"Couldn't Get Much Higher": The Musical Legacy of Robby Krieger

       The 1960's were the start of the peak of electric-guitar music, a time when a great range of popular acts, both white and black, American and British, made work of great emotional depth and curiosity. Several names would come out as Gods and heroes, as definitively influential on their own, and subsequent generations. Of course we could not imagine heavy metal or other guitar-based musics of the 70's and 80's without Jimi Hendrix. His tone, phrasing and expression form its bedrock. But there are other artists, perhaps equally important, who do not get the recognition that their influence and contribution warrant.
       Case in point: Robby Krieger, guitarist and songwriter in the Doors. A guitar teacher once compared Robby disparagingly to my own progress--
       "Yeah," I replied, "well he played everything finger-style." Indeed he was an anomaly in rock guitar, playing sparse triads and descending intervals, using a bottleneck slide with unorthodox phrasing, and sometimes just adding atmosphere. Not always being flashy like, say, Hendrix or Clapton. So yeah, it can sometimes sound like he's not playing anything at all. But he gives the music its emotional character, and in fact wrote some of their biggest hits, and indeed their biggest hit, actually.
       'Light My Fire' may have bored their lead singer after a while, and indeed it is their most played song; but they never would have gone so far without it. That was Robby's first song. The solo section is one of the most exciting in rock history. Robby is attempting to channel John Coltrane, and the result is an incredibly powerful guitar solo. The distorted modal passages certainly prefigure a different aspect of metal guitar than Hendrix, Cream and Page had done. Santana was certainly inspired by Robby's channeling of jazz and his melodicism. You can still hear this in Kirk Hammet's playing on 'Ride the Lightning.'
       Early metal bands like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Blue Öyster Cult certainly owe a lot to the Doors. This is evident in the influence of Jim Morrison, as lyric poet, dramatist, and madman; it contributed to the dark aesthetic above all. The musical innovation was just as important: Ray's bluesy organ was a bigger influence on Deep Purple's classic sound, but Robby Krieger brought in all these influences like flamenco, often using a simple descending progression that Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult would also use, a more dissonant sound, again the modalism and jazz, chromatic riffs, and, of course his distinctive use of the bottleneck, both within and outside a formal blues context.
       Duane Allman is the most conspicuous heir to Robby's slide technique, although use of slide guitar seems much more widespread in the Doors' wake. Just listen to 'Mountain Jam.' At about 3:07 the incorporation of a minor 6th adds that characteristic dissonance, reminding one of the disturbed solo in 'When the Music's Over' and contrasting to the bright yet bluesy feel that permeates most of the track. But Robby's style was completely inimitable. For example, incorporation of the major seventh in a minor blues scale on 'My Eyes Have Seen You', implying the diminished scale…the dark harmonies on 'End of the Night' and the use of open minor tuning, along with John Densmore who was actually, is, the most musically talented member of the band, whose drums beat out the cadence of Jim's stanzas, rather than just keeping time, and Robby brought out his voice with the strange wail of his bottleneck, yeah and 'Summer's Almost Gone,' the shimmering guitar Robby puts into it, drawing your sweat out, it's sticky, hot LA music, of course Ray, Rest in Peace, putting the icing on with insane brilliance, without his genius the music wouldn't have made it but ultimately Robby adds the anguish, the darkness, with certain dissonances and intervals that other instruments cannot achieve. Even a crappy song, well crappily sung anyway, 'Blue Sunday', Robby totally takes out onto another plane with his lyrical solo, as Jim sings "la, la la la," very jazzy, but different.
       In fact, Robby should be given more credit as a pioneer of fusion. Although some guitarists, such as John McLaughlin, had been messing around with combining elements of jazz and rock since the early 60's, and in fact any true musician in a metropolitan environment would logically have incorporated jazz, rhythm and blues, country and other styles into their playing, before such rigid definitions of 'genre' were invented, nonetheless there was an almost idealogical opposition between the rock crowd and the jazz scene, at least superficially, at the time the Doors hit the scene, to bridge that gap.
       Morrison himself was equally fond of Frank Sinatra and the composed cadence of poetry, as well as the wild Black Dithyrambs of Rock and Roll. Densmore was extremely jazzy in his drumming, which is what made the music so dynamic, although Jim often wished he would play a more simple, heavy beat. But it was Robby who brought his love of Miles and Coltrane into that solo on 'Light My Fire,' before Miles himself started the great fusion revolution from the jazz end. Other, more progressive rock bands like King Crimson show the clear influence of the Doors, who paved the way, along with The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix, for the more expansive approach to music that really took off in the 70's. The soft, introverted guitar solos on Robby's own compositions 'You're Lost, Little Girl' and 'Yes, the River Knows' are reflected in King Crimson's 'I Talk to the Wind.'
       Krieger, as well as the other members of the Doors, has continued to create and perform music after Morrison's death. He is best known for his contribution to that immortal, Dionysian frenzy that the Doors were able to achieve, however. It is a shame that commercialism and complacency have eroded the revolutionary spirit that pervaded music in the 60's and 70's and for a time blurred barriers of race and class. Ironically, that same hedonism that artists like Morrison naively asserted as new values to the young audiences of the time, has contributed to that very same complicit self-centeredness and false egotism of our modern culture. Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that this revaluation of all values would be cataclysmic. However, the state of music these days is so stale and anemic, it would be great to see some true creativity and revitalization of the scene; and whatever eccentric music is made, at least in a guitar/rock context, owes volumes to axe-slingers like Krieger, Syd Barrett and Lou Reed.