Liza Mitchell
It’s been 44 years since the lights went out for one of the most enigmatic bands in rock and roll history but The Doors’ guitarist Robby Krieger is making sure the music that opened minds and defined a generation lives on.
Krieger presents An Evening of The Doors Greatest Hits on August 15 at the Ponte Vedra Concert Hall (www.pvconcerthall.org). Waylon Krieger will step into the role of lead vocalist left vacant by Jim Morrison, a space the elder Krieger considers his son’s birthright. Krieger is also a guitarist like his father and has previously performed with his dad’s band. But Krieger is clear that Waylon is not playing the role of tribute artist or impersonator, but rather tapping into his biological connection to the music to deliver an authentic interpretation of his father’s legacy.
“He says he feels like he is channeling Jim quite a bit. He’s not trying to do a Jim Morrison-clone type thing. I mean, he doesn’t try and look like Jim, but he does a great job. He’s only been doing this for about eight months, but he gets better with every show,” says Krieger. “Like I told him, out of all the people in the world, he’s the one that has the most right to do it more than anybody else because of the blood line. I’m not going to be doing this forever, so I would love it if he took over the torch.”
With such a vast catalog of material to choose from, Krieger could create a different setlist every night, whether based on the venue, the audience or his own preference. The audience at any given show can be a varied as the lineup, and Krieger tows the line between the hits that fans of all ages come to hear and the lesser known tracks that appeal to the older generation.
“It’s not easy. We always have big arguments in the band about what we should do that night, but there are certain songs you have to do or the audience will be mad like ‘Light My Fire,’ ‘Break on Through’ and stuff like that. But we can do some stuff that is not as well-known, so we try to mix it up,” he says. “If the audience is made up of younger kids we’ll play more danceable songs, but if it’s more of a baby boomer crowd, we can bring in some different stuff.”
Whether or not the younger fans “get” the music in the same way as the older fans, Krieger says it definitely connects with them on a real level. “It’s obviously all about the music,” he says. “If the music wasn’t great, it doesn’t matter how many movies they make or books people write. People aren’t going to want to hear it.”
Krieger says he is often greeted by eager kids, excited about their recent exposure to the music, and he is genuinely interested in hearing their stories. “It seems every generation of young kids is getting into The Doors more and more as time goes on,” he says. “Kids come up to me and say ‘I love The Doors,’ and I ask them, ‘Did your parents turn you on to it?’ and a lot say no, they heard it on the radio or their friends told them about it. It’s pretty amazing to me.”
After Morrison slipped from this world in 1971, Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore released two final albums before closing the door on the band for good. It wasn’t until several years later that Krieger and Manzarek stepped on stage again as a re-imagined version of The Doors.
“When Jim died, the three of us had been working up some songs for the next album while Jim was in Paris, so we kept going, and we actually made two more albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, which are actually being re-released for the first time this fall. After that, we kind of hung it up, and we didn’t want to play the Doors songs anymore,” Krieger says. “I had my own band and played more or less jazz rock fusion until about 2000, when Ray Manzarek and I started to play Doors stuff again. A lot of people wanted us to do it, and we did for 12 years before Ray passed away.”
If Jim had returned from Paris in 1971, Krieger is certain that The Doors would have also survived, but where they would be today is a big unknown. “I’m sure we would have continued, but I think we would probably be making films with all of the video stuff going on nowadays and the fact that Jim and Ray were both in film school at UCLA. I was at UCLA, too, just not in film school.”
From their early college days to the Sunset Strip, Krieger has carved out a good life for himself beyond The Doors. He is a father, a musician and philanthropist, hosting an annual concert to benefit St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. He remains grateful for the time he spent building a legacy of music and the poetry that helped shape it. “Jim was real into poetry, and he wrote some amazing stuff. I ended up writing quite a bit of the lyrics, too, though I never considered myself a poet. But I learned from him. He always told me ‘write about the stuff that people can take different ways’,” he says. “Something that means something to one person that could mean something totally different to another person. It was all about the perception and knowing that four guys from totally different backgrounds can come together and find something magical.”
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