Warren Haynes | Long Road To Robby Krieger Collaboration

Later this month The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger will team with Gov’t Mule for a special New Year’s Eve performance at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. The show is just one of many live music options this New Year’s Eve. JamBase contributor Chad Berndtson recently spoke with Warren Haynes about many topics and today we wanted to share the Mule front man’s take on how the collaboration with Krieger came together, including the news that the late Ray Manzarek was originally supposed to take part in the Mule/Doors summit before the keyboardist passed away.

JamBase: Warren, the Mule will once again be doing the Doors over New Year’s Eve with Robby Krieger. Tell me how the original Halloween idea came together and that Robby would sit in.

Warren Haynes: We’d been talking with him for about three years. We’d told him we always do a thematic show for Halloween and New Year’s and we’d discussed the Doors, and we told him we had done the Stones and Pink Floyd and the Who and Zeppelin, and we most recently, last year, had done Hendrix.

I wasn’t necessarily thinking at the time of inviting him to join us but it just kind of came up: ‘Maybe you should do this with us.’ And he was like ‘Yeah, I’d be interested.’

Originally we were also looking at Ray Manzarek also being part of it – that came up the first time we had discussed it but we knew it was going to take a while for all our schedules to kind of work out. The last time we saw Ray, Mule was playing a festival in Vienna, Austria. Robby and I were talking then and looking at possibilities. Ray passed away, but the conversation continued and we’d also talked about making it sort of a Ray tribute.

Watch a set of eight fan-shot videos by blisstanger featuring Gov’t Mule covering The Doors with Robby Krieger from Los Angeles on October 30: