Light My Fire

by Ray Manzarek

  Dorothy and I would just drop in on Jim. Anytime, whenever we were in the area. He lived between UCLA and Venice, near the Veterans Hospital complex on Wilshire and San Vincente. And just a few blocks from the “Lucky U,” the UCLA Film School’s numero uno Mexican restaurant. All the hip students went there. It was Jim’s favorite, too. We spent many an afternoon at the Lucky U nursing our meager change into a divine meal. Rosario Carillo was the chef and he was a genius! His food was inspired. Chile colorado, rich and succulent with beef and spices in a deep mahogany sauce. Chile verde, his pork-and-tomatillo classic, light and green and fiery hot. He also put the chile verde on his burritos. Great, rolled-up flour tortilla tubes of frijoles and meat. The burritos were our main source of nourishment for almost two years. His tacos were crisp and beefy. Tostadas were warm-weather and luncheon fare. A mountain of salad, atop chile verde, atop refried beans, atop a crisp fried tortilla. Ambrosia. And when you were flush, well, shit…chile rellenos! The best. The best I’ve eaten, anywhere. Mexico City, La Paz, Cozumel, Cabo San Lucas, Cancun—nowhere better than Pancho’s—as he liked to be called. Large, mild ancho chiles, stuffed with longhorn cheddar cheese, dipped in an egg batter, fried on a large short-order grill. Served slathered with chile verde and pork on top, with a side of frijoles refritos, his wonderful Mexican/Spanish fried rice, rough chopped salad, and three corn tortillas. Wash it down with a Tecate and lime. Heaven. Mexican heaven. We ate there maybe three times a week. I loved it. All the heads loved it. Jim loved it. And it was all fresh and real. Pancho made everything himself, including his beans. I never saw the man open a can. And it was an open kitchen, behind the bar. You’d eat and drink and watch him cook. And I never saw a can. Man, it was good food. And good for you. What more could you ask from a meal?

  Now, Jim had a very nice apartment. Not that it was elaborate or anything, but obviously his mother and father had a couple of bucks. As Dorothy said, “Look, he has an electric blanket. He must have money. Look at his socks….” I said, “Look at his socks?” She said, “These are expensive socks, Ray.” She was like Sherlock Holmes. “Okay, honey, if you say so.” “He’s got money,” she said. He certainly had a substantial investment in books. They filled an entire wall of his apartment. His reading was very eclectic. It was typical of the early- to mid-sixties hipster student. Classics—both Greek and Roman—French Symbolist poets, German Romantics, modern novels—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald—existentialists—Camus, Sartre, Genet—contemporary literature—Norman Mailer, especially The Deer Park, Jim’s favorite. He identified with the character Marion Fay. And lots of beatniks. We wanted to be beatniks. But we were too young. We came a little too late, but we were worshipers of the Beat Generation. All the Beat writers filled Morrison’s shelves, along with James Joyce and Céline. All the antecedents to the Beat Generation, the same books we all were reading. That is what influenced and inspired Jim Morrison. And we borrowed freely from these authors, as homage. For instance, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. One of our songs is called “End of the Night.”

  Take the highway to the end of the night.

  Take a journey to the bright midnight

  End of the night.

  Realms of bliss, realms of light

  Some are born to sweet delight

  Some are born to the endless night

  (and from William Blake)

  God appears and God is light

  To those poor souls who dwell in night.

  Jim was borrowing and quoting and paying homage to his masters, as I was borrowing quotes from all my favorite jazz and blues musicians, and even a Western classical riff now and then. For instance, the solos in “Light My Fire” are based on John Coltrane’s “Ole” from the album Ole Coltrane. The same repeating chord structure, McCoy Tyner, comping behind ‘Trane—he’s in D minor, we’re in A minor—over and over. A minor to B minor in 4/4 time. Coltrane’s “Ole” is in 3/4 time. You know, like a waltz—1-2-3, 1-2-3—as opposed to 4/4 time—1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4. When it came time to solo in “Light My Fire,” I suggested we quote Coltrane on Robby Krieger’s song. It worked so well that Robby and I would extend our solos for upwards of ten to fifteen minutes in concert. It was such a joy to float over that repeating figure and to interact with each other that we never got bored with the piece, even though we played it at every concert.

  Other examples: I quote, verbatim, a Thelonius Monk line from “Straight, No Chaser” in the Doors’ song “We Could Be So Good Together.” The opening organ passage of “When the Music’s Over” was inspired by Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man.” The organ solo in “Take It As It Comes,” J. S. Bach. “Break On Through,” Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s bossa nova album Getz/Gilberto. This was one of our favorite “relaxing” albums. John Densmore and I were really into the whole Brazilian samba groove. And this record was the coolest. We’d get high, open the windows on Fraser, light some incense, put Desafinado on the turntable, and float away to Brazil. “The Girl from Ipanema” would walk down that beach at Corcovado and we would, indeed, say, “Ahh.”

  Even the name of the band itself is an homage to William Blake, who wrote in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is…infinite.” And Aldous Huxley takes that line and calls his book on mescaline experimentation The Doors of Perception. And Jim takes that line and calls the band the Doors.

  So Jim’s bookshelf was very eclectic, but also standard, de rigueur Evergreen Review, New York City hipster, San Francisco, City Lights Bookstore, beat jivester, jivenik, cool cat. In other words, we were all reading the same thing. John DeBella had the same books that Jim had, that I had, that Phil Oleno had, that Dennis Jacob had, and a lot of other guys had. Except Jim had more! A wall of books. And it seems he had read them all; nothing in reserve for future reading. He was able to tell you the author and title of any book he had. He would challenge people, “I’m gonna turn my back. Take a book off the shelf, open it to any page, read me a line—maybe I’ll need more, maybe a couple of lines—and I’ll tell you the title of the book and the author of the book. If I’m wrong…I’ll buy the beer. If I’m right, you buy…Corona or Tecate.” Jim Morrison drank free beer 95 percent of the time.

  What we did at Jim’s apartment was talk. Tecate, a toke or two, and we were all motormouthed. Film, literature, the political situation, the H-bomb (always lurking below the rational level of consciousness), Vietnam, Kennedy/Johnson, and the contrast between elegance and shit-kicking, and music…classical, jazz, and rock and roll. Coltrane was discussed, his modal compositions influenced by his tenure with Miles Davis. His repetitive chord changes so well handled by McCoy Tyner. McCoy Tyner’s relationship to Bill Evans. Bill Evans’s relationship to the piano music and tonal coloring of Claude Debussy. Debussy’s lyricism as contrasted to Stravinsky’s primitivism in Rite of Spring. Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana as even more basic and primitive. I first heard Carmina Burana at Jim’s apartment and was transfixed by its power. Big, rhythmic, Gregorian chant voices, ostinato bass lines—very moving. (I recorded it many years later with Philip Glass as producer. We did an electronic transcription of the piece, complete with jazz-rock guitar and rock and roll drums.)

  Film, of course, was our main topic of conversation. Here’s how the conversations would go….

  “I think Vivre sa Vie is Godard’s best work,” says Alain Ronay as he sips an aperitif.

  “Breathless, Alain,” Jim comes back. “Breathless is his masterpiece.”

  “You’re both wrong,” I passionately object. “Contempt [Le Mépris] with Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance and Fritz Lang. That’s his best film!”

  “Could be,” Jim agrees.

  “It can’t be Breathless,” says Alain. “Breathless is immature. His first work. Too cutty.”

  Jim sips his Corona (Alain didn’t buy this time, he wouldn’t play the “Name the Book and Author” game anymore. Jim beat him six times in a row. Alain said “f
ormidable” and quit.) and says, “It’s supposed to be cutty, man. It’s called jump cutting. It may not be correct for the ‘cinema of your papa,’ but it’s correct for today. It’s at our speed, our tempo. It doesn’t belong to the past. We don’t belong to the past, not anymore.” The hemp was working. Jim was off…and getting more loquacious….

  “Didn’t Kennedy say, ‘…the torch has been passed to a new generation’?…Well, that’s us! We are the future. We outnumber those bastards. Sure, they’ve got the military behind them, but we’ve got the ammunition.” And he held up one of his tightly rolled joints.

  I was always amazed at how perfectly he could roll a joint. They were like thin, machine-rolled cigarettes. Like a Lucky Strike or a Camel. Perfect, no wrinkles. I myself couldn’t roll for shit. Loose, flat, wrinkled, pathetic. I always let others do it for me; why embarrass myself in public? But Jim’s were little works of art. He couldn’t make a splice on 16mm film, he became Private All-Thumbs, but he could roll better than anyone. Clean, crisp, tight, perfect little magic bullets of pleasure. In fact, we were going to call the Doors music publishing company Ammunition Music, our motto, “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” When it actually came time to pick a name we opted out of any dope reference. Things were just too tight in those days. The Establishment was really cracking down on any public drug references. Ammunition Music was just a little too obvious. You know, ammunition…get loaded! Potential police problem there.

  “They can’t kill us all,” he continued. “They can ship us off to Vietnam to be slaughtered in an Asian jungle, but they can’t kill us all. We’ve got the numbers.” He lit the joint, a grin on his face, eyebrows arched like Groucho Marx.

  Alain smiled a French smirk and said, “And you get all of that from Godard’s jump cut?”

  We all laughed at that one. We passed the joint and sat back, relaxed. We stared at the walls, but they weren’t blank, as in most students’ apartments. One of Jim’s walls was a work of art in progress. It was a massive collage. He had cut out photos from Life magazine, from Time magazine, from fashion magazines, color and black-and-white images. Dorothy said Jim was the first guy she ever knew who bought fashion magazines. She was into Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. A fashion maven, she’s always been into au courant styles. Always keeping abreast of the fashion of the day. Enjoying the changing patterns, the light, the chiaroscuro on the covering of women’s bodies. And so did Jim. He would paste models, beautiful women, in surrealistic settings by using other photos as counterpoint, creating a long, continuing collage running the entire length of the wall adjacent to the bookcase. It was like a Chinese scroll unrolled and tacked up on his wall. Except the images were all contemporary. It was a picture story, a picture scroll. I stared at that wall, trying to discern a linear narrative in the images but I never could. The pictures didn’t tell a story…it was the same thing Jim was doing with his student movie. It was poetry. It was a collision of images. Sergei Eisenstein, again. Here’s one section: Marines are lounging about without shirts on. Naked to the waist, very relaxed in one another’s company—Genet would have loved it—in a state of easy camaraderie. They’re juxtaposed against this beautiful model—Jean Shrimpton—who’s looking very seductive, and coming out from behind her is a snake, and the snake moves into an elephant, and then an African scene—Watusi warriors jumping—and then an American basketball player in mid-leap, and another model, arms outstretched, seemingly about to catch him. It went on like that. Beautifully cut and pasted, it was a tripster’s delight.

  The sun was beginning to set. We had watched the wall long enough. It was time to go. I finished my Tecate, took Dorothy’s hand, and said, “Dinnertime. See you guys later.” And off we went, out to Dorothy’s mustard-colored VW bug, jumped in, and headed down San Vincente, out toward the ocean. Out to Venice. We hit Ocean Boulevard as the sun was beginning to dip into the Pacific. We hung a left on Ocean and ran parallel to the beach. And, man, what a sight! Palm trees silhouetted against flaming tangerine light hovering over slightly-darker-than-azure water. We were at the top of the cliffs, the Palisades, above the beach, with a view all the way to China. Probably could have seen it, too, if the Earth didn’t curve. It was that clear. The light was shimmering. The air was warm. The entire atmosphere was soft and gentle. We were high, my baby and me. We were headed home to our little apartment on Fraser. I was enrolled at UCLA, we had great and intellectual friends, and all was right with the world. And the sunset was a spectacular collage of reds and blues and golds.

  But best of all, we were in love! We were young and romantic, idealistic and in love. And we had met in an art class at UCLA. Drawing 101. The basic art course. Dorothy had to take it because she was an incoming art major. I took it because I wanted to learn how to draw storyboards like the great Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian director of Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible, Ten Days That Shook the World, Alexander Nevsky. A brilliant filmmaker. All stylized and angled. Russian Constructivism on the screen. And his storyboards were works of art. Hard, linear, insistent angles. Dynamic figures in kinetic relationships. Vigorous, forceful juxtapositions. My kind of stuff. “That’s the way I want to do it,” I said to myself. “I’m going to draw like Eisenstein!” What a boneheaded idea. I couldn’t draw for shit. Rendering something in three dimensions on a two-dimensional page is impossible! I could never get a sense of volume or the idea of the vanishing point. My drawings were flat and American primitive. If I had been doing what I was doing a hundred years ago, and had been an eighty-five-year-old woman…well, it would have been art. As it was, it was a C-minus grade. I was never going to draw storyboards. The class was a complete waste of…but wait a second. Hey…who’s that cute Japanese chick over by the windows? She’s got a great sense of style. Shoulder-length black hair, parted on one side. Sometimes it would fall across one eye and she would brush it back with a saucy little gesture that said “I’m not subservient to anyone.” Cute plaid skirts and blouse combinations. Black leotards under the skirt. She probably likes jazz, I thought. Black leotards meant beatnik, intellectual, hip existential chicks. Just the kind I liked. When the teacher called roll I listened for her name. “Miss Fujikawa, Dorothy Fujikawa.” She answered “Here” in a very refined voice. Soft yet purposeful. Very elegant and very Audrey Hepburn. I think I fell in love at that instant. The reflected sunlight was streaming through the large bank of industrial windows to the north and she was at a drawing board closest to those windows. She was radiant in that light. She was lovely and I wanted her. And the fact that she was of a different race was even better. It added something exotic to my desire. Although she was a regular American girl from Dorsey High, third-generation American, grandparents from the old country—same story as your author’s—at that moment she was beautiful and exotic.

  After class, I torqued up my courage and went over to her.

  “Hi, Dorothy,” I blurted out from my surprisingly now-dry mouth.

  She looked up at me, eyes outlined in black, her full, sensuous lips discreetly reddened. “How do you know my name?” she melodically asked.

  “I listened for it,” I said, and smiled. “My name’s Ray.”