The first time I heard The Doors was on a plane set up as a discotheque in Valle del Tiétar, near the town where my grandparents were born and where I spent the summer at that time.
Jim Morrison had been dead for ten years, but mythology wanted his legend to spread from mouth to mouth; the Lizard King, the provocative poet, the rebellious rocker and all those attributes that were so attractive to a fifteen-year-old like me who, in the heat of heat, adjusted leather pants and put a scarf around his neck to enter a plane planted in a field of onions, ready to dance the In a gadda da vida of the Iron Butterfly until exhaustion.
Now I remember these things with almost intact innocence. My memory takes me back to those times of joints and roses thanks to the book by guitarist Robby Krieger that reviews his life with The Doors, the group I discovered one summer night, when my pimples betrayed how close sin was, and my Friends and I entered that plane with the falsified date on the photocopy of the carnets. Robby Krieger’s book is entitled Set the night on fire and has been published in Spanish by Alianza. In one of his chapters, Robby Krieger reveals why syringe addicts leave their trail of blood wherever they go.
It turns out that every time you stick yourself, Robby says, you draw a little blood to make sure you’ve hit a vein. And the drops end up on the ceiling, on the walls, floors, and in every place that is within range. Robby ended up hooked, as did Hendrix, whom he met on the plane to the Isle of Wight to give his memorable concert. August 1970. Along with The Doors and Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Joni Mitchell, Supertramp, Leonard Cohen, Joan Baez, Chicago, Procol Harum, Miles Davis and a host of other great artists were announced.
Ten years later, the heroine had crossed the borders of show society and reached the most unlikely corners. The Spanish soil would end up strewn with syringes. Many of those friends with whom she was going to dance Light my fire by The Doors ended their days at the foot of the horse. Emulating our idols not only in the pose, but in speed that marks the blood in the chopped macaroni of the veins was the closest thing to fleeing forward when the abyss looms ahead.
At fifteen, that plane was the only chance I had of going abroad and spending the night reincarnated as Jim Morrison, the Lizard King, the rebel poet who knew he was going to be the third to die, after Hendrix and Janis Joplin. For this reason, when she died, Morrison stopped worrying about money and the future.
I read Robby Krieger’s book with the taste of summer in my mouth, remembering those times when I lived in the present as if I were living in eternity, with my tight leather pants and my scarf around my neck, receiving the first morning sun. lying on a field of onions that in time would end up strewn with syringes.