033093 Robby Krieger, Gatineau, QC

My only brush with The Doors came on March 30th, 1993 when Robby Krieger played a very unlikely venue in Gatineau called Houblon.  I went with my good friend Jojo and we had a whale of a time.

The place was a tavern through-and-through, with cheap mismatched chairs pulled up to uneven tables, a wooden motif adorned with old signs and rusty trinkets, and servers dishing out quarts of 50 by the hundreds.  One end of the bar had a stage and upon that stage the guitar player from one of the most important bands in the history of psychedelic rock led a collection of competent musicians through his ubiquitous back catalogue.

Krieger himself was singing, and if that seems odd I should quickly add that he played all the old Doors hits as blues songs.  Memorable hit after memorable hit, and each one arranged as a twelve-bar.  Of course this was easy pickins for songs like Roadhouse Blues or even Love Me Two Times, but the blues pastiche actually worked surprisingly well with all the songs.

Krieger even started taking requests by the end of the night and every last song came off perfectly as a straight-up blues.  It was great.

After the show Jojo and I got to meet the legendary guitar player.  When our turn came up we joined Robby at his table backstage where he was enjoying a cup of post-show tea.  While we waited we had both thought of a question to ask him.  Jojo asked what his favourite song to play live with the band was back in the day.  After a bit of reflection Robby answered, “When the Music’s Over.”  Jojo and I nodded like he had just bequeathed the meaning of life upon us.

Then it was my turn.  I asked him if he could tell me the final words of Touch Me.  You know, those horn shots at the end of the song that Morrison punches up with four undecipherable syllables.  Krieger stopped to think for a minute before replying, “Drunker than dirt.”  

“Ahhhh,”  I said, thanking him and probably bowing a little.  

The three of us shook hands again and as we were walking out Robby suddenly blurted out, “Stronger!”

“Huh?…What?” we asked, turning back.

“It’s ‘stronger’,” Robby Krieger said to me.  “I was mistaken.  The lyric is ‘stronger than dirt’”.*

Of course it is.  Jojo and I nodded and bowed a final time and were gone.  

I’m so, so glad he corrected himself before we left.

(I should add that I brought along a CD copy of LA Woman for Kreiger to sign, which he did in a Sharpie™ scrawl, adding a pair of devilish horns on Morrison’s head.  I loved it**.  A short time later someone ‘broke’ into the house where I was living and stole about 150 CD’s – including this one – along with a VCR.  The person just walked through the unlocked front door in the late morning and took things while one of my roommates was lying in bed reading.  

When I got home from class we called the police, who suggested that we pop into the local used CD stores.  “Thieves look at a pile of CD’s and just see a stack of five dollar bills,” he said.  “Whatever they don’t sell in the next day or two will go straight into a dumpster.”

I quickly did the rounds checking all the used CD stores and whattya know, I found one that had bought twenty or thirty of my CD’s off the thief, and they had to give them back to me.  The reason I knew they were my CD’s?  I’d found my Robby Kreiger-signed copy of LA Woman among their CD’s for sale and showed the guy my list of stolen discs.

The shop owner had the name and address of the scallywag who stole them but he said he would only give the info to the police.  No problem, I phoned the investigating cop and he called the store.  The cop said that the thief was known to him, and that he lived near my house.  He said he would go check the guy out when he had a chance.

He didn’t go to the guys house for a month.  “I couldn’t charge him because he didn’t have any of your CD’s anymore,” says the cop.

“Well yeah, you told me yourself that whatever he didn’t sell he’d immediately throw away,” I said, subtly flabbergasted.

“Exactly,” answers the cop.  “And it looks like I was right.”

“Then you waited a month to go to his house…” I stutter incredulously.

“Exactly,” replies the cop.  “So I guess this case is closed.”

I lost my signed Doors CD once and for all in a house fire about ten years later.)

*I have since come to learn that Morrison lifted the closing lyric and it’s rhythmic delivery from a jingle for Ajax detergent.  As a matter of fact, Ajax successfully sued The Doors for using their jingle without permission and were awarded half of the royalties from Touch Me.)  

**My favourite thing about the CD?  Robby’s signature was rather hard to decipher.  Difficult enough that I could often get people to believe that it was actually Jim Morrison who had signed the CD cover.  Tons of people believed me, despite the clear anachronism.