2023-08-04 12:00:07
The Doors, in concert in Frankfurt (Germany), in 1968, with, from left to right: Ray Manzarek (Hammond organ), Jim Morrison (vocals), John Densmore (drums) and Robby Krieger (guitar). MANFRED REHM/DPA/DALLE APRF
A distant clap of thunder, the harmonics of a ride cymbal that seem to follow the rhythm of the falling drops, a hypnotic bass line and dancing Fender Rhodes strums… Impossible to imagine Riders on the Storm without the famous rainy introduction which imbues the whole song with its drizzly and mysterious atmosphere, inseparable from its score in mi minor.
Read the review (in 2012): A new inventory of the album “LA Woman”
“A Storm in the Desert”, these are the words that the singer Jim Morrison gives as an indication to his companions of the group The Doors, the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, the guitarist Robby Krieger and the drummer John Densmore, to set to music the mystical lyrics he has just laid down on his notebook. The “Lizard King” himself suggested the addition of rain and thunder sounds during studio sessions at the Doors Workshop in California in December 1970 during the final sessions of the album L. A. Woman.
Nothing is more evocative, in fact, than a storm to tell the story of a lone wanderer. The poet in black leather evokes in particular in his prose “a killer on the road”. It is inspired by a news item that made headlines in the early 1950s: Billy Cook, a 23-year-old hitchhiker, murdered six people, including a young family, during a bloody road trip from Missouri to California. . A dark story that had already served as the plot for the experimental film HWY : An American Pastoral, directed in 1969 by Paul Ferrara. The charismatic Doors singer plays a hitchhiker himself in this fifty-minute metaphysical road movie, shot partly in the Mojave Desert and in Los Angeles.
A little western pattern
Musically, the song is initially inspired by a country classic (Ghost) Riders in the Sky : A Cowboy Legend, interpreted by Stan Jones and the Death Valley Rangers in 1948, a superb ghostly ballad on which the Californian quartet regularly jammed during their rehearsals.
To “ambience” this meteorological depression in the desert, the guitarist Robby Krieger finds a minimalist motif played on a “flanger” effect (a clear and drowned sound), a little western, in the spirit of the original tapes of maestro Ennio Morricone, very fashionable at the time. Finally, the last essential element of this alchemy, John Densmore’s jazzy, all-restrained drumming, which gives this seven-minute score a slightly mystical elegance.
Read the review (in 2010): The myth of the Doors told by Johnny Depp
These “riders of the storm” thus sign the ultimate manifesto of the Doors with Morrison. The song brilliantly closes their sixth and final album, L. A. Woman. In the spring of 1971, just after finishing the recording of this one, James Douglas Morrison took a flight to Paris, where he joined his fiancée, Pamela Courson. He died on July 3. This will be the last song recorded by the leader of the Californian rock band during his lifetime, signing his epitaph despite himself. But what an epitaph!
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