The Doors will turn 60 next year — something drummer John Densmore says the kids who formed the legendary rock group in Los Angeles could never have imagined.
“When I was a kid, 60 years old seemed like, ‘Well, you’ll be dead any minute,’” Densmore tells Billboard with a laugh. “And here we are.”
The group’s 60th anniversary celebration is upon us, too — starting next month with some key archival releases. Arriving Nov. 22 via Rhino’s High Fidelity audiophile vinyl series is The Doors 1967-1971, a limited edition (3,000 copies) six-LP set that houses the six studio albums the band released during late frontman Jim Morrison’s lifetime. A week later, for Record Store Black Friday, Rhino will release a four-disc remastered vinyl edition of Live in Detroit, taken from a May 8, 1970, concert at the city’s famed Cobo Arena. The 25-song set is the longest concert the Doors ever performed, according to band manager Jeff Jampol of JAM Inc.
Following those, in early 2025, will be Night Divides the Day, a 344-page book from Britain’s Genesis Publications that includes new interviews with Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger, archival material from Morrison and the late keyboardist Ray Manzarek, commentary from other colleagues, friends and admirers, a treasure trove of photos, a foreword by Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic and an afterward by conductor and composer Gustavo Dudamel (a recent Billboard cover subject). The 2,000 numbered box sets will be signed by Krieger and Densmore and come with rare demo recordings of “Hello, I Love You” and “Moonlight Drive” on a 7-inch vinyl disc. It’s available for pre-order here.
These are just the beginning of the Doors’ 60th festivities, according to Jampol. “Here we are 60 years later talking about them, and they’re just as relevant and the music is more relevant than ever, and the message,” Jampol, who also represents the Morrison estate, tells Billboard. “I want to preserve it because I think it’s relevant for new generations. We’re trying to do two things here. We want to do interesting things and fun things for Doors fans, who are great ’cause they’ve always been here with us and they’ll support whatever it is we’re doing, and they’re excellent passers-on of the baton. Then we also want to expose the Doors to people who are not as familiar…this group of potential new fans, which is thousands of times larger. So we’re trying to serve those two distinct fan bases.”
Jampol is confident that either constituency will be impressed by the remastered sound quality of the upcoming vinyl releases, while the book, he adds, is “a thing of beauty” that came in the wake of The Collected Works of Jim Morrison, another Genesis project that came out during 2021. “We started working on this three years ago,” Jampol says, promising that, “there’s some stuff in that book no one’s talked about, photos I’ve never seen.”
Densmore, meanwhile, was particularly flattered by Dudamel’s glowing assessment of the Doors’ creativity in his afterward.
“He talks about my rhythms and said, ‘Oh, a few hundred years down the road the Doors will be remembered like Beethoven and Mozart,’” Densmore says. “I’m like, ‘Holy sh-t! I feel a whole lot of helium rising up in my skull now.’”
Densmore himself has written a couple of books about the Doors — a memoir and another focused on his legal issues with Krieger and Manzarek after they began playing together again during the early 2000s — while Krieger has also published an autobiography. Both are clear about why interest remains so high in the Doors 52 years after its last album of original material.
“When you get right down to it, it’s the songs. We had great songs,” Krieger told Billboard a couple of years ago. “A lot of kids come up to me, like 10-year-old kids, ‘Yeah, I love the doors. You guys are amazing.’ I don’t think they even know about the Jim Morrison myths and all that as much as they love the music. And I think that’s what is gonna carry it for the next 50 years, or more.”
“I hoped we would last 10 years and pay the rent: ‘That’d be cool,’” Densmore says with a laugh. “I knew the ingredients were unique. It was a wonderful, blessed few years. And that we’re still talking about it? Come on, man!”
Other 60th anniversary plans for 2025 are still being finalized, including museum exhibitions and art installations and possibly additional archival releases. Densmore — who played with Krieger during February of 2016 in Los Angeles for a Stand Up to Cancer benefit on what would have been Manzarek’s 77th birthday — says he’d also like to see some sort of performance be part of the celebration.
“The Doors 60th at the Hollywood Bowl would be quite wonderful,” Densmore says of the venue where the group recorded and filmed a concert during July 1968 (and returned in 1972, after Morrison’s death in 1971). “Willie Nelson did his 90th birthday at the Bowl, so it’d be wonderful to have something like that — me and Robby would play a little bit here and there, and there’d hopefully be lots of wonderful artists that would show up for that. I’d love to see something like that happen.”
