Today we’re celebrating a man who stared down the sun and didn’t blink. A one named Albert Camus. That’s spelled C-A-M-U-S... but if you’re French, you don’t say the “S.” Just kinda let it hang in the air, like cigarette smoke in a Paris café.

Camus was born out there in Algeria; bright sun, blue sea, hard times. His mother cleaned houses. His father died in a war before he could walk. So Albert grew up looking straight at the world, no rose-colored glasses. Said life didn’t make much sense, but you might as well live it anyway.

Now, you might have heard his name in philosophy class, right next to a man named Sartre — Jean-Paul, the man with the round glasses and the smoky cafés. But Camus, he wasn’t sitting in the corner pontificating. He was out in the sun, feeling the heat on his face. That’s the difference. Sartre, he liked to talk about freedom, said you can choose who you are, even if it’s tough. But he also got tangled up in politics, made excuses for dictators because they fit his theory. Camus didn’t play that game. He said if your philosophy justifies killing folks, it’s no good. You can’t talk peace out of one side of your mouth and cheer for revolution out of the other. He called it “living as you preach”, (personally big fan). Walking the line between thought and action. No fancy words, no double talk. During the war, while Sartre was writing in cafés to later walk back home to his fancy apartment in the city of Paris, Camus was printing underground newspapers, fighting the Nazis with ink and paper. He didn’t just write about rebellion, he was one.

He said: “I would rather live my life as if there is meaning, than die for the idea that there isn’t.”

That’s not bad for a kid from the slums of Algiers.

He wrote about plague, murder, and the meaning of life, or maybe the lack of it. He said the world’s absurd, but that don’t mean you got to give up. You just keep pushing that rock up the hill. Some folks called that philosophy, others just called it Friday.

Camus won the Nobel Prize when he was forty-four. Handsome guy, looked more like a movie star than a philosopher. Wore that trench coat like he was born in it. You half expect to see him walking down a foggy street with a cigarette and a secret.

But life, she’s got a mean sense of humor. Camus died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket he didn’t use. Kinda poetic, if you’re into that sort of thing. The man who said life had no reason ended up in the backseat of fate.

So that’s Albert Camus, ladies and gentlemen, the philosopher of the absurd. He said the only way to deal with a world without meaning is to give it your own. Maybe he was onto something. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing here, finding our meaning between the grooves of a record, the spaces between the notes.

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Today the needle’s dropping on a guitar player who never needed to shout his name to make the walls shake. Robbie Krieger. Yeah, today we celebrate that Robbie Krieger. From The Doors.

Krieger’s one of those fellas who slips in sideways. You don’t see him coming, but suddenly the room’s on fire and you’re wondering who struck the match. Didn’t play like the bluesmen from Chicago exactly, didn’t play like the rock guys from London either. He played like someone who’d been reading poetry in one hand and holding a flamenco record in the other, wondering what would happen if they met in a dark alley. Robbie Krieger was 19 years old when he joined The Doors.

You listen to a song like “Light My Fire”, which, by the way, he wrote, and you think it’s about heat, about desire, about the old spark jumping the wire. But Krieger’s guitar doesn’t rush it. It circles. It waits. Like it knows the fire’s gonna burn whether you hurry it or not. That solo just keeps climbing, like a snake up a telephone pole, until you’re too high up to remember how you got there. And he didn’t hide behind a pick. Used his fingers. Bare skin on steel. That tells you something right there. That’s trust. That’s a guy willing to get burned by his own sound. Blues, jazz, Spanish scales, a little dust from the desert, all of it drifting through those strings. You hear “Spanish Caravan,” and suddenly you’re not in California anymore. You’re somewhere older. Somewhere the sun’s been watching people make the same mistakes for a few thousand years. Not to mention that beauty “Blue Sunday”, that slide coming from Krieger is along with jazz influences is memory provoking.

Now, when Jim Morrison was out front wrestling angels and demons and microphones, Robbie Krieger was off to the side, half-smiling, half-vanishing. Like he knew the song was bigger than the singer. Bigger than the band, even. That’s a dangerous kind of knowledge. That’s the kind that lets you play exactly what’s needed and not one note more. Robbie Krieger’s guitar didn’t preach. It suggested. It opened doors and left them open, didn’t tell you whether to walk through. And those are the ones that stay with you. Long after the music fades out. Long after the fire burns down to ash.

So here’s to Robbie Krieger, the quiet rider, string-bender, keeper of the sideways flame.

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