Robby Krieger Opens the Door to the Past with New Anthology and Memories of Jim Morrison

The Doors’ Robby Krieger on new ‘Anthology,’ band lore and Jim Morrison: ‘I trusted him’

If you joined a band when you were 19, would you still be talking about it 60 years later?

Most people would not. But this is Robby Krieger we’re talking about, guitarist for the groundbreaking Los Angeles band The Doors. So you better believe that at 79, he remains chock full of epic memories of the five years his quartet ruled the airwaves and rocked the culture.

“I think the combination of the poetry (of lead singer Jim Morrison) and the music was so different than anything else at the time, before, or maybe even now,” says Krieger, who cowrote “Light My Fire,” arguably the band’s most iconic song. “So many people come up to me at say, ‘You changed my life.'”

Those people will delight in “Night Divides the Day: The Doors Anthology” (out now from Genesis Publications, $75), a beefy new book that chronologically recounts the Doors’ rise and too-soon end after Morrison’s 1971 death in Paris at age 27.

Robby Krieger (right) jams away as The Doors singer Jim Morrison looks on in this vintage photo from the band’s 1960s hey day.
The hardcover tome is filled with archival photos of the band and its memorabilia, along with quotes from current musicians

ranging from Slash to Van Morrison as well as the group’s other members: drummer John Densmore, 80, and keyboardist Ray Manzarek (who died in 2013 at age 74).

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Call it a literary time machine. One spread is a black and white photo of the band in early 1967, standing in front of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The musicians are riding high just days after the release of their hit-packed eponymous debut album. Morrison, a magnetic if troubled front man, holds a massive stick while the rest smile at some joke.

Nearby, the caption features part of a review of the band’s show at the famous Fillmore Auditorium, where they played on a bill with the Young Rascals (“Good Lovin'”). The reviewer makes plain that The Doors were from a planet unfamiliar to that city’s flower child set.

“The Doors are a weird group,” it reads. “They start off without much and gradually get into something which is not exactly the Frisco sound but some kind of Eastern-oriented improvisation