Light My Fire

by Ray Manzarek

  And I see this guy, in semi-silhouette, wearing cutoffs, without a shirt, weighing about 135 pounds. Thin, about six feet tall; rail-thin kind of guy with long hair. There was something strangely familiar about this watery apparition. Was this a manifestation of the ocean itself? Did our mother conjure up this solidity? Or was this a projection of my own Jungian inclinations toward liquidity and wholeness? I looked again, with more intensity, and who should emerge from the light, from behind the sun, into my field of vision, into my field of consciousness, but Jim Morrison!

  “Hey, Jim. Hey…hey, Morrison,” I called out. The figure stopped, looked in the direction of the call, and waved back.

  “Hey, Ray,” and he comes walking over to me, across the twenty-five to thirty feet of sand where I’m sitting off from the shore break. And there, standing in front of me, is the new Blue God, my buddy Jim, transformed. He looked great. He had lost all his baby plump. Dropped thirty pounds. Down from 165 to about 135. His hair had grown out in soft ringlets and he looked not unlike Michelangelo’s David. Even more like busts I have since seen of Alexander the Great.

  “What are you doing here, man?” I asked. “I thought you were going to New York City.”

  “Nah, I decided to stay here.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  He shifted his weight and played Paul Newman in Hud.

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said, slyly grinning.

  “Well, cool, man.” I was happy to see him. “What you been up to?”

  “Nothin’ much”—now he was James Dean in Giant—“tryin’ to stay out of trouble.”

  “Succeeding?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately”—he shape-shifted again—“yeah.” And he smiled that Steve McQueen in The Great Escape grin of his.

  We laughed, easy in each other’s company.

  “I thought you let your apartment go. Where you living now?” I inquired.

  “With Dennis Jacob.”

  “Dennis?!!” (A notorious UCLA Film School, Nietzschean madman. He had been editing his final thesis movie for five years, and had succeeded in cutting three hours of film down to fifteen minutes. Great lighting and camera angles, though. Very Carl Dreyer.) “You sleep in the same apartment with Dennis?!! How can you do it? Isn’t he like…I mean…a slob?”

  “I sleep up on the roof,” Jim said, allaying my fears for his contamination. “I only go inside to take my meals. He’s a pretty good cook.”

  “Christ, you’d never know it. A good cook, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Really.” He grinned again. “Well, kind of.” We laughed, looking out at the setting sun.

  And we laughed like soft, mad children.

  Smug in the woolly, cotton brains of infancy.

  The music and voiced are all around us.

  “What have you been doing, man?” I asked.

  He said, “Nothing. What are you doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure out what to do.”

  He said to me, “Working on anything?”

  “I’ve been thinking about some film scripts and like that,” I said. “What about you, you working on anything?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been writing some songs.”

  And there it was! Just like that! It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies. Both Jim’s and mine and, in a perhaps less significant way…even yours, too. “Writing some songs.” My psychic antennae twitched. This could be something serious. (By that time—the summer of ’65—the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had completely captured the American airwaves. It was known as the “British Invasion” and it was a juggernaut. An irresistible force. It included the Animals, the Dave Clark Five, the Who, the Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Them, and even the ridiculous Freddy and the Dreamers—the comic relief of the invasion. But riding above it all were the Beatles and the Stones. Good and evil made manifest. We were all in awe of their success, if not their artistic accomplishments. They were frontpage news! The Beatles tour of America hit the national headlines. They came to New York and the Los Angeled Times ran the headline “Beatles in U.S.A.” Pandemonium, concerts, riots, chicks, limos, press conferences, flashbulbs, high fashion, mucho dinero. Everything a young man could dream of. The Herald Examiner ran the banner “Beatles Take Back America!” A Hearst paper, always provocative. But it was incredible. Youth on the front page. The mod movement had seized the aesthetic consciousness of the entire country. And then the Stones came. Those darling bad boys entered the land of innocence and hysteria. And everything went bonkers again. “Stones in L.A.” ran the Times headline. And Jim and I and all the hipsters at UCLA saw these headlines…and drooled. Those guys were just like us. Early twenties, art students, longish hair, Jagger from the London School of Economics, for cri-sake—like me, for cri-sake—and they’re changing the world! I thought, I’d sure like to be doing that.)

  My mind did a cartwheel at the possibilities. “Songs, huh?” was all I could say because this was beginning to feel like something preordained. Something requiring only an act of will…and ability, of course. Ability always comes first. It’s the ultimate prerequisite. You must be able to do it! You can’t simply wish for fame and fortune, you must have some ability. And you must know it in yourself.

  So I said to him, “You know what, sing me a song, man. Let me hear what you’ve been writing.”

  “Aw, Ray. I don’t have much of a voice,” Jim shyly responded.

  “C’mon, Jim, of course you got a voice. Bob Dylan doesn’t have a voice and look where he is. You can do fine. Just go ahead and sing. Like at the Turkey Joint.”

  “That wasn’t the real me. I was drunk then,” he said. And he shifted shapes in the sand once again. But this time he was looking for himself. No more playacting. No more character adapting. And straight as an arrow. This was going to have to be the real Jim Morrison. And, Lord, he was shy.

  I continued encouraging him. “It’s just you and me here and I’m not gonna judge your singing voice. I just wanna hear your words and, you know, what you’ve got in your head.” And then softly, “Go ahead, Jim.”

  That seemed to work. Emboldened, he got up to his knees, faced me, and dug his hands into the sand. He came up with two handfuls and began to squeeze real tight. And the sand started streaming out between his fingers. I saw these rivulets of sand, this waterfall of sand coming out of his hands, like the yogic master Sai Baba, and he said, “Okay. Here’s one I have. It’s called ‘Moonlight Drive.’” And he closed his eyes and began to sing, sand still streaming, and I heard those words for the first time.

  Let’s swim to the moon.

  Let’s climb through the tide.

  Penetrate the evening that the

  city sleeps to hide.

  Let’s swim out tonight, love,

  It’s our turn to try.

  Parked beside

  the ocean on our…moonlight drive.

  I’m a fish in the ocean, I see the bait. It looks delicious.

  Let’s swim to the moon

  Let’s climb through the tide

  Surrender to the waiting worlds that lap

  against our side.

  Nothing left open and no time to decide

  We’ve stepped into a river on our…moonlight drive.

  Now I take the bait! It is delicious.

  Let’s swim to the moon

  Let’s climb through the tide

  You reach a hand to hold me but I

  Can’t be your guide

  I instantly fell in love with that line. It signifies a loss but also a need for individual strength. We must each do it on our own. “I can’t be your guide.”

  Easy to love you as I watch you glide

  Falling through wet forests on our…moonlight drive.

  I swallow the bait. And I’m hooked. Caught. Seduced. The words have both ensnared and enfolded me. I am secure and warmed by their art
istry. I surrender myself to their liquid images. There, on the beach, at the end point, the terminus of Western civilization; watching our great, glowing Father sink into the softness, the blueness of our Mother, I am happy. I know what I’m going to do with my life!

  Because as he’s singing, I’m hearing an entire recording taking place in my mind’s ear! Drums, bass, guitars, backup vocals; and I’m playing a funky organ over the whole thing. Jimmy Smith style, or maybe Ray Charles, or Charles Erland on Gerald Wilson’s “Blues for Yna Yna.” I’m punctuating the words and filling the spaces with imaginary riffs, blue and cool and mean and funky. The whole track is percolating and bubbling and I’m loving it. And Jim is floating like a blue angel over the top of the whole thing, singing his ass off. But every once in a while he tries to float away, carried off by the inspiration, into the blue canopy, off into the light; but I bring him back with a firm hand on his ankle and a blues line on the organ. And he’s grounded again, centered and singing. And, man, we are making great music together.

  He finishes with these dark and portentous lines.

  Come on, baby, gonna take a little ride

  Goin’ down by the ocean side.

  Get real close, get real tight.

  Baby, gonna drown tonight.

  Goin’ down, down, down.

  The chief ghost, the angel of death, brushed my shoulder at that instant, but I feared it not. I was in a rapture of creative imagining and nothing could dissuade me from my goal. This was just too good not to be. This will be. This will happen. Even if we have to do battle with death itself, I thought, my mind racing with possibilities. Besides, with death involved in the process, well, that only adds an urgent edge to the entire construct. And being the LSD ingestors, the acid eaters that we were, death was not foreign to us. The idea was not to be feared, nor was it to be embraced. It was simply a fact of life. The other end of life. The exit point. The terminus. And there we were, after all, at the terminus of the West. So why not “drown tonight.” It was dangerous, it was slightly obsessed, and it was pure Morrison.

  “Oh, man. I love it! This is incredible. Do you have anything else?” I was glowing. He felt my enthusiasm for his creation and breathed a great sigh of relief. The sand had run out but he was not rejected. His psyche began to swell, a smile crept across his face, and his shyness began to retreat. This was the beginning of Jim Morrison, rock star!

  The grin ate up his face. “Yeah, I’ve got a couple of other things,” he said. “One’s called ‘Summer’s Almost Gone.’ I’ve got another one called ‘My Eyes Have Seen You.’”

  “Whoa, ‘My Eyes Have Seen You’?” I whooped. “What a great title. Do that one for me!”

  “Okay.” His eyes were blazing. We were both on fire. “This one’s kind of fast.”

  And he began to sing, not in the booze voice he used at the Turkey Joint, but in a Chet Baker voice. You know who Chet Baker is: trumpet player, West Coast jazz, cool school, played with Gerry Mulligan, handsome young heartthrob of the early fifties. When he sang he had a very cool, soft, mellow voice. And here’s Morrison, sitting in front of me, singing like Chet Baker, but even better. A whispering kind of soft. A haunted voice. Jim’s real voice.

  My eyes have seen you

  My eyes have seen you

  My eyes have seen you

  Stand in your door

  And now he gets more intense. The whisper recedes.

  When we meet Inside you can

  Show me some more

  Show me some more

  Show me some more

  He was beating on his thighs for rhythmic accent on the last three lines. Hard, almost tribal. He was intense as shit. I’d never seen this personality in Jim Morrison before, and I loved it. “Show me some more” sounded vaguely like the Kinks but also Latin at the same time. I could do Latin jazz-rock behind it. It would work great. It had never been done before. Chet Baker cool into hard Latin rock. Oh, yes!

  He continued, dropping down to the haunted voice again.

  My eyes have seen you

  My eyes have seen you.

  My eyes have seen you.

  Turn and stare

  Fix your hair

  Move upstairs

  Move upstairs

  Move upstairs

  He was slapping and whacking in rhythm, and I swear he almost began to levitate. He was so into it. And so was I. I was deep inside the structure of the song, creating the bed track for his manic vocal.

  “Solo here,” I shouted, and began to sing a melody line of my own. Working my fingers over an imaginary keyboard. Latin, jazz, and rock and roll.

  “Go, Ray,” he enthused, keeping the rhythm on his thigh drums. I finished and brought it down to whisper level again. I knew what he was doing and where the song structure was going. Following him was very easy, very logical. It all made perfect sense. And he began the third stanza…

  My eyes have seen you

  My eyes have seen you

  My eyes have seen you.

  Free from disguise

  Gazing on a city under

  Television skies

  Television skies

  Television skies.

  And we were off and racing again. I was beating the rhythm now on the sand. The last stanza kept the intensity going. No haunted voice at all. Hard rock all the way out.

  My eyes have seen you!

  He almost shouted. Strong and clear. Heads turned.

  My eyes have seen you!

  We paid them no mind. We were in another world.

  My eyes have seen you!

  And my favorite lines of the song…

  Let them photograph your soul

  Memorize your alleys on an

  Endless roll

  Endless roll

  Endless roll

  “Keep it going,” I cried out. “Keep the rhythm going.” We slapped at our drums, feverishly, like pagan revelers around an ancient bonfire. “We’ll do a ride-out and solo and then a long fade.” I sang solo lines over the tribal drums. Jim drove me on. “Go, man! Get it,” he enthused. And I did. And he did. We rocked that song out over the beach and into the ocean. A long, gradual fade-out that took us into the blue space. And it was finished. Quiet, peaceful, spent.

  We both exhaled huge gulps of air. “Whew…that’s a great song, man.”

  “Yeah, I kind of like it.” And he grinned that sly Southern cat grin of his.

  I hit him on the arm. “Smart ass,” I said. “You gotta sing me some more. Sing me some more.” We both laughed.

  So he did “Summer’s Almost Gone,” and I found it sad and melancholic. A song of the end of innocence. Perhaps of the end of love. Perhaps of the end itself. I heard a bolero behind it. A Latin, close dancing–ballad rhythm. It would work perfectly with his lyrics of loss. It was in a blues structure with a bridge.

  Summer’s almost gone.

  Summer’s almost gone.

  Almost gone,

  Yeah, it’s almost gone.

  Where will we be

  When the summer’s gone?

  And now the bridge, with a Bach-like descending passage.

  Morning found us calmly unaware,

  Noon burned gold into our hair,

  At night we swam the laughing sea…

  There’s the liquid again. Our Mother, the ocean. We were definitely Venice boys. Of the beach. Of the ocean. Both of us.

  When summer’s gone, where will we be?

  Where will we be?

  Where will we be?

  Indeed, where will we be? We needed the intense energy and light of that high summer sun. We needed the warmth, the comfort, the security. We were two young men, college graduates, about to embark on a grand undertaking and we would need all the support we could muster.

  I told him, “Jim, these are the best songs I’ve ever heard in rock and roll. With your lyrics, what I can do playing the keyboards, playing behind that…man, we got to get a band together.” And just for fun—as a joke—not in any calculat
ed way, but out of sheer exuberance, I laughed, “We’re gonna make a million dollars.”

  And he looked at me and said, “Ray, that’s exactly what I had in mind.”

  “Cool, man. All right!”

  “But who’s going to sing?” He was shy again.

  “Well, shit. You are, man.” I said. “Not me. As of this moment I’m officially retiring ‘Screamin’ Ray Daniels.’ Hell, they’re your words. Who could do them better?”

  “I don’t have a real voice, ya know?”

  Time to prop up his ego again. “Your voice is fine, Jim. It’s just fine. And it’ll only get better with practice.” (And that was the truth. He was right on pitch; he didn’t waver. His tone was good and he had a strong sense of rhythm. He was in the pocket and his sound was right. He would be fine, as soon as he gained some chops and some much-needed confidence. And that would come. I wasn’t worried at all.)

  “You think so?”

  “I know so.” I paused. “But there is one problem.”

  He frowned. “What, what problem?” I loved the way he stretched out the word “whhaat” with a downward inflection. Kind of singsong. Kinda cute.

  “We need a name for the band. We’re not gonna call it Morrison and Manzarek, like a folk duo or something.”

  He laughed. “Or Jim and Ray.”

  “That’s cute,” I said. “They’d really take us seriously as Jim and Ray.”

  “Well, we could add ‘Two Guys from Venice,’” he joked.