The Doors drummer John Densmore recently sat down for an interview with Appetite for Distortion.
As per Ultimate Guitar, during the seven minute chat, Densmore opens up on the late Jim Morrison when asked, “After all these years, what feeling do you get talking about Jim now?”
“Yeah, sure. I occasionally dream about him, I had one not too long ago where he was back, and he was dressed in like an Armani suit and wanted to play music. And that felt really good.”
“Jim was, besides being an incredible wild man, the Lizard King – he had a real vulnerable side, and there was a sweetness there that most people don’t know.”
Densmore went on to say, “In rehearsal when we were hanging out, he was open. He got caught by alcoholism. And we didn’t have substance abuse clinics, and we didn’t know he had a disease, so we didn’t know what to do.”
“I was kind of tortured, I knew there was an elephant in the room but I couldn’t define it. But we have his music, and it’s such a gift. Feeds me all the time.”
Densmore also reflects on The Doors’ performance with Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland.
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“Yeah, great singer. It was on ‘Storytellers’ that he performed with us, I’m trying to remember which song… It was ‘Break on Through’ and ‘Five to One.’ I think there was a lyric, ‘she gets high’ and we had to edit out the word ‘high,’ and Ray Manzarek was encouraging him to sing that.
“And I said, ‘You don’t have to sing it, man.’ And I didn’t know that Scott had like Jim the addictive gene. I wish I had known that, maybe could have pointed him towards some sort of recovery road.”
“I miss that guy, he was a great singer, and Stone Temple Pilots are wonderful. We played with the bass player Robert DeLeo on a tribute to Ray, I hope it comes out this year, called, ‘Break on Thru: A Tribute to Ray Manzarek’. It’s a film of the concert that Robert DeLeo played with us.”
Watch The Doors perform, ‘Light My Fire’
