The Doors drummer shares a gripping account of the band’s legal battle to control its name
In The Doors Unhinged: Jim Morrison’s Legacy Goes on Trial, New York Times best-selling author and legendary Doors drummer John Densmore offers a powerful exploration of the “greed gene”—that part of the human psyche that propels us toward the accumulation of more and more wealth, even at the expense of our principles, friendships, and the well-being of society. This is the gripping account of the legal battle to control The Doors’s artistic destiny. In it, Densmore looks at the conflict between his bandmates and him as they fought over the right to use The Doors’s name, revealing the ways in which this struggle mirrored and reflected a much larger societal issue: that no amount of money seems to be enough for even the wealthiest people.
In recent years, artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Stevie Nicks have sold their songs or recording rights for astronomical amounts of money—Bruce Springsteen did so to the tune of a reported $500+ million. Conversely, Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids, “We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands.”
“There are some of us out there who still have principles and cannot be bought,” Tom Waits shares. “John Densmore is one of them. He is not for sale and that is his gift to us.”
“When you read in these pages about the difficulties in communication suffered by and between surviving band members, you become witness to something very similar to the grief and heartbreak felt by parents who have lost a young child,” adds Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder. “It wasn’t just Jim Morrison that they lost, but their kid, their band, The Doors. Though it’s something I don’t like to think about, there will come a time when I will be a Dead Rock Star. I can only hope that in my inevitable absence, there will be someone with the integrity and principled behavior of Mr. Densmore looking after whatever legacy our group may leave behind.”
The Doors continue to attract new generations of fans, with more than one hundred million albums sold worldwide and counting, and nearly twenty million followers on the band’s social media accounts. As such, Densmore occupies a rarified space in popular culture. He is beloved by artists across the decades for his fierce, uncompromising dedication to art. His writing consistently earns accolades and has appeared in a range of publications such as the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone. As his friend and American novelist Tom Robbins recently advised him, “If you keep writing like this, I’ll have to get a drum set.”
