Author: smngrx01

Up until the launch of his solo career last year, Kerry King was Slayer through and through. After co-founding the notorious thrash metal rabble in 1981, the tattoo-domed terroriser held the fort, not only never leaving his band but also refusing to entertain any long-term project on the side. Well, apart from that one time…

In 1984, as Slayer were still finding their feet in the burgeoning Cali thrash scene, King found a side-hustle gigging with fellow high-speed agitators Megadeth. The partnership only lasted for five concerts, however, and it didn’t take long for King to return to his original band, more seasoned a player but also clearly unable to coexist with a leader as steadfast as Dave Mustaine.

The shows that King did with Megadeth were the band’s first five. Mustaine started the outfit with bassist David Ellefson after the singer/guitarist got booted from Metallica. He was driven to be faster, harder and more dangerous than his ex-cohorts, but the campaign got off to a stalled start, several members coming and going within the early months. By the time Mustaine, Ellefson and drummer Lee Rausch felt ready for the live arena, they needed a fourth man to round out their ranks.

Fortunately, King and Mustaine had history. The Slayer man told Loudwire in 2015: “This is certainly no offense against [Mustaine’s Metallica replacement] Kirk Hammett, Kirk’s a wonderful friend of mine, but I was lucky enough to see Metallica with Mustaine. I say that because it’s just a rare thing to be able to say!”

He continued: “I was so intrigued by Mustaine, because he was just ripping on guitar and looking out that way somewhere. I can’t do that to this fucking day!”

By 1984, with Slayer having released their debut album Show No Mercy the year prior, the two bands had a mutual contact in guitar maker B.C. Rich, and Megadeth tapped on their shoulder in search of axe-slinger number two. After King was recommended and the two parties met up, the band were blown away by his six-string skills.

Ellefson remembered in 2020: “So Kerry comes to play guitar with us, and he would stand there with just no expression on his face and watch Dave play some gnarly riff like Chosen Ones or The Conjuring. And then Kerry would just stand there and then he’d put his hand on his guitar and play it back note for note. And you’re like, ‘Holy hell! This guy really gets Dave.’”

Make no mistake: even though King was interested in the Megadeth gig, his goal was never to defect from Slayer. “At the end of the day, I thought, ‘This is a gigantic learning situation,’” he explained in the Loudwire interview. “And, I also thought, people would see me and know me from Slayer, because we only went to the Bay Area, and people would think, ‘Slayer!’ I had Slayer’s best intentions in mind.”

Kerrydeth made their live debut at Ruthie’s Inn in Berkeley on February 17, 1984. The band played a 14-song headline slot, offering previews of material which would show up on their ellipsis-loaded first three albums: Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good! (1985), Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? (1986) and So Far, So Good… So What! (1988). They proceeded to host several more home-state shows, ending at The Stone in San Francisco on April 18. The band wouldn’t play again for six months and, when they did, it was as a three-piece: Mustaine, Ellefson and new drummer Gar Samuelson.

According to Ellefson, King getting to travel and see the further reaches of the Cali thrash scene with Megadeth had a profound effect on Slayer, who spent their earliest years caked in deliberately ugly face-paint.

“When we went up to San Francisco, he saw the thrash scene and met the Exodus guys and all that was going on,” he recalled, “and Kerry saw the light. And he went back home to L.A. and wiped the makeup off of Slayer’s faces.”

In the end, though, King only lasted in Megadeth for two months. Talking to Metal Hammer last year, he hinted that there was scope for him to stick around longer, but that he couldn’t click with Mustaine.

“I think if myself and Dave Mustaine could have coexisted for four years, it would have been a very different band,” he said. “I’m not saying I’d have made them better – I’d have made them different.”

In 2015, he talked more in-depth about the fast turnaround of Megadeth members in the early 80s (which somewhat persists today). “I don’t know how anybody can be in Megadeth for more than a couple hours,” he quipped, “’cause that guy’s crazy!”

During the same chat, the guitarist confirmed that there’d been a feud between Slayer and Megadeth, which kicked off after he left Mustaine’s side. He offered insight into his relationship with his ex-bandmate at a press conference in 2009. “Everybody’s all worried about the beef with me and Dave; we don’t really get along,” he admitted. “But I don’t really have anything against him. I think he’s a great guitar player.”

Fortunately, even if they couldn’t be in the same band together, Kerry and Mustaine were able to embark on some blockbuster tours in later years. In 1990 and ’91, Slayer and Megadeth co-helmed the now-legendary Clash Of The Titans run. Then, two decades later, they joined Metallica and Anthrax for the landmark Big Four shows, and King played Killing Is My Business… cut Rattlehead with Megadeth onstage.

Ultimately, King’s Megadeth membership was a brief dalliance that seemed to launch an on-and-off rivalry, but clearly neither band were damaged by the tensions. If anything, the story of two superstars sharing members like that adds to the mythology and uniqueness of the speed metal scene that ruled California 40 years ago – and launched some of the biggest heavy bands in history.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Sixty years after the group formed in Los Angeles, The Doors’ legacy continues to endure. A career-spanning studio box set, a live album, museum exhibitions, art installations and further releases are already lined up over the coming months to mark the anniversary, but first comes Genesis Publications’ Night Divides The Day.

With unlimited access to The Doors’ vaults, this sumptuous anthology features interviews with surviving band members guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, archival text from frontman Jim Morrison and keyboard player Ray Manzarek, rare photos and memorabilia, a limited-edition vinyl seven-inch, plus contributions from famous names including Slash, Van Morrison and Krist Novoselic.

Attempting to decode the enigmatic power of The Doors – whose six studio albums with Morrison helped define the existential chaos and wild adventurism of West Coast rock during the 60s and beyond – can be a tricky business. But the chemistry was unique.

“Maybe it was luck, or maybe it was meant to be, but it turned out to be the perfect amount of people at the right place at the right time,” Krieger says today. “I don’t know if The Doors could’ve worked with a different combination of people.”

Krieger and Densmore attempt to make sense of it all as they take Classic Rock on a whistle-stop journey through The Doors’ back pages. From their early days as house band at clubs the London Fog and the Whisky A Go Go, through to international stardom and a groundbreaking run of albums from 1967’s self-titled debut to 1971’s fearsome L.A. Woman – released just months before Morrison’s untimely death in Paris, aged just 27 – it’s certainly a remarkable story, and one that elicits its own sense of myth, madness and wonder.

“How the fuck have we lasted so long?” asks Densmore. “I’d hoped to just be able to pay the rent for a couple of years, but now we’re on sixty. I could never have known we were going to make this big an impact. I mean, wow!”

In the summer of 1965, UCLA film school graduates Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek bump into one another on LA’s Venice Beach. Aspiring singer Morrison joins Manzarek’s group, Rick & The Ravens, but soon suggests changing their name to The Doors, after Aldous Huxley’s psychedelically-inclined novel The Doors Of Perception.

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Robby Krieger: I first met John at high school, where he was in jazz class. I saw them play a few times and they were pretty good. Then he and I ended up going to meditation classes in Los Angeles. That’s where we first met Ray. John was invited into the band first, then I joined later in 1965, when Ray’s two brothers left.

John Densmore: I was a musician who played weddings, bar mitzvahs, whatever. Ray said: “Hey, you wanna come to my parents’ garage and jam?” So I go down to Ray’s, and he introduces me to Jim, the singer, who’s so ridiculously shy he won’t even sing. In fact he’s never sung before. This is not the next Mick Jagger. Jim was in the corner, doing nothing, so I said to Ray: “Do you know All Blues by Miles Davis?”

And he said yeah. So we played it. Ray liked all the same jazz musicians that I did. His two brothers were playing back then – one guitar, one harmonica – but they quit. They just didn’t get Jim. He was kind of crazy and really a novice, but I was staggered by his words. I just heard rhythm in his lyrics and thought: “Fuck! Poetry and rock’n’roll! I’m down.” There was a void that need to be filled, and I brought in Robby.

Krieger: At the audition, I think it was between me and my friend Bill Wolff, who’d started playing guitar before I did and was a little more experienced. I was expecting him to get the job. But the very first song we played was Moonlight Drive. I thought: “That’ll sound good with slide on it.” And that was it right there.

Densmore: Ray was kind of insecure about Robby, because he wasn’t the flamboyant lead guitarist, all flash, milking every note. But I asked Robby to play bottleneck, because it’d been played primarily by old blues guys and not in an electric context much. So that’s what he did when he first played with us. Ray and Jim kind of went: “Oh my god! Put that bottleneck on every song,” which was ridiculous. But he was in.

Krieger: We all loved jazz, but I was really into Indian music and flamenco guitar, and I’d play that stuff for the other guys. And Ray had this amazing record collection. That’s where we got the idea to do Whiskey Bar [Brecht and Weill’s Alabama Song]. Jim didn’t really know much about music at that point, he was more into the poetry side of things. So the combination of all those things just worked, musically.

Early on, we’d rehearse anywhere we could. Ray knew this guy, Hank [Olguin], who had a little place in Santa Monica, so the first couple of rehearsals took place there. And we rehearsed in my parents’ garage a couple of times. It wasn’t until we started getting gigs that we had enough money to rent a house in Venice Beach. That’s where we really got going.

Densmore: Venice was empty, apart from some old Jewish people near the temple and a few old beatniks. The Beat Generation was just before the hippies. So it was deserted. The rent was cheap, it was slightly dangerous, and we were writing all these songs and sitting on the beach, watching planes take off from LAX and dreaming that we’d be on one some day.

Krieger: I wrote Light My Fire around that time, when I was still living with my parents in the Pacific Palisades. Sadly, the house where I wrote Light My Fire burned down in the recent wildfires. I was thinking: “Why didn’t I write Don’t Light My Fire?” I hadn’t been back for fifty years or so – and I don’t know who was living there – but it was a nice place to grow up.

Densmore: In the beginning, Jim and I would drive around, talking twenty-four-seven about how to launch this band. We’d go into bars that had never had bands on before and beg for them to do so, but they didn’t. Then the opportunity to play at the London Fog came up, and we packed the house with UCLA film school friends. So we were hired. The next night it was empty. The London Fog was crucial for us. Jim could now sing, but his voice hadn’t evolved into that deep baritone. And he was nervous, so he would only look at us – the audience only saw his back.

Krieger: By the beginning of 1966 we were playing regularly at the London Fog on the Strip. But we really found our feet right afterwards, when we became the house band at the Whisky [May 1966].

Densmore: There was a fight one night at the London Fog, which we had nothing to do with but they blamed it on us and then fired us. That same night, Ronnie Haran, the booker of the Whisky down the block, saw us. She liked the band and she liked the singer, so she talked [Whisky owner] Elmer Valentine into hiring us. When we got to the Whisky, Jim began turning around and facing the audience.

Krieger: Doing those gigs was such an exciting time for us. We played at the Whisky every night, which meant we really got our chops down and the ideas started to glow. As a performer, Jim was changing too. He’d been very shy at the London Fog, but started getting better at the Whisky. By the third or fourth month of playing there, he pretty much knew what he was doing.

Densmore: Being the house band at the Whisky was really important, playing every night – several sets a night – and opening for very big acts: The Byrds, Frank, Zappa, Van Morrison. That was our fertilisation.

Krieger: I’ll never forget sharing a bill with Them and Van Morrison. They were one of our favourite groups, and we used to cover Gloria live, so it was cool to meet those guys. The last night that we played with them, we all got up on stage together and did Gloria.

We had stuff like Light My Fire and The End in the set-list from very early on. Jim and I came up with the verse part of The End at my parents’ house. At one point, they left town for a couple of weeks, so Jim stayed with me and we wrote a lot of songs together at that place. I think that might be my favourite time in The Doors.

We’d get up and start writing, then we’d go down to the beach, come back and write some more. Jim was a great collaborator. I’d come up with a chord progression, and his words were so musical in themselves that it was just easy to make it work as a song. Later in the day we’d go to the Troubadour or someplace where we could hear some cool music.

Densmore: I’d say The End was a goodbye love song. And Light My Fire was just wonderful. The minute Robby played it I went: “Shit, that could be a hit!” And over time at the Whisky those songs evolved. Light My Fire turned into this jazz excursion over six minutes, and The End evolved into this ten-minute poetic piece.

Krieger: Light My Fire started off as just a three-minute song, without any solos in the middle. It was the same with The End, which turned into something else once we started playing it live. I wanted to make it sound like Indian music, like a Ravi Shankar kind of thing, so that feel pervaded the whole song, which grew to be longer and longer as time went on.

John and I actually went to Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara School of Music together for a while. I remember one time Ravi showed up and said: “If you really want your best music to come out, don’t have sex. It’s a similar energy that you’re using. So if you have a big concert coming up, hold off on the sex.” [Laughing] Did I take his advice? I doubt it!

Densmore: We auditioned bass players – including a girl bass player, which would’ve been cutting-edge – but it kind of made us sound like a white blues band. Then Ray and I stumbled onto this piano bass at Wallichs Music City in LA, and it had this kind of drone going, which gave it this open, transparent thing with my drums. When we started making records, a lot of times we had bass players overdub Ray’s left-hand line to give some punch. But live it was just the trio and that crazy singer.

We were on Columbia at first, the same label as Miles Davis and Bob Dylan. So exciting! Then they dropped us because they were a giant company who didn’t have the vision of something new. Elektra was a boutique label, so we were very excited to get five thousand dollars and a three-album deal on the same label that had the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Judy Collins. I think [Elektra boss] Jac Holzman was attracted by the fact that we covered stuff by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. We were an eccentric, European-ish melting pot of jazz and classical and flamenco and rock.

Krieger: We’d been playing the songs so often that we had all the arrangements down perfectly by the time we went into Sunset Sound to record the first Doors album. So [producer] Paul Rothchild and [engineer] Bruce Botnick didn’t really have to do much. And we didn’t have time to do much, because we only had a small budget, so we’d do an average of two takes for each song.

For Light My Fire, Ray’s Bach intro wasn’t there originally, it came in after the solos to get back into the verse. But Paul Rothchild goes: “That part’s really cool. Why don’t we start the song with that?” So we tried it and, of course, it really worked. Not only that, but we used it at the end too, so it happens three times during the song. That was probably the best idea that Paul Rothchild ever had.

Densmore: We orchestrated the sound for Jim to lie on top of. He loved it! It just freed him up. This guy may not have been a musician, but he was a genius, because he could remember all these words, the books of poetry that he’d written, and came up with melodies – and some very complicated melodies. The Crystal Ship, for instance. Oh, my god! [sings] ‘Before you slip into unconsciousness…’ Jim was the most well-read guy on the planet, with a mad passion for words and ideas. I certainly couldn’t compete with him philosophically, but musically I knew how to enforce these words. Here was this really gifted guy who heard a concert in his head, and we helped him get it out.

Krieger: That first album was recorded using a four-track, so there were limitations as to what you could do in the studio. And certain imperfections gave the album a different kind of life. On Break On Through, for example, Jim sings ‘Break on through to the other side’ three times on the first chorus, but he forgets to come in on the second chorus, so he only sings it twice. We did stuff like that quite often. Nowadays you’d never get away with some of the stuff we did on there. They’d just fix it with Pro Tools. But to us it sounded pretty perfect.

Densmore: Technically, it can be really frustrating with four tracks, but they were great songs on that record. Fuck technology, they went through the roof! We loved Break On Through, but frankly I thought it was too eccentric and sophisticated to be a big hit. It was a bossa nova that I picked up from listening to The Girl From Ipanema. I just made it faster and harder. Now the song is freaking legendary.

Eddie Vedder says it gives him chills whenever he hears it, which makes me feel great. But it wasn’t a straight-ahead rock song. It got to number eleven, but then local DJs were saying: “You’ve gotta cut down Light My Fire, it’s a hit.” I knew it was a hit. So we castrated it, from six minutes down to three, to get it on the radio. We took the jazz guitar and organ solos out and it was number one for weeks.

On the back of the million-selling Light My Fire, which tops the US chart in July 1967, The Doors become international stars. A subsequent performance on The Ed Sullivan Show (in which Morrison defies a request to omit his ‘higher’ lyric due to network bosses’ unease over its possible drug connotations) marks out the band as countercultural rebels.

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Krieger: I think LSD was important to all of us. I know it was to me. It took me out of my normal thought pattern and showed me that there were other ways to use your mind. Actually, I’d been taking LSD since before I took up meditation. I’d do it at least once a week. We had a bunch of guys and girls that would get together every weekend, pretty much. John became one of them for a while.

Densmore: When it came to LSD, I thought: “There’s knowledge there, but it’s dangerous.” It’s like danger is always next to knowledge. I don’t want to say you can take LSD and smoke pot and make great art. I would say it influenced the seeking process, your research, your practise.

Krieger: I still did acid once in a while when I was in The Doors, especially with Jim. He was doing a lot of acid. Jim would take so much that it was ridiculous, but he claimed that it took him back to past lives and stuff like that. I think it really did help him.

Densmore: Robby and I were living together on Lookout Mountain, and Jim came over late one night. He was just really kind of down. So at sunrise we suggested walking up the road. A block up the street was the top of Laurel Canyon, where you could see the whole city. So he went up there and came back elated. He said: “I need to write this down: ‘People are strange when you’re a stranger, faces are ugly when you’re alone. Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, streets are uneven when you’re down. When you’re strange, faces come out of the rain.’” It was wonderful, because that’s an artist channelling his angst into his work.

Krieger: Watching the sunrise over Laurel Canyon seemed to work, because as soon as we got back, Jim wrote the lyrics for People Are Strange, then I added a guitar part. That song just came about so quickly and naturally. People Are Strange became the first single from Strange Days [1967]. Recording the album on eight-track gave us the chance to stretch out more. Maybe too big a chance. I think we wasted a lot of time doing backwards tracks, which The Beatles had started doing at that point. But it was fun to make.

Densmore: Maybe we got an early copy of Sgt. Pepper… We were flabbergasted and wanted to experiment and do backwards electronic tracks and stick Jim’s vocal through a Moog synthesiser. The Beatles and The Doors were both experimenting with then-legal psychedelics. We stumbled into the Maharishi and meditation, and so did The Beatles. Then we dipped some of our songs in curry sauce and got onto Ravi Shankar and the whole Indian culture.

Krieger: Things were happening so quickly, and people realised that you could not manage Jim Morrison. You could try, but he would do what he wanted and that was it. There was a certain point, when he got too drunk, where he would turn into this other character: Jimbo. It really was kind of a split personality type thing. He really started drinking a lot when we were recording Waiting For The Sun [1968]. He was just very difficult to deal with at that point. So I think Paul Rothchild kind of went the other way when he was producing that record, trying to be a perfectionist and making us do endless takes of everything. It wasn’t easy.

Densmore: Jim was on the way to self-destruction at that point. I threw my sticks down during one session for Waiting For The Sun and said I was quitting. That’s after Jim brought several people around, who were all stoned out of their minds. But I came back the next day. What was I going to do? I’d found my path in life. I could make a living making music. I just happened to be in a band with a crazy singer, but I had to continue.

Krieger: I was growing as a songwriter on Waiting For The Sun, with stuff like Yes, The River Knows and Spanish Caravan. In fact I just found my old 1963 flamenco guitar that I used on Spanish Caravan, in storage at my house. I’ve been practising, trying to get to the point where I can play that song again. I’m going to play it at the Whisky this year.

Densmore: During the band’s incubation period, we’d written two albums’ worth of material. But by the time we got to Waiting For The Sun we had no songs. So we wrote in the studio. I really like the title track. I think that’s kind of the first heavy metal song.

Krieger: Hello, I Love You had been on a very early demo and we finally decided to record it. I knew the fuzztone guitar sound that I wanted for that song. The original wasn’t very exciting, so I said: “Hey, I’ve got an effect that’ll make it work better.” And I gave John the idea for that drum beat, which is actually taken from Cream’s Sunshine Of Your Love.

We were also touring a lot at that point. When we’d been playing at the Whisky every night, it was more of the same type of show. But once we were on the road, that’s when it got more spontaneous. You never knew what was going to happen, which was kind of fun in a way.

Densmore: At the Hollywood Bowl [July 1968], Jim took acid and didn’t tell us. Somehow we got through it, but the timing was a little off. People love that live video, but I’m in the band and I’m thinking: “What’s weird about this? We’re not quite… Oh!” Then we come off stage and find out that he had imbibed. Thanks a lot, Jim. But that was always the danger with Jim: what’s he going to do tonight? Is he going to be subdued, or is he going to be the Lizard King, writhing around on the floor? That was the roll of the dice.

Doors shows were like rituals. I’d read Jim’s poems, and he was talking about the word ‘shaman’ before I’d ever heard of it. It was not in the common vocabulary back then, but he knew about these medicine men that get into trances. That’s what he was up to. On stage, I’d surrender to the ritual. It was like a meditation. Once we got going, it was trance time for us and the audience, which was fabulous. Some creative arts give you a little taste of infinity, you forget about time.

Krieger: We flew to London and played the Roundhouse with Jefferson Airplane [September 1968], which was pretty cool. I liked it a lot over there, hanging out and shopping for clothes on Carnaby Street. European audiences seemed to love us, though Scandinavia was kind of weird, because they liked to clap in unison. Jim hated that. He’d shout at them: “God damn it, don’t do that!” It was pretty funny.

Densmore: London was wonderful. Chelsea was like Haight-Ashbury or the Sunset Strip in LA or the Lower East Side of New York. The audiences in Europe were kind of different. They’d jump around to Light My Fire, but when we played The End they were just like: “Holy shit! What is this, a funeral? We’re gonna go home and chew on this rather than applaud.” Which Ray and I thought was maybe more powerful than mass adulation. Y’know, here’s Jim in black leather and it’s supposed to be the flower-power era.

Krieger: Once we were back in LA we started working on The Soft Parade. I’ve been playing that lately with my band, and I forgot what a cool album that is. Those recording sessions took a long time, because we’d been on the road and had to rehearse in the studio. A lot of the songs were written in the studio, too, where it can go a million different ways.

Densmore: With our jazz backgrounds, Ray and I talked about using horns even before recording the first album. So when we finally got the power to do that, we wanted to expand our sound, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The critics hated us for changing, but Touch Me was a huge hit. Ha! I remember George Harrison came into the studio when we had all these horns and string players, and went: “Oh, Sgt. Pepper…”

Krieger: I’d written stuff like Tell All The People and Touch Me at home. Then if Jim didn’t like the words, he’d change the lyrics. That’s what happened on Touch Me. Originally it was ‘Hit me’, because I wrote the song about a game of blackjack: ‘Hit me, babe! Can’t you see that I’m not afraid?

Already notorious for being the first rock star to be arrested on stage during a live gig, a drunken and confrontational Jim Morrison causes a stir during a Doors show in Miami on March 1, 1969. The local country sheriff’s office issue a warrant for his arrest, baselessly claiming that the singer exposed himself on stage. The resulting furore, and Morrison’s protracted legal trial, derail the band’s forward momentum

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Krieger: I think Jim actually had a great time in Miami, he thought it was a great show. And parts of it were. Afterwards we were having beers with the cops upstairs. Nobody was arresting anybody. That only happened a week later, when the politicians started using it to gain attention for themselves: “This is bad! You can’t use dirty words in rock’n’roll!” That Miami show was pretty well done in the movie [The Doors, 1991]. You get a good idea of what really happened that night.

Densmore: Jim had seen The Living Theatre, a very political group of actors, and it was also during Vietnam, which was just horrendous. So he was interjecting some of that, which was great, but he was also drinking. When we had our first giant concert where people almost rioted, backstage afterwards he said: “Okay, we’ve had our riot. Now let’s go to an island and start over.” I went: “What? Are you kidding?” But in retrospect, I see that he was trying to keep the creativity alive. He didn’t want to get complacent and do giant concerts for ever, playing the same songs like everybody else does. I love him for that now.

Krieger: The bad part, of course, was that we couldn’t play anywhere after Miami. No one would book us. But it was also good in a way, because it gave us the chance to really take our time with stuff for the next album. Elektra had their own studio by then, so that was our second home for a while. We went in to record Morrison Hotel later that year. I think there’s some really good stuff on there. Indian Summer was an old one. It was actually the first song that we ever recorded at Sunset Sound. But when we first worked it up it just didn’t sound right, so we decided to hold on to it for later.

For Morrison Hotel, Jim really wanted to do a blues. He always did. But that day, especially, he just had it in his mind. John Sebastian happened to be in the studio. We didn’t know it, but he was a great harmonica player. We’d run into [blues guitarist] Lonnie Mack a couple of weeks before that, and he started coming to work at Elektra. He’d never really played bass before, but he said he’d do it, and came up with a great bass line on the song, which became Roadhouse Blues.

Densmore: Morrison Hotel and then L.A. Woman were both a case of going back to Ray’s garage, musically, back to roots and blues, and less takes. We didn’t need to be such perfectionists. With Rothchild, I remember working on a drum sound for a fucking hour. But twenty minutes into L.A. Woman, Bruce said to me: “You know how to make records. You’re done, you’ve got it.” Exactly.

On Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall [1962], he hits a really bad note on So What. The engineer had told him he could fix it, but Miles said: “No, it feels too good.” That’s what I said to Ray: “Let’s approach L.A. Woman like that. Fuck the mistakes. Let’s just go for the gut, the feel of it.” It was sort of like the first punk album or something.

Krieger: We kept a similar feel to Morrison Hotel when we came to record L.A. Woman, but one major difference was that we were producing it ourselves, with Bruce Botnick. Paul Rothchild wasn’t feeling it, because Janis [Joplin] had died and he’d just finished producing her. Maybe he was guilty about that or something, I don’t know. And he could tell that Jim was going in that same direction too.

Densmore: Paul taught us how to make records, and he was great, but he became too perfectionist. He didn’t get Riders On The Storm, he called it cocktail music. And that’s when he bowed out as producer, and Botnick said: “I’ll do it with you.”

Krieger: We didn’t use the Elektra studio this time. Across the street from there was our workshop, so we moved some of the gear over and recorded the whole thing at our little rehearsal place. That made it very relaxed, with no time constraints or anything. We ended up doing Riders On The Storm while we were just kind of warming up. We didn’t know what we were going to record, so we started playing Ghost Riders In The Sky, which has that same guitar sound and similar chords. Then Jim suddenly got the idea to sing ‘Riders on the storm’ instead of ‘Ghost riders in the sky’.

Densmore: I didn’t know Riders On The Storm was going to be that iconic, but I knew there was something there. It just fell together beautifully.

Krieger: I think we played Riders On The Storm live for the first time in Dallas [December 11, 1970]. That was one of the last shows we ever did.

Densmore: The next night, Jim was so drunk that Robby and Ray agreed to stop touring for a while, which I’d been begging them to do for about a year. Jim’s demise was heartbreaking. I mean, it was so good live, and then it eroded. And I hated that. But now, many years later, time has really helped me reflect on the fact that he was supposed to be a shooting star – a quick impact and then goodbye.

Krieger: When Jim went to Paris [March 1971], I figured he’d be back at some point and we’d start playing again. But it wasn’t meant to be. Was there much discussion about the three of us carrying on after Jim had passed? Yeah, that was a big decision. There were three different possibilities. We could just go out as we were, we could find another singer – which we really didn’t want to do – or we could become a jazz trio. I kind of wish we’d done that. But you never know.

Densmore: That was a real struggle. We didn’t want to give up the musical synchronicity, but who’s going to fill those leather pants? We tried a few people, and Ray and Robby sang. They were okay, but it avoided that comparison. Jack Holzman had given us a five-album deal for serious money, a quarter of a million dollars for each album. We did two [1971’s Other Voices and 1972’s Full Circle], but then we passed on the next pile of money. Without Jim, what is The Doors?

Krieger: I like a lot of the songs on those two albums we made after Jim, and the fans do too. In fact, after Light My Fire, The Mosquito has had more cover versions than any other Doors song. I think it’s because it’s in Spanish, and people in Spanish-speaking countries appreciated that. John and I then formed the Butts Band. There’s some pretty cool stuff on those two records.

When that ended we got back together with Ray for An American Prayer [1978]. You can’t really say it’s a Doors album, because Jim recorded the poetry on there eight or nine years before we decided to put music to it. But it’s still one of my favourites. Lately I’ve been playing Ghost Song with my band. There’s such a rhythmic quality to Jim’s voice when he’s reading poetry, especially on that one.

Densmore: An American Prayer is way out there. We were trying to make a movie for your ears, with Jim’s words directing us. We used natural sounds, the wind and various other things. I’m very proud of that record. It’s different.

Krieger: Not long after An American Prayer, a Doors compilation made the charts and The End was used in Apocalypse Now. People were suddenly interested in us again. I didn’t see that coming at all. We had no idea that The Doors would have any kind of resurgence. Now there’s so many books and movies, some of them more reliable than others. It’s easy to kind of start believing some of that stuff myself, but I pretty much remember the truth. That’s what I tried to do in my book [Set The Night On Fire, 2021]. I wanted to set everything straight. I still visit Jim’s grave whenever I go to Paris. I think the last time was three or four years ago. Do I still think about him a lot? It’s hard not to.

Densmore: Had Jim lived, I think our music would’ve gone more in the direction of Riders On The Storm. And we’d be into film soundtracks. We all loved film. Ray and Jim went to UCLA film school and would be experimenting with that. Editing film can be like drumming. It’s all about timing.

Krieger: I do sometimes wonder how The Doors might’ve sounded through the seventies, and possibly the eighties, if Jim had lived. But I really have no idea. That was the thing about The Doors – what we came up with was always a surprise, even to us. I think that’s one reason why the music still holds up today. I still play those songs so much that it sometimes feels like it was only yesterday. It seems like we never stopped.

Night Divides The Day: The Doors Anthology bookstore edition is published on May 13.

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes. Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.

The fourth album of five in the now sadly departed guitarist Bernie Marsden‘s Inspirations series comprises Marsden’s devoted covers of songs by some of his rock heroes, and includes a sparkling reimagining of Jimi Hendrix‘s Purple Haze.

It opens, in homage to Peter Green, with Shake Your Money Maker, the Elmore James song made famous by blues-years Fleetwood Mac, and also includes Green’s Man Of The World, as well as Like It This Way, a Danny Kirwan song from Mac’s 1969 Chicago sessions album.

The choice of that illustrates Marsden’s appreciation of deep cuts, underlined by a brilliant version of Rory Gallagher’s Wheels Within Wheels and his take on Derek And The Dominos’ Bell Bottom Blues.

Two bonus originals – the instrumentals Kestrel and Barford Blues – show just how much Marsden learned from the masters named above and others, and his Midas touch is confirmed on all 12 tracks.

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Freelance contributor to Classic Rock and several of its offshoots since 2006. In the 1980s he began a 15-year spell working for Kerrang! intially as a cub reviewer and later as Geoff Barton’s deputy and then pouring precious metal into test tubes as editor of its Special Projects division. Has spent quality time with Robert Plant, Keith Richards, Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore – and also spent time in a maximum security prison alongside Love/Hate. Loves Rush, Aerosmith and beer. Will work for food.

Pessimism and PUP go hand in hand. Rather than embroidering ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ into throw pillows, the Toronto punk rockers have become the poster boys of snot-nosed nihilism – that is, until now. Five releases deep, these self-deprecating scamps have inadvertently landed on their own brand of life-affirmation; while it’s certainly no ‘Carpe Diem’, Who Will Look After The Dogs? serves as a mantra for the down-but-not-out generation, banishing suicidal despair with a reminder of the defiance and downright spite that make life worth living.

Don’t worry: PUP haven’t gone soft. While guiding pearls of wisdom are there, each one is delivered with a bite of PUP-flavoured malice. Best Revenge paints it best; as Stefan Babcock howls “The best revenge is living well!” his advice is wholesome despite its callous undertone of vengeance. This off-beat joy encapsulates the record’s call-to-arms camaraderie in this burning shitheap of a world.

Who Will Look After The Dogs? is bursting at the seams with this clash of celebratory bitterness and dissonant chaos. From the jubilant No Hope to the bratty “I don’t give a shit” petulance of Concrete, PUP thrive in their fuzzy, overdrive-drunk whirlwind of ‘c’est la vie’ negativity. Much like their 2014 debut, there’s no logic or sense to the cacophony of gritty punk rock, yet it somehow manages to hold itself together.

A razor-sharp wit ties everything together, with frontman Babcock taking on the role of the world’s most charming antagonist. On songs written after his life “unexpectedly imploded“, he’s constantly teetering on the edge, wearing a high-strung façade of apathy that could crack. Whether it’s the anthemic, gnawing angst of top-tier cut Paranoid, or the frazzled, twanging hostility of Get Dumber, he’s also out for blood: even Hunger For Death’s floating, airy intro is loaded with venom, with the singer proclaiming “Fuck everyone on this planet!”

While the record often lingers in a realm of enraged absurdity – Olive Garden combines familial death, horniness and a Sesame Street-worthy chorus – there is ample vulnerability on show too. The title alone comes from Hallways, with the line “I can’t die yet ‘cause who will look after the dog?” showing the peculiar details that might delay action on suicidal thoughts. Shut Up is equally as sombre, Babcock crooning “I’m working through the fog” with the aid of his “stupid little songs.”

As excruciating as life can be, this record accepts that the only way out is through. While PUP will never quite see the world with rose-tinted spectacles, their lens of spite and absurdity seems to do the job. It’s bizarrely optimistic nihilism – and it’s bloody marvellous.

Full-time freelancer, part-time music festival gremlin, Emily first cut her journalistic teeth when she co-founded Bittersweet Press in 2019. After asserting herself as a home-grown, emo-loving, nu-metal apologist, Clash Magazine would eventually invite Emily to join their Editorial team in 2022. In the following year, she would pen her first piece for Metal Hammer – unfortunately for the team, Emily has since become a regular fixture. When she’s not blasting metal for Hammer, she also scribbles for Rock Sound, Why Now and Guitar and more.