Legendary Krieger performs at rare Bay Area concert

The Doors were the ultimate LA band, lighting the world on fire with equally psychedelic and poetic tales spun by a magnetic lead singer with Hollywood matinee idol looks. Despite that well-cemented geographic connection, however, the band’s legendary guitarist — Robby Krieger — does have a pretty strong connection to the Bay Area.

“I went to high school up here at a school in Menlo Park,” the 80-year-old Krieger told fans Friday at the Mountain Winery, referring to his time at Menlo School (which is actually in Atherton). “It was a school to get you into Stanford. Unfortunately, I didn’t get into Stanford.” Yet, not getting into The Farm turned out just fine for the young LA native, who would instead return to SoCal and then study at UC Santa Barbara before transferring to UCLA. He met Jim Morrison while at Westwood and that would lead to the creation of one of the Top 5 most significant rock bands in American history:

The Doors. On Friday night (July 31), more than 1,100 fans gathered at the gorgeous mountaintop venue in Saratoga to celebrate the legacy of that mighty band during a brilliant two-hour show delivered by Krieger and his three-piece backing band.

Following a winning half-hour set by the instrumental Santa Barbara electric-music duo Tripform, featuring Pablo Manzarek (son of the late great Ray Manzarek of The Doors) and Norm Reed, Krieger and company took the stage and kicked things off from the Doors’ very beginning.

“This is the first song from the first album,” Krieger announced. With that, the group jumped right into one of the most powerful musical opening statements of all time — “Break On Through (to the Other Side)” — the hard-hitting Track 1 from The Doors’ eponymous 1967 first album, which may well be the greatest debut record ever recorded. It was such a treat to see this first-tier Rock & Roll Hall of Famer — who was inducted alongside vocalist Morrison, keyboardist Manzarek and drummer John Densmore in 1993 — practice his otherworldly craft on the Bay Area stage.

And it certainly doesn’t happen often enough. Besides his terrific outing at 2025 BottleRock Napa Valley, Krieger hasn’t performed a Bay Area outing since a Sweetwater Music Hall gig in Mill Valley way back in 2017 — and it’s been over 10 years since his last South Bay show. Instead, Krieger has just been staying local and playing in LA, performing fairly regularly at the old Doors haunt The Whisky a Go Go.

Krieger wasted little time in showing Bay Area fans what we’ve been missing, filling up the early-in-the-set offerings “Five to One,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Twentieth Century Fox” and “Love Her Madly” with astounding leads and passages. He’s not a gunslinger — certainly not in the classic guitar hero sense, like a Jimmy Page or Eddie Van Halen — but his fretwork is spellbinding, drawing from blues, flamenco, jazz, classical, pop and more in ways that are strikingly original. He doesn’t often get his due in conversations about rock’s top guitarists, but I’d take Krieger’s approach — which favors new ideas and bold passages more than flashy moments and speed for speed’s sake — over pretty much any other guitarist’s.

And Krieger certainly doesn’t get enough credit as a songwriter, which has a lot to do with the fact that the songs on the first three Doors album were credited to the band as whole. One must also factor into Morrison’s massive mythology and substantial prowess as a poet, a potent combo which has overshadowed Krieger for much of his career. Yet, he was the primary architect of some of The Doors’ very best numbers — including “Touch Me,” “Love Me Two Times” and “Light My Fire” — and co-authored many more, very much as an equal, with Morrison.

The rest of Krieger’s band is also topnotch and does a wonderful job reviving these Doors numbers in ways that are true to the original recordings but still manage to feel excitingly fresh. The four-piece lineup consisted of Krieger, drummer Ty Dennis, vocalist-bassist Dan Rothchild and keyboardist Ed Roth. That differed from what we saw at BottleRock, or at the regular Whisky shows, in that the bandleader’s son — vocalist Waylon Krieger — wasn’t in attendance. He was reportedly still down in SoCal, attending to family matters, which meant we missed hearing him split time on the mic with Rothchild at the Mountain Winery.

Tribune News Service