By the time Robby Krieger gets to talking about Morrison Hotel, he’s already shrugging off the mythology. No incense, no cosmic manifestos, no velvet curtains. Just a band that wanted to have fun again. After The Soft Parade—with its horns, strings, and a recording process that felt like a slow crawl through wet cement—the Doors wanted to get their hands dirty. “We just wanted to get kind of back to basics,” Krieger says. “And do a fun album, you know what I mean?”
That phrase—fun album—does a lot of work here. Morrison Hotel has long been framed as the Doors’ return-to-roots blues record, a corrective after the orchestral detour. Krieger doesn’t push back on that. He leans into it. “Jim really wanted to do a blues album. That was his idea,” he says, crediting Jim Morrison with the lyrical sweep while noting how the band tightened the screws. “The one before took forever… all that extra stuff. We wanted to do something more fun for us.”
Fun, in this case, didn’t mean casual. It meant discipline. Less adornment, more groove. The band let the songs breathe and trusted the conversation between instruments. You hear it immediately on Morrison Hotel: the swagger of “Roadhouse Blues,” the snap of “Peace Frog,” the sense that the Doors were playing with each other again instead of stacking parts on top of each other. Morrison handled all the words this time, Krieger brought in fresh musical ideas, and the album snapped into focus.
Take “Peace Frog,” which contains one of Krieger’s most recognizable moments—a solo that feels stitched into the song rather than slapped on top of it. He says the idea was straightforward. “I wanted to kind of play something Chuck Berry-like,” he explains. “That’s really why I started playing electric guitar, because of Chuck Berry.” The studio got involved—“they put all this echo on it and stuff”—but the intent stayed pure. “Everybody copies Chuck Berry,” Krieger says, “but I tried to do something like him, but a little different.”
That difference is the Doors’ calling card. Even when they’re nodding to the blues, they never quite behave. “Roadhouse Blues” is a straight-ahead barroom burner until you look closer and realize the bass is doing something quietly unhinged. On the anniversary edition, multiple takes reveal different feels, but Krieger is quick to correct the record about the final version. “On ‘Roadhouse’ it was Lonnie Mack,” he says. “He’d never played bass before. Believe it or not.”
Lonnie Mack, the legendary guitarist who had quit music altogether. “He was sick of it,” Krieger says. “He was selling Bibles out of the back of his car.” Through a series of near-accidents involving Elektra Records and a no-show from the Doors’ usual bassist, Mack ended up holding down the low end. “We said, ‘Hey Lonnie, can you play bass on this? It’s just a blues.’ He goes, ‘Well, I’ll try. I never played bass before.’” The result was “the most amazing bass part… when it goes into that chorus, it’s like a freight train.”
Fifty years later, that freight train still hits. And Krieger hasn’t exactly stopped chasing that feeling. His solo record, The Ritual Begins at Sundown, feels like a continuation. Bluesy, loose, and unbothered by expectations. Krieger hears the connective tissue too, especially on “The Hitch.” “I’m glad you noticed that,” he says. “That’s kind of the connector between the two albums.”
The new record also carries a strong Zappa-adjacent gravity—not imitation, but proximity. Krieger knew Frank Zappa back in the Mothers of Invention days, though he admits he wasn’t always sold. “I wasn’t really a big fan at first,” he says. “I thought the music was good, but he always had to have these jokes.” It clicked later, when Zappa leaned into seriousness and surrounded himself with monster players. Through bassist Arthur Barrow, Krieger found himself collaborating with Zappa alumni. “It wasn’t like we were trying to recreate Zappa,” he says. “Frank was just great at finding these musicians. And I used them well.”
There’s more waiting in the wings—other albums in the can—and, of course, another anniversary looming. “Next year we’re going to have the 50th of L.A. Woman,” Krieger says. “There’ll be some cool stuff on that too.”
Back to basics doesn’t mean looking backward. For Krieger, it’s about staying in the groove, trusting feel over fuss, and letting the song do the talking. Or, as he put it, half a century ago and still standing by it now: make it fun, make it real, and if it sounds like a freight train, don’t slow it down.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
