Post by darkstar3 on Jan 5, 2011 22:11:32 GMT
Gibson
Lifestyle
Ted Drozdowski
August 10 2010
The Gibson Interview: Doors Legend Robby Krieger
“I’ve always said that if your mom can’t pick you out on the radio, you’re doing something wrong,” says Gibson SG legend Robby Krieger.
That’s never been a issue with Krieger, whose distinctive playing with The Doors helped carve tunes like “Light My Fire,” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Moonlight Drive,” “Riders on the Storm” and “L.A. Woman” into rock and roll history.
Those songs and a mess of others also affirmed his position as one of the first, if not the first, textural guitarists in the genre. His fluid playing – a mix of his early musical focus on flamenco guitar and jazz juiced up on the intoxicating drive of Chuck Berry – added mystery and deft emotional shading to the bassless quartet’s exploratory performances. And Krieger’s approach is even more fluid today, as the slippery melodies of the steel-fingered extravaganza “Let It Slide” and the ornate two-part Miles Davis tribute “Russian Caravan” reveal on his brand-new album Singularity.
The fact is, Krieger has continued to write his own history as a guitarist since The Doors dissolved in 1973, two years and two albums after the passing of their famed frontman Jim Morrison. The now-64-year-old picker has continued to push his chops, ears and compositional skills ahead through his short-lived, post-Doors Butts Band and a string of seven solo albums, including Singularity, that tap into rock, jazz, cinematic soundscapes, rippling fusion and even instrumental versions of Doors tunes.
Just back from a tour playing Doors material with the group’s equally legendary keyboard player Ray Manzarek, Krieger spoke with Gibson.com about his playing past and present, his tone, his slide approach and tunings, and much more.
When The Doors was released in January 1967 it was obvious you were unlike most guitarists on the scene – drawing elements of modal jazz, nylon-string playing and dramatic texturalism together in songs like “Light My Fire” and “The End.” That was four months before Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” was released as a single, so it was quite a departure. How did you formulate your style and what were your goals as a player out to make his mark on the ’60s rock scene?
Well, it started with my dad’s record collection. He had a few flamenco records that I heard when I was maybe 12 years old. And there was something I really liked about them: the guitar. It was the first music I heard that was totally guitar-based, so when I started to play guitar, flamenco is what I wanted to do. Great flamenco players are amazing – their picking, their melodies, everything.
What woke me up to rock was seeing Chuck Berry in the early ’60s. He just blew me away. And that day I saw him I went and traded my acoustic flamenco guitar for an electric. Not because I wanted to play like him, even though I did do that a few times with The Doors. Every other guy I knew who played rock and roll back then played like Chuck Berry. When I started playing rock I could hear Keith Richards or Michael Bloomfield or some of the other top guys, but they sounded like Berry or like the old bluesmen, and that wasn’t where I wanted to go. I liked the energy and the attitude and the excitement, but didn’t want to play like any of them. I don’t think I consciously planned to combine rock and roll and flamenco, but it just came out that way.
What about the jazz elements in your style – the major scales and modal playing that really jumped out in the solo breaks on “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through”?
A couple years before I started with The Doors, I was friends with [Doors drummer] John Densmore, who was in a high school jazz band and used to drag me out to jazz clubs in L.A., like Shelly’s Manhole. I saw musicians like John Coltrane and Elvin Jones and loved how free they were. It was a little above my head, but I could understand that they’d freed themselves from basic chords and conventional sounds. I felt that was what I would like to do. Jazz in the ’50s and early ’60s changed from bebop into the modal thing, and it was a little like rock and roll, because the fewer chord changes, the better. That’s a two-edged sword, but if you can play that way and make it work, it sounds great. That was my goal with The Doors, and on the first album “Light My Fire” and “The End” both feature that approach.
Did you realize at the time that you were seeing such profoundly important jazz musicians?
In retrospect, I didn’t realize how amazing guys like Elvin Jones and Coltrane and Miles Davis were. I thought, “Ah, these guys are pretty good.” It’s too bad nobody came along to take the kind of experimental playing they were doing out further. I was always waiting for the next guy who’d innovate jazz. [Horn players] Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman kind of did, but to me they just sounded crazy for crazy’s sake. It wasn’t musical anymore. But with Coltrane, he was musical and melodic, no matter what he played. And he was carrying on from where Charlie Parker left off. He was always melodically adventurous.
What model was your first electric guitar?
It was a Gibson SG www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric....eissue-VOS.aspx with P-90s that I got for $180.
And the Gibson SG is what we’re hearing on the first Doors album, but your playing sounds radically different than Pete Townshend, Carlos Santana or other notable SG users of the day – in part because of your picking. Did your flamenco background inspire you to fingerpick?
Yes. All during The Doors I didn’t use a pick. A few years after The Doors disbanded, when I was recording a solo album, I read an article on Wes Montgomery, who was one of my favorites, and they asked him if he had it to do all over again, would he learn to use a pick. He said, “Yes, I would,” and explained it would be one more thing he could do to make his style less constricting. So I decided I would learn to use a pick. It was a little late in the game and took a few years until I got good at it. Today, I do half and half – depending on what sounds I’m looking for. But regardless of how I’m picking the strings, to me what’s important is to be spare and focused. The less you can say in a phrase, the better. With a lot of guys technique can really take over, and it doesn’t make their playing any better.
Your slide playing is distinctive and original. Because of the Gibson SG, I hear a little bit of a Duane Allman-like tone, but the first Allman Brothers Band LP came out two years after The Doors. What’s your approach to slide?
I used mostly three or four open tunings in The Doors days. Today I use standard tuning a lot, too. The first slide guys I heard were the classic blues guys like Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson… all the Johnsons. I didn’t want to play like those guys. I wanted to take it somewhere else, like on “Moonlight Drive.” There are elements of blues in my playing, but I wanted the slide to make a different kind of sound rather than try to play blue notes with it. If I was as good at blues as Stevie Ray Vaughan, it might be a different story – but it takes years and years to reach that level. Instead, I think I have my own style.
What tunings did you use in The Doors?
Open D, dropped D and open E were big ones. I even used minor tunings for songs like “End of the Night.” I didn’t really know how the blues guys played in open tunings. I just used them because it was easier to play slide in open tuning. You just lay the slide across the strings and hit a chord. But lately I’ve been playing slide in standard turning, which is neat, too. It’s a whole different approach. I use a metal slide today –stainless steel – but back in the day I used a glass slide.
You have huge tones all over the new Singularity. What guitar and amp combinations did you use?
I use my Gibson Signature Model SG [http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-Guitars/SG/Gibson-Custom/Robby-Krieger-SG.aspx] for almost everything, live and in the studio. It’s an exact copy of the ’67 SG you see me holding on the back of the album cover, right down to the dents and scratches. In the old days I also used a Les Paul on a couple things. My favorite amp is an old Twin that I use to record, but I also used a Blues DeVille that goes on the road for this album, too.
The new tune “Southern Cross” is a reminder of how you use delay and echo as a way to enhance melodies. Do you compose using effects, and what are your go-to stomp boxes?
I really don’t write with effects, but it’s not a bad idea! I do record with my own effects, but I try not to get locked into depending on certain boxes. That said, I have used the Boss ME-10 [multi-effects] box for a long time. It is very analog sounding and it’s got all the delays I need on it. I’ve tried newer models, but they get more and more digital sounding, and I just don’t like their sounds. In The Doors, of course, I used an Echo Plex for gigs, and in the studio we had a real, actual echo chamber. [laughs]
The Echo Plex was a great pedal, with a really rich sound and fairly subtle controls for a tape delay. Hendrix and Jeff Beck also made great use of it.
We used to do some gigs with Spirit, and I would watch Randy California on stage using that Echo Plex. He got amazing sounds out of it. As a guitarist, he was underrated – one of those guys passed over by time.
Did you make Singularity with a specific vision for the album in mind?
I started with the first piece, “Russian Caravan.” I was working on some songs with my friend Arthur Barrow about 10 years ago. We decided to write a tribute to Miles Davis, something like [1960’s] “Sketches of Spain.” I told Arthur, “I’ll be Miles Davis and you be Gil Evans,” the arranger who worked with Miles on a few classic albums like Birth of the Cool. The song started with the acoustic flamenco stuff and then shifted into the full electric band. Finally, a year or two ago when we began to record this album, we resurrected the piece. “Event Horizon” has a similar approach, with the flamenco leading into the fusion playing, but we couldn’t do an entire album of that kind of material, so we spiced it up with some other kinds of jazz and rock stuff we were writing. I think it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever done.
Will you be taking the music from Singularity on tour?
For the last six or eight years I’ve been playing with Ray live, and we’ve been doing The Doors’ stuff pretty exclusively. But I may be going out on the road with a band including some of the guys who play on Singularity to perform the album live.
www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/robby-krieger-0810/
Check out
Robby Krieger Doors guitars
Lifestyle
Ted Drozdowski
August 10 2010
The Gibson Interview: Doors Legend Robby Krieger
“I’ve always said that if your mom can’t pick you out on the radio, you’re doing something wrong,” says Gibson SG legend Robby Krieger.
That’s never been a issue with Krieger, whose distinctive playing with The Doors helped carve tunes like “Light My Fire,” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Moonlight Drive,” “Riders on the Storm” and “L.A. Woman” into rock and roll history.
Those songs and a mess of others also affirmed his position as one of the first, if not the first, textural guitarists in the genre. His fluid playing – a mix of his early musical focus on flamenco guitar and jazz juiced up on the intoxicating drive of Chuck Berry – added mystery and deft emotional shading to the bassless quartet’s exploratory performances. And Krieger’s approach is even more fluid today, as the slippery melodies of the steel-fingered extravaganza “Let It Slide” and the ornate two-part Miles Davis tribute “Russian Caravan” reveal on his brand-new album Singularity.
The fact is, Krieger has continued to write his own history as a guitarist since The Doors dissolved in 1973, two years and two albums after the passing of their famed frontman Jim Morrison. The now-64-year-old picker has continued to push his chops, ears and compositional skills ahead through his short-lived, post-Doors Butts Band and a string of seven solo albums, including Singularity, that tap into rock, jazz, cinematic soundscapes, rippling fusion and even instrumental versions of Doors tunes.
Just back from a tour playing Doors material with the group’s equally legendary keyboard player Ray Manzarek, Krieger spoke with Gibson.com about his playing past and present, his tone, his slide approach and tunings, and much more.
When The Doors was released in January 1967 it was obvious you were unlike most guitarists on the scene – drawing elements of modal jazz, nylon-string playing and dramatic texturalism together in songs like “Light My Fire” and “The End.” That was four months before Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” was released as a single, so it was quite a departure. How did you formulate your style and what were your goals as a player out to make his mark on the ’60s rock scene?
Well, it started with my dad’s record collection. He had a few flamenco records that I heard when I was maybe 12 years old. And there was something I really liked about them: the guitar. It was the first music I heard that was totally guitar-based, so when I started to play guitar, flamenco is what I wanted to do. Great flamenco players are amazing – their picking, their melodies, everything.
What woke me up to rock was seeing Chuck Berry in the early ’60s. He just blew me away. And that day I saw him I went and traded my acoustic flamenco guitar for an electric. Not because I wanted to play like him, even though I did do that a few times with The Doors. Every other guy I knew who played rock and roll back then played like Chuck Berry. When I started playing rock I could hear Keith Richards or Michael Bloomfield or some of the other top guys, but they sounded like Berry or like the old bluesmen, and that wasn’t where I wanted to go. I liked the energy and the attitude and the excitement, but didn’t want to play like any of them. I don’t think I consciously planned to combine rock and roll and flamenco, but it just came out that way.
What about the jazz elements in your style – the major scales and modal playing that really jumped out in the solo breaks on “Light My Fire” and “Break on Through”?
A couple years before I started with The Doors, I was friends with [Doors drummer] John Densmore, who was in a high school jazz band and used to drag me out to jazz clubs in L.A., like Shelly’s Manhole. I saw musicians like John Coltrane and Elvin Jones and loved how free they were. It was a little above my head, but I could understand that they’d freed themselves from basic chords and conventional sounds. I felt that was what I would like to do. Jazz in the ’50s and early ’60s changed from bebop into the modal thing, and it was a little like rock and roll, because the fewer chord changes, the better. That’s a two-edged sword, but if you can play that way and make it work, it sounds great. That was my goal with The Doors, and on the first album “Light My Fire” and “The End” both feature that approach.
Did you realize at the time that you were seeing such profoundly important jazz musicians?
In retrospect, I didn’t realize how amazing guys like Elvin Jones and Coltrane and Miles Davis were. I thought, “Ah, these guys are pretty good.” It’s too bad nobody came along to take the kind of experimental playing they were doing out further. I was always waiting for the next guy who’d innovate jazz. [Horn players] Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman kind of did, but to me they just sounded crazy for crazy’s sake. It wasn’t musical anymore. But with Coltrane, he was musical and melodic, no matter what he played. And he was carrying on from where Charlie Parker left off. He was always melodically adventurous.
What model was your first electric guitar?
It was a Gibson SG www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric....eissue-VOS.aspx with P-90s that I got for $180.
And the Gibson SG is what we’re hearing on the first Doors album, but your playing sounds radically different than Pete Townshend, Carlos Santana or other notable SG users of the day – in part because of your picking. Did your flamenco background inspire you to fingerpick?
Yes. All during The Doors I didn’t use a pick. A few years after The Doors disbanded, when I was recording a solo album, I read an article on Wes Montgomery, who was one of my favorites, and they asked him if he had it to do all over again, would he learn to use a pick. He said, “Yes, I would,” and explained it would be one more thing he could do to make his style less constricting. So I decided I would learn to use a pick. It was a little late in the game and took a few years until I got good at it. Today, I do half and half – depending on what sounds I’m looking for. But regardless of how I’m picking the strings, to me what’s important is to be spare and focused. The less you can say in a phrase, the better. With a lot of guys technique can really take over, and it doesn’t make their playing any better.
Your slide playing is distinctive and original. Because of the Gibson SG, I hear a little bit of a Duane Allman-like tone, but the first Allman Brothers Band LP came out two years after The Doors. What’s your approach to slide?
I used mostly three or four open tunings in The Doors days. Today I use standard tuning a lot, too. The first slide guys I heard were the classic blues guys like Blind Willie Johnson, Robert Johnson… all the Johnsons. I didn’t want to play like those guys. I wanted to take it somewhere else, like on “Moonlight Drive.” There are elements of blues in my playing, but I wanted the slide to make a different kind of sound rather than try to play blue notes with it. If I was as good at blues as Stevie Ray Vaughan, it might be a different story – but it takes years and years to reach that level. Instead, I think I have my own style.
What tunings did you use in The Doors?
Open D, dropped D and open E were big ones. I even used minor tunings for songs like “End of the Night.” I didn’t really know how the blues guys played in open tunings. I just used them because it was easier to play slide in open tuning. You just lay the slide across the strings and hit a chord. But lately I’ve been playing slide in standard turning, which is neat, too. It’s a whole different approach. I use a metal slide today –stainless steel – but back in the day I used a glass slide.
You have huge tones all over the new Singularity. What guitar and amp combinations did you use?
I use my Gibson Signature Model SG [http://www2.gibson.com/Products/Electric-Guitars/SG/Gibson-Custom/Robby-Krieger-SG.aspx] for almost everything, live and in the studio. It’s an exact copy of the ’67 SG you see me holding on the back of the album cover, right down to the dents and scratches. In the old days I also used a Les Paul on a couple things. My favorite amp is an old Twin that I use to record, but I also used a Blues DeVille that goes on the road for this album, too.
The new tune “Southern Cross” is a reminder of how you use delay and echo as a way to enhance melodies. Do you compose using effects, and what are your go-to stomp boxes?
I really don’t write with effects, but it’s not a bad idea! I do record with my own effects, but I try not to get locked into depending on certain boxes. That said, I have used the Boss ME-10 [multi-effects] box for a long time. It is very analog sounding and it’s got all the delays I need on it. I’ve tried newer models, but they get more and more digital sounding, and I just don’t like their sounds. In The Doors, of course, I used an Echo Plex for gigs, and in the studio we had a real, actual echo chamber. [laughs]
The Echo Plex was a great pedal, with a really rich sound and fairly subtle controls for a tape delay. Hendrix and Jeff Beck also made great use of it.
We used to do some gigs with Spirit, and I would watch Randy California on stage using that Echo Plex. He got amazing sounds out of it. As a guitarist, he was underrated – one of those guys passed over by time.
Did you make Singularity with a specific vision for the album in mind?
I started with the first piece, “Russian Caravan.” I was working on some songs with my friend Arthur Barrow about 10 years ago. We decided to write a tribute to Miles Davis, something like [1960’s] “Sketches of Spain.” I told Arthur, “I’ll be Miles Davis and you be Gil Evans,” the arranger who worked with Miles on a few classic albums like Birth of the Cool. The song started with the acoustic flamenco stuff and then shifted into the full electric band. Finally, a year or two ago when we began to record this album, we resurrected the piece. “Event Horizon” has a similar approach, with the flamenco leading into the fusion playing, but we couldn’t do an entire album of that kind of material, so we spiced it up with some other kinds of jazz and rock stuff we were writing. I think it’s one of the best albums I’ve ever done.
Will you be taking the music from Singularity on tour?
For the last six or eight years I’ve been playing with Ray live, and we’ve been doing The Doors’ stuff pretty exclusively. But I may be going out on the road with a band including some of the guys who play on Singularity to perform the album live.
www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/robby-krieger-0810/
Check out
Robby Krieger Doors guitars