JIM MORRISON CELEBRATION CONCERT FT. WILD CHILD

In the aftermath of Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, the surviving members of the Doors tried all sorts of ways to carry on. They initially attempted to soldier forward as a trio with keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger sharing lead vocals, but they gave that up after just two underwhelming albums. In 2002, Krieger and Manzarek rebooted the band (minus drummer John Densmore and plus singer Ian Astbury) as the Doors of the 21st Century. That project petered out, too, due to a nasty legal battle with Densmore over the use of the Doors name, and Astbury’s commitments to his main band, the Cult.

Fuel’s Brett Scallions and Steelheart’s Miljenko Matijevic both had brief runs fronting the band after Astbury left, but Krieger and Manzarek didn’t settle on a winning formula until 2010, when they brought in Dave Brock, lead singer of the long-running Doors tribute band Wild Child. “We’ve always been kind of afraid to ask him to play with us, because people say, ‘Oh, you’re using a tribute singer. Now you’re your own tribute band,'” Krieger told Billboard in 2011.

“But then Journey got a karaoke singer [Arnel Pineda] and everyone loved it,” he continued. “We said, ‘If they can do that, we can use David.’…. When people come to see Ray and I, they want to see us do the Doors music as it should be done, so why not use a guy who really is an expert? He knows the songs better than we do, really.”

Brock grew up in San Francisco and loved groups like Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane, and Led Zeppelin as a kid. His first concert was Sammy Hagar, and he followed it up with 1978’s Day on the Green featuring AC/DC, Van Halen, Foreigner, and Aerosmith. But a career in music wasn’t much of a thought when he finished high school and enrolled at Long Beach State.

“One of my mother’s last wishes was that I follow business administration,” Brock tells Rolling Stone on the phone from his home in Huntington Beach, California. “She passed away when I was just out of high school. I majored in marketing. I gotta say, it probably did me some good in the career that I’m in.”

During his time at school, he heard a commercial on the radio that Gazzarri’s on the Sunset Strip was going to stage a rock opera dedicated to the life of Jim Morrison.

He’d recently read the Doors biography No One Gets Out of Here Alive, and decided to check out the show. “I drove down there,” he says. “Turned out to be a live audition.

Honestly, it was a surprise. But I got the lead role. I only knew one Doors song, ‘L.A. Woman.’ It was kind of my theme song at the time.”

As the years went by, his knowledge of the Doors went way, way beyond “L.A. Woman.” It was a journey that ultimately led Krieger and Manzarek to tap him as their final Jim Morrison replacement.