Riders On The Storm - John Densmore - Talks About His Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors.

I've been doing a lot of reading lately. One of the great things about #reselling is that you come across all kinds of books at really cheap prices. I've been purchasing most of my books lately between 50 cents and $1, rarely do I go over $1 for any title. I've also found a wide array of subject matter. Everything from Zen, to growing weed, to autobiographies.

The weather in the US has been terrible. Where I live, we keep getting smogged out from the Canadian forest fires. Most of the places I wanted to trek to have also had floods, extremely hot weather, or forest fire smog. Hence, I've been focusing on my #resell business, and READING A LOT. Expect many book reviews soon.

I know I've been absent lately, I'll post more on that in the next few days. I think I just needed a break. So, let's talk about the most recent book I read....

Riders On The Storm by John Densmore

I'm a huge Doors fan. For those that don't know The Doors were a pretty big rock n roll band during the hippie era. Late 60s early 70s. The front man for the band was a guy named Jim Morrison who was a pretty wild and controversial dude. He considered himself a shaman and when everyone else was singing about peace and love, The Doors wrote songs and sang about a lot of darker topics. They weren't your typical peace and love hippie band.

The original band consisted of Ray Manzarek on keyboards, Robby Kreiger on guitar, John Densmore on drums, and Jim Morrison on vocals. The book is about John Densmore's experience with The Doors and dealing with Jim Morrison on a regular basis.

I'm a huge Morrison fan. He was just an all-around wild man. At the start of their career, he did a lot of drugs and became a really bad drunk towards the end of his career. Like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, he died well before his time due to his excessive lifestyle.

I always find it hard to read about Jim Morrison because I had a really close friend I lost who reminded me a lot of him. He's been gone for well over 25 years now, but whenever I read about Jim Morrison, I always think of him. The similarities are so striking it's actually painful to read at times.

So I put off reading this book for a really long time. It's no secret that John Densmore (the author and also drummer for the band) wasn't super close with Jim Morrison the singer. After reading the book I think they had a sort of love-hate relationship. I actually get that now, because, knowing a similar personality, it can be tough dealing with someone with so many excesses.

Knowing their relationship beforehand I just figured he would shit all over Jim Morrison for 319 pages. After reading the book though, that wasn't the case. The book chronicles the history of the band from the start right up until the demise of Jim Morrison and a little more of John's life after Jim passed.

It was a really good read and you could tell John Densmore really shared his true feelings. After reading the book it was obvious that John had a ton of respect for Jim as a poet, writer, and entertainer. He just had a really hard time watching him literally destroy himself.

Throughout the book, I sensed a lot of guilt. Why didn't they try to help him more? Why did everyone look the other way? What was Jim really trying to accomplish?

The book starts out with a little autobiography about his life before The Doors. It then dives into how he met Ray Manzarek. After meeting Ray and auditioning as the band's drummer, John brought in Robby Kreiger when their original guitarist quit.

As soon as Robby joined the band it became pretty obvious that they were on to something. They just cliqued! They all shared in writing and creating the music and also shared the credit. According to John and other accounts that I read, nobody was really egocentric. They were just 4 guys that loved creating music and art.

Ray Manzarek was a very grounded musician with a love of the keyboards. He had a happy homelife with his live in girlfriend who he stayed with throughout his career. He was almost like the father of the band.

Robby Kreiger was a very shy, soft-spoken guitarist into jazz and blues. He came from a well-to-do family, but was very mellow and grounded and far from snobby.

John Densmore came from a typical catholic family. He started studying the drums in high school and became a really great percussionist.

Jim Morrison was a writer and poet. He met Ray Manzarek while in film school. It was Ray who most people say brought the band together.

I really had no idea how dedicated they were at the start. They knew they were on to something and most people that heard them play in the early day, also immediately sensed that these guys were going to be big.

Surprisingly, nobody wanted to sign them. They made a demo recording and were rejected by almost every record company in LA. It wasn't until a guy from Elektra Records (a small record label at the time) got a tip to see these guys perform at some dive bar in Los Angeles. They were then hooked up with Paul Rothchild who was an absolute genius in the recording studio. From there, they shot off like a Roman candle into the night! Everything just came together and they produced hit after hit. John refers to Paul as the fifth member of the band.

With there success came the typical sex, drugs, and rock n roll. I did find his description of their rough start surprising though. I never knew about any of that.

John's description of events is much different than The Door's movie. It also differs a lot from Danny Sugerman's "No One Here Gets Out Alive" book. The Door's movie was an Oliver Stone film/docudrama about the band's career. Danny Sugerman was around The Doors from the age of 12. He had a job answering their fan mail and later went on to manage the band. He wrote several books about Morrison and The Doors.

John drops a few bombshells too. Morrison's treatment of women through John's eyes was rather shocking. Let's just say if Jim was still alive today he might have been a casualty of the whole #metoo movement.

His description of drug and alcohol abuse sounded pretty spot-on and not exaggerated or glamorized. John actually hated watching Morrison kill himself. Both he and Paul Rothchild could see very early on that Jim was going to be another rock and roll casualty if nobody intervened.

He also described Jim and Pam's relationship as always kind of rocky. I guess she couldn't control him either and just kind of dove in head-first with him.

Throughout the book John writes several letter's to Jim. In these letters he shares his true emotions. It's obvious John Densmore was really sad about Jim's passing. Throughout the entire book you can feel almost a sense of guilt that they didn't try harder to intervene.

In other parts of the book you can tell he's just plain angry. Jim's ego and personality were huge. He wasn't really approachable. The slightest thing could set him off. He was often moody and would try to drink his problems away only adding to everyone's misery. This really upset John.

He also gets into the lawsuits from the concerts when Jim supposedly "exposed himself" on stage. That segment was really interesting. To this day, nobody really knows what happened. I'm guessing Jim was lucky he didn't live in the modern age where everything is recorded and photographed!

All in all, this was a really good book. I couldn't put it down. 319 pages, I read about 100 pages a day. As soon as I woke each morning I'd grab the book off the nightstand and read another chapter. It was a really interesting read, very tasteful and respectful. Frankly, I'm sad I didn't read it sooner.

If you're a fan of The Door's or just rock and roll in general, you might want to give this book a read. I really enjoyed it A LOT!

Image credit for No One Here Gets Out Alive cover from WikiCommons.