Los Angeles — The door to the Doors is numbered 420. A quirk of circumstance that feels comically ordained.
Technically, this is the entrance to the Doors Music Co., the licensed legal corporation in a fourth-floor suite of a flavourless glass rectangle in West Hollywood. Should you take 2,000 steps east, you’ll find yourself at the world-famous Whisky a Go Go, the nightclub at which the Doors reigned a half-century ago as they became the sinistral emissaries of sex and death at the centre of the Summer of Love.
This air-conditioned shrine is consecrated with artifacts of the past and faint reminders of its perpendicular intersections with the present. Platinum and gold plaques occupy almost every square inch of available wall space. Portrait photos depict the Doors at their Aquarian zenith, shaggy and seditious, without time to wallow in the mire. Jim Morrison, now dead 46 years, leers, taunts and preens from every angle.
It’s been 50 years since the first song Robby Krieger ever wrote, Light My Fire, topped the Billboard charts, but he still quietly mourns the loss of Jim Morrison
In the conference room, Robby Krieger remains very much alive. For much of the past year, the lead guitarist has busied himself with the promotional cycle surrounding the self-proclaimed Year of the Doors, commemorating the semi-centennial of the quartet’s self-titled debut and follow-up Strange Days, released a mere nine months apart in 1967. Festivities included Los Angeles proclaiming a Day of the Doors, Krieger throwing out the first pitch at Dodgers Stadium, and the remastered vinyl reissues and re-packagings that have become pro forma around the anniversaries of iconic boomer bands.
It’s been 50 years since the first song Krieger ever wrote, Light My Fire, topped the Billboard charts, but he still quietly mourns the loss of Morrison, who was interred at Paris’ Pére Lachaise cemetery a short four years after the band’s career took off.
“It’s pretty tough to get away from it because pretty much every day something reminds you of him,” Krieger says, underscoring the sepulchral reality that has shrouded Morrison since 1971.
Krieger, a native of Southern California whose earliest guitar playing was steeped in flamenco, was the band’s youngest member and just 25 when Morrison died. Now 71, grandfatherly and silver-haired, he’s dedicated almost his entire adult life to burnishing the legacy of his youth and attempting to transcend it. He tried first with a pair of Doors albums, without Morrison, before the band finally split up. In the intervening decades, Krieger has released half a dozen records of jazz-rock fusion, several of which included contributions from Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who died in 2013, and drummer John Densmore. He still writes most nights.
“It’s my dream to write a hit instrumental song that people will always remember,” he says.
Adopting a “one for all, all for one” mantra, the Doors split equal songwriting credit among the four members. But when Jim Morrison is your lead singer, it’s inevitable that less oxygen exists for the other members. Few know that Krieger wrote three of the band’s highest-charting singles (Love Her Madly, Touch Me, Light My Fire).
Even though it’s a story he’s retold thousands of times, there’s a certain simplistic thrill to hear Krieger explain the spark behind the band’s biggest hit, inauspiciously composed late one night on the piano bench at his parents’ house, where he lived until the band’s career became the grist for an Oliver Stone biopic.
“I asked Jim what should I write about and he said, ‘Write about something universal,’ so I decided to write about earth, air, fire or water,” Krieger says.