22 Jul Robby Krieger: My Career in Five Songs
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A stolen SG! Lonnie Mack! The Doors guitarist reflects on key tracks from his legendary canon.
If you’ve ever wondered why you never hear Robby Krieger play the same solo twice, the Doors guitar legend has a simple explanation.
“I think that would be so boring,” he says. “I mean, just because something is on a record, I’m expected to play it note for note all the time? I just can’t see the point in that.” He laughs. “My guitar tech, Forrest [Penner], gets on me about that occasionally. He knows the old stuff better than I do. He’s always telling me, ‘I think you missed a note.’”
Assessing his past work, Krieger draws an interesting and somewhat surprising conclusion. “I think my ideas didn’t always match my technique,” he says. Krieger explains that when the Doors formed in 1965, he had been playing guitar for only a few years.
“I was 14 when I first picked up the guitar, so when I got out there I was really behind the curve of where a lot of other guitarists were. They could play all the latest songs, but I wasn’t good enough to do that, so I had to make up my own stuff.”
“Our thing was always to be ourselves. Nobody played drums like John Densmore, nobody played keyboards like Ray Manzarek, and nobody sang like Jim Morrison. I had my own thing going, too. Put us together and we sounded like ourselves. We were the Doors.”
