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John Densmore...

(From a 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.

...no, this is not Dave Tough
- it's John Densmore

...but the resemblance is intentional. For an L.A. production of a play entitled "Bad Dreams and Bebop" former Doors drummer John Densmore was recruited to portray the legendary Dave Tough.