B-side "The Changeling" Format 7" Genre Psychedelic rock | Released June 1971 (1971-06) Recorded December 1970 | |
Length 7:09 (album version)
4:35 (single version) | ||
"Riders on the Storm" is a song by American psychedelic rock band The Doors. It was released as the second single from their sixth studio album, L.A. Woman (1971), in June 1971. It reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S., number 22 on the UK Singles Chart, and number 7 in the Netherlands.
Contents
Background and composition
"Riders on the Storm" is a psychedelic rock song. According to band member Robby Krieger, it was inspired by the song "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend". Also, Jim Morrison mentions spree killer Billy Cook, in passing, during at least one interview. Cook killed six people, including a young family, while hitchhiking to California. In all likelihood, the Cook murders were inspiration for the song's lyric, "There's a killer on the road / His brain is squirming like a toad ... if you give this man a ride/sweet family will die ;..."
"Riders On the Storm" is played in the E Dorian mode, and incorporates recordings of rain and thunder, along with Ray Manzarek's Fender Rhodes electric piano playing, which emulates the sound of rain.
The song was recorded at the Doors Workshop in December 1970 with the assistance of Bruce Botnick, their longtime engineer, who was co-producing the recording sessions. Jim Morrison recorded his main vocals and then whispered the lyrics over them to create the echo effect. This was the last song recorded by the members of the Doors, according to Manzarek, as well as Morrison's last recorded song to be released in his lifetime. The single was released in 1971, shortly before Morrison's death, entering the Billboard Hot 100 on July 3, 1971, the day that Morrison died.
Many incorrectly believe that this is the song longtime Doors producer Paul A. Rothchild disparaged as "cocktail music", precipitating his departure from the project. Rothchild actually applied this moniker to "Love Her Madly". Engineer Bruce Botnick was selected to produce the album instead.
Heidegger's influence
Speaking with Krieger and Manzarek, the philosopher Thomas Vollmer argues that the line "Into this world we're thrown" recalls Heidegger's concept of thrownness (human existence as a basic state). In 1963 at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Jim Morrison heard an influential lesson for him, where were discussed philosophers who had a critical look at the philosophical tradition, including Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
In 2009, Simon Critchley dedicated his column on The Guardian to Heidegger's thrownness and explained it using the aforementioned verse of the song.
The connection between the thrownness into the world and a dog's life was anticipated by the anti-Heideggerian author Ernst Bloch in his main work The Principle of Hope (1954–9).
Post-release
The band's drummer John Densmore wrote a 1990 book called Riders on the Storm, detailing the story of his life and his time with the group.
Ray Manzarek and guitarist Roy Rogers covered this song as an instrumental duet on their 2008 album "Ballads Before the Rain".
In November 2009, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame under the category Rock (track).
The song was among the first songs released for Rock Band 3 as downloadable content.
The song, according to an interview with Ray Manzarek, was only performed live twice: on the L.A. Woman tour at the Warehouse in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 12, 1970, and in Dallas the night before that. Ray said playing those songs was "magic". This was The Doors' last public performance with Jim Morrison. It was only the second date of the tour, but was also the last, as the tour was cancelled after this concert.
According to the book FM: The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio by Richard Neer, legendary overnight disc jockey Alison Steele would always play this song on Monday nights if it was raining in the city while she worked at New York City's WNEW-FM through most of the 1970s.