JOHN DENSMORE DRUMMER ON THE STORM

by Teri Saccone

 Perhaps more than any other band, the Doors personified the rebellious spirit of the  60s. With their self-titled debut album, the Doors erupted onto the scene in 1966, replete with an innovative sound, attitude, and message. In contrast to the peace-and-love hippie propaganda of the era, the Doors explored the darker side of  death, sex, war, and anarchy. Aside from the talents of frontman/poet/singer Jim Morrison, the rest of the band were supremely gifted musicians: drummer John Densmore, keyboard player Ray Manzarek, and guitarist Robbie Krieger. Although more than 25 years have elapsed since Morrison passed away in Paris, the band s international popularity has not diminished.  In France, the Doors remain a huge cult band.

 Over the years, John Densmore has become well-regarded for his jazz-inflected, powerfully elegant drumming with the Doors.  Besides his music career, he is also an actor and writer, having  chronicled his observations and experiences with the Doors in his 1990 book Riders On the Storm  (Delacorte Press, Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group).  It is a very personal and often humorous account of the fascinating story of the band and John s search for self-discovery. Writing the book was cathartic for its author, who struggled with his past and the loss of his friend and mentor, Jim. "The book was a way to work through a lot of what I went through," he declares.  " I dedicated it to John Lennon because he exposed so much of his personal life that it was inspiring to me. Public people also have relationship problems and have to go to the bathroom just like everybody else. "You know, my book has never been  published in French which is a shame, with Jim being buried there and all," he remarks regrettably. " I don t understand why."

 WHAT S A TYPICAL DAY LIKE FOR YOU? JD: I get up around 7 AM -- that s because I have a 4 year-old. Then I do my yoga, hang with my kid, eat breakfast. Then, either work on my novel or get on the phone to make calls. I also exercise. I take walks and ride my horse way out in the country. I ve also been trying to help a singer-songwriter, John Coinman. I made four demos for him, put a band together, produced everything, and played drums. Hopefully, we ll get to do  a whole album.

 HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE MUSIC? Well, it s pretty hard to describe. I guess it s rock  n  roll with Zen Buddhist lyrics. It s Southwest sounding -- the sound of the desert. I did those demos months ago and I m trying to hustle them a deal and then we can make six or seven more songs. We did four.

 YOU RE ALSO INVOLVED WITH DOORS BUSINESS, TOO. Recently, we finally got the money to transfer "An American Prayer"  -- Jim s poetry album -- onto CD. So we were in the studio working on that. We did make a video for one of the songs which MTV in the States would not play because it s in the spoken word category and they don t play spoken word. The rest of the world played that video. I guess the U.S. is behind the times, in my opinion .

 DO YOU THINK THE ARTS STILL HAVE A PLACE IN THE U.S. UNDER THE PRESENT RIGHT-WING SENTIMENT? The whole trend of the country is towards the right, so the arts are not that important. Taking money away from children, the elderly and arts programs is the thing to do to balance the budget, according to the Republicans. I m getting a little political here.

 THAT S FINE. There s still great art being done. It s hard getting it through, though.  American MTV and Rolling Stone magazine are so big now that they ve gone corporate and they ve got conservative. They ve made some money and they re afraid of losing it so they get tight. It s funny, Newt Gingrich was gonna be on MTV for an interview because they gave Clinton equal time when he was trying to get elected. Ray (Manzarek)  made a joke and said "Is Newt gonna  sing since they don t allow spoken word on MTV?"

 YOU COLLABORATED ON TWO ALBUMS WITH KRIEGER AND MANZAREK AFTER MORRISON'S DEATH. We didn t want to give up the musical synchronicity, (pauses) but we didn t want to replace Jim.  I mean, who could fill those leather pants? (laughs) So Ray and Robbie tried to sing, ha ha. By the second one we started fighting musically and we decided, "Our spearhead, our forefront is gone. It s time to go our own ways."

 TELL ME ABOUT THE PLAY THAT YOU VE APPEARING IN? I ve always occassionally played drums for small, avante garde theatrical productions, mainly just to see people. If you re writing, you re all alone with the blank page or the video computer screen so it s good to be with people. For a while I was drumming for  the Actor s Gang.  It was a small theatre company run by (actor) Tim  Robbins before he became a big success. I had a great time performing with them.

 My wife is an actress and she was in a play by an Argentinian playwrite, Eduardo Pavlovsky. The director wanted to do  another play by this man and he wanted me to drum and I said "Great." It was a piece about a man and a woman and relationships. Then he convinced me to do the man part so I m acting and drumming. My wife s drumminga little too, to balance it out. I gave her a few lessons. The play s an interesting piece called "Circa."

 WHAT OTHER DRUMMING PROJECTS ARE YOU INVOLVED WITH? Besides the play, there s another thing my wife and I are up to that s real interesting.  I was involved men s groups with Robert Bly who wrote Iron John, before it became a big movement. It s all about sharing feelings. I met a fellow at one of these men s conferences who ran a prison program in Louisiana. He had gotten permission from the warden to give drums to the inmates. This just blew my mind. So I bought 20 drums for the inmates of Dixon Correctional Insitute in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and sent them down there. Six months later I went there with my wife who was eight months pregnant with that four year-old I was talking about and we went in the prison and had a whole afternoon of drumming and dancing and crying and sharing feelings and it was just unbelievable. My wife and I wanted to film this program but the warden got real nervous. He thought it would be an expose on the prison, but we were just trying to show that this program helped a lot.  The program eventually was booted out because it works. The whole turn of the country is to incarcerate everybody. But I think deep down people know that the streets  aren t safer.  This program -- called Project Return -- is now on the outside, helping ex-offenders get their high school diploma, giving them counseling.  When inmates get out their families don t know how to deal with them, they can t get a job because they have "ex-convict" etched on their forehead. This program gives them a hand up instead of a hand out. They have to write from prison to get into the program and they must show that they are serious about it.  For this program, the recidivism rate  -- the rate at which ex-offenders return to prison -- is four percent as opposed to 60 percent in the rest of the country. Anyway, we filmed this program and the drumming, and we hope to get it on television.  I just teach them simple beats and talk about how if we all play together for 15 minutes, when we finish, we kind of form an instant community of the drum which helps us access instant community for sharing deeper feelings.  When you ve drummed together, there s a real oneness there. One thing this men s movement got me thinking about was that so-called primitive cultures had initiations at 13 and it was clear: "You re a man know and you have to go out and hunt." We don t have these clearly defined rituals so it takes us to 35 or 40  before we really know who we are. Of course it s continual. I don t mean to sound like a guru who knows where it s at believe me.

 YOUR BOOK, RIDERS ON THE STORM, REVEALED NOT ONLY YOUR LIFE WITH THE DOORS, BUT ALSO YOUR OWN PERSONAL SEARCH AND STRUGGLES. The book was a way to work through a lot. I dedicated it to John Lennon because he exposed so much of his personal life that it was inspiring to me. Public people also have relationship problems and have to go to the bathroom, just like everybody else.

 DID YOU KEEP A DIARY OVER THE YEARS? No. I just kind of went through all my memories. It took me  years to write it.

 HOW DID THE NOVEL WHICH YOU ARE CURRENTLY WRITING COME ABOUT? It s partly out of a response to the Oliver Stone movie ("The Doors"). I love Oliver for trying. He was in Vietnam  during that era so that was his fantasy of what it would have been like to be Jim, from a bunker in Viet Nam. I think the film was the story of a tortured artist, which Oliver is similar to. But I m a little more interested in the earlier  60s, before things got a little too decadent. There was a real feeling of hope for social change on the street. We really thought "Man, we re gonna change this around." Maybe it was naive, but I will say that the civil rights movement, the peace movement and the women s movement were all from seeds planted in the mid-  60s. I m  kind of tired of people viewing the  60s as just hippy burnouts who got stoned. Although, we did get stoned and I m not trying to gloss-over Jim s self-destruction or anyone else s. Jerry Garcia is an example of the best and worst of the  60s: he was a wonderful, giving spirit yet he could not face the demons of addiction. So yeah, we did burn out, but I don t feel than any movies or books have looked at the mid- 60s and the war at home, as we called it. There have been a lot of movies on Vietnam which were important films, but what was happening in this country at the time was astoundingly important. We stopped the Vietnam war. The people actually stopped the war! I m interested in that and in those unsung heroes who were trying to do something. Maybe they can re-inspire people in the  90s. So that s what I m writing about. I know those times well.

 THERE ARE THOSE WHO SPEAK OF THE  60S IN REVERENTIAL TONES. I don t want to go back  and I can t go back. No one can.  But I m slightly nostalgic for the passion of the time. It s like the old question "If you had to  do it over again would you do it differently?"  I wouldn t, because then I wouldn t be who I am now and we re all a product of our experiences and I m happy now.

 AMAZINGLY, ALMOST 30 YEARS HAVE PAST SINCE YOUR RECORDED THE FIRST DOORS ALBUM.  THE GROUP HAD ONLY BEEN TOGETHER A YEAR YET YOU WERE INCREDIBLY TIGHT. I  had studied jazz a lot before that. I m still not real crazy about the first album. The second album ("Strange Days") I like a lot because we were more relaxed in the studio and we were experimenting a lot. Each of us individually had played for  years and Jim had read every book written so he was certainly a word man. When Ray and I met we talked about Coltrane and Miles and we had the same influences. When we played it all came together real quick. Recently, I went to hear Elvin Jones who was John Coltrane s drummer. I gave him  my book backstage. I was pretty nervous because jazz is such an art form and it was possible that he would look down at rock  n  roll. I said to him  "I wrote in here that you gave me my hands."  And he was so sweet and appreciative that it made my day.  Oh man, it felt great just to give something back to somebody. I copied every lick of his and could play his style exactly. I didn t play his style on Doors records but that was my roots, it gave me my. technique.

 SPEAKING OF TECHNIQUE, YOUR PLAYING HAD MORE EMPHASIS ON YOUR HANDS RATHER THAN YOUR FEET.  Like Mitch Mitchell, I have very fast hands. Due to the old school jazz and Be-bop playing, my hands are real fast. My feet are not as fast as they could be. When fusion came along I just about died: those guys are so fast with their feet.  I stil have some work to do. But I love some of that bass drum stuff: funk, fusion oh, man! I m always trying to get my foot to go faster.

 DO YOU BELIEVE THAT YOUR UNIQUENESS  WAS AS APPRECIATED DURING THE DOORS HEYDAY AS IT IS NOW? When people ask what made the Doors last so long I tell them it was the drumming! (laughs)  Ginger Baker at the time was the number one rock guy and a great soloist. He had more technique than me. Thank God technique isn't everything. I'm more an ensemble player and my uniqueness, Bruce Springsteen told me a few years ago at the Hall of Fame, was that in silent parts like in "The End," I would just drop a bomb in there for some reason. I don't know how to explain my style but I'd listen to the words closely and try to be musical.

 YOU CERTAINLY HAD A FLAIR FOR DRAMA. Yes. I love the drama and the dynamics. That's what I loved about the Doors. Ray also knew that if you played real loud and then real soft, oh man, it s just so musical.

 I SUPPOSE YOU CAN APPRECIATE A BAND LIKE NIRVANA, WHO ALSO MAXIMIZED THE USE OF DYNAMICS? Oh very much. Wonderful.

 BY THE WAY, WHAT DO YOU LISTEN TO THESE DAYS? Oh, everything.  I don't listen to a lot of grunge or rap, but I admire it and respect it and I m really glad it s there. I'm kind of interested in  world music. It's fascinating that English-speaking countries are listening to music in other languages now and just going with it and I think that s a healthy thought. You can get the essence of a culture just by the music you don't have to have the literal interpretation of the words.

 THE DOORS DIDN T HAVE A BASS PLAYER LIVE, BUT YOUR BOOK MENTIONS THAT YOU DID HAVE BASS PLAYERS  ON THE ALBUMS. Moog synthesisers hadnt been invented yet, but Ray found a keyboard bass.  We thought it was adequate so we decided that we wouldn t get a bass player and we d be different. Anything to be different. But when we got to the studio, the Fender Rhodes piano bass just didn t record that well. We actually recorded with it for the first album  and then we had a bass player -- an L.A. session guy -- just overdub Ray s bass lines exactly the same. The plucking gave it a little more touch, and as I said the synths hadn t been invented which have great bass. For the second album there were a bunch of different guys playing bass. But they always did exactly what Ray had played.

 DID YOU PAY DIFFERENTLY LIVE TO COMPENSATE FOR LACK OF A BASS PLAYER? Having just Ray s left hand as opposed to a bass player was pretty interesting for a drummer: it wasn t a separate mind holding the beat down which is very helpful. So I had to work real hard at keeping the tempo the same. When Ray would play a solo with his right hand, sometimes he d speed up because his left hand was the bass and he d get into it. But on the other hand, if there had been a bass player he would have been playing more lines, playing more fills which is natural for a musician to do. So there was a little more room in our sound which  I filled with little percussive comments and accents on Jim s singing.  That was the effect that had on me.

 DID YOU TUNE YOUR OWN DRUMS BACK THEN? Yes. I tuned them loosely to the one, four, and five chords. I had been playing drums since I was in junior high -- marching band, etc. -- and it gave me a good background. I kind of developed what some people say is a unique sound: I love the heads to get real old and loose and rancid and get them to talk back. If you listen to "Hello I Love You," for example, you can hear that the head is really old and it gives it a personality. Then when the head would break and I d have to get a new one I couldn t stand the sound for several weeks  cause it sounded too slick.

 AMERICAN DRUMMERS  OFTEN MENTION SCHOOL MARCHING BANDS AS  OFFERING GOOD TRAINING. The stereotype of marching band would be stiff, military-type music, which is correct. But playing with 40 other musicians gave me a sense of the ensemble side of music. So when it came time to mix our songs in the studio, I had something to say about every aspect of the music. I had played in all kinds of orchestras, dance bands, everything. That helped me a lot and gave me a perspective on the levels, the  echo, EQ s, the sounds of every instruments.

 YOU WERE INTO  SOME HEAVY JAZZ PLAYERS AT  A REALLY YOUNG AGE. People always say that they re in awe that I saw all these greats live so many times. What happened is that I had a piano playing friend and a high school buddy named Grant -- who s in the book-- who might have started me on it. We were jazz nuts. We d go to the record store and see these LP s by these jazz guys and think they were the coolest. Then we d get our fake i.d. s and go see them live. We actually looked down on rock  n  roll! But then the Beatles came along and we thought "God! That s far out!" We liked it and slowly got into rock and blues and all that, but we started with jazz.

 WHAT ABOUT YOUR DRUMKIT BACK THEN? Gretch was my original drumkit, then I played Ludwig for many years. Now I have a Pearl kit and a Ludwig snare.

 DID YOU KEEP YOUR FIRST KIT THAT YOU RECORDED WITH? No but I have the original snare which I use and an old floor tom. There are a few laying around.  I have one that s in the Hard Rock Hotel in Vegas (laughs)

 DID YOU DEVELOP A DIFFERENT SOUND FOR YOUR LIVE PLAYING? Well, I didn t know this about the heads before I started making records. When I got into the studio, I realized that you have to muffle drums a little bit in order to make them sound better. That ringing sound live just doesn t sound good. When I started recording and listening to other records, I understood that.

 L.A. WOMAN -- WHICH WAS RECORDED LIVE -- HAD A LOT OF COMPLEX STRUCTURE CHANGES AND TEMPOS. Oh, thanks. It was basically more bluesy and we were into different rhythms.

 WASN T MORRISON IN ANOTHER ROOM DOING THE VOCALS? He was in the bathroom. The other albums were more structured than that one. The first album was fairly live and then in the middle period we kind of tried to make a "Sergeant Pepper".  For the last album, we denied technology and went back to eight-track. 16-track had been invented and we used it on the previous album, "Morrison Hotel" . But we wanted to record "L.A. Woman" in a rehearsal room and we wanted to be real relaxed and produce it ourselves and it came out real raw, and with a lot of feeling.

 IN YOUR BOOK, YOU SAY THAT "STRANGE DAYS" AND "L.A. WOMAN" ARE YOUR PERSONAL FAVORITES. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY WAS YOUR LEAST FAVORITE SESSION? "Waiting for the Sun". Jim s self-destruction was just coming in and I was just torn. That s when I quit the band but came back into the studio the next day. I couldn t give up the music, the path in life I had found, but our singer was destroying himself. Onstage it was great. But that album was when Jim started really drinking. You may remember from the book that a couple of years after he died, I went into a bar that was near our old rehearsal hall and the bartender, who was an old guy, said that he never saw anybody drink more than Jim. Oh, man. This guy had a disease. I didn t know that and our culture didn t understand that back then. Jim was an alcoholic with a biological problem.

 FANS  WOULD PROBABLY LIKE TO BELIEVE THAT THE THREE REMAINING DOORS  ARE STILL CLOSE -- THAT YOU GET TOGETHER SOCIALLY. HAVE YOU REMAINED FRIENDS? Oh, sure.

 YOU MADE SOME VERY CANDID COMMENTS ABOUT THEM IN THE BOOK. Well, I guess at times in the book I did paint Ray a bit Svengali-like. But then the book sold more records, so he was happy! Oh, no, did I say that? (laughing) Robbie had always been my best friend for many years, although not as much lately. We just went in different directions: I re-married and had a little kid so now I know a lot of people with little kids. But we re still friends. Robbie has a band and he plays about half Doors songs and half originals. He recently played at the House of Blues in L.A. and I went down and sat in with him and it was great fun. Now and then we get together. And Ray too.

 YOU ALSO GOT TOGETHER FOR THE ROCK  N  ROLL HALL OF FAME AWARDS A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO.That s because Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam wanted to sing with us, and that was fantastic. He sang "Break On Through," "Roadhouse Blues," and "Light My Fire." Boy, was that fun.

 IS  THERE A POSSIBILITY OF A REUNION? I always thought it d be nice to do an instrumental album. It certainly could be a soundtrack to a film because we always wrote for Jim s vocals so we could easily write for visual. It s an idea in my mind. Maybe in a few years, I don t know. I d like to go out on the road right now just for the fact that I heard that Mick Fleetwood had a chiropractor on the road years ago. (laughs) When I heard that I thought  "Oh my God! now that s great!" Nevermind all the elaborate riders they have in contracts for the food backstage.

 THE DOORS ARE PART OF YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE, EVEN THOUGH YOU HAVEN T RECORDED TOGETHER IN MANY YEARS. DOES BEING AND EX-DOOR EVER BECOME A BURDEN? Yes and no. It certainly gives me the freedom to write a novel. But you have to stay on top of it. For example there s been a recent movie "Strange Days." We  usually license our songs although we don't do that for commercials. I haven't seen the movie but I read a review and even though it s by a woman director, it s another one of these extremely violent movies that says violence is bad. There s rape and murder and really, haven t we had enough? So I took the money I got from that and gave it to a group against domestic violence. I felt like my karma wouldn't be clean if I'd accepted that money.

 SINCE THE BAND SPLIT, DID YOU INTENTIONALLY SEEK OUT OTHER CREATIVE VEHICLES SUCH AS ACTING AND WRITING? I ve always respected my intuition. A lot of people self-destruct after the downside of a huge peak such as The Doors. But I stumbled into this acting class and I thought, "This could keep me out of trouble for a while." I realized that performing is what I do whether it s playing, acting or writing and it s the process that counts, not the goal.