He’s dead he’s my ancestor, and I’m going to honor him as much as I can. Jim wrote a couple of lines-”Our love becomes a funeral pyre.” But he went ballistic when he saw the commercial, so what does that say? He cared about the whole catalog and the meaning of the whole band. What’s interesting is that the song “Light My Fire” was primarily written by Robby. I can’t get that out of my head, and the underlying thing that the book is all about is integrity. Jim Morrison-when he gave us that great line about “Come on Buick light my fire,” he said, “Great! I’ll smash one on television with a sledgehammer!” When he said that, he sledgehammered his feelings into my brain. The word that keeps coming up around this case is “integrity …” I want that story out there for those that are interested. At the time, some fans-the hardcore ones, certainly-said “What!? They’re suing the other guys?! Then it was ‘Ugh! … The other guys are countersuing for $40 million?! Oh my God, this is a train wreck.” If you read the book, you get that our goal was to preserve the Doors’ legacy, and to keep the original band and its intent intact. So I rallied Jim’s estate and we entered a legal struggle to stop them. The Doors without Jim Morrison is like the Stones without Mick, or the Police without Sting.

John Densmore: Several years ago, the Doors were knocked off of their hinges because the guitar player and the keyboard player thought they could continue without Jim. In his latest book, The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison’s Legacy Goes On Trial (CreateSpace.), Densmore chronicles the courtroom proceedings, and his subsequent victory, while justifying his actions against his former bandmates to honor Morrison’s vision.Ĭhad Radford: Why did you feel compelled to write The Doors Unhinged? So much so that it became the basis for waging legal action to stop Krieger and Manzarek when they tried to relaunch the group without him, and without Morrison, in 2002 as the Doors of the 21st Century. He died in 1971, but his reaction to the commercial resonated with Densmore profoundly.

For Morrison, the Door’s artistic integrity was at stake.

When Morrison returned and found out, he was so angry that he threatened to smash an Opel with a sledgehammer on television if the commercial continued airing. When Buick came knocking, Morrison was out of the country, so the other three went forward with the commercial. But the group had previously agreed that every decision the Doors made was to be done unanimously, and each of its four members, including Dionysian front man Jim Morrison, had 100 percent veto power. For drummer John Densmore, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, and guitarist Robby Krieger, the deal was simply a way of getting paid for their song. In October 1968, the Buick Motor Company paid the American rock ‘n’ roll group the Doors $75,000 to use the song “Light My Fire” in a commercial for a new luxury car, the Opel.

The Doors Unhinged by John Densmore