by Ray Manzarek
“Have you found anything yet?” I asked him.
“Nope, still looking,” he replied.
“Well, if you don’t come with us, where are you going to stay?” Dorothy asked him.
“Felix and Phil Oleno have gotten a place together. I’m gonna move in with them.”
“Phil and Felix? What about his girlfriend, Mary?” I could feel the potential for disaster. “Is she gonna be there, too?”
“Naw, she threw him out.”
“It’s just gonna be the three of you?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” He was almost getting testy. “You don’t think we can take care of ourselves?”
I felt fate slap me across the face. I tried not to blink.
“I just don’t want you to…well, you know…get in any trouble or anything.”
He put his arm around my shoulder in a macho bonhomme-like way.
“Hey, Ray, don’t worry about a thang. I’ll be fine.”
He grinned his best Steve McQueen and I was relieved. Maybe it would be all right.
It wasn’t. Felix was a reprobate and Phil was brilliant but unstable, and the three of them together were incendiary. They drank too much. They indulged in strange chemical substances—Asthmador, belladonna, jimsonweed—just to see what they would do. If they had read about a crazy drug they wanted to try it. No heroin, however. Just weird shit, and the more arcane, the better. It was Jim’s “derangement of the senses” phase. He told me about seeing the green lady on belladonna. He started hitting the bottle with Felix. That sot started to impart the “secrets of the tribe” to him. And in a receptive, boozed-up state, Felix’s eye contact diatribes began to make sense to Jim…or should I say “Jimbo.” The jimsonweed had opened the trapdoor to Jim’s id, and out had come the character called Jimbo. A good-old boy. A racist. A fat man who liked the power of domination. A monster. A monster of skin. The creature who would eventually take Jim to Paris and kill him.
Unfortunately, I knew none of this at the time. I had never experienced alcoholism before. I didn’t know the symptoms or how it began. I didn’t know the causes of the disease or its warning signs. But it wasn’t just the alcohol, you see. Jim had the shaman’s crack. The split. The psychotic leaning into the fissure between ordinary reality and what could be called…madness. And the monster could escape through that crack. But so had Jim’s angels. And had Jim served a proper shaman’s apprenticeship, he could have controlled his demon. But, unfortunately, a proper shaman’s apprenticeship had not been served in the West for a thousand years.
And I didn’t know the warning signs. The signs of the fissure. I also didn’t know the secrets of the tribe. Or that they would matter. And I had no idea what derangement was possible under the influence of those weird drugs the unholy three were taking. I saw Jim intoxicated. Out of it. Not himself, but also not yet possessed. It was far too early in the game. The good Jim Morrison—the poet, the artist—was still too strong to be seduced by negativity. But Felix was sowing the seeds and Jimbo was peeking through the trapdoor, and the sleep of reason was going to produce nightmares. Waking nightmares, for me and everyone who loved James Douglas Morrison.
Dorothy and I took up residence at the beach house, the equipment was set up, and the perfecting of Doors’ songs began. It was very powerful to rehearse in the electric mode. It was the first time I was able to plug in with John and Robby and I loved it. And everybody loved the sunroom. Grins all around and great music. All the songs immediately responded to the sun’s prodding. We had become the chosen ones, infused with solar energy, warmth, and joy. And the music was smoking. We were hot…and we were rocking.
Jim was in great spirits. When he was with the Doors there was no other self but his real self. The real Jim Morrison—funny, poetic, charming, witty, intelligent. The artist. The guy all three of us loved. He didn’t “get down with his bad self” when he was around us. He was part of the circle. The charmed circle of the music. In that sunroom, on that beach, he was on the grail quest with the rest of us. We were seeking a cleaner, purer realm. A place of unbounded joy. The realm of enlightenment. The pure land. Buddhahood.
The rehearsals were going great. New songs were being created, and strange and interesting cover songs were being reworked in the collective Doors mind. Robby came in with Willie Dixon’s classic “Back Door Man” and we put it into the sifter and came out with what I consider to be one of the great Doors songs. Dorothy had a record of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera with a couple of cuts from Mahagonny at the end of the disc. It was an original cast recording from 1932. This was her kind of music. She was a twenties and thirties buff. Loved the fashion, the art, and the music of that rich and fecund time between the wars in Europe. We’d play the record on our breaks and marvel at the textural harmonies and orchestrations of Kurt Weill. It was so Weimar. Jim was especially taken with “The Alabama Song.” To hear Lotte Lenya and the girls sing in a haunted, broken English:
Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar.
Oh, don’t ask why,
For if we don’t find the next whiskey bar
I tell you we must die.
—Brecht and Weill
Well, it was just too delicious for a Southern Gothic boy. He was hooked on the song. He walked around humming it, and one day Dorothy said, “Why don’t you guys do ‘The Whiskey Bar’? As long as you’re doing other people’s material, you might as well do Brecht and Weill, too.”
It struck Jim like a flash.
“What a great idea, Dorothy!” He was pumped. “Let’s try it,” he said to us.
“Whoa, those are some complex harmonies going on in that song,” I protested. “I don’t know if I can figure them out.”
“We don’t have to do it exactly like the record,” Robby wisely said. “We’ll do our own version.”
“Exactly,” Dorothy said. “Make it a Doors song.”
I was unconvinced. But we went to work on it and, man, was I wrong. Robby divined the chord changes, I put on the “nightmare carnival organ,” John gave it a German oompah beat, Jim played Lotte Lenya, and we had it! Another Doors classic.
And now it was time for some gigs. It was time to audition at the local clubs and make a few bucks already. We had enough tunes for two sets. We were ready. Of course we didn’t have a bass player—we auditioned two guys and wound up sounding like a cross between the Stones and the Animals. It was not right with a fifth guy. Four Doors, that’s all. The cardinal points. The diamond.
So we hit the circuit…and were rejected by everyone. Once again—same as the demo. “Too weird…” “Can’t you play ‘Satisfaction’?” “Where’s your bass player?” “You’re not what we’re looking for.” “You stink!”
But at a club in the South Bay we found our bass player. The Fender Rhodes keyboard bass. It was sitting atop a Vox Continental Organ, and belonged to the group that was a permanent fixture at this “airport” lounge. It was all black and silver and looked great against the red and black of the Vox. I took one look at it and said, “This is it! This is what I’ve been looking for.” I was playing left-hand figures on the Vox but the sound was too muddy. The Vox was strictly a one-handed instrument; four notes in the upper register were the maximum. Add a left-hand bass line and the sound fell apart. Fuzz crap was what you got…the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted clean and crisp and hard-edged stiletto-like shrieks emanating from my red, black, and chrome Z-legged beauty. I wanted a sound to clean plaque off your teeth. I wanted it screaming like a banshee, and then soft and thick and mellow on our ballads. I didn’t want fuzz crap. So I didn’t use my left hand—well, only sparing little pokes at the lower end. I might as well have used my boogie-woogie Bach-trained left hand to pick my butt or piddle Little Ray for all the good it was doing on the Vox low notes. But when I saw that keyboard bass I knew I had found something for lefty to do other than something of a scatological nature. We didn’t get the gig but we got our bass.
We
went to a music equipment store the next day, Robby and I, to seek out our new friend. We found it in Hollywood, and it was fine…and it was $250. Way too much for a gigless band. What to do, what to do? All chip in? Hell, they were paying rent already. Dip into our savings account? Hell, that was for rent, too. Get the loan from Dorothy’s father? We already tried that. He turned us down, said the “twain didn’t meet.” We were fucked. There was our bass player and he was beyond us. We simply couldn’t afford him. I told Robby we’d just have to keep saving until we had the $250. He said, “That could be a long time.” He was right. Shit.
We reconvened at the beach house for a rehearsal about three days later. And, lo and behold, in walked Robby Krieger carrying a brand-new, fresh-in-its-box, Fender Rhodes Keyboard Bass! I was shocked, delirious, overjoyed…and then worried.
“You didn’t steal it, did you?” I asked him.
Robby smiled. “Yeah, I robbed it with my bottleneck. Threatened to carve a hole in the salesman’s neck unless he gave me a keyboard bass.”
We all laughed.
“No, really…,” I said.
“I asked my mom and dad for a loan and they wrote out a check to Wallach’s Music City. I got it yesterday.”
“It’s ours?!” I exclaimed.
“All ours,” Robby said.
“I love your mother and father!”
“Good thing they’re rich,” Densmore joked.
“Fuck you, John,” Jim said.
“I’m only kidding. Jesus, can’t you take a joke?”
“When I hear something funny, I’ll laugh,” Jim responded.
“Shut up, you guys,” I said, “we’ve got our bass player!”
I tore open the box. It was brown. The Fender Rhodes Keyboard Bass—brand new—was brown. I didn’t want brown, I wanted black and silver. Brown didn’t work with the Vox. Brown wasn’t sleek. Brown wasn’t dynamic. Brown wasn’t bitchin’. Black and silver was bitchin’.
“It’s brown,” I said to Robby.
“It’s all they had,” he replied.
“I wanted black and silver.”
“Those were all sold. Brown is all they had left.”
“Oh, sure, the good ones were all sold. I get the dregs.” I was looking the gift horse in the mouth…and complaining. What an asshole.
“Hey, you got it,” Robby said. “What am I supposed to do? They didn’t know when they were gonna get a new shipment.”
“You want him to take it back?” John chided.
“Fuck you, John,” Jim said again.
“No, no! It’s fine. I’ll keep it…I’ll take it!”
I wasn’t going to let this baby go. This was a godsend. Stu and Marilyn Krieger were the greatest.
“How do your mom and dad want me to pay them back? Something every month?” I asked Robby.
“My dad said just make ‘Light My Fire’ a hit and he’d forget about it.”
“No shit?!” I whooped. “Well, let’s play and see what this baby sounds like!”
I set it on the left hand side of the Vox, plugged it into a spare amp, hit a few notes—the damned thing sounded just like a bass!—and we started “Light My Fire.” And, man, it was good! John’s cool Latino beat sounded great against a big bottom bass line. The four-on-the-floor chorus had real balls to it now. And the Olé Coltrane solo section…well, it was hypnotic and ecstatic! The repetitive A minor to B minor triad pattern on a deep, gut-rumbling, chest-cavity-massaging, lower-two-chakras-stimulating bass instrument was incredible. Robby and I floated on that deep bottom, weaving lines of melody in, out, around, and through each other. John whacked away at his drum kit, keeping his impeccable time. Playing with even more fury and abandon now that he had a deep bass line to support him. We kicked that solo hard and Jim went into a rapture. He grabbed a maraca and started dancing around the sunroom, shaking that gourd on a stick for all it was worth. He was into it! We were all into it. We played our asses off. We had never sounded better. The keyboard bass was the missing ingredient. Now we were ready to challenge the Beatles. Now we were ready to take on the Stones. Now we were…the Doors!
About a week later, Jim came over by himself. Just to get some sun and laze around on the beach. But something was wrong. He seemed edgy, nervous. He was slightly disheveled with four or five days’ growth of beard. Maybe he’d been to the desert again with Felix and Phil. Dave Thompson told me a story of the three of them—he heard it from Phil—going out to the Sonora Desert to look for peyote. They got as far as the California/Arizona border, stopped at a bar for beer and tacos, in Needles or somewhere, and got the living shit kicked out of them by some Chicano bikers after Felix had made another one of his racist remarks. Probably insulting the brown-skinned low riders with a vicious “greasers” and putting a nasty WASP twist on the word “Mexicans.” So they got their white boys’ asses kicked from one end of the parking lot to the other. Felix later told me that one of the bikers was kicking him in the head as he lay on the tarmac. He said: “I thought, If this spic doesn’t stop kicking on my head I’m gonna fucking die right here in Needles.” And then he laughed. What an asshole. But he didn’t blink.
Jim had cowered near the car with Phil, so he only got a cut over his eye and a few body bruises. Phil came out okay but shaken. Felix didn’t look too good when I saw him. And neither did Jim when he came in that day.
“You okay, man?” I asked him.
“Yeah I’m…uhh, fine.” He wouldn’t look me in the eye. “You got anything to drink?”
“Some apple juice, couple of Cokes.”
“No, I mean a beer. I’m thirsty.”
Shit! That was Felix’s line. Jim didn’t talk that way. A beer was for fun. You didn’t drink a beer when you were thirsty, for cri-sake. You drank water when you were thirsty. Why was Jim talking that way? Had the psychic transference begun? Did Jim have a new mentor now? Was he going to follow Felix’s lead instead of mine? Were the secrets of the blood tribe stronger than the calling to universal brotherhood? Was the combination of weird drugs, booze, and “blood” going to prevail over the new multiracial tribe? Would the future not be attained because of the pull of the racial archetype? Pulling him back into the security and exclusivity of the ethnic tribe. Would he abandon the giant family in favor of a feast-of-friends blood tie?
“Why don’t you have some ice water, man?” I said. “I’ll get some ice cubes out of the freezer. Make you a big, cold glass.”
“Yeah, that could be good.” He looked about the room, distracted. I tried to make small talk…
“It sure is sounding great.” I fiddled in the freezer. “Your songs sound terrific. It’s definitely the way I heard them in my head…maybe even better,” I said with a laugh.
“They’re our songs, man. They’re not mine anymore. I just gave them their first shot. They belong to all of us now.”
He seemed better already. I handed him his ice water and he downed it quickly. He was thirsty.
“Oww, that burns,” he said. “My head hurts…I guess I drank it too fast.”
“No shit,” I answered.
He touched his temples and grimaced. He was hurting but he didn’t want to let on. Didn’t want to appear to be weak.
“Why don’t you sit down, man? Relax awhile,” I said.
“Yeah, I think I will. I’ll just relax…that’s why I came over, anyway.”
“You’re welcome anytime. You know that. Let me see if I’ve got a joint around here,” I said as I fumbled around in the bedroom. I couldn’t find anything but it gave him the opportunity to regain his strength as he sat looking out at the ocean.
“Why don’t you take a towel and go out on the beach? You could use some sun.”
His neck hairs bristled. He had a Marlon Brando hairline in the back that was now covered with what I thought to be a too-shaggy mane. But still those hairs bristled. He was testy, edgy. Too much revelry…and it showed.
Then I, like a fool, pushed it over the edge….
“You k
now, man, you really ought to get a haircut. Your hair looked so much better about three months ago. Why don’t you—”
And he exploded! He jumped out of the chair, threw the glass down—merciful God, it didn’t break—and stormed toward the door.
“Don’t ever tell me what to do, Ray!” he shouted at me. “Don’t ever do that again.”
He opened the Mondrian door and then turned and shot me an enraged look. A look unlike any I had ever seen in his eyes before.
“Nobody tells me what to do. Nobody!”
I couldn’t believe it. I was shocked, outraged. I thought, What are you hollering at me for? I’m on your side. I’m here to protect you, to see that your art flourishes, to help you stay out of trouble. And then a terrifying thought flashed through my mind for the first time: To help keep you from…killing yourself. And a sadness swept over me. A deep darkness with the green thing wrapping itself around my gut. An emptiness. A longing for the sun. He was shattering himself, psychically. He was imperceptibly destroying himself. He was, perhaps, going mad.
He glared at me again. “Understand, Ray?!”
I nodded. “Yeah, sure, Jim. Whatever you say, man.”
And he was gone. Slammed the door and was gone. I had just confronted “Jimbo” for the first time.
the sunset strip
Now began our assault on the citadel. We were going to Mecca. Into the eye of the hurricane. Into the very heart of the beast. We had an audition for a gig at a club on the Sunset Strip. The London Fog. Just down the street from the holy of holies…the Whiskey-a-Go-Go.
The Whiskey had all the big bands. One didn’t “audition” for the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. If you didn’t have a record contract you didn’t play there. If you weren’t on a national tour you didn’t play there. If you weren’t hot and racing up the charts, you didn’t play there. We couldn’t play there…yet. We had to start at the beginning, and that was the London Fog, a funky little club with very little clientele, but with “live” rock and roll! And we wanted to be on the Strip; and the London Fog, whatever its shortcomings, was on the Sunset Strip.