Roadhouse Blues (featuring Robby Krieger)

Roll it on over here, Zoo Freaks, and keep your eyes on the road. The Zoo Crew has got The Black Moods spinning through the speakers with “Roadhouse Blues (featuring Robby Krieger),” pulled off the album Roadhouse Blues, and if you have ever stood in a room when that opening lick hits, you already know why the place starts moving. Josh Kennedy, the singer and guitar player out front of this Tempe power trio, has been covering the old Doors number for years. He will tell you plain that you light into that thing and everybody goes nuts. This cut is a different animal, though, because the man who wrote the lick is right there in the track with them.

The way it happened sounds like one of those stories you only half believe until you hear it from the people who were in the room. During The Doors’ 50th-anniversary run, The Black Moods opened for the Robby Krieger Band. Krieger’s son Waylon, who sings with that outfit, got sick out on the road, and Kennedy stepped in and took the vocal. Later they crossed paths again at a show in Phoenix, talk turned to working together, and the band’s manager floated the idea of cutting “Roadhouse Blues” with Krieger himself. Everybody said yes. The trio, Kennedy with drummer Chico Diaz and bassist Jordan Hoffman, headed down to Krieger’s Love Street Sound studio in Southern California in November 2022 and spent a few days tracking it. A lot of the same kind of gear The Doors had used on the original was sitting around, which kept the grit in the thing while the Arizona boys pushed their own muscle through it.

Kennedy has said the first couple of takes came out stiff. They were so keyed up about being in the room that he had held off getting stoned that day, and you could hear it. Then Hoffman passed along the word from Krieger that they needed to smoke some grass. They stepped outside, burned a joint, came back in, and that was the take they kept. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith had been lined up to appear on the track and could not make it on account of personal matters. Krieger shrugged it off with a maybe-we-can-still-get-him, and the song found another voice instead. Diamante came in and tore the roof off the vocal. She has said “Roadhouse Blues” was the first rock song she ever performed on a stage, so when a band whose classic-rock vibe she digs asked her to sing it next to the actual Robby Krieger, it was an absolute yes.

Kennedy grew up in a small town in the Ozarks, Wheaton, Missouri, and he has called playing this song with the man who wrote it life-changing, something he never figured he would get a shot at. He snuck a look at The Doors movie when he was a kid and was not supposed to, and from then on the band sat in that place where you assume you will never even be in the same vicinity. Standing next to Krieger in the studio, talking guitars and laughing their heads off, was the part that stuck. The two of them traded lines back and forth like a conversation, and Kennedy figures that little guitar dialogue is what made it special for him. The Doors, he has said, meant a lot to the band from the name on down to the way they write and play, and cutting the song with Robby more than fifty years after Krieger cut it with The Doors was something he could not quite put words on. Krieger’s take was simpler. He keeps running into younger players who are into The Doors, and he had a real good time recording with these three because they connect with that sixties style of music. An extended version came along later, with extra room for the jam and a longer look at the session.

The road that got Kennedy into that studio starts a long way from Tempe. His dad had a band from the time Josh was born. His mom’s water broke at one of the old man’s club gigs. Once the kid was old enough to grab a few chords he started sitting in on the jam sessions, cutting his teeth on Merle Haggard and the real country stuff before Eric Clapton showed up in the picture, and around twelve the Gin Blossoms got hold of him. He took the guitar seriously from about that age. In 2001 he left Missouri for Tempe and the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences. He made a teenage pact with himself about that Arizona band, went looking for Long Wong’s, the bar where the Gin Blossoms came up, and got run out for being underage, but not before Robin Wilson invited him over to Uranus Recording. Wilson later papered the campus with flyers that read wanted, student from Missouri, smoky van required. Kennedy called the number and wound up teching for the Gin Blossoms, which is about as clean a circle as a kid from the Ozarks is going to draw.

He and Chico Diaz had already played together back in a Missouri band called Chalmers Green. Out in the desert they put a trio together, at first with a different bass player in the mix, and went looking for a name. Kennedy had been reading a Jim Morrison biography where the dark stretches got called black moods, and they had a song by that title already. The phrase kept coming back. Ray Manzarek had used a similar offhand line about one of Morrison’s stormy moods in a Doors documentary, and later Kennedy caught Paul McCartney saying it in the Beatles anthology, so the name stuck. They self-released a record under it in 2012, produced with Jim Kaufman, and started living in a van, hitting rooms like the Viper Room and the Whisky a Go Go, parking-lot overnights and all. A deal with Sony’s Another Century imprint brought 2016’s Medicine, the same producer, a little more road worn. Sunshine and Into the Night followed, the later ones with Grammy-nominated Johnny K in the chair, and the singles started climbing the mainstream rock chart. They have shared stages with Shinedown, Jane’s Addiction, Whitesnake, Collective Soul, the Dead Daisies, the Gin Blossoms, and Krieger’s own band, and they have turned up at Aftershock and Roger Clyne’s Circus Mexicus. Kennedy has said the tightness comes from the work. Every live show is worth about ten rehearsals, and they earned it the long way instead of the shortcut.

That is the band you are hearing when “Roadhouse Blues (featuring Robby Krieger)” rolls through THE ZOO. A Missouri kid who teched for the Gin Blossoms, a Tempe trio named for a Morrison mood, and the guitar player who wrote the lick, all in one room after somebody finally passed the joint. Let it roll, baby, roll. If you want the rest of the story straight from the source, the band keeps the lights on at theblackmoods.com, where the Robby Krieger collaboration sits right in the middle of the road history. You can also find them on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The folks who have been hauling the flag from the fan side hang out in The Black Moods Fan Lounge, a listener-built room for show talk and the long haul. Keep it loud out there.