Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on May 1, 2006 13:46:07 GMT
THE SONG WRITING OF ROBBY KRIEGER
Robby Krieger
CS: I'm directing the focus onto you as the songwriting legend behind numerous rock classics. That's because your real contribution to The Doors collective body of work, other than as the guitarist, was the songwriting.
RK: I got some words too that I've written down.
CS: You're the lyricist for many, many of those rock classics, especially all The Doors #1 hit songs ... and Jim Morrison was not The Doors exclusive poet/lyricist. I'm just curious to find out if it was a collaborative composing process.
RK: We collectively arranged the songs. Like most of the ones I did, I came up with myself and then I'd bring it in to arrange it. CS: And that - not that you didn't get a lot of credit for it - but perhaps your musical legacy over time has been so overshadowed by the celebrity aspects. What were some of the song titles where you completed all the music and lyrics?
RK: Well, "Light My Fire" was the first one ... AND The Doors' first #1 hit song. There's "Love Her Madly", "Love Me Two Times", "Lost Little Girl", "Spanish Caravan", "The River Knows", "Touch Me ...
CS: "Touch Me" ... another #1 hit song for The Doors and all the words and music ... that was you?
RK: Yeah ... I wrote the words and music to all those and many others. I always tried to write something that Jim could sing. I knew I had some pretty stiff competition - so you just can't write anything, you know!
CS: Was it easy for him to fit his voice into your lyrics?
RK: Jim never complained about singing any of my lyrics - no matter how dumb they were. He was great about that.
CS: If Jim Morrison would sing them, I imagine he thought they weren't all that dumb! Where does Robby Krieger's story really begin with The Doors?
RK: I really started playing guitar in the San Francisco Bay area. The guitar music that I played first was classical Spanish flamenco music, until a couple of friends up there at school - really got me into the American roots-folk music scene like 1963. We were right near Berkeley, we'd go hear folk music there. I had no thought of even playing electric guitar at the time. It was folk music, flamenco and bluegrass-styled acoustic stuff.
CS: Doors' music is unmistakably the blues!
RK: We loved music, we drew from all kinds of stuff ... but I was also into blues stuff and of course so was Ray, being from Chicago. 'The Paul Butterfield Blues Band' was my favorite band at the time and Paul Rothchild was their record producer. Long before it ever came to pass, I had decided that if there was only one guy I could pick to produce The Doors, it was going to him, Paul Rothchild.
CS: Is that why Jac Holzman, (Elektra Records Prez' 66') approached him?
RK: No. Jac approached him because he was Elektra's only producer at the time. It just happened to be. It just happened that Paul Rothchild became our producer.
CS: There were higher powers at work then?
RK: In different ways. Also it was, well for the first couple of albums, The Doors original inspiration and composer of melodies and lyrics was Jim Morrison, which was so unusual because Jim did not play a musical instrument at all! He just had a lot of stuff that he just heard in his head. He would actually hear it in his head and convey to Ray and I what he was hearing.
CS: Would he have a melody for his poems/lyrics?
RK: Yeah, he had the melody and the whole thing.
CS: But then not necessarily the chords for it or a key signature.
RK: No, no chord changes or a particular key because again, he didn't play anything, but he'd surely hear it inside his head. Then it was just a matter of coming up with the right chords and stuff.
CS: Yeah, like "Moonlight Drive" which was based on poetry, one of his poems.
RK: Well, no, not really. He had it as a song; it was always a song in his head. He sang it to Ray that day they met for the second time, on the Venice beach boardwalk ... That was one of the songs that Jim composed in his mind. Ray suggested they start a rock n' roll band together and Jim suggested using the title of a William Blake book ... "The Doors of Perception." "Crystal Ship" was another with no chord changes or a particular key. Again, it was just a matter of coming up with the right chords. "Crystal Ship" was definitely a Jim Morrison song because he'd finished it inside his head. That was just one of the ones, from those first ten songs or so that he had finished on his own. Jim always loved traditional American Indian music and he'd always want John to play 'toms' on everything.
CS: Jim also loved the way you played blues bottleneck guitar and he'd always want you to play 'slide' on everything.
RK: Yeah.
CS: Jim, in his way was an arranger as well as a songwriter. He was helping to build the mold using and encouraging all of the components, finding a way to blend everybody's individual sounds into a group sound.
RK: Yeah. And then, you know, when we realized we really didn't have enough songs at the time, Jim tried to get us to write some new songs too!
CS: Did higher powers go to work again?
RK: Yeah. And so, the first song I wrote was "Light My Fire".
CS: Still, no one really guessed how important in rock history that song would become and how that one song would literally change each of your lives forever!
RK: After we made that first album we knew we had this great album. The first single did nothing ... "Break On Through". It was on my mind, "Oh my God, here we made this great album and nobody was going to hear it!"
CS: And you guys thought your careers were over.
RK: And then they talked us into shortening "Light My Fire" to a 3-minute song and it would be a big hit on the AM radio, which you had to have in those days. But then, there was no such thing as a 6-minute pop song on radio.
CS: Yeah, in Los Angeles, 93 KHJ and the 'Real Don Steele' show started playing the 3-minute version of "Light My Fire" which became a HUGE hit on AM radio.
RK: So the songwriting gods smiled on our second single, because it would have been our last if "Light My Fire" was like ... "Break On Through" and did nothing Instead, "Light My Fire" went up like a rocket.
CS: Then, across America, the song became so popular that AM radio stations were deluged with listener requests for the album version. "Light My Fire" ... if I'm historically correct, was the very first 6-minute pop song put into heavy rotation on AM radio in America!!
RK: You know, if "Light My Fire" hadn't taken off, that would have been our last album.
CS: Instead, you broke ground and created a paradigm shift in rock n' roll music forever. The test of a great song is to do it with only one instrument and one voice. You could do that with "Light My Fire" and the song wouldn't lose the emotion behind it.
RK: I think that the test of a great song is that you could do it in many different arrangements and it would still hold up. "Light My Fire" for instance, was also the first #1 hit song for Jose Feliciano ... totally different.
CS: But still it's considered as another 'classic' version of the song. Absolutely. He did a fabulous job on that.
RK: Then after Jose Feliciano did it, everybody started doing it. Like your big band leaders, all those guys did it. It turned out that "Light My Fire" was by far our most covered song. Again, it's a kind of poetic-irony because if "Light My Fire" had failed to ignite on AM radio and stiffed like "Break on Through" ... The Doors would have vanished into oblivion.
CS: Instead, The Doors become one of the most influential rock groups in history. Doors tunes are really just standard pop tunes underneath. Very strong verse/chorus stuff. Each musician added a lot of their own musicality.
RK: Well, in 1967 I was being influenced by jazz guys like Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Back in 63' ... I'll tell you jazz music was a mystery to me, you know. Yeah, I liked jazz, but I never thought I would ever play jazz on electric guitar.
CS: So #1 you got very strong verse/chorus pop tune song structure ... and #2, so long as Ray's keybass loop and John's kick drum we're in the pocket then ...
RK: There's ... a great variety of musical styles, like Swamp Rock, Latin Blues, Psychedelic Jazz, Tribal Soul, Glam Pop and even German cabaret and traditional musical theater.
CS: One of the big questions I have is that the music of The Doors is heavily theatrical. It's a real mastery of dynamics, far and above any band that I can think of. It really lends itself to the poetry and content of the lyric. Was a lot of that theatrical stuff written or developed by your on-stage vibe, or was it pre-planned and you guys just performed it that way?
RK: No. It was more worked up on stage. One song in particular stands out because It started out to be a little love song that Jim and I worked up one day ... "This is the end, beautiful friend, this is the end."
CS: Certainly. The stuff was written through actual performing ideas. It seems like "The End" developed a life of it's own up on the stage, is that true?
RK: Yes, then it kept growing longer and longer and until it exploded one night in a now mythical performance at the Whisky a Go-Go. It was born, this little tiny song and morphed into becoming this 'Raga-rock' epic on the stage!
CS: The Doors own 'Magnum Opus' ... your "Stairway to Heaven" or your "Yesterday". Is it true, that night when The Doors played their song "The End" at the 'Whisky', Jac Holzman and Paul Rothchild signed the band immediately after witnessing the performance?
RK: Oh yeah, that was the one, but Jac Holzman and Paul Rothchild had seen five or six shows by then. So getting discovered and signing the record deal with Elektra didn't exactly happen 'overnight' as portrayed in the film, but it was close.
CS: Is it true like in the film, that it's the show where the club owners heard Jim Morrison say, "Mother, I want toooo ... FUCK YOU" onstage and had all of you and all of your equipment physically ejected into the gutter outside the 'Whisky' stage door on Clark St! Was it Elmer Valentine who freaked out?
RK: No, Elmer always liked us. It was Phil.
CS: What did he say?
RK: You're fired!
CS: In looking at the whole body of work, I notice that the trademark "Doors" thing is obviously the extended middle passages. Ray was kind of saying, "We needed to fill some time." You were playing clubs in New York and playing for five hours, you couldn't just have Jim singing the whole time. You had to stretch stuff out, so that just came about out of necessity.
RK: I don't buy that. Maybe a little bit. But we did that because it was fun, you know. Then things grew, they started out to be just short solos and got longer and longer. So it wasn't just to fill the time, it was fun.
CS: They go somewhere, they just don't meander around.
RK: It's not like . The Grateful Dead.
CS: In terms of highlighting ethnic styles of music like "Spanish Caravan" especially, you're using the Phrygian modal scale.
RK: I never learned anything about music or composition theory until after The Doors, when I got more into fusion. I believe it's better not to know that stuff to early in a career.
CS: Meaning what, you've got to first trust your songwriting instincts to keep fresh ideas flowing.
RK: If you check The Doors albums out, there are hardly any bad songs and the depth of the material. Even though there's only six albums, the amount of good stuff is pretty amazing.
CS: I was looking through your discography and counted 25 songs, at least. that are just all-time classics of rock. Most rock bands would die to have written the words and music to just ONE of those songs. How much stuff percentage-wise never made it to albums?
RK: We would pretty much record whatever we had and we wouldn't bother recording something if it wasn't good.
CS: You approached music as artists ... not as rock stars. How did you guys approach songs like "Alabama Song", or "People Are Strange"? These songs are very Kurt Weil German cabaret tunes.
RK: Well, I mean obviously we were very much into Kurt Weil ...."Whiskey Bar" and all that Lotte Lenya singing. Ray had this album and we used to listen to it endlessly. Finally one day, we tried to do that ... that "Whiskey Bar" one, maybe even "Mack the Knife".
CS: "Alabama Song" (Whiskey Bar) has a very Slavic feel to it ... I hear Russian music there. It sounds like mandolins or balalaikas?
RK: Yeah, that's called a Marksaphone. It's kind of like a typewriter and you press the keys and it's kind of like a zither or something. It's an amazing little instrument.
CS: Like a hurdy-gurdy? Where did you find these instruments?
RK: Well, at that time there was a place called Wallach's Music City and that was actually the only place in Hollywood that you could rent an instrument. There was no SIR. And this place had some really cool stuff.
CS: So you guys just went in there then and fooled around with sounds and said that would be good for this tune. Did you have any preconceived ideas to make it sound this way or say we need to find instruments that would do this?
RK: Well, once in a while we did it that way. Paul (Rothchild) was great at finding weird stuff like that. He was very into all kinds of ethnic music and stuff. He was like a trained musicologist kind of guy.
CS: Like George Martin was classically trained ... wrote all the orchestrations for the Beatles records.
RK: Paul Rothchild wasn't into writing like that but he was into sounds!
CS: It just amazes me how you've blended all this stuff so seamlessly, you know a parfait if you will, a mixed drink of musical styles and sounds. Seeing how the tunes progressed throughout the career, spanning from 1965 to 1971 ... All of the early stuff had a really raw bluesy edge to it. Then you get into a kind of traditional 'popular' musical style with full orchestration using the strings and the horns on "Touch Me", complete with a saxophone solo.
RK: It was the fourth album. After that we kind of went back to raw stuff on "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Woman" which was the last album and that was very raw. "Riders on the Storm" was on that record.
CS: "Riders On The Storm" is a Rhodes electric piano, and is very 'cool' jazz, while you softly play passing guitar chords behind it.
RK: The way that song came about was when we were fooling around in the studio, playing the old cowboy number "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and it just kind of turned into "Riders On The Storm." Still I personally believe it is the "L.A. Woman" album that stands alone as the quintessential album written from the Doors communal mind.
CS: In terms of the arrangements and the way you guys made records you definitely were not afraid to try different things ... The Doors music made bold, creative strokes.
RK: I don't know about anybody else, but we weren't afraid to try anything else, but nowadays, it's like the record companies kind of tell you what they want to hear, you know?
CS: That's pretty much it. After they dress you and film you, then they get to the music which is last on the list ... and it shows.
RK: Not like it was back then. People were really open to trying new things. It was accepted and it was encouraged.
CS: Looking at the whole body of work - you dressed them all . and dressed them up well. Every song is distinct in its sound and arrangement, but it's still a 'Doors' song at its essence.
RK: It kinda happened . you know we didn't try to do it - it just came out that way. Looking back after being in a million different band situations afterwards ... how difficult it is composing inspired music and lyrics. Songwriting creativity has never been that easy ... since. It was just a magic happening - four guys that just worked well together. It was never - ever a problem.
CS: Like the musical legacy that comes from the songs of Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd, or The Beatles or U2 where all four members - you can't take one away ... because one is not more important than the other.
RK: EXCEPT ... for the SONGWRITER !!!!
CS: People always said that Jim Morrison was The Doors irreplaceable member. I disagree and feel it was the well written songs and musical craft that became the irreplaceable member of The Doors. All four members had to add to the soup. Robby had to write those songs, just as Morrison had to sing those songs ... to become the superstars you are in rock music history.
RK: Yeah, who knew when I first wrote "Light My Fire" ... that The Doors whole existence, our whole history, our whole legacy and our whole lives could have just as easily ... 'never happened at all'. The scary truth is that 38 years ago, if "Light My Fire" hadn't become a hit record ... we'd have vanished like a blip on a screen. The Doors music was saved from eternal oblivion by the grace of just ONE song. That's how important learning good songwriting technique is, and can be, to any band. The difference between the life and death of anyone's music career!
The Exclusive California Song
Interview by Kevin McCarley 2004
Also check out Robby's musical style here
newdoorstalk.proboards43.com/index.cgi?board=rad&action=display&thread=1146504467
Robby Krieger
CS: I'm directing the focus onto you as the songwriting legend behind numerous rock classics. That's because your real contribution to The Doors collective body of work, other than as the guitarist, was the songwriting.
RK: I got some words too that I've written down.
CS: You're the lyricist for many, many of those rock classics, especially all The Doors #1 hit songs ... and Jim Morrison was not The Doors exclusive poet/lyricist. I'm just curious to find out if it was a collaborative composing process.
RK: We collectively arranged the songs. Like most of the ones I did, I came up with myself and then I'd bring it in to arrange it. CS: And that - not that you didn't get a lot of credit for it - but perhaps your musical legacy over time has been so overshadowed by the celebrity aspects. What were some of the song titles where you completed all the music and lyrics?
RK: Well, "Light My Fire" was the first one ... AND The Doors' first #1 hit song. There's "Love Her Madly", "Love Me Two Times", "Lost Little Girl", "Spanish Caravan", "The River Knows", "Touch Me ...
CS: "Touch Me" ... another #1 hit song for The Doors and all the words and music ... that was you?
RK: Yeah ... I wrote the words and music to all those and many others. I always tried to write something that Jim could sing. I knew I had some pretty stiff competition - so you just can't write anything, you know!
CS: Was it easy for him to fit his voice into your lyrics?
RK: Jim never complained about singing any of my lyrics - no matter how dumb they were. He was great about that.
CS: If Jim Morrison would sing them, I imagine he thought they weren't all that dumb! Where does Robby Krieger's story really begin with The Doors?
RK: I really started playing guitar in the San Francisco Bay area. The guitar music that I played first was classical Spanish flamenco music, until a couple of friends up there at school - really got me into the American roots-folk music scene like 1963. We were right near Berkeley, we'd go hear folk music there. I had no thought of even playing electric guitar at the time. It was folk music, flamenco and bluegrass-styled acoustic stuff.
CS: Doors' music is unmistakably the blues!
RK: We loved music, we drew from all kinds of stuff ... but I was also into blues stuff and of course so was Ray, being from Chicago. 'The Paul Butterfield Blues Band' was my favorite band at the time and Paul Rothchild was their record producer. Long before it ever came to pass, I had decided that if there was only one guy I could pick to produce The Doors, it was going to him, Paul Rothchild.
CS: Is that why Jac Holzman, (Elektra Records Prez' 66') approached him?
RK: No. Jac approached him because he was Elektra's only producer at the time. It just happened to be. It just happened that Paul Rothchild became our producer.
CS: There were higher powers at work then?
RK: In different ways. Also it was, well for the first couple of albums, The Doors original inspiration and composer of melodies and lyrics was Jim Morrison, which was so unusual because Jim did not play a musical instrument at all! He just had a lot of stuff that he just heard in his head. He would actually hear it in his head and convey to Ray and I what he was hearing.
CS: Would he have a melody for his poems/lyrics?
RK: Yeah, he had the melody and the whole thing.
CS: But then not necessarily the chords for it or a key signature.
RK: No, no chord changes or a particular key because again, he didn't play anything, but he'd surely hear it inside his head. Then it was just a matter of coming up with the right chords and stuff.
CS: Yeah, like "Moonlight Drive" which was based on poetry, one of his poems.
RK: Well, no, not really. He had it as a song; it was always a song in his head. He sang it to Ray that day they met for the second time, on the Venice beach boardwalk ... That was one of the songs that Jim composed in his mind. Ray suggested they start a rock n' roll band together and Jim suggested using the title of a William Blake book ... "The Doors of Perception." "Crystal Ship" was another with no chord changes or a particular key. Again, it was just a matter of coming up with the right chords. "Crystal Ship" was definitely a Jim Morrison song because he'd finished it inside his head. That was just one of the ones, from those first ten songs or so that he had finished on his own. Jim always loved traditional American Indian music and he'd always want John to play 'toms' on everything.
CS: Jim also loved the way you played blues bottleneck guitar and he'd always want you to play 'slide' on everything.
RK: Yeah.
CS: Jim, in his way was an arranger as well as a songwriter. He was helping to build the mold using and encouraging all of the components, finding a way to blend everybody's individual sounds into a group sound.
RK: Yeah. And then, you know, when we realized we really didn't have enough songs at the time, Jim tried to get us to write some new songs too!
CS: Did higher powers go to work again?
RK: Yeah. And so, the first song I wrote was "Light My Fire".
CS: Still, no one really guessed how important in rock history that song would become and how that one song would literally change each of your lives forever!
RK: After we made that first album we knew we had this great album. The first single did nothing ... "Break On Through". It was on my mind, "Oh my God, here we made this great album and nobody was going to hear it!"
CS: And you guys thought your careers were over.
RK: And then they talked us into shortening "Light My Fire" to a 3-minute song and it would be a big hit on the AM radio, which you had to have in those days. But then, there was no such thing as a 6-minute pop song on radio.
CS: Yeah, in Los Angeles, 93 KHJ and the 'Real Don Steele' show started playing the 3-minute version of "Light My Fire" which became a HUGE hit on AM radio.
RK: So the songwriting gods smiled on our second single, because it would have been our last if "Light My Fire" was like ... "Break On Through" and did nothing Instead, "Light My Fire" went up like a rocket.
CS: Then, across America, the song became so popular that AM radio stations were deluged with listener requests for the album version. "Light My Fire" ... if I'm historically correct, was the very first 6-minute pop song put into heavy rotation on AM radio in America!!
RK: You know, if "Light My Fire" hadn't taken off, that would have been our last album.
CS: Instead, you broke ground and created a paradigm shift in rock n' roll music forever. The test of a great song is to do it with only one instrument and one voice. You could do that with "Light My Fire" and the song wouldn't lose the emotion behind it.
RK: I think that the test of a great song is that you could do it in many different arrangements and it would still hold up. "Light My Fire" for instance, was also the first #1 hit song for Jose Feliciano ... totally different.
CS: But still it's considered as another 'classic' version of the song. Absolutely. He did a fabulous job on that.
RK: Then after Jose Feliciano did it, everybody started doing it. Like your big band leaders, all those guys did it. It turned out that "Light My Fire" was by far our most covered song. Again, it's a kind of poetic-irony because if "Light My Fire" had failed to ignite on AM radio and stiffed like "Break on Through" ... The Doors would have vanished into oblivion.
CS: Instead, The Doors become one of the most influential rock groups in history. Doors tunes are really just standard pop tunes underneath. Very strong verse/chorus stuff. Each musician added a lot of their own musicality.
RK: Well, in 1967 I was being influenced by jazz guys like Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, Back in 63' ... I'll tell you jazz music was a mystery to me, you know. Yeah, I liked jazz, but I never thought I would ever play jazz on electric guitar.
CS: So #1 you got very strong verse/chorus pop tune song structure ... and #2, so long as Ray's keybass loop and John's kick drum we're in the pocket then ...
RK: There's ... a great variety of musical styles, like Swamp Rock, Latin Blues, Psychedelic Jazz, Tribal Soul, Glam Pop and even German cabaret and traditional musical theater.
CS: One of the big questions I have is that the music of The Doors is heavily theatrical. It's a real mastery of dynamics, far and above any band that I can think of. It really lends itself to the poetry and content of the lyric. Was a lot of that theatrical stuff written or developed by your on-stage vibe, or was it pre-planned and you guys just performed it that way?
RK: No. It was more worked up on stage. One song in particular stands out because It started out to be a little love song that Jim and I worked up one day ... "This is the end, beautiful friend, this is the end."
CS: Certainly. The stuff was written through actual performing ideas. It seems like "The End" developed a life of it's own up on the stage, is that true?
RK: Yes, then it kept growing longer and longer and until it exploded one night in a now mythical performance at the Whisky a Go-Go. It was born, this little tiny song and morphed into becoming this 'Raga-rock' epic on the stage!
CS: The Doors own 'Magnum Opus' ... your "Stairway to Heaven" or your "Yesterday". Is it true, that night when The Doors played their song "The End" at the 'Whisky', Jac Holzman and Paul Rothchild signed the band immediately after witnessing the performance?
RK: Oh yeah, that was the one, but Jac Holzman and Paul Rothchild had seen five or six shows by then. So getting discovered and signing the record deal with Elektra didn't exactly happen 'overnight' as portrayed in the film, but it was close.
CS: Is it true like in the film, that it's the show where the club owners heard Jim Morrison say, "Mother, I want toooo ... FUCK YOU" onstage and had all of you and all of your equipment physically ejected into the gutter outside the 'Whisky' stage door on Clark St! Was it Elmer Valentine who freaked out?
RK: No, Elmer always liked us. It was Phil.
CS: What did he say?
RK: You're fired!
CS: In looking at the whole body of work, I notice that the trademark "Doors" thing is obviously the extended middle passages. Ray was kind of saying, "We needed to fill some time." You were playing clubs in New York and playing for five hours, you couldn't just have Jim singing the whole time. You had to stretch stuff out, so that just came about out of necessity.
RK: I don't buy that. Maybe a little bit. But we did that because it was fun, you know. Then things grew, they started out to be just short solos and got longer and longer. So it wasn't just to fill the time, it was fun.
CS: They go somewhere, they just don't meander around.
RK: It's not like . The Grateful Dead.
CS: In terms of highlighting ethnic styles of music like "Spanish Caravan" especially, you're using the Phrygian modal scale.
RK: I never learned anything about music or composition theory until after The Doors, when I got more into fusion. I believe it's better not to know that stuff to early in a career.
CS: Meaning what, you've got to first trust your songwriting instincts to keep fresh ideas flowing.
RK: If you check The Doors albums out, there are hardly any bad songs and the depth of the material. Even though there's only six albums, the amount of good stuff is pretty amazing.
CS: I was looking through your discography and counted 25 songs, at least. that are just all-time classics of rock. Most rock bands would die to have written the words and music to just ONE of those songs. How much stuff percentage-wise never made it to albums?
RK: We would pretty much record whatever we had and we wouldn't bother recording something if it wasn't good.
CS: You approached music as artists ... not as rock stars. How did you guys approach songs like "Alabama Song", or "People Are Strange"? These songs are very Kurt Weil German cabaret tunes.
RK: Well, I mean obviously we were very much into Kurt Weil ...."Whiskey Bar" and all that Lotte Lenya singing. Ray had this album and we used to listen to it endlessly. Finally one day, we tried to do that ... that "Whiskey Bar" one, maybe even "Mack the Knife".
CS: "Alabama Song" (Whiskey Bar) has a very Slavic feel to it ... I hear Russian music there. It sounds like mandolins or balalaikas?
RK: Yeah, that's called a Marksaphone. It's kind of like a typewriter and you press the keys and it's kind of like a zither or something. It's an amazing little instrument.
CS: Like a hurdy-gurdy? Where did you find these instruments?
RK: Well, at that time there was a place called Wallach's Music City and that was actually the only place in Hollywood that you could rent an instrument. There was no SIR. And this place had some really cool stuff.
CS: So you guys just went in there then and fooled around with sounds and said that would be good for this tune. Did you have any preconceived ideas to make it sound this way or say we need to find instruments that would do this?
RK: Well, once in a while we did it that way. Paul (Rothchild) was great at finding weird stuff like that. He was very into all kinds of ethnic music and stuff. He was like a trained musicologist kind of guy.
CS: Like George Martin was classically trained ... wrote all the orchestrations for the Beatles records.
RK: Paul Rothchild wasn't into writing like that but he was into sounds!
CS: It just amazes me how you've blended all this stuff so seamlessly, you know a parfait if you will, a mixed drink of musical styles and sounds. Seeing how the tunes progressed throughout the career, spanning from 1965 to 1971 ... All of the early stuff had a really raw bluesy edge to it. Then you get into a kind of traditional 'popular' musical style with full orchestration using the strings and the horns on "Touch Me", complete with a saxophone solo.
RK: It was the fourth album. After that we kind of went back to raw stuff on "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Woman" which was the last album and that was very raw. "Riders on the Storm" was on that record.
CS: "Riders On The Storm" is a Rhodes electric piano, and is very 'cool' jazz, while you softly play passing guitar chords behind it.
RK: The way that song came about was when we were fooling around in the studio, playing the old cowboy number "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and it just kind of turned into "Riders On The Storm." Still I personally believe it is the "L.A. Woman" album that stands alone as the quintessential album written from the Doors communal mind.
CS: In terms of the arrangements and the way you guys made records you definitely were not afraid to try different things ... The Doors music made bold, creative strokes.
RK: I don't know about anybody else, but we weren't afraid to try anything else, but nowadays, it's like the record companies kind of tell you what they want to hear, you know?
CS: That's pretty much it. After they dress you and film you, then they get to the music which is last on the list ... and it shows.
RK: Not like it was back then. People were really open to trying new things. It was accepted and it was encouraged.
CS: Looking at the whole body of work - you dressed them all . and dressed them up well. Every song is distinct in its sound and arrangement, but it's still a 'Doors' song at its essence.
RK: It kinda happened . you know we didn't try to do it - it just came out that way. Looking back after being in a million different band situations afterwards ... how difficult it is composing inspired music and lyrics. Songwriting creativity has never been that easy ... since. It was just a magic happening - four guys that just worked well together. It was never - ever a problem.
CS: Like the musical legacy that comes from the songs of Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd, or The Beatles or U2 where all four members - you can't take one away ... because one is not more important than the other.
RK: EXCEPT ... for the SONGWRITER !!!!
CS: People always said that Jim Morrison was The Doors irreplaceable member. I disagree and feel it was the well written songs and musical craft that became the irreplaceable member of The Doors. All four members had to add to the soup. Robby had to write those songs, just as Morrison had to sing those songs ... to become the superstars you are in rock music history.
RK: Yeah, who knew when I first wrote "Light My Fire" ... that The Doors whole existence, our whole history, our whole legacy and our whole lives could have just as easily ... 'never happened at all'. The scary truth is that 38 years ago, if "Light My Fire" hadn't become a hit record ... we'd have vanished like a blip on a screen. The Doors music was saved from eternal oblivion by the grace of just ONE song. That's how important learning good songwriting technique is, and can be, to any band. The difference between the life and death of anyone's music career!
The Exclusive California Song
Interview by Kevin McCarley 2004
Also check out Robby's musical style here
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