The John Densmore Interview Set II

Open to It All Ray Manzarek knew Dick Bock. It’s all six degrees of separation. When we went to make our little demo at World Pacific, before Robby was in the band, Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha were packing up their gear while we were coming in. I sat on stage with Ravi Shankar at UCLA Royce Hall and just drooled over Allah Rakha’s tabla playing. His son, Zakir Hussain, is the greatest tabla player alive. Arjun Bruggeman has bridged modern music and ancient Indian. He can swing like a rock drummer on tablas. He can play the polyrhythms with a groove feel that blows me away. He’s a great trap drummer to begin with. Robby and I did a benefit for the homeless a couple of years ago. I got Arjun to play, and we played some Doors songs and he was playing tablas. It was gorgeous. The tablas on “The Crystal Ship”: that works! When we did “Roadhouse Blues,” I told him just to play a shaker. He’s open to it all, and it’s a beautiful thing. That’s why I like him so much musically and personally. Soundtrack to Porn I was in Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara School of Music. Robby was studying sitar and I was studying tablas, in between Doors tours. I was learning Indian hand drums and I realized it would be a year until I could have fun. This is the most difficult drumming ever. I loved learning enough to realize how difficult it was. Robby learned to tune his guitar to Indian sitar tuning, which can be heard on 113 “The End” and “Indian Summer.” One day Ravi came and gave a talk about how you could sublimate your sexual drive into practicing your instrument. It’s interesting how sitar music became so popular that it was co-opted and used as the soundtrack to porn flicks. Ravi sued but couldn’t stop them. I commented, “The sound of God became the sound of sex.” So Many Rivets During the making of our first album I would bring the drums to the Whisky a Go Go if we had a gig that night. After a while I had some roadies who helped me load my drums. I took the snares off on “The End.” I wanted the tom tom sound, which is a little more tabla-esque. There’s a lot of spaces where I leave it open, and then I just drop bombs during quiet parts. God knows why. People told me later that those spaces heightened the tension. You’ve got enough technique to get across your uniqueness, and then you just let it go. The music tells you, and you’re in the moment, and whatever comes out, comes out. I didn’t realize in the beginning, but it’s good to dampen the drum heads a bit in the studio. I hate new drum heads, and when I put a new one on it doesn’t “bark” back at me. They ring too much, if they’re really tight. Paul Rothschild, who taught us how to make records, was a perfectionist, and after a while for him to get the drum sound he wanted was over the top. By the time we did “L. A. Woman” with Bruce Botnick producing, we did the drum sound in twenty minutes. Bruce complimented me: “You know what your drum sound is.” I got the opportunity to play Billy Higgins’ drum set at the World Stage after he passed. He had so many rivets in his cymbal. Rivets are what help the music sizzle. I dropped my stick into Billy Higgins’ ride cymbal and it was like butter. I copped that sound from Ed Thigpen at the very beginning of “Riders on the Storm.”

Added 26 Mar 2026