Robby Krieger

Born

January 8, 1946 · Los Angeles, California

Age

80 (as of 2026)

Role in The Doors

Lead guitar, songwriter

Years active

1965–1973, solo and touring since

Known compositions

“Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me”

Status

Living · active touring musician

Early Life

Robert Alan Krieger was born on January 8, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, to engineer Stuart Krieger and Marilyn Krieger. He picked up guitar as a teenager and studied flamenco technique intensively, later absorbing Indian classical guitar and jazz influences that would set his playing apart from the blues-rock guitarists of his generation. He attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, before devoting himself fully to music.

Joining The Doors

Krieger met drummer John Densmore through a Transcendental Meditation class in Los Angeles in 1965, and the two joined Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison to complete the original lineup of The Doors. He was the last of the four to join and, notably, the only member without formal music-theory training beyond his own guitar study — a gap that didn’t stop him from becoming the band’s most prolific individual songwriter. Full detail on the band’s formation is covered on the About The Doors page.

Songwriting and Guitar Style

Krieger wrote or co-wrote several of The Doors’ best-known songs, including “Light My Fire,” “Love Me Two Times,” “Touch Me,” and “Love Her Madly.” His flamenco fingerpicking and slide-guitar work, often played on a Gibson SG, gave the band a melodic, non-blues-standard vocabulary that set The Doors apart from contemporaries built around riff-driven guitar leads. He is widely credited with bringing more conventional pop songcraft to a band whose other material tended toward the sprawling and theatrical.

After The Doors

Following the band’s 1973 breakup, Krieger pursued a long solo career rooted in instrumental jazz fusion, beginning with Robbie Krieger & Friends (1977) and continuing through albums like Versions (1982) and No Habla(1989). He briefly reunited with Manzarek and Densmore in 1978 to record an album of Morrison’s spoken-word poetry set to music, An American Prayer, and later toured with Manzarek as The Doors of the 21st Century and, after a trademark dispute with Densmore, as Manzarek-Krieger. He published a memoir, Set the Night on Fire: Living, Dying, and Playing Guitar with The Doors, in 2021.

Current Status: Still Performing

As of 2026, Krieger is the most active performer among The Doors’ surviving members. He continues to lead the Robby Krieger Band, with his son Waylon Krieger handling lead vocals, and tours regularly across the United States. In October 2025, he headlined a 60th-anniversary Doors concert at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, performing the Morrison Hotel album in full with guest vocalists including Perry Farrell and Billy Idol. In 2026, he and John Densmore contributed to Playing for Change’s global “Songs Around the World” series, joining musicians internationally on a new recording of “Riders on the Storm.”