage, so many years ago. I sent that last chapter to Ray and Robby before the book was published, to make sure they got to that section, because the first half was going to be a tough pill for them to swallow.
 
Even amid those philosophical and personal struggles, the two of us never lost the almost telepathic communication we had on the musical level. Ray understood the avant-garde, and he understood dark matter. He was comfortable, as I was, with venturing outside traditional rhythmic and chord structures, but he also knew that eventually you had to get back or you would leave the cosmos and your audience behind.
 
When to come back is the question, and that is one that can only be answered intuitively. The astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says that the earth doesn’t just rotate around the sun, that it is also affected by the gravitational pull of all the planets in our solar system. A musical ensemble is the same. The rhythm section (Ray’s left hand and me) vibrates at a lower frequency, supporting the lead players. All of the celestial bodies in our solar system push and pull each other, to varying degrees, while the sun is the lead singer.
 
Balance is everything. If the ice caps are melting, or if the guitar player is too loud, life gets out of balance (koyaanisqatsi). That’s why the really accomplished musicians listen intently to their fellow players. They put aside their egos. If one of the musicians gets a little too full of himself when he’s the focal point, the “star,” the surrounding planets have to adjust. But sometimes the star spins out of orbit and no amount of adjusting will bring him back.
 
Ray and I were completely in sync when it came to finding common musical ground. The musical background each of us brought to our partnership fed us well and fertilized our unique feel and sound. With my drums and Ray’s left hand as the bottom, Robby Krieger’s liquid guitar completed the sound. The resulting melting pot was an American gumbo that Jim obviously couldn’t get enough of. I say that not out of arrogance. Just think about it: here was a guy who had never sung before and who, after getting over his shyness, sang from the bowels of his vocal chords. He was in heaven lying on the bed of sound we made for him. Without Manzarek, our quartet would have sounded like a three-legged dog.
 
When I heard that Ray was getting really sick, I gave him a call. Our relationship had obviously been strained, so I was very pleased that he picked up the phone. We talked about his bout with cancer, and I said to give his wife Dorothy my love. At the time I didn’t know it was going to be my last conversation with him. I’m so grateful that we had a closing talk.
 
I will forever miss this remarkable, gifted musician. After Ray passed, I called Robby, told him death trumps everything, suggested we get together. We recently played some Doors songs at a film screening at the Los Angeles County Art Museum. It felt so good. After only a few bars, we were back in the garage in Venice, California. Music is a healing salve.
 
Excerpted from The Seekers: Meetings With Remarkable Musicians (and Other Artists) by John Densmore. 2020.
 
The Doors’ John Densmore on His Eternal Musical and Spiritual Bond With Ray Manzarek. By Jon Blistein. Rolling Stone, November 13, 2020.