ROBBY KRIEGER
The voice of Robby Krieger on the phone sounds like Travis in Paris, Texas. One note. Bone dry. Exhausted and burned by the whole sentenced-to-life séance that the story of The Doors has become. Yet quite cheerful. Robby was always the most easy-going in The Doors. After Ray Manzarek, who spoke of golden vibrations yet jumped at shadows. Far behind John Densmore, who was still calling Jim “a psychopath, a lunatic” the last time anyone heard from him. Jim Morrison was all fucked-up of course, but in a good way, at first. Then in a bad way, soon after.
“When he was doing the acid and marijuana, he was great,” Robby says. “No problems. It’s when he started drinking, then he would just turn into an asshole sometimes.”
Jim saw himself as a disrupter; Robby was a maintainer. You build but you do it from a place of peace. Robby was a real musician. That’s how it was done. Jim couldn’t play, had no patience for the studio, saw himself as Rimbaud on the loose in Hollywood. Yet the two opposites attracted when it came to making up stuff together. Jim with his pages and pages of neo-Beat poetry, Robby with his transcendental guitar playing.
I’ve been reading about your childhood, where you came from, and it sounds like you came from a really nice family. Tell me if any of this is wrong. Your dad was an engineer? You grew up in the 1950s listening to classical music?
Yes. Not only classical, but pop as well. My mom liked Frank Sinatra and stuff like that, and my dad liked classical. But we had all kinds of records at my house, like flamenco records, stuff like that. Some jazz, even boogie-woogie.
The flamenco stayed with you, became a characteristic of your style in The Doors? Yeah, for sure. I didn’t really get into that stuff until I was maybe thirteen, fourteen years old, but my dad had those records in the house. The first one I really liked was Peter And The Wolf.
Is it true that you once broke your record player, which meant you couldn’t keep listening to Peter And The Wolf, and that’s when you began listening to the radio, which got you into more popular stuff of the day like Elvis and Chuck Berry?
No, that’s wrong. I broke a Peter And The Wolf record. That started me listening to other records.
The reason I started trumpet is because my friend at school was the
