by Ray Manzarek
I didn’t even get a program that day. I just wanted to sit there and let the water wash over me, let that sound come up from the orchestra, hit the ceiling, move across the ceiling to the top balcony and just wash over my head and chest and dip right behind me. I would always sit in the last row so that I could be up against the wall and have the music swirl around the auditorium and come right in over my head, around and down through my feet and back out through the balcony. A very sensual experience and the best way to listen to classical music.
Fritz Reiner took the stage. A hush fell over everything. And the music began. Soft and lush, wave after wave, building and building to one climax after another. It was oceanic, it was like the sea. Talk about waves of water washing over me. I was being inundated, drowning in a modernist lushness. It was glorious and I had no idea what it was. And it continued and continued; I never wanted it to end. It was so redolent of the sea that I was transported to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I was engulfed with water. And I thought, What is this music? Who is this genius composer? Who is this man?
It finally concluded and I was spellbound. I rushed to the usher for a program, rifled through the pages to the day’s performance, and there it was…Claude Debussy, La Mer. My first time for live Debussy and my first time for La Mer. I became a fanatic. A Debussy fanatic. And then I heard him in Bill Evans’s music. My favorite piano player and he was doing Debussy in jazz! Fantastic. That lushness. That early-twentieth-century French romanticism, that sheer beauty…in jazz? Well…I had to try that, too! I spent a lot of time working on those inner voicings, those tone clusters. And one of these days I may just get good at it. “Practice, practice, practice.”
Some great theater was happening in the fifties. Broadway touring companies of the hottest plays and musicals came through Chicago on a regular basis, and student tickets were $2.50 for Wednesday matinees; the theaters were within walking distance of De Paul. I tried to see as many as I could. I saw Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer with Diana Barrymore in the role Elizabeth Taylor played in the film version, which also starred Katharine Hepburn and Montgomery Clift. You really ought to see it. It’s on videotape. But on stage, wow! When Diana Barrymore screams out at the end, “They had devoured him!” it was like a bloodcurdling shriek of pain from the hell mouth of a soul in terrible anguish. It froze everybody in the audience. The power of her performance. The agony of those lines. “They had devoured him.” Overwhelming.
Next season it was Rip Torn and Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth. What a play. What great writing. What a performance! Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth with Rip Torn as Chance Wayne and the incomparable Geraldine Page as the incomparable Princess Kosmonopolis. It doesn’t get much better than that…and for $2.50. I loved it. Theater in the fifties was inspiring. I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to be in—or write—or direct plays like that. I wanted to be a part of that energy. I wanted some meaning in my life. I wanted that passion that I saw on the stage. I wanted in!
And then it was West Side Story, with Chita Rivera and Larry Kert from the original Broadway cast. I didn’t know what to expect. Romeo and Juliet as gang kids in New York? Could work. Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim music…well, that had to be good. Shit, it was brilliant. The music was inspired. Great Aaron Copland–like motifs. Great rhythms. Ballads of love and loss that still swirl through the jukebox of my brain. Hot, smoking, incendiary Jerome Robbins dancing! And tragic love…and death. What more could a young college man ask for? It’s the best musical theater I’ve ever seen. The culmination of American music, dance, and theater. It’s the high watermark of what a Broadway musical can be. And I wanted to do that, too. I wanted all of it. I was greedy and lustful and deeply desirous of that kind of passion. I wanted that kind of commitment…to art.
And so did Jim Morrison. He had, in one way or another, seen, heard, and experienced the same artistic things that I had. All these little epiphanies are part of the soul of the Doors. These little moments of light and clarity and inspiration are what brought us together and what we tried to infuse into our music. Jim, too, was a devotee of Tennessee Williams. He loved his body of work, and knew it well. Even fancied himself as a bit of a Chance Wayne. At his college in Florida they had staged Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Jim was the set designer. Whether he acted in the play or not, I don’t know. But what he did with the set was inspired. He had a slide of a cancer cell—Big Daddy is dying of cancer in the play—projected on the back wall of the stage. And Jim had that cell enlarging ever so slowly, enlarging through the entire course of the play. Until at the end of the play, when it is found out that Big Daddy has not kicked the cancer and is in fact dying of the disease, Jim had the cancer cell filling the entire back wall of the stage, pulsating, eating…devouring everything. “They had devoured him!”
Jim was into the same things that I was into. He went to the film school at UCLA because he had seen the same films I had seen. He’d seen Black Orpheus and The Seventh Seal. He’d seen Death and the Knight—Max Von Sydow—play chess. Gambling for the Knight’s very life. The life of Antonius Block. Jim loved Bergman. The bleak and haunted landscapes of the great Swedish master. Both exterior and interior. The existentialism. Everything seen through a glass, darkly. But also the never-ending courage of his puppets. His characters’ courage to face life. To dare to live it. To be alive, and to live through the terror…that we are alone. Jim had seen Rashomon and The 400 Blows and all the other first crashings of the Nouvelle Vague and he was in love. In love with the possibility that he could be an artist. In love with the idea of freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of thought. The freedom to he. And when it came time to decide what to do with his life…when he arrived at the crossroads, at that existential moment…he chose UCLA. The Film School. Just as I did.
You got to meet me at the crossroads.
Meet me at the edge of town.
Outskirts of the city.
You better come alone…
He was drawn to the cinema, just as I was. For both of us it combined all the arts. It combined theater, photography, music, acting, writing…everything. And there were no experts! There were geniuses, but no experts. Jim said to me…, “The thing about cinema is there are no experts. Anyone can know the body of work. The entire history of film is only about sixty years old. Anyone can know its complete history. Anyone can be an expert. I love that about the cinema.” And he was right. All you had to do was study, and the entire history of world cinema could easily be digested. We could be experts…and artists…and free men.
These are the things that put me into the Department of Cinematography at UCLA, and these are the same things that called Jim Morrison out of the Florida swamps to the setting sun of the Western dream and UCLA. And our task became, how to incorporate our artistic backgrounds into the Doors. How do we bring all of this good stuff into the Doors? How do we bring the drama, how do we bring the depth of emotion, how do we bring the pathos, the joy, the sorrow, the terror into rock and roll music? How do we bring the terror, indeed. That’s what the Doors are all about.
destiny and the ucla film school
I first met Jim Morrison at the UCLA Film School. The University of California at Los Angeles. We had enrolled in the Department of Cinematography, seeking a study of the art of the cinema. Jim and I, both being apprentice “artistes,” had heard the seductive, siren call of the muses and found it irresistible. And it came from the West. From California! Mythic land of surf, palm trees, chicks, beatniks, hot rods, and freedom!
The West is the best.
Get here, we’ll do the rest.
Jim and I met through our mutual friend John DeBella. A big weight lifter/poet from New York, DeBella was intelligent, obtuse, and sometimes clownish. Somebody once called him the intellectual Huntz Hall. Never learning to drive a car only added to that image.
John was my cameraman on my student movie Evergreen. He was also Jim’s cameraman on Jim’s student movie. It had no title
and has long since disappeared. The student movies were our term papers. You completed one for the end of the semester, at which time the students—and I mean all the students—assembled in bungalow 3K7 for a weeklong session of disembowelment and psychological mutilation. At five marathon screenings, we viewed one another’s films and critiqued them. The teachers sat in the last row of the small theater and watched their charges devour one another. You see, each director had to stand in front of the assembled smart-ass, wise-guy intellectuals (the students) and receive his or her fair share of verbal abuse. Or, as it was called, constructive criticism. Man, it could be brutal. I saw sensitive young artists reduced to tears. And Jim’s film was pretty much raked over the coals.
I remember his film, and the thing about his misunderstood 170 project was that, basically…it was poetry. It was cinematic poetry. It was a juxtaposition of images that really didn’t have any relationship to one another in a linear, narrative form. But after five minutes went by, it became a collective “whole.” It became a poetic piece. I thought it was excellent! It was nonlinear; it was purely experimental. And it was fun. One shot had Jim doing a great hit off a huge bomber. You know, a spliff, a doob, a blunt, a joint. Jim takes this monster hit, eyes and cheeks bulge out, and he cuts to an atomic bomb explosion. Ka-blam! Associative editing. Sergei Eisenstein did it first. Jim was in the tradition.
Another sequence, a bunch of guys (the crew) having a little party. College guys goofing, drinking beer. They were throwing darts at a Playboy centerfold hung on the wall. The Playboy pinup was hung upside down. It was lit from the side, and as the darts were going in there was a strange ninety-degree angle of shadow, light, and actuality. Completely disorienting and most effective. The sound track had American Indian peyote chanting and musique concrète.
In the Oliver Stone movie The Doors, Oliver tried to re-create Jim’s film based on what I told him and what I’m now telling you. Of course, he went completely over the top. A grotesque exaggeration. And how he turned Jim into a disciple of Adolf Hitler, well…perhaps someone ought to look into Mr. Stone’s psyche; into what I perceive to be his latent anti-Semitism, and not-so-latent fascist tendencies. I like to think that little student movie is as revealing of Oliver’s real problems as anything he’s ever done. It’s all there in capsule form. A wonderful reduction of psychotic leanings.
And what a misreading of Friedrich Nietzsche. Typical Leopold and Loeb–type of misinterpretation. If you don’t understand the concept of the Übermensch, Oliver, don’t quote Nietzsche. Don’t do what the Nazis did. Don’t interpret the warrior’s freedom from the lowered state of consciousness of the first three chakras. That only begets a Hell’s Angels type of man. It uses the will to power as a justification to be the bringer of death instead of a bringer of joy and creativity. The lowered consciousness shouldn’t approach Nietzsche. He’s too dangerous. Nietzsche would have you leave all your preconceptions, all your childish beliefs, all your fears, and step into the light of freedom and divine responsibility. He would have you become a creator, if you dared. A creator who was responsible for the continuation of this existence. A lover of life. A dancer. A proud, bold, laughing man who delights in all the nuances and dangers of this all-too-brief life of ours. Not a naysayer or an extinguisher of life, but one who embraces it all and says, “Again!” And if you don’t understand that, don’t get too close to the fire. It’s highly volatile. This heat is definitely more than you should approach, Mr. Oliver Stone.
And, for God’s sake, don’t put your fascist, Hell’s Angels interpretation onto Jim Morrison’s student film. There wasn’t any “Sieg heil,” Aryan-nation business in it. That’s in your head.
Here’s what happened, and here’s what I told Stone.
Big John DeBella had a girlfriend named Elke. Big, blond German girl. (They were a good fit; their kids would have been giants.) They’re shooting film at Jim’s apartment over on Goshen in West L.A. John’s got the camera trained on the TV set. One of those too-fat, too-large all-American TV sets that people had in the old days. A real piece of furniture. Blond wood. Fits all decors. And Elke was on top of the TV set (you could actually stand on those monsters) wearing a bra, panties, maybe a little filmy sliptop for discretion, and black stockings. Long stockings with a garter belt. Very sexy, with high heels on top of this big piece of furniture. And she’s doing a very Germanic bump ‘n’ grind! Jim shouted over the rock and roll music that was playing, “Turn the TV on, turn the TV on!” DeBella reaches over, turns on the TV, does two dial flips, and what should come on the screen? Scenes from World War II; Hitler, stormtroopers, and Nazis marching through Berlin, or Prague, or the Sudetenland. And Jim says, “Leave it! Leave it! It’s perfect.” So he’s got this German girl, in a black négligée, on top of the TV set, doing a nauch girl routine. He’s got Nazis on the screen and American rock and roll music is blasting. It’s great!
Somehow or other, Oliver Stone perverted this into the bizarre, strangely anti-Semitic tract that he put into his version of Jim’s film. And then it goes up on the big screen as the truth, as reality. And people see the movie and think, That Jim Morrison was one sick dude. But it ain’t Jim, you dig? It was the Stone. My friend’s student movie was a much lighter, much friendlier, much funnier kind of thing. You see, we were all heads at the time. That’s the whole point of it. The whole point of the UCLA Film School in those days—the sixties—is that we were all heads. Everyone was high. Everyone was giggling and laughing and just having the grandest time. That’s what that intoxicant does to you. The good green herb that grows on God’s good green planet is a mild intoxicant. Slightly psychedelic and far less deleterious than alcohol. And it’s only for adults. Children aren’t allowed to smoke pot or drink alcohol in my universe. But for grown-ups…it’s a delightful thing that takes you into another state of being. That puts you into a very silly, funny state. And at times a very perceptive state. I suppose that’s why it’s illegal. It enables you to actually see through the bullshit. You begin to see the lies and the motives for the lies. And the powers that be can’t have that. They can’t have the populace pinning them. They can’t have the people saying, “Ah-hah, I see what you’re up to!” Because if we could see behind the curtain we’d all rise up and tell them, “Stop it!” That’s what they’re afraid of. “Stop cutting down the forests! What’s going to make the oxygen if you cut down the trees?” “Stop using artificial fertilizers and deadly pesticides! How can we eat the food if the soil is depleted and the fruits and vegetables are covered with poison?” “Stop the burning of fossil fuel! How can we breathe the filthy, hydro-carboned air?” “Stop the exploitation of the working man; the common man. Give him a decent wage and working conditions! Or else how can he support his family? How can he live?” “Stop ruining the children’s minds in your terrible schools! Teach them love and respect! Nurture them! Or else how can we have responsible adults? How can we have a contented citizenry without education?” And most important…“Stop war! Stop the killing! Love thy neighbor as thyself and do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
It’s all so simple, isn’t it? It’s what the sixties were all about. It’s why we were in the streets, protesting, fighting the Establishment. Trying to get them to just STOP! We were trying to remake the world in a more decent fashion. To love the world and all its tender, fragile lives. Plants, animals, fishes, birds, people. All living together in harmony, a symbiosis. All dependent on all. Perhaps someday we can return to those goals and actually accomplish the transformation that was dreamed of in the sixties.
Let’s reinvent the gods.
All the myths of the ages.
Celebrate symbols from deep, elder forests.
So marijuana is illegal and alcohol is not. Shit-faced drunk versus pothead hippie. Mean, drunken, wife-beating, car-wrecking, child-abusing, fighting, swearing, brawling, puking alcoholic is allowed to buy his booze at the corner liquor store. But flower-child hippie can be thrown in jail for a joint. It do
esn’t make any sense today and it didn’t make sense back in the sixties. Especially for us Venice Beach dwellers, who were usually walking around in a very silly, funny state. And Jim Morrison’s student movie was a very silly, funny, very poetic film following the aesthetic lines of Jonas Mekas’s Film Culture out of New York City. And in the manner of Stan Brakhage and his famous Dog StarMan.
Now, I also had made a couple of films while I was a student at UCLA. Starring my girlfriend at the time, Dorothy Fujikawa (who has long since become my wife; we’re still happily married and still together and it’s been a wonderful relationship). She was an art student. We became lovers and she became my leading lady. She had a vulnerable intensity that the camera just adored. A great look and a great way of delivering a line. She had a quality in her voice that gave the lines I had written for her a truth and life of their own; far deeper than what I had originally conceived. I heard the words being spoken in my mind’s ear…but she brought them to life. And her eyes. She could look into you and through you. No games, no lies. She was in her moment of time. In the suchness, as Zen master and author D. T. Suzuki would say. And she was cute as hell.
The best of all the student films were screened twice a year for the public at what was called the “Royce Hall Screenings.” The faculty would select a dozen or so films to be composite-printed and projected up onto the big screen of Royce Hall. Dignitaries were invited. Critics were invited. And the carved, Spanish-style doors were flung open to the public as if to say, “See, we’re not insane here. We can do good work.” And, oh, how the faculty would strut. Because Royce Hall was the prestigious auditorium on the entire west side of Los Angeles. Symphonies were performed there, great jazz artists and intense folksingers of the time performed there. I saw the Modern Jazz Quartet play there. The great Odetta sang there. The Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra performed there. I walked in one afternoon on a rehearsal of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and it was absolutely overwhelming, standing at the foot of the stage—Zubin Mehta was the conductor—and I’m watching the L.A. Philharmonic power their way through the Rite of Spring…in Royce Hall. Thrilling.