Pelle Sten

Blue Apron is losing money and very badly needs a strategic turnaround. Despite the initial fervor surrounding meal kits, Blue Apron was not able to keep the momentum. As a result, it now faces a tough road ahead. Here’s what happened.

How did Blue Apron get here?
First launched in 2012, Blue Apron brought about two different online business booms. First, it was a pioneer in the meal kit space — a new way for busy young professionals to have fresh ingredients shipped to them, ready to be cooked by following only a few instructions. Second, it relied on a subscription revenue model, having people opt in to a certain number of meals shipped per week. Both of these were new concepts back then — so too was the direct-to-consumer model it used.

Before it went public in 2017, Blue Apron was a private market darling. In 2015, it raised a $135 million round of funding, giving it a whopping $2 billion valuation. But while revenue was growing a fast clip during that period, it was predicated on colossally expensive marketing. In 2016, the company brought in $795.4 million in revenue, but posted a loss of nearly $55 million. The company was reportedly spending $400-per-customer on marketing in 2017 while only earning around $235-per-quarter on them. This past quarter, Blue Apron spent $12.1 million on marketing alone, which represented 12.8% of its revenue.

The company has always needed one thing: more cash to acquire new customers. That’s why it went public in 2017, which raised Blue Apron $300 million. Now, three years later, the company once again needs an infusion to keep the business afloat.

There are multiple reasons why Blue Apron has yet to be sustainable. The biggest ones are ever-mounting competition, and the realities of a low-margin business. While Blue Apron was one of the first to meal kits, it certainly wasn’t the only one. Competition got fierce, with players like HelloFresh, Purple Carrot and Plated entering the space too. But many of those companies didn’t last for long as they too had trouble keeping up with marketing costs in the name of customer acquisition.

Meanwhile, grocers began to also dabble in the space. Kroger bought the meal kit company Home Chef in 2018 for $200 million, and Amazon began offering its own meal kits both online and at Whole Foods locations.

Put together, the space got crowded — and very few (if any) of the players had a solid pathway to profitability. Blue Apron especially — in its most recent earnings report, the company posted a net loss of $21.9 million on $94.3 million in revenue. “We continue to believe that we have the right strategy to drive customer and revenue growth in the business and we continue to work to launch additional capabilities and test new product offerings,” said president and CEO Linda Kozlowski.

As a result, customer retention has been one of Blue Apron’s biggest pain points. This past quarter, it reported 351,000 subscribers, down from 557,000 the year prior. In March 2017, the company boasted more than 1 million customers. Customers aren’t the only retention problem either. Kozlowski is Blue Apron’s third CEO — joining less than a year ago after Brad Dickerson, who took the job in 2017, stepped down. Dickerson took the reins from co-founder Matt Salzberg. Currently, no Blue Apron founder holds an executive position.

Where meal kits currently stand
The overall realization for companies offering meal kits is that they can’t do it alone. Many companies either got bought up by grocers or formed partnerships. Blue Apron sought out such partnerships, inking deals with both Jet.com and Weight Watchers. But, as Freedonia Group analyst Cara Brosius told Digiday in 2019, these moves likely weren’t enough.

“The meal kit subscription delivery model simply doesn’t work for a lot of potential customers,” she said. “Sometimes people want to cook a meal on a whim and don’t want to wait for a meal kit to arrive one or two days later from Jet.com.” Indeed, Blue Apron ended its pilot with Jet.com last August, saying it wanted to focus more on its direct-to-consumer business.

The company toyed around with other ideas too — opening up a series of pop-up shops in New York featuring well known chefs and food personalities. It tested out a retail partnership with Costco in 2018 that lasted less than a year. In early 2019 Blue Apron began trying out same-day delivery in certain locations. Just a week ago the company unveiled a new product called Meal Prep aimed at letting customers make many meals at once they can then eat later.

According to NPD food and beverage industry analyst Darren Seifer, meal kit companies are still trying to figure out how best to offer convenience. “Consumers are looking for ways to cut out time from the whole process,” he said. This means businesses like Blue Apron both need to be available in as many places as possible, as well as offer products that are quicker and easier than just a box of ingredients.

The tradeoff, however, is cost. “A clear factor is margins,” Seifer said. “That is a major challenge: how do you add steps, add labor, but keep it at an affordable price?” For many meal kit businesses, the strategy has been to partner with retailers who could help offset the costs. For Blue Apron, it either didn’t act quickly enough to find the most sustainable pathway to profitability or couldn’t hit on the right partnership.

The company’s future will likely have an impact on the industry as a whole. It began as a subscription-based product that would make it easier for people to cook at home. But the model has yet to fully be proven out.

“I think meal kits need to prove their value,” said Seifer. “I don’t think they’ve gotten quite there yet.”

The financial health of journalism has been deteriorating in such an acute way that every spit and cough emanating from its institutions is anxiously pored over to ascertain whether it’s a death rattle or a sign of miraculous recovery. An outcome few would have predicted for the future of media has been the resilience of a handful of decidedly old-fashioned legacy institutions, at the cost of the shrinking of the supposedly more innovative digital players.

The new gatekeepers of the global media, which are mostly American and Chinese mega-platforms such as Facebook, WeChat, YouTube, Google, Apple and co, have created a business environment that is inherently hostile towards free, advertising-supported media.

Costly journalism is the first casualty of an advertising model that favours these online platforms. Those organisations that have unbelievably survived the past 15 years of digital onslaught are defined by both the presence of mission and money.

Take for instance the New York Times, the midtown Manhattan local news organisation which is transforming itself into a global digital news brand. Historically characterised by its preponderance of seersucker suits and Mont Blanc pens, the “Grey Lady” was on the critical list a decade ago. Weakened by the financial crisis, its market capitalisation had halved to $1.5bn (£1.16bn) and its lavishly staffed newsroom numbers were heading south of 1,300. When it introduced a paywall in 2011 it felt like a last roll of the dice.

Even as recently as 2013 former publisher Arthur Sulzberger noted that it was a “very low moment” when the New York Times’s biggest rival, the Washington Post, was sold by the Graham family to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Last week, the New York Times emerged from its period of digital transition as a financially stronger, editorially robust organisation. It hit its very ambitious target of earning $800m per annum through digital revenues 12 months early and its share price rose to a 15-year high.

The newsroom, no doubt too busy to celebrate as it documents the unravelling of American politics, is at a historic high level of 1,700 journalists.

Ironically, this remarkable revival in both its subscription base and its share performance stems from the policies of Donald Trump. Digital subscriptions have boomed as the progressive audience sees support for reporting institutions like the New York Times as the only effective opposition to a corrupt government.

And the stock market boom, as we are constantly reminded by the president’s Twitter feed, is peaking on the basis of an economic policy that largely favours rich business owners at the cost of everyone else.

The revolving door between media organisations is in constant motion, but as the layoffs in local and digital news outlets continue, the New York Times is hiring many more than it is firing. Many of those who have joined as either staff or columnists come from the world of digitally native publishing.

Ben Smith, former editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed, left the newsroom he founded to join the New York Times as a media columnist. Pioneers of journalism startups such as Kara Swisher, America’s best-known technology reporter and commentator, joined the huge roster of writers. Choire Sicha, a key founder of defunct but highly influential sites such as Gawker and the Awl, now heads the styles section. Taylor Lorenz has joined, bringing with her beat reporting on influencers and TikTok, making the New York Times relevant to a whole new audience. The Daily Podcast is also hugely popular among younger audiences. This isn’t how the future was meant to be.

Chief executive, and former BBC director general, Mark Thompson put the success of the New York Times down to a strategy that allowed the digital assets within the news organisation to grow independently of the gravitational pull of the still-declining print product. Crosswords and cookery, both addictive and slick digital offerings, are far more important in revenue terms than their positions in a printed package would indicate.

However, there’s something else at play here which has more to do with the political and economic environment.

An aging audience of wealthy newspaper subscribers helped get the New York Times across the wobbly bridge to a digital world, where now, the same elderly subscribers have embraced digital subscriptions on their iPhones.

From here the process will be one of perpetual change, but one led by the elite legacy institutions. The New York Times, in one sense, is a spectacular and hopeful success story. But in other ways it reveals the disastrous state of the current media landscape. Connectivity has sorted society into the 1% and the rest. Winners taking it all are a feature, not a bug, of the current technocracy. If Smith, a far-sighted editor deeply invested in his staff and newsroom at BuzzFeed, could not see a sufficiently attractive path forward, then there probably isn’t one.

Against these lessons from America, the Conservative party’s attitude towards news media looks wilfully inadequate. Despite debating the Cairncross review’s recommendations on how to keep public service journalism plural and sustainable, the government rejected its most vital recommendation: that through a newly created Institute for Public Interest News, there should be a sustained and well-researched effort to ensure British media does not devolve into a 1% market.

The adaptation of the BBC as an extended platform to support local reporting was also effectively nixed by budget cuts. Further pressure on funding comes from the government’s dogged determination to decriminalise the licence fee; a consultation on the matter was launched only this week. Facebook’s refusal to curb lies in political advertising has been immediately rewarded by the culture, media and sport select committee switching emphasis from probing platform power to exploring how to diminish public service media.

The culture secretary Nicky Morgan’s most high profile utterance on the task of rethinking media was to urge the BBC to be more digitally adaptable, so as to not end up like video rental chain Blockbuster. It should be far more concerning to Morgan and the British electorate that instead the BBC ends up like Netflix: undifferentiated, afloat only on borrowed money, and inherently uninterested in the cultural needs of a population that needs reliable news.

I was originally due to meet Christopher Eccleston a few months back. The plan was to discuss his new book, I Love the Bones of You, which is part autobiography and part moving tribute to his father, Ronnie, who died in 2012 following a long period with dementia. But then word reached us that the actor was keen not to dwell on that; was there anything else we might like him to talk about?

It is unusual for a celebrity to want to discuss anything other than the thing they were promoting. But it turns out Eccleston had his reasons for changing the subject. His book focuses heavily on his previously undisclosed struggle with anorexia and a mental breakdown so intense that the Priory psychiatrist Justin Haslam described it as one of the worst cases of clinical depression he had ever seen. Eccleston, 55, found it easy enough to write his account of the trauma, but the subsequent task of promoting it was far tougher than he had expected.

“It became very difficult,” he says, when we meet up in London at a members’ club in Soho. “Going on Lorraine, for instance, where you’ve got a couple of minutes to try and be articulate about anorexia. I think of myself as really quite robust – but I felt very exposed.”

He casts his mind back and smiles: “I mean, can you imagine going on The One Show to talk about clinical depression? They went straight from me to a piece about badgers!”

Eccleston’s breakdown came in early 2016 after his relationship with his wife, Mishka, collapsed; the pair are now divorced and co-parenting. He says he’s a lot better, even if recovery is likely to always be a work in progress. He exudes what you might call classic northern warmth – a big handshake to greet me, an arm around the shoulder even, and a keenness to make sure everyone in the room is happy, from the photographer to the woman bringing us coffees.

Writing a book was a big thing for Eccleston. It covers his acting career, of course – those defining roles in Shallow Grave, Our Friends in the North and Doctor Who, as well as his 1991 breakthrough as Derek Bentley in Let Him Have It – but it is largely focused on the demons that have pursued him through life. It is delivered with searing honesty, and that is how he comes across today – a great talker, open about everything – which is strange, given that opening up doesn’t come naturally to him.

“I’m male and northern and from a working-class background, so you were not supposed to speak about your feelings,” he says. “I still carry all the baggage about masculinity and toughness, and I was ashamed about my depression and eating disorder.”

So why write it?

“Because I do think that the breakdown and hospitalisation changed my life,” he says, and as he does so his voice wobbles, almost breaking for a second. Eccleston has a big presence but there is an obvious fragility there. “It changed my view of myself and existence. I really felt that I was going to die.”

At his worst moment, Eccleston contemplated suicide. “I did have what people might call intrusive thoughts.” But then he thought about his two children, Albert and Esme, and the legacy it might leave. “I think cowardice played a part too,” he says, allowing himself a smile. “I thought: ‘That’s gotta hurt.’ Sorry to be crass.”

Instead, Eccleston ended up in a psychiatric ward, celebrating his 52nd birthday on his second day inside. He remembers that day, seeing himself in the mirror and realising he was walking like he had seen mentally ill people walk onscreen – he gets up and shuffles across the room to demonstrate, all hunched up. “I remember clocking it and thinking: ‘Am I acting this?’”

His doctors told him that there was a severe imbalance in his brain chemistry and he was put on high doses of medication. The trigger might have been the split from his wife, and the guilt around not seeing his children, but Eccleston’s problems had been brewing for years. Since childhood, he had suffered from body image problems. He wanted to be androgynous – “Still do, because I feel like a prop forward” – but he knew his mum and dad wouldn’t have tolerated their kid dabbling in eye liner on the streets of working-class Salford, where he grew up.

“I could do all the male stuff – I was captain of the sports team and I’d get very physical on the field,” he says, “but I also had this interest in femininity. When I did my first play at Eccles college, Lock Up Your Daughters, I wore mascara and I was like: ‘This is fucking brilliant!’ I was expressing on the outside what I felt on the inside.”

He was never confused about his sexuality, although he says he has always appreciated male beauty. His relationship with his male friends had always been especially intimate, too: “It’s a terrible word, but there were suspicions,” he says, “because of how we were together.”

What Eccleston was actually hiding from his family were his issues with food. These only became worse when he ventured into acting, so determined was he to achieve the striking angular features of his heroes such as Daniel Day-Lewis.

Anorexia is, he says, “like being in hell”. Did it affect him every day?

“Every minute. All you think about is food – the consumption of, the rejection of. You don’t think about anything else.”

Eccleston’s approach to his work has always been intense and obsessive – not just in how he approaches his characters but in how he picks his roles. Yes, he has indulged in some Hollywood fluff in his career – he has described himself as a “whore” for starring in GI Joe and Thor – but he normally evaluates his roles in terms of what social good they’re bringing to the screen.

“Like my dad, who was an autodidact, I always saw television as political,” he says. “I always felt the work had to have some value beyond just me showing off, which I love doing.”

He once turned down the role of Begbie in Trainspotting, thinking it a cliche to cast a northern man in the most violent role (he wrote to Danny Boyle to say he thought he should be Renton instead). His proudest achievements aren’t always his most famous: Jimmy McGovern dramas such as Hearts and Minds or Hillsborough; Peter Bowker’s 2002 TV film Flesh and Blood. But even deciding to become Doctor Who or Macbeth had a political element to it – showing kids that a working-class lad from Salford could do it.

His choices, he thinks, were a subconscious attempt to make his father proud. His dad has been the overriding influence in his life, and this is something the book unravels with admirable elegance. I’ll admit that for the first 50 pages or so I worried it was going to be overly sentimental – Ronnie starts off being portrayed as an almost saintly character. But then Eccleston talks about his dad’s rages – terrorising the whole household when he returned home from work – and he writes incisively about the frustrations bound up in this man whose background meant he was never given the opportunity to reach his full potential. Eccleston bases most of his roles on aspects of his father and he unpicks every aspect of his character, good and bad, that came from him, too. His life story – from the highs of acting and the lows of depression – ends up far rounder for having been intertwined with that of his father’s.

Despite the devotion to his dad, Eccleston’s mother, Elsie – with who he had, if not a better, then a far less complex, relationship – emerges as the real rock of the family, the unsung heroine. Has she read the book?

“She has,” he says. “I’ve still not had the absolute conversation about it. I think she’s a bit ambiguous about it. I was worried she’d think I’d betrayed her.”

At Christmas last year, Eccleston thought things had come to a head when his mother told him he’d “got it wrong” in his book. She apparently said: “When you first moved to London, I didn’t send you a fiver every other week. It was a tenner.”

He grins: “I was just relieved it wasn’t something deeper.”

Eccleston actually moved back in with Elsie after getting out of the psychiatric ward, continuing his recovery while she looked after him in his childhood home. His first UK job from there was to continue his role as Maurice in The A Word, Bowker’s BBC drama that centres around a young boy with autism. It is a show that means an awful lot to him: he has become close friends with Leon Harrop, the actor with Down’s syndrome who plays Ralph, and he loves the fact that television is bringing autism – “something that affects millions of people’s lives in some way or other” – into people’s homes. But the series is also closely connected with his recovery. “I first became ill on The A Word,” he says. “They saw it and they cared for me.”

In his book he relates how his agent convinced him to finish filming series one of the show before checking into hospital, which sounds like terribly irresponsible advice to me given his condition.

“Well, she did tell me that she found it hard seeing that written down,” he admits. “She’s a very sensitive, very intelligent human being. But I think, as a fellow who has defined himself by work, what she was saying to me was: ‘There will be a future – but less of one if you don’t finish The A Word, because it will leave you in the shit.’”

It is a depressing truth that leaving the show would likely have led to insurance issues for production companies hoping to cast him again. That may be the case anyway, given that he has now publicly disclosed his mental health issues. “What my agent and I discussed was that the more I worked, the more relaxed the insurers would become, and I’ve not missed a day’s work since,” he says, proudly. Still, he has noticed that work has been thin on the ground recently. “I only had three months’ work last year and there’s nothing coming up now,” he says. “But I think that’s possibly got more to do with me being white, male and middle-aged. And, quite rightly, those stories, which I’ve benefited from for 30 years, are not being told at the moment. I completely accept that. But I’m hoping that there are a few toxic male roles I can play soon. Surely we’ve not cleaned them all out!”

Reading Eccleston’s book, I was struck by how relentlessly critical he was of his own achievements. Whether it was playing Macbeth (“a deeply flawed performance”) or starring as Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends in the North (Daniel Craig and Mark Strong supposedly gave better performances), he is never particularly kind to himself. Had I never seen him act I would assume, from his own words, that he was poor to middling at best.

“Well, that’s how I feel most of the time,” he says. “It’s tied up with my whole notion of being thick and working-class. That I’m not very poetic. But I’m much easier on myself since the breakdown. I still don’t watch my performances – because I can be very critical of my physical appearance, which I have to be very careful about – but I am easier on myself.”

I think writing the book has probably helped Eccleston cut himself some slack. As with his best performances, he can identify the value in it.

“I do feel that going through my own hell can benefit my kids,” he says. “I know how extreme I’ve been in my life in the search for identity and self. And so I’m prepared for them to go seriously off-piste, as people do, and not panic or make it all about myself.”

In a way, it’s not for his father that he wrote the book, but for them.

“I didn’t want Albert and Esme to ever feel there was anything they couldn’t talk to me about,” he says, softly. “Not in the way that I felt I couldn’t talk to anybody. Nobody should go through that.”

• I Love the Bones of You is published by Simon & Schuster (£20 rrp). To buy a copy for £16.80, with free UK p&p, visit guardianbookshop.com. Series three of The A Word will air on BBC One later this year.

• For help and advice on eating disorders in the UK, contact Beat on 0808 801 0677; in the US, contact the NEDA on (800) 931-2237; and in Australia, contact the Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673. For help with mental health issues, contact mind.org.uk. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org

If you can walk or bike to work in 15 minutes—and can make it to a grocery store, a park, cafés, your kids’ school, or anywhere else you might want to go on a typical day in the same amount of time—you’re living in what’s called a “15-minute neighborhood.” They’re very hard to find now, even in dense cities (the average New Yorker now spends around 43 minutes getting to work, and that’s not on foot). But it’s a vision that Anne Hildalgo, the mayor of Paris, now wants to adopt city-wide.

Hidalgo, who is currently running for reelection, has embraced the idea of “la ville du quart d’heure,” or the 15-minute city, an extension of her work to create a post-car city. “It’s a city of neighborhoods where you can find everything you need within 15 minutes from home,” she tweeted in French last week. “This is the condition for the ecological transformation of the city, while improving the daily life of Parisians.”

“This is a road map, an ambition, a new vision for cities,” says Carlos Moreno, a “smart city” professor at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne who originally conceived of the idea and has been advising Hidalgo. Inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs, who argued that proximity is the key to making cities vital, he argues that cities should be redesigned so that people can access the basic social functions of a city within their own neighborhoods. Traditional urban design, with people commuting to a city center from a distance, is outdated. “I want to radically change this vision of cities,” he says. In part, it’s a response to climate change and the pollution from cars. But it’s equally about quality of life.

Paris is already walkable, and as the city has added new bike lanes, the number of cyclists has grown 54% over the last year alone. But the aging train system often has delays, and many people still drive. More than half of people working in the area have a 45-minute commute, and it’s even worse for others. In one survey, the majority of Parisians said that they would be willing to take a pay cut for a shorter commute.

“The quarter-hour city would reduce two serious problems plaguing many Parisians: the air pollution that kills 3,000 people a year, which is largely caused by car traffic, and the many hours lost in transport suffered to go to work,” says Delphine Grinberg, a member of Paris Sans Voiture (“Paris without cars”), a group of Parisians who helped launch an annual car-free day in the city. “Many of my colleagues spend two to three hours on transportation to work each day. I am fortunate to live 15 minutes by bike from work. During the recent transportation strike, I hosted exhausted colleagues in my home.”

The overall vision—focusing not just on how people get around the city, but on making sure that people live near the places that they need to go—is something that some other cities are now also beginning to consider. In Canada, Ottawa announced last August that it also wants to transform into a network of 15-minute neighborhoods. Moreno is also working on the concept with a think tank in Montreal, along with other cities in France, Tunisia, and Latin America.

Hidalgo’s plan would add offices in neighborhoods that lack them, so people can work closer to home. Some people could work in neighborhood coworking hubs; Moreno says that for many jobs now, the biggest hurdle will simply be convincing companies that employees can successfully work remotely. Another key to the approach, he says, is finding multiple uses for infrastructure that already exists. Libraries, stadiums, and other buildings could be used outside their standard hours. Nightclubs could double as gyms in the afternoon.

Paris has relatively little green space, so the city is adding greenery to school playgrounds, and Hidalgo wants to open access to these new “parks” to neighbors on weekends as a new place to relax. Two other large parks will be built from scratch, and the city also wants to plant “urban forests,” thickets of trees in public squares and on former parking lots. New gardens for urban agriculture can provide neighborhoods with local food. Cars will be banned near schools when kids are arriving and leaving to make it safe for kids to walk and bike. The city will encourage a diversity of local businesses, along with kiosks where neighbors can meet and share services with each other. And since in many cases, local resources already exist and may simply be underused, part of the concept involves reconnecting people with their neighborhoods (and perhaps finding ways to discourage addictions to shopping on Amazon.)

A sketch from the reelection campaign outlines one way a street might change to make it more enticing to avoid driving and better utilize the existing road space: Filled with traffic and parked cars now, it would be redesigned with greenery and park space at the side, a wide lane for biking and walking, and parking spaces on the other side would be replaced with trees and terraces for café tables and activities such as bike repair. Hidalgo wants to pedestrianize the city center, with vehicle access limited to residents, emergency vehicles, and a few other exceptions, as the next step in a long effort to reduce driving in the city. She wants to build even more bike lanes, calling for a “100% bike” city. (When she was elected in 2014, she promised to build 1,400 kilometers of bike paths by this year; as of December, the city has not hit the goal, but it has reached 1,000 kilometers of paths.)

For the city, the efforts are one part of a plan to become carbon neutral by the middle of the century. But it’s also meant to improve the quality of life for Parisians and reconnect neighbors. “Paris is a beautiful city, but it is a stressful and lonely city for the inhabitants—many do not know their neighbors and their neighborhood,” says Grinberg. “If schools are open on weekends, if children can play on the streets, if services are found near you, the city will become much more friendly, and solidarity will develop.”

It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He didn’t even go to the funeral. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. “No. I hated his self-destruction … He was a kamikaze who went out at 27 – what can I say?”

Quite a lot, it transpires. Morrison was a man who was spectacularly good at being a rock star – a lithe figure in leather trousers, prophesying about death, sex and magic on some of the biggest hits of the 1960s – Light My Fire, Break on Through and Hello, I Love You. But he was catastrophically bad at the rest of life. Like many alcoholics, he could be reckless, selfish and mercurial. “The Dionysian madman,” Densmore has called him – a “psychopath”, a “lunatic” and “the voice that struck terror in me”. He had lobbied to get Morrison off the road before his death, and even quit the band at one point. “Some people wanted to keep shovelling coal in the engine and I was like: ‘Wait a minute. So what if we have one less album? Maybe he’ll live?’” Why did he carry on? “Because I wasn’t mature enough to say that at the time. I wasn’t trying to enable him. It was another era. I used to answer the question: ‘If Jim was around today, would he be clean and sober?’ with a ‘no’. Kamikaze drunk. Now I’ve changed my mind. Of course he would be sober. Why wouldn’t he be? He was smart.”

Densmore, 75, is a defiant survivor of the music scene he helped build. This, perhaps, is why, in the decades since Morrison’s death, he has become not only one of the great chroniclers of the Doors, but the fiercest protector of Morrison’s legacy. Anyone who has read Densmore’s 1990 memoir – a book he says was “written in blood” and would later form the basis for Oliver Stone’s (dreadful) Doors biopic – this may come as a surprise. “It took me years to forgive Jim,” he says. “And now I miss him so much for his artistry.”

Next month, a documentary about another of his bandmates, the keyboardist Ray Manzarek, who died in 2013, will be released. Manzarek’s relationship with Densmore was not smooth either. From the early 2000s, they were embroiled in a vicious six-year legal battle in which Densmore tried to stop Manzarek and the band’s guitarist, Robby Krieger, from touring under the Doors name as well as selling the band’s music for use on a Cadillac commercial. “I know. I sued my bandmates – am I CRAZY?!” he yells. People certainly thought he was. It is not usual to spend years in court trying to stop yourself from earning millions of dollars to prove a point about the value of artistic integrity over the pursuit of money. “What can I say? Jim’s ghost is behind me all the time,” Densmore says. “My knees were shaking pretty strong when they upped the offer of $5m (£3.8m) to $15m. But my head was saying: Break on Through for a gas-guzzling SUV? No!”

Manzarek and Krieger’s lawyers tried to paint Densmore as a dangerous communist – even citing a piece he wrote that was published in the Guardian as evidence for this – but eventually, and spectacularly, he won. He wrote a book about the case, published in 2013, and donated the profits to the Occupy movement. “Money is like fertiliser,” he says. “When spread around, things grow; when it’s hoarded, it stinks.”

Densmore is fluent in the language of the 60s elder: on the one hand, he talks of peace rainbows and pots of gold filled with love, despairing at the rise of “separatists and populists and borderline racists” running the US. On the other, he displays an almost chilling pragmatism about life and death, not uncommon among musicians of his generation, who lost so many friends to the era’s excesses.

“I interviewed Tom Petty a few months before he died,” he says quietly when I bring this up. The pair became friends during the court case – Petty’s song Money Is King, about a singer he once idolised who was selling his songs for a light beer advert, struck home with Densmore. “He had trouble with his hip. I guess he was taking painkillers and brown powder, too. Damn it …” he breathes deeply. “I just ache losing him.” He pauses. “Maybe it’s more noble to die in a friggin’ hospital with a bunch of tubes up your arm. I mean, it sounds horrible, but at least you rode the train all the way to the end – you never checked out early.”

I was shocked when heroin became popular. Even Jim knew heroin was a serious drug

Densmore grew up in the west LA suburbs. He was a gifted drummer from an early age, starting out in the high school marching band (an activity that in those days “ranked next to having leprosy” he once wrote). College put him on to jazz, and he worshipped at the altar of Coltrane and Davis. He was 21 when he met Morrison, who was tall, bookish and handsome. “I’m not into guys, but he looked like Michelangelo’s David,” he says. They had met through Manzarek, a friend of Morrison’s from UCLA film school, at a transcendental meditation workshop run by the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He took up meditation, he says, because he couldn’t take acid all the time and liked the “separate reality” meditation offered. “When we took LSD, it was legal. We were street scientists exploring the mind. I experimented with cocaine during the 70s and 80s. But it wasn’t my drug of choice. Ugh … drug. I hate that word. I was shocked when heroin became popular. Even Jim knew heroin was a serious drug. Heroin tried to make you forget everything. It scared me. So I stayed away.”

Compared with his bandmates, Densmore was a square. He wasn’t the film-school/literary type. He couldn’t understand Morrison’s obsession with Nietzsche (“Why would anyone want to read a whole book of such double talk?” he wrote); when Manzarek suggested he watch the François Truffaut film The 400 Blows, he ran out and got it, thinking it was The 400 Blowjobs. “Adolescence!” he laughs. At times, he was envious of the attention Morrison got – particularly from women. “Sure, I was jealous. I’d been a teenage drummer with acne. I remember thinking: ‘Why is Jim’s face so big?’ on the cover of our first album, The Doors. Probably because it wouldn’t have sold a lot of copies if it were my face!”

While he may not have been the centrepiece of the group, there is no doubt Densmore was pivotal to the band’s sound. It is hard to imagine Break on Through without his shimmying bossa nova rhythm, or LA Woman – a song that pulses with the hum of a hot California night – without the cascading drum break that makes way for Morrison’s growls of “MR MOJO RISIN’”.

But as he toured the world with the Doors, Densmore’s family life became more unsteady. His brother had several stints in a psychiatric hospital. He describes going to visit him, finding him heavily sedated, and wondering how sleeping for 17 hours a day could possibly help his schizophrenia – a point that will be familiar even now to anyone who has had to endure acute mental illness. His brother killed himself in 1978. He was also called Jim; he also died at the age of 27. Densmore later wrote that he struggled handling sharp objects after his brother’s suicide. “I thought that if I did it, too, it would somehow make it better – atone for not saving him.”

“My sister got angry at me for writing about it,” he says. “For revealing the family secret. Our brother killed himself and back then it wasn’t talked about. And I apologised. I said I was sorry. I said: ‘I know it hurts, but I also want you to read these letters I’ve got from fans who say they wanted to commit suicide and didn’t because of this book.’ And that’s why it’s there. Because, as difficult as it is, it’s healing to get this stuff out on the table.”

Densmore made more music after the Doors split in 1973, and then turned his hand to acting and dance. But it was grief, it is clear, that drove him to the written word. “It’s funny. I got Cs in English at school. I hated it. But now I want to be a writer and I’m voracious for new vocabulary and new ideas. I like connecting new synapses. Like Jim Morrison did. I do sort of feel as if I’m channelling his passion for life.” He stops. “Actually, not for life – as I said, he was a kamikaze who went out at 27. But I want to set an example.”

Densmore’s writing about Morrison often reads as if it were done by someone who has survived an abusive relationship, such was the terror he felt around Morrison towards the end. “On the outside, Jim seemed normal,” he wrote. “But he had an aggressiveness toward life and women.” One such incident was early in their friendship when he went to pick Morrison up from a woman’s house and found him brandishing a knife at her while holding her hand behind her back. At the time, Densmore did nothing because he was worried that if anyone found out about Morrison, the band – and his own career – would be over. What does he make of this now? “I was really young,” he says. “I couldn’t figure out whether they were lovers, friends or enemies. I just felt like I needed to get out of there.” Would he have acted differently if it happened today? “Yeah, I would say: ‘What the fuck are you guys doing? Please take it down a few notches here.’”

There is also an anecdote in his memoir, one that makes it into the Stone film, too, in which Morrison’s partner Pamela Courson is brought into the vocal booth and asked to perform oral sex on the singer while he is recording the track Lost Little Girl. “Urgh,” he groans, when I bring it up. How does it make him feel? “Not so good. I mean, I don’t think he … Well, yeah … See, I’m at a loss for words. SEXIST, what can I say?” How did it feel at the time, when the whole band was there, seeing it happen from afar? “Well, you know, it didn’t really happen. They were just sort of kissing, and then she left.”

So it didn’t happen?

“No.”

That’s odd, I say, because Stone creates a scene out of it in his film. “Oh, my goodness. Well, you know, Hollywood movies are an impressionistic painting of the truth,” he says.

Later in the interview, we go back to this point. “I’m a little nervous that I’ve said stupid things,” he says. “But life is messy.” It is true – if you have lived as many lives as Densmore, seen generations change and shift, there is no doubt that what was acceptable 50 years ago is no longer so.

Densmore’s next book will be about his meetings with musicians. “Each chapter is about a different artist who has fed me artistically,” he says. It will go from his time learning to play the tabla with Ravi Shankar to his adoration for Patti Smith to the time he met Bob Marley. “Writing is a little easier on a 75-year-old,” he says. “I gotta pace myself. No disrespect to Jim and his 27 years, but I’ve been in it for the long run.” He will also get married this year “for the hundredth time” (it is his fourth time), to his partner of 13 years, the painter and photographer Ildiko Von Somogyi. “I guess I believe in the institution,” he laughs. He is proud he has found another career after music. “You want to have a bunch of lives,” he says. “And life does go on – if you stay vital.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.