"We were so fired up to go on before Jim checked out that we didn't acknowledge his death and grieve": When the music's over - the story of The Doors' strange afterlife

Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek (1939 - 2013) and John Densmore, of the American rock band The Doors, pose for a group portrait in London, England, August 27, 1970.

The lizard king is dead, long live The Doors. It’s August 1971, barely a month after Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub in Paris, and his surviving bandmates in The Doors are putting the finishing touches to their first album without him. You might politely call this an act of professionalism. In less charitable terms it could easily appear plain cold.

Incredible as it might seem, at that time there hadn’t been a whole lot of debate about whether or not to carry on. “Of all the mysteries surrounding The Doors, the one that maybe confounds people the most is why we thought we could still be a band after Jim died,” guitarist Robby Krieger wrote in his 2021 memoir Set The Night On Fire. “It seems so ridiculous now, but there was some logic to it.”