Light My Fire

by Ray Manzarek

  “Yeah, Mom, I agree.” I laughed. “Those black people, they’ve got it.” Man, would I love to have that record collection today.

  So it was to be piano lessons. The fateful day arrived one Saturday morning—ten o’clock sharp. My father and I walked to 35th and Archer Avenue, a small commercial area, entered a two-story building, climbed a flight of stairs, and entered the studio of “the little professor,” as my father, always the wise guy, would call him. I’ll never forget that morning. It’s seared in the synapses. The studio was darkened, I don’t know why, and it was vaguely eerie. It was Saturday morning, free-from-school day, and his room was dark. Open the shades, for cri-sake, my brain shouted to itself. More light. And the smell was musty, as it should be for an old man who left Europe in the pre–World War II days. The man greeted me and I instinctively drew back. He was a strange, wizened creature. Today I know who he was, he was Shygoltz from the film Pandora’s Box. (He was Louise Brooks’s first patron. Her character was Lulu and the gnomelike Shygoltz was her first lover.) I wanted to get the hell out of there, fast! It was Saturday morning. Kids’ shows were on the radio. Just like cartoons on TV today. We were on the cusp of the radio-to-TV changeover and everyone I knew loved those Saturday-morning shows. The Lone Ranger and the great Captain Midnight—you had to have a decoder ring; two General Mills cereal box tops and a quarter got you a little plastic piece-of-junk ring that you loved, and it worked maybe a half dozen times and then it broke, but you wore it anyway because it was cool and you were part of Captain Midnight’s Billy Batson Boy Rangers Club—and Smiling Ed McConnel’s Gang with Froggy the Gremlin. “Pluck your magic twanger, Froggy…boinnggg!” And I loved that stuff and there I was, stuck with Shygoltz and no Lulu to dance for us. Shit!

  As if being there weren’t bad enough, now he began the terrible mental torture. He opened a red music book. It contained pieces of music. Very simple little pieces of music.

  He said, in a mittel European accent, “Okay, Raymont…zis is musick. And zis is how it is written.”

  And I looked at it and I thought, This is some kind of message from outer space. Surely it was something from Ming the Merciless. It was indecipherable. If only I had my Captain Midnight decoder ring, I thought. The page was filled with lines and dots. Horizontal lines with dots scattered randomly about. Vertical lines divided the dots into groupings of no discernible pattern. The dots had little tails sticking up in the air. Some of the tails had a little flag on the end of them. Some had a double flag. At the beginning of the left-hand side of the page, the lines had a bizarre symbol: a baroque curlicue covering all five of the lines. What an arcane language!

  “What do these lines and dots mean, sir?” I asked the little professor. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  He chuckled. “It’s all quite isey, son. See zis note?”

  Ah-hah, the dots with tails were called notes. He pointed to a dot at the bottom of the five lines that had a small line cutting through it.

  “Zis is mittle C. Zis corresponds to mittle C on za piano.” And he played a C note. Now, I’m looking at eighty-eight keys in front of me. They’re all black and white. They’re all exactly the same. And Shygoltz, for cri-sake, can distinguish one key from another. How? My brain started turning into Wheatena. They all look exactly the same, it screamed as it became hot cereal mush. All the white keys and all the black keys. There are some low ones over here to the left and some high ones over here to the right…but they’re exactly the same! This is totally insane! How can anyone understand any of this?! It was beyond me how anyone could possibly comprehend where anything was on that keyboard.

  He repeated, “Zis is mittle C,” and plunked on the note. “You try it, Raymont.” And he took my hand as I extended my index finger and moved my hand up and down and I plunked the note a few times.

  I thought, Don’t hold my hand! I’m not a baby. I can plunk the note without your help, thank you. I was pissed. Why did my father bring me to this house of pain?

  “Very goot, Raymont. Now I play za whole piece for you.”

  I wanted to stop him right there. Don’t go any further! I can’t do this, I thought. I will never, in a million years, be able to decipher this encoded message from Ming. Stop!! But on he went, and the piece he played was (go to your piano now, dear reader) C-D-E, E-D-C, D-E-C. That was it.

  “Step-ping up, step-ping down, then a skip.” And it had a rhythm to it. And a logic and a symmetry. It was clean and precise and symmetrical. He played it again.

  “Step-ping up, step-ping down, then a skip.”

  And a lightbulb turned on in my brain. The Wheatena was gone. I was Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jr. again. IQ of 135. I can do this. Yes! This is not beyond me, my brain cartwheeled in its pan.

  “You try it,” Shygoltz said.

  And I did…index finger on each note. I did it once, and then I sang the words as I played it, “Step-ping up, step-ping down, then a skip.”

  And the little professor grinned. “Very goot, Raymont.”

  And my father clapped his hands together—my first applause—and beamed at his little boy. And I was on my way. The little musician.

  And we’re on our way and we can’t turn back.

  And that was the beginning of many long years of practice. A half hour after school and a half hour after dinner. The half hour after dinner was easy because my mother shrewdly gave me the choice of practicing the piano or helping her with the dishes. Naturally, I opted for the former. And she loved it. She would do the dishes and hum along as her boy would play the piano in the next room, her husband would read the paper, and Rich and Jim would scurry around on the floor. This was her family. And she was a happy woman.

  The after-school practicing, however, was purgatory. My mother and I fought every other day. Half hour after school? No way, Jack. Not this pent-up-energy boy. I needed to blow off steam. I had a rocket in my pocket and I wanted to move! And we lived right across the street from the school and the two school yards. The fun yards. I could hear the kids playing. I could hear that high-pitched yelling and squealing that trips the wild-child switch in a kid’s brain and sends his nervous system into the hyper zone. I could look out the window and see goofy stuff going on in the yards and, ohh, I wanted to be there.

  “I don’t want to practice today, Mom,” I’d whine. “I wanna go and play.”

  My mother would try to maintain a calm demeanor. “You can play after you’ve practiced.”

  “But it’s too long…I don’t feel like it,” I countered.

  “It’s only a half hour, Raymond,” she said in that soothing way of hers that could be so infuriating to a young maniac.

  Maybe I can bargain with her, I thought. My evil and conniving mind would stoop to any lie. “I’ll make it up after supper. I’ll practice a whole hour then,” I blurted out.

  “Raymond…” I hated it when she called me Raymond like that. “You can’t fool me. I’m your mother. I know you won’t do an hour after supper. You’ll just make up another fanciful excuse.” She was right, of course. And then she would get logical on me….“You’re wasting time as we’re arguing. You could be out there before you know it if you start right now.”

  Her logic was unassailable. My last resort was rage. “I hate the piano,” I shouted. “I don’t want to practice ever again…I hate it!” What an act, bet she doesn’t have a comeback for that one, I thought.

  But she did. And it was apocalyptic, complete with a catch in the throat and a faux tear. “Well, then…let’s just throw the piano out of the house. Let’s just throw it in the alley….” A faux sob. “I don’t care anymore. You don’t ever have to play again.” And for emphasis…“Ever!”

  Whoa, Mom. Hold your horses. Never again? I didn’t mean I hate it that much! My brain reeled at her full frontal assault. Adults can always push it further than kids want to go. They have the psychic strength to beat a kid down. They always win. When they try it on each other, however, it’s called war. Or murder.
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  “Okay, okay. I’ll practice now,” I gave in.

  But she wouldn’t accept her victory that readily.

  “No. Don’t practice…we’ll just get rid of the piano. In the alley.”

  I didn’t want to get rid of the piano. Hell, I liked playing the piano. I was good at it. She knew I liked it, and that’s why she pushed that particular button. Adults can be so clever sometimes. I was beaten.

  “Ma, I’ll practice.” And I headed for the basement rumpus room and began my Czerny finger exercises, as those high-pitched screams and giggles continued off in the distance. Torture!

  This went on for the next two years until I changed piano teachers. Shygoltz was gone and I was now in the hands of a young teacher, Bruno Michelotti. A dance band leader and a real cool cat. He taught me virtually everything I know about music. Put a sheet of music in front of me called “Rag Mop,” a hit of the day. Kind of a jump tune in a I-IV-V blues structure. Showed me stride piano with the left hand. Key of C—low C with the little finger on beat one, C triad an octave up on beat two, low G below C on beat three, C triad again on beat four. That was the tricky part, the long jump from low G to the C triad. But once mastered, stride piano became fun. Pumping an oompah beat in the left hand, with “Rag Mop” melody on top with the right hand, I thought, Hey! This is not bad. This is kind of cool. This has a little beat to it. A little jump thing. A little groove to it. And I played that stride stuff…without ever again having a fight with my mother.

  I played stride until my second epiphany a year later: boogie-woogie! That’s what really hooked me. And to tell you the truth, I am its slave to this very day. That rolling snake beat in the left hand. That repetitive mantra of hip-swaying sex rhythm. Over and over and over. Never changing. Never needing to change. Why? How could you get bored with it? It was the rhythm of the act of love. The rhythm of creation. The sway of a woman’s hips. The thrust of a man’s haunches. Hard backbeat on two and four. Implied seduction. Unstated but always understood penetration. And right-hand filigrees? My Lord, what a delicious Bach-like dance of fingers. Clean and precise. Joyous and spontaneous. With just a hint of sadness.

  I heard a recording of the Giants of Boogie Woogie—Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis (I love the Lux in the middle. The dictionary defines lux as being the “international unit of illumination.”), and Pine Top Smith. And they were burning. Tearing up the ivories, melting the black and whites. And I was transfixed. Frozen in time for a beat and then released to bop.

  I gotta learn to do that, I said to myself. Stride piano couldn’t compare to boogie-woogie. Stride was white man’s piano. A little stiff but well meaning in its attempt to groove. But, man, you hear a black guy playing boogie piano and it’s all over. You’ve just got to do it. And I sat at our country German upright and worked on my left hand, over and over, trying to get that beat, trying to make that snake crawl out of my fingers. Trying to hypnotize myself with the mantralike repetitive rhythm. And I did it. I got the hang of it. I could do it! And my parents, those blues record collectors, loved it. My mother smiled and my father tapped his foot as he relaxed in his chair with his Chicago Sun-Times. I once heard him say to my mom, “That boy’s getting good, Helen.” And as John Lee Hooker said, “I felt so good. I boogied in the house!” And you know what?…My left hand eventually became the bass player for the Doors. That boogie-woogie technique and “lefty” and his Fender Rhodes keyboard bass combined to create the hypnotic drone sound of the Doors. All that practice gave my left hand the dexterity to become the foundation upon which the Doors’ Bauhaus-like structure was built. The clean and efficient Mies van der Rohe bass lines were a natural evolution from that twelve-year-old Chicago boy’s explorations and repetitions of barrelhouse boogie-woogie. You know the old joke: Tourist in New York asks a police officer, “Officer, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” New York cop says, “Practice, practice, practice.”

  That took care of my left hand; now it was time to enter into the mystic. Into the blues!

  It’s the middle of summer. It’s Chicago. And it’s hot and humid and steamy. It’s Tennessee Williams country, North. It’s the long, hot summer. It’s the sweat basket of America. As soon as you become active the sweat begins to drip off your body. But so what? You’re thirteen years old, you’re looking for something to come around the corner and just blow you away. To take you to a new psychic space. And for me it came in the form of the blues.

  I was at Hoyne Playground, playing ball. And as you know, if you play baseball, the whole point of the game is to get up to bat. You want to hit! That’s it. You only tolerate being a fielder because those are the rules of the game. You give the other team a chance to bat and you have to go out in the field and catch the ball. But who cares? It’s boring. You just want to hit the ball. You want to be up to bat, all tight and coiled with your Louisville Slugger cocked and armed and ready to explode from its perch on your shoulders. You want to put your whole damned body into it. Like a woman. And the pitcher floats that softball up to you—slow-pitch softball in Chicago—and it’s like a dream cloud and you just explode on it. Blast that sucker. Swing for all you’re worth with all your power. And I was worth some pretty good power. I was pumping iron at home. I was working out, getting strong. I was up to about 135 pounds. I was thirteen years old and I was packing a touch of teen muscle. Semen and muscle, what a dangerous combination. I’d take out all my aggressions on the ball. “Just let me hit that ball, goddamn it! Just let me hit!”

  It was our turn to bat. I was the second batter of the inning. First guy up gets a double. Oh, boy, man on second. It’s always great to bat with men on base. You could hit the shit out of the ball and drive in a run. That, my friends, is the whole point of baseball. So I’m coming up to the plate, swinging my war club, and I’m just about to step into the batter’s box when I hear, off to the right-hand side of the diamond, from a radio in the stands…a mournful sound. A sound unlike anything I had ever heard before. A dark blue wail. It was electric and emanating from a deep blue cavern. The mournful wail of a harmonica. And behind it was a backbeat on two and four. Hard and dark. And I heard an electric guitar playing some kind of a snaky I don’t know what. I had never heard a guitar played like that. It definitely wasn’t Les Paul and Mary Ford’s “How High the Moon.” It was as if the neck of the guitar had become reptilian and the frets had become its ribs. And, riding over it all, a man’s voice. Full and deep and throaty. Full of an anguish and a passion and a knowledge that I’d never heard before. That I’d never realized even existed before. I heard that music and I just stopped and listened. I was about to step into the batter’s box but I came to a dead stop. Staring in the direction of the music. And time stopped with me.

  The guy behind me, the next batter, said, “Hey, Ray, get in there…get in there and hit, it’s your turn. We got a man on second. C’mon, get in there. What’a ya waiting for?”

  And I turned around, handed him my weapon, and said, “Here, man, you go ahead and hit. I gotta see what this is over here.” And off I went, sacrificing the game’s raison d’ětre, my precious turn at bat, to hear this music…this dark, mournful, unknown music.

  I got to the source and still didn’t know what this music was. I picked up the radio and saw where the dial was set. Far right-hand side of the dial, ethnic side of the dial. German, Polish, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian…and Negro. I looked at the guy who owned the radio and said, “This is great music.” He was a hoodlum type in Levi’s and engineer boots. Regulation uniform…even in the summer. What a Neanderthal.

  “Yeah,” he said. “These are some real cool cats.”

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Fuck if I know,” he grunted.

  Well, my friends, I know now what it was. It was the blues. It was the South Side of Chicago. It was the music of descendants of Africa. It was Black, and it was the blues. A unique creation on this planet. A musical art form unlike anything else that has ever existed.

  I don’t kno
w to this day who the artist was that was singing to me on that hot summer afternoon. But he changed my life. He opened the door to the sadness of life. The pain and suffering of a love lost. The tragique. The French know it: triste. It could have been Muddy Waters, it could have been John Lee Hooker, it could have been Magic Sam, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf. It could have been any one of a hundred guys. But when I heard that music I thought, Oh, my God! This is the most amazing music I’ve ever heard. It’s got a snakiness. It’s got a rhythm. It’s got a fury…and a passion…and a compassion. The singer’s voice was so full of wisdom, and so full of pain. Both existing at the same moment in time. It was mournful and deep and heavy. You know what it was like? It was like Russian classical music. Like Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Also like Bartok and Smetana. Like a Chopin Polonaise. It was like Slavic music. Heavy and deep and mournful. Put that with a two-and-four backbeat and a I-IV-V, twelve-bar blues progression, and the Chicago boy enters heaven. The blues! That was it. Changed my whole life. Why…I even gave up my turn at bat…for the blues.

  In those formative years I was actually able to see the blues performed live. Not at a nightclub; that wouldn’t come until I was older—but instead at the legendary Maxwell Street market, where my parents, when they were dating, bought their records. An outdoor market. A very big outdoor market in the quote-unquote “ghetto.” Every weekend stalls lined the streets for blocks in every direction, selling a myriad of things. Junk and desirables of every description. Hair tonic to hubcaps. Tools to tires. Ladies’ clothes to nylon hose. Kitchenware to shoe repair (while you wait). Gewgaws, knickknacks, gimcracks, and junk. Old bottles of a cobalt blue not used in bottle making since the discovery of its dangerous properties, but what a beautiful deep blue color. Old lamps, old pots and pans, old car parts, old clothes, old family photographs, old books, old drapes, old furniture, old records (not hip ones), old newspapers, old everything and anything. All spread out on makeshift tables of two sawhorses and a piece of plywood, or on a blanket on the street, or just held in the offerer’s hands—sadly and entreatingly. And musicians on the corners. Street musicians begging a little spare change and playing gospel music and some, not many, playing the blues. That Maxwell Street market was filled with people and life and jive and experiences of an ilk this young boy had never seen before. It was like market day in the Middle Ages. Or a street fair in Islamabad. I was in a Persian bazaar. I was in a place of magic. And I was safe and secure. I was with my father. And his strong hand held mine securely as we walked into the magic.