by Ray Manzarek
Away, away, away, away, away
in India
Someone had pointed out John Densmore to me and mentioned in an off-the-cuff way that he was a drummer. This was after the fourth lecture, and Jerry was carrying on in much detail about the void, and our relationship to it, and the pure energy. All the marvelous things that Indian mysticism and Eastern spirituality and Zen Buddhism and LSD, peyote, and mescaline open up to you. And I’m nodding my head yes, yes, yes. I agree, that’s what I saw. Then he asked for questions and my hand shot up.
“What about the bummers?” I blurted out. “What about the terror, the stark terror? What about the dark night of the soul?” The collective giggled at my too-flowery imagery. I continued, determined to make a fool of myself…and to get some answers.
“What about LSD and its ability to induce the horrors? What is that fear? Where does it come from? What about the terror that exists inside of me; the absolute, sheer terror of being alive!” I was ranting. The class loved it. I even got a light sprinkle of applause amid the smirks and giggles. I was almost going to take a bow but I wasn’t doing it to be entertaining, for cri-sake. This was the real shit. This was why I was here in the first place.
And Jarvis was cool. He said to wait until we received our mantra. “Practice the meditation and then we’ll talk about your questions. Then you’ll begin to understand. Once you’ve tried it for yourself.”
And I replied with the classic impetuous-youth line: “I can’t wait until then. I want to know now!”
Everyone laughed at that one…and the class was over for the evening. “Two more lectures and then your mantra, Ray,” Jerry said as he pocketed his papers from the lectern. We all milled about and I was pumped. I spotted John and went up to him, Dorothy at my side.
“Hey, man, I hear you’re a drummer,” I said to him.
“Yeah…I am. How’d you know?”
“I’m psychic.” I grinned.
“You’re a bullshitter, too.” He grinned back.
“You’re right about that,” Dorothy said. Always telling the truth. Did she always have to be so damned truthful? We all laughed.
“Well, maybe I am and maybe I just like a good story,” I said, grinning back. “But here’s what’s happening…I’m putting a rock and roll band together. My buddy Jim Morrison is a poet and a singer. I’m the keyboard player”—I extended my hand—“Ray Manzarek.”
“John Densmore.” We shook hands.
“I’m Dorothy Fujikawa,” said my baby. “I’m the patroness.” She grinned.
“The what?” said John.
“Uhh…never mind about that,” I blurted again. Damned chick and her truths. “We could use a good drummer.”
“What’s the music like?” he asked.
“I wanna do poetry and rock. Like the beatniks, ya know? Like poetry and jazz.” John’s eyes began to light up. “I hear a jazz-based thing…but in rock,” I said.
“Jazz!” he said. “Are you into Coltrane?”
“I love Coltrane. McCoy Tyner is my idol.”
“I worship Elvin Jones,” he said. “He is the greatest drummer on the planet.”
“That’s for sure,” I agreed.
“What about Miles?” he asked.
“Miles…I’m Bill Evans!”
“Man, Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb…that side stick on four, I love that, it’s sooo cool.”
I thought to myself, Great! Here’s a guy who knows his jazz. Yes!
To John I said, “That’s what I want to do with the band, bring in that kind of stuff. Man, you can do anything in rock today!”
“Cool,” he said. “‘Cause I’m not good enough to be a real jazz drummer.”
“Hell, I’m not good enough to be a real jazz piano player.” We laughed at our inadequacies. “I just love the stuff. If we could incorporate that into rock and roll…”
“Man, no one’s doing that!” he jumped in.
“My buddy Jim has these great lyrics and they’re very poetic. We could do all kinds of hip stuff around them.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said.
And we had our drummer! Just like that. John Densmore. A fop, a jazzer, and a would-be artiste. Perfect!
“We need a good…no…a great guitarist, too,” I said.
And here’s how the fates work. Sometimes Dame Fortune giveth and sometimes she taketh away. That night she was in a most charitable, giving mood.
John pointed to a guy at the other end of the room talking to the Wallace kid.
“See that guy with the frizzy hair?” he said. “He’s a guitarist. Plays great bottleneck. Name’s Robby Krieger.”
I said, “…all right!” and the diamond was soon to be complete. Robby Krieger…John Densmore…Ray Manzarek…Jim Morrison.
However, before we actually formed the magic circle, before Robby joined the band, I plugged John into the remnants of Rick and the Ravens for a demo record session. Along with their high school buddies Vince Thomas, Pat Stonier, and Roland Biscailuz, Rick and the Ravens had rocked the entire South Bay, garnered a record deal, cut a couple of singles with yours truly, Screaming Ray Daniels, the “Bearded Blues Shouter,” on vocals…and were now going nowhere. Nothing was happening. No record sales, no gigs. Dissent descended on the Ravens. Their deal with Dick Bock’s Aura Records was coming to a close and the band had broken up. They had one more single to cut…and no band. So Jim and John and I jumped in. We talked Dick Bock into letting us cut a demo record of six Doors’ songs instead of Rick and the Ravens’ last single.
Of course nothing happened with the demo…Robby hadn’t come aboard yet. The circle wasn’t complete. The diamond hadn’t been formed. The power hadn’t manifested itself in reality so how could the demo succeed? My brothers decided to give up the hunt and leave the rock world behind. It was the best decision for them. Everything was going nowhere. Why beat your head against the wall of rejection? They bade adieu to Rick and the Ravens, the Doors, and the whole damned frustrating thing. Within two weeks Robby was in.
We finally assembled on an autumn afternoon at Hank Olguin’s house, behind the Greyhound bus terminal in Santa Monica, about four blocks from the Pacific Ocean. The weather was California perfect. Sun everywhere, high seventies, humidity in the low twenties, just enough of a cooling breeze off the ocean to keep it sweet and mild. Everything was golden. And we were all ready for the alchemical transformation. We were going to leap into the alembic, and it was labeled the Doors.
Jim and I arrived in the Navy Chevy. We had an amp and a microphone for him to sing through. I was going to play Hank’s acoustic piano. And, wouldn’t you know it, it was a big old carved-wood upright. Almost my country German Golem again. I felt good about that, secure. We were going to leap into the void and I was back on Bell Avenue in Chicago with my big protector machine. Full circle. Robby arrived in his VW van, also gray, also German. He hauled in his Fender amp and a Gibson guitar case. I introduced him to Jim. They looked into each other’s eyes, shook hands…and smiled. The psychic bond was established right then and right there. These two guys were going to hit it off. It felt good…the three of us.
And then up pulled a little Singer four-door English automobile, stuffed with drum cases, cymbals, hardware, and John Densmore. It was like a clown car at the circus. How could such a little car contain so much equipment? Well, what it was, was shrewd packing, developed to an expertise over hundreds of gigs. John had played all over L.A. From jazz gigs in Watts, where he was the only honky on the date, to bar mitzvahs in the Valley, where he was the only goy in the entire place. He played everywhere, including lead snare drummer in his University High School marching band. He was schooled and he was versatile. And he was funny. Best of all, he loved jazz.
He and Robby had been together in a band called—and dig this—the Psychedelic Rangers!
Robby was the brainy type. Well-formed cranium, Albert Einstein hair, glasses or contacts depending on the occasion, loose-fitting surfer threads, and a laconi
c manner. And something behind the eyes that said he was willing to risk everything. Willing to go all the way. Ready to take a chance on anything. Jim loved that about him.
Robby was cool from the git-go. He was well off—from Pacific Palisades—nice home, overbearing father, and a sweetheart of a mother. He certainly shared the overbearing father part with Jim. Hell, that’s where Jim’s anti-authoritarian bent came from. Rebellion against the father figure. Strictly Freudian. Robby and his nonidentical twin brother, Ron, had been busted for pot at Pali High and sent off by Stu Krieger to the Menlo Park Military Academy for a year or so. “Teach those damn kids some discipline.” Jim could identify. Robby put in a year or two at UCLA and changed majors six times. He was just drifting. Until today. Now he could begin.
We got everything set up in Hank’s living room and it was time to play. Robby tuned his too-cool black Gibson to the piano, Jim said, “Yeah, yeah!” into the mic and through the amp, John went rat-a-tat-tat-splash-whack on his drums, and I tickled the ivories with a riff of Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” We were ready.
“Let’s do ‘Moonlight Drive,’” I said.
“Groovy,” said Jim.
“How does it go?” asked Robby.
“I’ll show you the changes,” I said. “It’s in G.”
“Wait,” said Jim. “Before we get into chord changes and that kind of stuff…we need some ammunition.” And he pulled out a bomber. Like the one in his student movie. Robby’s eyes sparkled but John looked apprehensive. Jim lit it, took a toke, and passed it to me; I did the same and passed it to Robby, who sucked on it, filled his lungs with the sweet smoke, and passed it to John. John held it, looked at it, hesitated, and finally conquered his fears. You could almost hear his conscience say, “Come on, don’t be a chicken now. Not in front of these guys. What the hell, man. Go for it!” And he did. He stuck that bomber in his maw, pulled on it, and held the firestorm in his lungs. Then he coughed. A big one. The smoke came roaring out but the damage had already been done. John smiled a goofy, stoned smile and said, “That’s some good shit.” A great collective sigh hit the rest of us. We were all stoned. John, Robby, Jim, and Ray. The Doors. High together for the first time. In the late-autumn light of Southern California.
Jim said, “Groovy.”
As we finished the joint I showed Robby the chord changes to “Moonlight Drive.” They were easy. Mostly G with a few Cs and Ds here and there and a solo in the middle. Robby digested the form in an instant. Another high IQ. And then a “Eureka” lightbulb went illuminati in his brain pan.
“I got an idea,” Robby said. “See if you think this works.”
He reached into his guitar case, in the little compartment in the neck, and pulled out a weapon! A fucking broken bottle. A mean and evil piece of jagged glass. The neck of a greenish bottle that was all sharp and broken off and could cut a hole in your neck with one quick thrust.
“What the fuck is that?” I shouted. “Is that for cutting someone’s face off?” I was incredulous. What would Robby need a weapon for? What kind of gigs did he play that he needed a throat slasher in his guitar case? In what kind of neighborhoods?
He laughed. “No, man, it’s a bottleneck.”
“I’m hip, it’s a bottleneck. But what do you need it for? Where the hell do you go that you need to slash at people with that thing?”
He thought that was hysterical. “Ray…I don’t slash at people with this.”
“Then what do you do with that monster?” I asked.
“This,” he said as he slipped the bottleneck onto the pinkie of his left hand. “This is what you do with a bottleneck.” And he put the glass weapon ever so gently against the strings of his guitar, plucked a note, and moved the weapon up and down the fretboard as he did a tremolo with his wrist. And, oo-wee, what a sound! Dark and spooky. A banshee wail. The sound of ectoplasm, the cry of a death bird, the moan of things that go bump in the night. I was amazed. It was so eerie, so unearthly. I’d never heard anything like it before.
And Morrison! Well…he went over the top. Kundalini completely uncoiled and raced up his spine. He shivered and jumped to his feet. Or was he lifted by the sound? He said, “Holy shit, Robby, that’s the greatest sound I’ve ever heard on a guitar.”
Robby did some extra-fancy spook slides and it was all Jim could do to remain attached to the earth. He was about to start floating again. I had to hold his psyche down, except mine was threatening to disengage from my spinal column, too. Robby’s guitar was making our kundalini energy race up and down our bone ladders, and we were tingling and shivering with delight.
“I want that sound on every song,” Jim blurted. “I love that sound!”
Robby grinned, pleased with the reaction he had garnered from these “intellectual” college graduates.
“Every song?” he asked.
I jumped in, the voice of reason. “Well, maybe not every song…but on a lot of ’em. Okay?”
“Fine with me,” said Robby. “How about on ‘Moonlight Drive’?”
“Let’s do it!” Jim enthused.
And John did his rat-a-tat burst of nervous energy on the drums. We all took our positions. Jim said “Yeah” into the mic, Robby played a G chord, and I counted it off: 1…2…1-2-3-4. And it began. Our first groove. Our first time. And, man, we were on it! We drove that car down Pacific Coast Highway and it was night and the moon was full and we were going for a swim in the Pacific Ocean with our best girl…and maybe we were going to drown tonight. Or maybe we were going down on each other tonight. It was the Morrison triumvirate of love, death, and travel. And we were all there. All four of us were in the same space at the same time. An impossibility in physics—two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But in the holographic universe, on the psychic plane, in the energy…all four of us were in one place. And that place was called “Moonlight Drive.”
We were inside the song. And we were inside each other. We had given ourselves over to the rhythm, the chord changes, and the words. We had let go of our individual egos and surrendered to one another in the music. Jim and Ray and John and Robby no longer existed. There was only the music. The diamond was formed and it was clear and hard and luminous. The facets glistened in the sonic spectrum like the ragged edges of Robby’s bottleneck. We caught the light and we held it. We held it in our heart chakras and it warmed us like sex. The light filled that room and we rode it and we were high on it and we were one with it. We created it and we were one.
We were the Doors.
I’d never felt anything like it before. It was perfect synchronicity. Perfect harmony. Four spirits locked in a love embrace inside the insistent, propelling rhythm. John’s drums were carrying us on a trip into the primitive. We were riding his tom-toms into the primeval world. Into the realm of basic instincts. And Robby’s bottleneck guitar was snake-weaving us into the fourth dimension, into a higher, expanded state of consciousness. We had gone primordial and cosmic at the same time. And, man, it was fine!
When the song finally ended, a hush fell over the room. An angel passed over again as we collected our thoughts. I was the first to speak.
“Man,” I said, shaking my head. “I have played music all my life…but I never understood music until right now. You guys are amazing.”
Murmurs and a laugh or two, nervous and delighted chatter; youthful exuberance poured out. Jim smiled his lazy-boy, Robby tugged at his corkscrew hair, John bounced on his drum stool, shifting his high-pockets butt from left to right to up to down and said, “That was very groovy. I like that tune.”
“I love the bottleneck,” said Jim.
“Gallo wine bottle,” said Robby. “They’re the best for slide.”
I was in the future….“We’re going all the way with this, I can feel it.”
“Where?” Jim teased. “In your sphincter?”
John and Robby laughed.
“In my bone marrow, man,” I shot back. “And bone marrow doesn’t lie…can’t…that’s w
hy it’s marrow.”
Jim laughed. John grinned and snorted. Robby smiled and slid his Gallo glass up and down his Gibson’s neck, punctuating my pun like a Vegas pit musician.
“We’ve got it,” I continued. “Like the sax player in On the Road.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jim.
I was off and running….“You know the section. Kerouac walks into this bar in San Francisco. A quartet is playing and the sax player is wailing. The place is packed and Sal Paradise says, more or less, ‘He had it!’ And everyone in the joint knew he had it. And he rode it and bobbed and weaved and honked and squealed it out over the whole crowd. And they called back to him, “Do it! Go! Get it, man!” And he did. He was sweating and squatting and leaning into it and pouring it out over the audience and they were taking it all in, every ounce of it. I’m telling you, he had it!’”
I stopped to catch my breath. “And you know what?…I always wondered what it was. What did the sax player have? What did Kerouac mean, ‘he had it’? What? I never knew what it was…until now!” I looked at the three of them, trying to impart some of the profound depth of what I felt, some of my revelation, and repeated, “…until now!”
Jim smiled. “An epiphany, huh, Ray?”
“Now I know what it is.” I nodded. Then I laughed, partly at my own pretentiousness and partly from my delight. “And we’ve got it!”
And they all laughed. Alive, young, and excited. We were the Doors and we were one.
And we had it!
We played a few more tunes: “Summer’s Almost Gone,” “End of the Night,” “My Eyes Have Seen You.” They were all that they were supposed to be. Doors’ music. Some fell right into place, others needed more work. But we were there. We were at the crossroads and there was only one possible direction for us to choose. Straight ahead. We threw ourselves into the arms of destiny and she embraced us. She enfolded us under her angel wings and said, “I’ll protect you.”
We formed a bond that afternoon. A bond that would last until Jim went to Paris. We formed a magic circle. A circle of art and love and energy. A circle of power based on creativity and the regenerative forces of the earth. A circle of inspiration and trust in each other. A circle of trust in the universal energy. Trust in the karmic principle of “as you sow, so shall you reap.” The music was hot and hard rock; and we were ready to sow our seed into the belly of the American psyche. We were ready for love. We were ready to give the young people of America, the hip people of America—because it had nothing to do with age, and everything to do with consciousness—something they had never heard before. Psychedelic music by a group called the Doors!