by Ray Manzarek
“You know what you do, Dorothy?” Felix asked.
“No, Felix…do about what?” she responded.
He looked about the room, checking for eavesdroppers. “The power!” he said.
“What about it?”
“Do you know how to get it?” he slurred, secure in his privacy.
“What power are you talking about, Felix?”
“The power to the whole thing, Dorothy.” And then his eyes lit up, savoring the thought. “The power to rule!”
“Why would I want to rule?” she asked.
“Because you want to! Because it’s there,” he blurted.
“What would I do with the power, Felix?”
He looked at her, quizzically….“That’s not the point, beautiful. It doesn’t matter what you do with it.” He sipped his scotch. “It only matters…whether or not…you have it, see?”
“I think I’m beginning to understand you,” she answered.
“Do you know how to get it”—more scotch—“in a situation like this party, for instance?” And before she could reply, he was off: “You look the other guy in the eye, straight into his eyes, hard.” Another hit of scotch. “You hold his gaze until he can’t take it anymore and has to look away. You make him blink!” And he killed the scotch. “Then you have him.” Dorothy said his chest swelled, as if he were reliving a moment of psychic assault and triumph. “Then you have the power. He’s yours!”
Dorothy looked him in the eye and said, “You know what, Felix? We call that kind of shit…mind games.”And she turned away from him and walked off into the party.
Later, Felix told me how much he admired Dorothy.
“She’s got a good mind, Ray, and”—he had danced with her that evening—“she dances like a fucking snake!”
I laughed. “Yeah, Felix. I like her, too.”
Now Jim’s satyr was a most appropriate hallucination for a Dionysus-like individual. Satyrs are the familiars, the attendees of Dionysus. Also of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry. They mill about Dionysus, waiting for the fun to begin. They wait for the maenads, those frenzied women who take part in the wild, orgiastic rites that accompany his worship. They wait for the bacchantes. They wait with Dionysus for the rock concert to begin. For the groupies to appear! And this particular faun came out of the ether because he saw a new Dionysus walking down the street in Venice Beach, California, and he knew the fun was going to start again. Jim Morrison was going to assume the mantle of Dionysus, as had Rimbaud and Nijinsky, Modigliani and Mayakovsky and Picasso, Brendan Behan and Jackson Pollock, Neil Cassady and Michael McClure and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and so many other hard-living artists. Dionysus. The shaken-loose god of the green powers, the resurrection, the rebirth, the fecundity of the planet. And the wildness! That was Jim’s calling. The wildness. Jim Morrison was the one who would dare to go further than anyone I have ever known. A man who knew no bounds, acknowledged no restraints, no rules, no laws. Only joy! Complete, unfettered, unbounded joy. He spoke of the powers of the earth and the delights of the earth and he had no fear in embracing the wild child in himself.
Wild child, full of grace,
Savior of the human race,
Your cool face.
Jim was able to dive into himself and find the fauve, the wild beast, and actually become that free-spirited animal. That Dionysian wild man. He had the courage to embrace that ancient god and enter into a partnership with the bearer of the grapes, the passionate one. Jim had the courage, and very few do. And that embrace was not evil, was not harmful to others, and was certainly not the devil. It was joy!
The new Dionysus was here, and the old cycles and the old gods were about to spin the wheel of destiny again; and the satyr—running down the street—was waving to his new master, just to let him know that he was ready for action. And Jim had been to a liquor store, the modern temple of Bacchus, to buy beer and wine, the libations of the gods. And perhaps the faun saw him there. Looking on from some Olympian vantage point and detecting the ancient stirrings once again, the satyr came back to partake of the rituals. Feeling the vibrations in the ether, this old-time party animal was back for some real excitement, denied him on this continent since the days of Salem and The House of the Seven Gables. And here was Jim Morrison, the new Dionysus/Bacchus, ready to lead the new orgy. And it was called…rock and roll!
forming the doors
Now it’s time to put a rock and roll band together. We’ve got the lead singer and the keyboard player…we’ve got the patroness…what we don’t have is the drummer and the guitar player. Someone’s got to be the skin whacker/timekeeper and some young genius has to play the role of phallic snake-sliding rib-tickling maestro/fret master. Someone has to be the jungle and someone has to be the gliding angel. Someone has to be Thumper and someone has to be Les Paul/Chuck Berry by way of Charlie Christian. The guitar player will be a rocker who knows jazz. And the drummer will be a jazzer who can rock. These were my prerequisites. This is what I had to have to make the music I heard in my head.
If Jim and I were going to realize the dream of the Doors, we needed two guys of exceptional abilities. If we were going to create this Doors’ something…out of nothing but our collective will and imagination, we needed a pair of psychedelic warriors. A brace of fevered, maniacal souls who could plug their spinal column electrical cords into our collective kundalini and not feel they were being strapped into the electric chair at Sing Sing University with Manzarek and Morrison flipping psychic overload switches to full fry! We needed two men of courage and vision. Two adventurers in the void. Two brave and hearty sailors of the psychological sea of dread to accompany us on our mad journey into the unknown.
And they had to play their asses off. They had to have an expertise on their instruments. They had to have studied and logged their too many hours of “practice, practice, practice.” I didn’t want anybody who wanted to be in a rock band or some egomaniacal nut-butters who wanted to be “rock stars.” I wanted musicians who loved music; who wanted to play music more than they wanted to fuck. I wanted that same passion and commitment to art that Jim and I were bringing to the table…and I wanted them to be heads.
“We need a bass player, too, Ray,” Jim said.
“Yeah, I know. But that’s the easiest part of it. I want Max Roach on drums and Jim Hall on guitar. That’s the hard part.”
“We’ll find ’em. I can feel it,” he presciently said.
“They’ve got to play like jazz cats and then smash your face with hard-core rock.” I was off in my aural fantasy. “I hear the keyboard and guitar interweaving like Escher’s Möbius strip. Like Bach but with a rock foundation, ya know? Hard and loud.”
Jim smiled. “Bach rock! I like the sound of that.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And I want it to be dark and moody. Real misterioso.” I heard the terror in my head. “But then I want it to explode into the light! I want the sun to shine into the dark corners.”
“The dark corners of the mind,” Jim added. “We have to take the people inside themselves. Those places they’re afraid to go into.”
I nodded in agreement. “Those places they have to go into…”
He completed my thought for me: “…if they’re ever going to be whole.”
The angel passed over us again. Silence. What was there to say after that? Jim lit a joint and we passed it back and forth. We were high and we were Jungian. And we needed two more players to complete the diamond. We had the polar axis. We had the line between north and south, between heaven and hell, between good and evil. We had the opposing inclinations of Dionysus and Apollo. My Apollonian sense of order, fitness, propriety, and harmony as opposed to—or, more accurately, balancing—Jim’s wild-man ways. But those two points, when connected, only resulted in a straight line. We had no breadth. We needed the east-west axis to be complete. We need two more suns to occupy all the cardinal points of the compass. North-south-east-west. Height, width, breadth, depth. Red, white, y
ellow, blue, according to the Hopi. The four cardinal points. And when the dots were connected, the form was a diamond.
I found the other two burning men, our other two suns, in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation class, held in the fall of 1965. Transcendental Meditation. It would become all the rage by 1968, when the Beatles went to India to study with the Maharishi in the foothills of the Himalayas. But for me, for now, it was an attempt at a natural high. I knew I couldn’t continue taking LSD any longer. I had been to hell on the substance. Of course, I saw heaven first. And I grasped after heaven. I wanted heaven. I wanted to be in that state of blissful, energy-infused, intoxicated oneness. I wanted to see the energy waves on the plants and trees and flowers, the Aztec glyphs on the walls of our Fraser apartment; I wanted to be able to feel the tactility of the sunlight, to feel the gelatinous viscosity of the ocean’s water, to be able to step in and out of the energy flow of the universe at will. And I wanted it. All the time! And when I took LSD again, after seeing and being the oneness of all life, I wanted to feel exactly that way again. That’s why I was taking the soma. It made me feel better than anything I had ever taken before. I wanted to feel that way again. In the light. At one with the light. I wanted. I wanted to be golden again.
And the LSD said, “Ha-ha-ha! You’re telling me what you want? You grasping, greedy little pissant! You may know heaven…but you don’t know hell, boy. Now you’re gonna find out the whole truth.”
“I want to go to heaven,” I whined. “I want bliss and beauty and peace and love.”
“Fuck you. You want? You haven’t learned nonattachment? You’re still grasping? Go to hell, Ray.”
And that’s exactly where I went. Into a whirlpool of sinking darkness. Into total ego isolation. Into a cold, frozen place of abject terror! Complete and total terror. The Frankenstein monster coming after me in my childhood nightmares, unstoppable, inexorable, with no other thought than to crush me to death with blind killing efficiency while I screamed in terror. This recurring dream of my baby youth years was nothing compared to the terror of LSD. Total panic! Blind, senseless fear. The worst possible panic attack. And all because of grasping and wanting and demanding. This young man’s heart was in the right place, he wanted joy and love and peace for all mankind. He had become a true Christian, a lover, for the first time in his life. A mystery Christian. A universalist. But not a Buddha. The web of maya had closed over him again, but this time on the deepest psychological level, at the root core of his existence, at the bottom of his beliefs.
I could not surrender my ego. I could not die to myself. And yet that was the only door into what I so desperately wanted. The surrendering of all desire was the only way I could attain what I desired. A Zen koan! I was living a fucking Zen koan and I was trapped in hell. I could not crack through the shell of my armor, my ego. I was closed, knotted, encased inside myself…and I was sinking. I was being sucked down in a whirlpool of fear and panic. To nowhere. To a place where I would be locked out of the beautiful. To a state of existence where I would not be a part of the divine energy, of life, of light and delight. A place of total isolation. The place called me! And it was hell. It was fearful and it was the absence of God. It wasn’t the hellfires. It was the ice. It was the eternal damnation of me. The ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno. And then I knew…hell is ME!
After a night of terror, a dark night of the soul, the chemical wore off and I came back to ordinary reality…shattered! The terror had subsided, the panic attack was over, but this novitiate was definitely the worse for wear. I began a psychologically imperative study of philosophy, religion, and mystical thought. I did what Joseph Campbell did, I embarked on the search for self in the literature and mythology of the world. And I was led to India. To yoga and to meditation.
I had discussed my acid bummers with Dick Bock, the head of World Pacific Records. He had signed Rick and the Ravens to Aura Records, the rock subsidiary of World Pacific. I was part of the package as the blues shouter. We cut two or three singles and I became friendly with Dick. He was an older, wiser man and the visionary who had brought the cool jazz West Coast sound to America. He had recorded, among others, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Chico Hamilton, Shelly Manne, and Ravi Shankar. What a lineup! And now Screaming Ray? Well, I was floored. And he had also recorded the Maharishi. A two-disc set of lectures. He obviously had an Eastern bent and I felt I could confide in him. I told him of my profound distress and he gave me the Maharishi’s discs. “Listen to what this man is saying, Ray. He just may be what you’re looking for,” he said to me. What I heard was a jolly Indian man with a giggle in his voice talking about man, God, and existence. I went back to Dick Bock and said, “He’s saying all the right things but what do I do about my dread?” I was living every day with the remnants of my terror and I wanted it to stop. I was, however, doing a good job of hiding it from everyone. No one knew, except for Dorothy. She could sense my psychic distress. And Dick told me of a class starting up in Los Angeles in which the Maharishi’s type of mantra yoga would be passed on to novitiates and seekers of the way. A class in meditation. Transcendental Meditation.
“That’s it,” I exclaimed. “That’s what I need, meditation.” And Dorothy and I arrived in Pacific Palisades one evening at the home of the Keith Wallace family. They were Indiophiles and had opened their house to the Transcendental Meditation group. A series of six lectures was to be given by Jerry Jarvis, the director of T.M. West, and then a mantra would be imparted to you. Okay, I’ll listen…fire away.
And the lectures were not unlike the records Dick Bock gave me, minus the giggle and the Indian charm and lilt to the English language. Jarvis spoke of life and energy and consciousness and levels of thought and the web of maya and the goal of all human existence…cosmic consciousness. It was both eminently logical and deliciously mystical. The two sides of the coin of life. The yin and the yang. The duality acknowledged. The attempt would be to rectify the split in the psyche through meditation. To create the integrated personality through mantra repetition. Through inaudible sound…through thought waves. To bring us to a state of Jungian wholeness through the manipulation of our own thought waves by repeating a Sanskrit word over and over in our minds. Focusing, pointedly, on our mantra and saying it over and over in our minds twice a day for twenty minutes, eyes closed, seated and relaxed. And, eventually, the alienation of Western man from nature would be resolved. Id, ego, and superego would merge into oneness. The unintegrated personality would merge its disparate parts into oneness. The shattered schizophrenic—a very American malady—would merge, integrate, and heal himself into oneness. That’s what he was selling. And I was buying. I definitely wanted to try it. Wouldn’t you?
Now here’s the serendipity of the story. Guess who is also in attendance at the Wallace house in the Palisades. John Densmore and Robby Krieger! Doors’ guitarist-to-be, Robert Allen Krieger, and Doors’ drummer-to-be, John Paul Densmore. But they don’t know it. They don’t know about a rock band called the Doors and a keyboard player named Ray Manzarek and a poet-singer named Jim Morrison. All they know is that they are looking for something to change their lives. They want something else, something different.
We need someone or something new
Something else to get us through
Amongst a group of approximately twenty people—assorted hippies, older women (always fools for a guru), and a few men in the midst of a midlife crisis—were what I was looking for. The Maharishi’s meditation is a discipline that may not give you what you want—but will, more than likely, give you just what you need. And the three of us needed each other. The Doors needed the other Doors. And we found each other in India.