FREE SPIRIT

Robby Krieger’s new solo album The Ritual Begins At Sundown finds The Doors legend still testing the boundaries of feel, technique, and genre. But to understand Krieger’s playing today, you have to take it back to the start, to Los Angeles, 1965...

- Jonathan Horsley

The Doors were many things. They played rock. They played jazz. They played blues, too. And the LA group’s charismatic singer Jim Morrison, inheriting the Beat Generation’s countercultural posture, wrote poetic lyrics oscillating between the psychonautic free-lovin’ spirit of the 60s and a foreshadowing of the darkness that would consume that decade’s end. There was light and shade in The Doors’ sound. There were psychedelic pop hooks, proto-funk rhythms, morbid visions, sex and death.

As a guitar player, Robby Krieger pushed the envelope. He developed a hybrid jazz-blues style, was red-hot with a slide, and had flamenco chops gleaned from lessons with the late theatre actor Frank Chin. This flamenco hot sauce often found itself spicing up The Doors’ compositions because... Well, why not? There was an element of chance to The Doors’ writing and no rules, a dynamic that felt entirely in keeping with an era riven with chaos, when everything was up for grabs.