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Paradigm Shift
Interview
by Philip H.
Farber
This is one from the archives. In
1995, John Densmore, drummer for the legendary rock band The
Doors, was touring with a one-man performance that included
live music and reminiscence about life on the road with Jim
Morrison and company. Paradigm Shift, then simply Paradigm,
interviewed Densmore prior to a show at the Bardavon Opera
House in Poughkeepsie, New York. This is the first time this
interview has appeared in its entirety.
PHF:
Can you tell us something about this performance?
John Densmore: When my book came out, I was on
a book tour and I got asked if I wanted to do a college
lecture tour. I said no. I'm not a lecturer. Then they said I
could do whatever I wanted for an hour. I thought that was
interesting, because I've done a lot of theater. So I
developed this... Everything is from my book. It's all
excerpts. I play drums while reading. I show videos in the
dark. I light incense and read in the dark. Hopefully it's an
experience rather than a talking-head lecture kind of thing.
It puts you, the audience, on the drum stool. That's what I'm
trying to do so that you viscerally get what I went through.
PHF: It all relates to the Doors?
John Densmore: Well, I certainly philosophize
about life in the book. I dedicated the book to John Lennon
because he used his personal life a lot as art and was really
open, he and Yoko, about themselves. It inspired me to put my
personal life in there, too. Public personalities are on
pedestals and it's good to humanize them and show that we too
have to go to the bathroom and have relationship problems and
all of that.
PHF: I never doubted that for a
minute. I never saw the Doors in concert, but I heard that
people would come out of concerts feeling very changed. Is
that the case?
John Densmore: I don't know
about that. We're the music makers, so it's hard to say what
happened for the audience. I'd say that in the very beginning,
the first several years, before Jim's self-destruction really
kicked in, I was very proud of our live performances. They
were really concentrated. Our percentage of playing well was
extremely high, maybe ten percent problems due to technical
difficulties. I got goosebumps a lot of times. I can say that.
After a while, Jim would be more drunk or stoned and it kind
of went down. I was trying to get everybody to stop playing
live for a while, to try and regroup. In the studio, if he
were drunk, we could say forget it, but live, you're just out
there naked.
PHF: I understand that most of the
band met in a Transcendental Meditation class...
John Densmore: That's true. Ray had already
known Jim from UCLA film school. We were all dabbling around
with psychedelics. They were even legal back then. We knew
that you can't do that all the time, you'll wrack your nervous
system. Robby and I knew each other well and we went to this
TM class. We thought maybe the yogis had something to teach
us. Ray happened to be there. He said, 'Hey, I hear you're a
drummer. I've got this singer...' Jim hadn't sung yet at
all... He didn't call for a couple of months because he said
the time wasn't right yet. I thought, 'He's into astrology or
something.' Robby was not in the band then. It was Ray's two
brothers who played guitar and harmonica. After early
rehearsals, they quit, which shocked me because we had already
written 'Hello, I Love You,' and a few songs that became very
big. But they didn't believe in what we were doing or
something. So I brought Robby down and he played his
bottleneck (slide guitar). Back then, there was nobody playing
electric bottleneck. Robby was one of the first. Jim and Ray
wanted it on every song, they liked it so much. It ended up on
'Moonlight Drive' and a few others. So he was in the band. We
tried bass players, but it just made us sound traditional,
like the Stones or something, and we wanted to be different.
Ray find an electric keyboard bass, which was adequate live.
In the studio, sometimes we had a bass player because you
needed that punch from a string. Synthesizers hadn't been
invented, so the electronic bass wasn't that good yet.
PHF: In Morrison's lyrics, the psychedelic
aspect is sometimes very apparent...
John
Densmore: What do you mean by that? What is psychedelic?
PHF: I would say that something like 'The Soft
Parade' is definitely more non-linear than your average pop
song.
John Densmore: Surreal or whatever.
PHF: Right. And he says 'This is the trip...'
etc.
John Densmore: Well. That was kind of
literal, wasn't it?
PHF: Was there a conscious
attempt to integrate that kind of experience, psychedelics or
TM or whatever, into the music itself?
John
Densmore: Well, I'd say so. We were like street
scientists, experimenting. Back then, 'Just Say No' would have
been a very simplistic statement. Careful use of psychedelics,
like the Indians use peyote, and semi-careful use of pot, you
could learn things. But that's where you drew the line.
Cocaine or anything else was a serious drug. We were carefully
exploring our minds. When cocaine became chic, we were all
shocked, Morrison included, because we knew it was serious.
Then [Morrison] went for the big legal drug, alcohol. Alcohol
and cigarettes kill more people than anything. End of lecture.
PHF: I know you've been writing lately,
obviously, but have you been playing music?
John
Densmore: I'm doing a play right now, with my wife, and I
play hand drums all throughout that. I did reading of the
novel I'm working on, in a small club, in a writer's series,
and Ray and Robby came down and we jammed. That was great.
Here and there, I'll sit in with friends or whatever.
I'm working with a singer/songwriter, John Coinman,
who I like very much. I made some demos which I think maybe
are as good as masters. I played drums, produced them, put the
band together, with the guitar player from X. I hope to get
them a record deal.
PHF: When I called you,
there was some great African music on your answering machine.
What was that? I loved it.
John Densmore: It's
part of a three-cassette thing called 'The Big Bang', all
about how drums evolved.
PHF: You mentioned
that you are working on a film documentary. What is it about?
John Densmore: It's a documentary about an
after-care program for ex-convicts. Serious. It flies in the
face of the trend of the whole country. Everyone wants to
incarcerate everybody, but deep down everyone knows the
streets are not safer. If you just give a tiny bit of
compassion to the people getting out, they turn into better
employees than spoiled middle class kids.
PHF:
How did you get involved with that?
John
Densmore: I met the guy who was developing the program and
he inspired me. Drums are also included. I bought 20 or 30
African drums for inmates in Louisiana and I went down into
the prison and played with them. Now the drums are on the
outside, in this program. Drumming is part of the program, the
community of the drum. It helps bring people together and they
can share their pain and stuff. | |
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