by Ray Manzarek
“We don’t know.”
“…or was he murdered, for cri-sake? Did somebody shoot him, or stab him to death?”
“I don’t know, Ray.”
“Bill, what do you mean, ‘I don’t know’?”
“It was none of those things. He just…died.”
“Jesus Christ.” I tried to let that sink in. It didn’t compute. “What?! Where?”
“In his apartment. In the bathtub.”
“Did somebody try to drown him or something?”
“No,” Bill said. “The doctor’s certificate says something like, ‘his heart stopped.’ It’s all in French, and I can’t read it.”
“Oh, man. Well, how did he look?”
“I don’t know, Ray.”
“If you say that one more time, I’m gonna strangle you. I’m asking you how he looked. Don’t tell me ‘I don’t know.’” And then he drops another bomb on me.
“I don’t know. I never saw his body.”
“How could you not see his body?” I wanted to bang the telephone on the kitchen counter, where Dorothy and I were having breakfast. Or bang it on Siddons’s head. Talk about sending a child to do a man’s job.
“It was a sealed coffin.”
“You’re telling me you never saw Jim’s body?! Why didn’t you open the coffin?” I was livid.
His voice got quavery. “I couldn’t.”
“Why didn’t you demand to see it? Why didn’t you say, ‘Let me see Jim Morrison. I’m the manager and I have to see his body!’ Why didn’t you do that?” And then the absurdity…
“I was afraid,” he said.
“So you buried a coffin?”
“That’s right, Ray. We buried him this morning.”
“How do you even know he was in the coffin?” I raged at him. “How do you know it wasn’t one hundred fifty pounds of fucking sand?”
“Well, uhh, Pam was all broke up, crying and everything. And, uhh, I mean…he was in there. I know.”
“Oh, Jesus.” The air was being sucked out of my body. The whole confused story was beginning to take its place.
“Bill, I told you to make sure. And you don’t know squat.” I paused, gulping for air and grabbing for some reality. “Where…where did you bury him?”
“In Paris. Something called Père Lachaise cemetery. I don’t really know how to pronounce it, Ray.”
“No shit, Bill.”
“It’s really nice,” he said, trying to make amends. “A lot of famous artists are buried there. Chopin and, uhh, Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, and…uhh…” I could hear the gears grinding. “I don’t know who else, but lots of others.”
“That’s great, Bill. But is Jim buried there?”
“I just told you. Yeah, we just buried him.”
“You buried a sealed coffin, man. We’ll never know the real truth now. It’s all gonna be rumors and stories from here on out.”
“What do you mean, Ray?”
“Never mind, Bill. You’ll understand someday. Come home now.”
I just hung up the phone. There was nothing else to say. I later found out that Agnes Varda, Alain Ronay, Pam, and Siddons were the only ones there. Just four people on a beautiful Paris morning. And he was gone. Went to Paris for a vacation. For a little R and R. And he died. Simple as that. And confused as that.
Some public announcements were made. The press was notified. Elektra Records was notified. Our attorney was notified. And then the rumors began to fly. I won’t even dignify those innuendoes by discussing them. But if you’re reading this book…you’ve probably heard a few. Suicide, murder, CIA plot, he’s alive in Africa, Australian outback, he’s become a Tibetan monk. That sort of thing. The late-twentieth-century penchant for embellishment. The pathetic need for secret plots. Conspiracies everywhere. We have descended into the depths of paranoia. We’re consumed by fear and mistrust. We have no faith in the energy. The energy that is us and supports all life. We’ve lost understanding of the cycles of life. We don’t even believe in cycles. It’s all a straight line to us. It’s all progress. We must progress from one point to another. We must be going toward a goal. If the Judeo-Christian-Islamic man is not progressing, he will go mad. If life is circular, he will go mad. If he does not advance, he will go mad.
And we are, indeed, going mad.
We met at the Doors’ office later that afternoon. We were completely distraught. All of us: John, Robby and I, Kathy Lisciandro (our secretary), Leon Barnard (our publicist), Vince Treanor (our equipment designer and road manager), and little Danny Sugerman (office boy and Doors’ manager-to-be). We were shattered, destroyed. We had been waiting for Jim to come back, going about our business, working on new tunes, woodshedding in our rehearsal space. We were looking forward to playing again, another album (the new tunes were great), gigs, fun times, another great experience. All of a sudden, not only is Jim not coming back, he’s dead.
We’ll never make art again. We’ll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Dionysus-and-Apollo dichotomy thing again. The four of us will never enter that zone again, that holy place, that transcendent place…making Doors music…again. It was over and we would all be something slightly less. We would always have a piece of us missing. For the rest of our lives.
the south side of chicago
I didn’t even know that piece was going to be missing back on the corner of 34th and Bell Avenue in Chicago, Illinois, the city of my birth—on February 12, 1939—and the corner of my home and my grammar school. All I knew was that I was alive and the adventure began at that intersection. My axis mundi.
My time of arrival on this planet was 3:30 A.M., smack dab in the middle of the hour of the wolf, and on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday to boot. He, too, is an Aquarian, and our card is the King of Diamonds. I was born in the year of the Rabbit, the lucky sign in the Oriental zodiac…and I’ve certainly had no complaints that way. My rising sign is in Sagittarius, as is Jim’s sun sign.
I went to a little grammar school called Everett School. I did eight years there. We lived right across the street, 3358 South Bell Avenue. Very convenient. I came home for lunch every day. Can you imagine? So did my two younger brothers, Rich and Jim. What a life, huh? Mom fixes you lunch at home! My father, Ray Sr., worked at International Harvester’s McCormick Works as a tool-and-die man. A good UAW union man. My mother, Helen, took care of her four males. They both did a great job. Wonderful parents. Very supportive…most of the time.
My ethnic lineage is Polish. Manzarek (original spelling Manczarek) is a Polish name. I’m third-generation. My grandparents came over during the great immigration to America from eastern and southern Europe in the 1890s.
They worked incredibly hard. And our parents worked hard and wanted their children to go to school. To better themselves. To get an education. And that’s what we did. We went to college. “You kids are gonna go to university and have a better life than we had.” “Well, okay, Mom and Dad, we can do that.” Unfortunately, we went off to UCLA and became artists. I don’t think that’s what they had in mind. We were supposed to be professional people. I was supposed to be an attorney. Dorothy Fujikawa—my wife-to-be—was supposed to study medicine. Jim Morrison was supposed to be a diplomat. If he wasn’t going to go to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis (as his father had), he was to enter the diplomatic service. Jim Morrison at a military academy? Can you picture it? Impossible. So instead of realizing our parents’ dreams, much to their chagrin, we created our own dreams. We became artists! And even worse…we became intoxicants. We ingested psychedelic substances, smoked the herb, and broke on through to the other side. The veil—the web of maya, as the Hindus call it—fell away from our eyes as we opened the doors of perception. I don’t think that’s exactly what Mom and Dad had in mind for us. “You kids have to stop smoking those marijuanas,” my father once said to me. “But, Dad,” I replied, “I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my entire life.” What could he say to that? “And you really ought
to stop living with that Chinese girl…you know the twain don’t meet.” I almost laughed. “No, Dad,” I said, suppressing a smirk, “she’s Japanese and, besides, I love her.” What could he say to that? He left our apartment on Fraser, having said what he felt he had to say, going on the public record. He was just being a concerned father. Just making a stand for his acquired principles, for his version of how things ought to be. And I couldn’t fault him for that. I loved my father. He died in 1986. He thought the Doors were the greatest and he grew to love Dorothy and was a complete fool for his grandson, our little boy, Pablo. He was especially fond of my recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Renegade monks and wild Latin chants struck a very responsive chord in him. He had become a renegade Catholic in his later years…after he moved with the entire family to California. The light and the freedom finally zapped him, too. He wanted the piece “The Roasted Swan” played at his funeral. What a kook.
Chicago was a well-thought-out, well-laid-out city, and the Manzarek family took advantage of it all. My father took us everywhere. To the parks, the summer beaches on Lake Michigan, the museums—both Natural History and Science and Industry, the great downtown “Loop” and the first-run theaters, such as the Chicago and the Oriental, the forest preserves ringing the city to the west for camping and meat grilling and picnicking and nature walks, Soldier’s Field for stock car races and football games, Riverview Amusement Park for roller-coaster rides, the International Amphitheater for rodeos and sports and the yearly new-car automobile show, and…everything! We did it all and my father was the leader of the pack. He was wonderful. However, he was also a tough guy who would kick your butt if your butt needed it. But mainly he was wonderful and supportive and strong and manly and protective.
Of course, he had no idea what in the hell I was up to. But when I sat down at the piano and played some boogie-woogie or a cute little Bach two-part invention, he loved it. He was my slave. I was his firstborn son and he was proud of his issue. He was an extremely supportive man…as long as I stayed in school and got good grades.
My mother, of course, was the queen of the castle. Her maiden name was Helen Kolenda (she likes to say it means “Christmas carol” in Polish). She has a great singing voice. A very pure tone. She loves music and she loves the Doors. She fell in love with Jim Morrison and thought he was her fourth son. She would have loved to have nurtured him, too, just as she nurtured her first three boys with her great heart and her wonderful home cooking. With her big golden brown oven-roasted tom turkeys, all moist and succulent with crispy, crackling skin. With her delicious roasted leg of lamb redolent of garlic, and homemade steaming pots of vegetable beef soup, and ears of Illini Chief sweet corn, and sliced beefsteak tomatoes from the farms and fields of the midwestern breadbasket. And homemade poppy seed egg bread, hot and golden and slathered with fresh local butter. And her lemon meringue pie, all sweet and tart and standing almost a foot high with peaks and swirls of pale gold-and-white meringue. And her apple slices in large loaf pans, drizzled with creamy white frosting on the outside and filled with cinnamon brown-sugared apples on the inside. Delicious.
What a well-fed childhood I had. And wasn’t it a sybaritic indulgence to come home for lunch during the school week. No crappy cafeteria food. No brown-bagging it. A nice little hot lunch, prepared by your own mother. Nothing fancy, just the regular all-American 1950s lunch of, for instance, Campbell’s tomato soup, a grilled-cheese sandwich, some carrot or celery sticks, and a glass of milk. We’d wolf it down and boom, off we’d go. Run back across the street into the school playground, fool around for fifteen, twenty minutes and back to class. What a secure routine.
My two brothers and I did a lot of running around in Chicago. Lots of sports. Lots of goofing around. The city was made for outdoor activities. It was laid out in a grid, smack up against Lake Michigan, with a public playground or a city park every four blocks or so, sprinkled over the entire city. Kids and teenagers running off their excess energy all over the place. Down the street from my home, three blocks away on 34th and Hoyne, was the eponymous Hoyne Playground, our local maniac yard. It had a baseball diamond—complete with lights for night games for the big guys—an outdoor basketball court, where I shot my brains out, a single tennis court and swings and teeter-totters and a sandpit for the little kids. A small brick building contained the office and supply room—they would actually pass out sports equipment for the kids to use, balls and bats and jump ropes and such—and the desk of old Ralph, the chief of the playground. He had worked in the Chicago Playground District for forty years and this was his last assignment. He was a sweet old man, he loved kids, and he kept Hoyne all shipshape. Me and a bunch of the local guys won the boys’ city softball championship for him. We had a great team.
I played first base and batted third in the lineup. We were all thirteen and fourteen years old. Bunch of fifties Chicago kids and we could hit, catch, and run like the wind. And it was old Ralph’s first championship in all his years. He almost broke down and cried with delight after the final out.
My father liked to call us the Hoyne Giants; he always said it jokingly with a pseudo-Chinese inflection. Wise guy. That fall we also won the City Touch-Football championship. Same bunch of playground rats blocking, passing, and running our young teen asses off.
But basketball was my main sport. In Chicago, in the wintertime, you had one of two choices for your organized-sports activities: hockey or basketball. Hockey?! Forget it, man, I was not going to play hockey. It’s freezing outside. It’s as cold as Dante’s ninth circle. Who wants to be outside in the ice and snow? Skating around in the frozen white, hitting a hockey puck. The damned skates bother your ankles. Your ankles are always going one way or the other, in or out, knock-kneed or bowlegged. And somebody is going to hit you in the shins for sure with that big, hard hockey stick. It’s practically a lethal weapon, for cri-sake. And the puck is way too hard. It’s like a rubber bullet shot off the end of that lethal weapon. And you’re in the line of fire and it’s fucking freezing on top of it. But in contrast, there’s the basketball court…and it’s inside…and it’s hot. You take your clothes off, it’s like being in Hawaii. You’re wearing little shorts and a tank top. And it’s eighty degrees. Ahh…paradise.
I was fourteen years old, six feet tall, and I was good. I played a lot of b-ball with my good friend Joe Nies and we were the main cogs on the McKinley Park City Championship basketball team of the next winter. I was the center and he was the point guard. I was the same height then that I am now. I was the big guy. Six feet tall, 145 pounds, a “force” in the middle. I had a jump shot, a hook shot, a decent spin step; I could rebound, play face-to-face defense. I could do it all. And Joe Nies was a great ball handler and passer. And we won the boys-fourteen-years-old-and-under Chicago Park District city championship. I was very proud of our team. A good bunch of guys.
I didn’t realize it in the ebullience of our victory, but that was the high point of my basketball career. The next year I was six feet tall and 145 pounds, and the guys who were guards are now playing forward. They’ve grown and I haven’t. By the time I’m sixteen years old, the guys who were playing guard are now six feet five and I’m still six feet tall and 145 pounds. Everybody just got taller and taller…except me. I went from being the big guy at fourteen to a forward at fifteen, and by the time I was sixteen, they said, “Ray, play guard.” I said, “I don’t play guard. I don’t handle the ball, I’m not a dribbler. I crash the boards. I wheel and deal in the paint. I’m a rebounder. I muscle for position. I’m an inside shooter.” And they said, “No, you’re not tall enough to be a rebounder anymore, Ray. You have to play guard now.” And that was it, the end of my basketball jones. I was sixteen and I hadn’t grown. So I said, “Well, I guess it’s going to be music after this.”
My long march into the “floating world” of music began with the first step of…piano lessons! My mother and father had bought a huge upright piano. A carved-wood upright. Of a style I can only des
cribe as country German. Turned legs, a carved flower here and there, a deep brown color, and all of it massive. They had it deposited in the basement rumpus room, had a half dozen piano movers wrestle it in, and said, “Raymond, you are going to learn how to play the piano.” I was seven or eight years old. I pounded on the keys, went slightly goofy, made a ruckus, and thought, Why not? This could be fun. Thank God my mom and dad were hip and didn’t bring home an accordion. Lots of kids in Chicago had to learn to play the accordion. In the post–World War II Midwest, the accordion was a very popular instrument. Large masses of children played “Lady of Spain” together on stages all over the city. It was not a pretty sight. Chicago, Milwaukee, and the entire state of Pennsylvania were the accordion capitals of America. But my parents were too hip for that. My father played the guitar and a mean ukulele. All the young cats in their raccoon coats in the roaring twenties and the Depression thirties played the ukulele and sang of moon, spoon, and June to their little kittens. And my father sang to my mother. And she sang right back to him, only better. She had the great voice in the family. And together they would harmonize and sing songs of love in a little Spanish town and jump tunes about coming to get you in a taxi, honey. They told me many years later about their record collection of 78s that melted in a fire just before I was born. Blues records. Bessie Smith and other singers and musical groups they couldn’t remember. And all black. South Side of Chicago music. My mother told me the two of them would go record hunting together.
“We used to go to Maxwell Street and we’d go into these little record stores,” she said. “But they weren’t even stores. People lived in them and sold records, too. And people were poor in those days. They would have a rug hanging in the doorway to keep the cold out and you’d go in behind the rug and they would have records for sale. You could hear the music from the street as you’d walk by and just went in, under the rug. They would have the greatest music playing. I tell you, Raymond, those black people…they’ve got it!”