Riders on the Storm

"John Densmore was a drummer for The Doors, a band from Los Angeles of enormous depth and popularity in the late sixties. Their music has never been off the radio in 40 years. You may hear more Doors on the radio today than 20 or even 40 years ago. The staying power of their music is quite remarkable. John Densmore was writing about his few years in the band from ’65 until ’71 when Jim Morrison died. What I love about this book is that it’s so confused. It is somebody struggling to make sense of what he was doing, of what was going on around him, of the people he was working with. It’s that sense of struggle that I find captivating. I don’t know. I don’t think people visit Janis Joplin’s or Jimi Hendrix’s grave the way they visit Jim Morrison’s. I did – I went to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But what’s really fascinating about that place is Balzac and Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt’s graves, and the Holocaust memorials. It’s a really fascinating place. Jim Morrison’s grave has just been turned into a graffiti site. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s a listening book, it’s not a biography. It’s about listening to the Doors – getting lost in the songs and coming out with a story about how the song plays, how it communicates. The Doors’ music is unlike anybody else’s. Song to song, their music is not even like itself. There is a constant attempt to tell truth in their music and in the way Morrison’s words are shaped. My book is not a survey of a career, it’s about taking the songs and trying to put into words what makes them so special."