by Ray Manzarek
And the rest of the song played itself out as we recorded it. The fourth verse and chorus came on the speakers and Jim was singing for all he was worth. We were playing like men possessed and it was great. A great song and a fiery performance. Robby Krieger’s first composition was brilliant…but Paul had cut the guts out of it. I thought there was going to be delicate surgery but instead there was disembowelment with a dull blade.
Robby was the first to speak. “I hate it,” he said.
“I hate it, too,” I joined. “You’ve cut the solos. That’s the whole point of the song.”
John said, “It’s not that bad. I can live with it.”
Jim was mute, in shock, I suppose. Paul began his rationale.
“You never hear solos on AM radio. Only short ones, no more than eight bars. Listen to any Beatles tune, short and cute solos.”
John interrupted. “George Harrison doesn’t even play them. Eric Clapton does.”
Jim looked at John. “How do you know that? The Beatles invite you to one of their sessions or something?”
“I read it in an English music magazine,” John said. “Why would they lie?”
Jim could only snort, “You ought to try reading a book, instead.”
Paul continued, “Just think of it as a song. It’s a great song with a quick little break in the middle.”
“Like a Beatles song,” said Robby, now beginning to warm to the idea.
“Exactly,” said Paul. “A hit single. A good melody, you can dance to it, regular verse-chorus, verse-chorus structure, a little instrumental break in the middle, and then repeat verse-chorus one and two. Man, I’m telling you, they’ll play it on the radio.”
I was even beginning to see the logic of the edit.
“If I didn’t know the solos were there, I’d think it was just a groovy new tune,” I said. “Especially the part about ‘Our love becomes a funeral pyre.’ Being seventeen in Cleveland, I’d love that part. Ohh…spooky!”
Jim jumped in. “And if I dug the single on the radio and went out and bought the album and played ‘Light My Fire’…I’d get a whole new trip! A real bonus. Solos, in the middle of the song where there weren’t any solos before! It would be like magic.”
“Exactly,” exclaimed Rothchild.
“There’d be the short version on the radio…and the long version on the LP,” said Robby, almost convinced. “But I still hate it.” He laughed.
“Of course you hate it,” Paul said. “I cut your solo. But does it sound like a hit single?”
Robby grinned. “Man, it sounded like a hit single the day I wrote it.”
That was the arrogance of the Doors in action. And Robby, for all his shyness and quietude and seeming humility, was really an arrogant and opinionated S.O.B. He still is, God bless him.
“Sounds like a radio song to me,” John said.
“It’s gonna be a famous radio song,” Jim said. “I predict a monster hit.”
“Whoa, man, how big?” I asked.
“I’m not saying for sure, Ray. But I think…” And then he felt the air in a mock mystic manner as if he were the Great Kreskin. He was goofing in the ether. Then his eyes lit up. “Maybe…number one!”
We all whooped. “The Amazing Kreskin has spoken,” I said, doing my best Ed McMahon imitation. “It will be number one!” Rothchild was ecstatic. His brutal butcher cut had worked. We were all yelping and hollering.
“Play it again, Bruce,” Robby said.
“One more time,” said John, imitating Count Basie on “April in Paris.”
And on it came, on those magnificent speakers, in that cocoon of a studio. The butterfly was born…and it was rocking. The edit came up and Robby and I were hit in the gut by a low blow, but we smiled through it. The damned slashing was going to get us some radio airplay. Paul had done it.
“When does it go to number one?” John yelled at Jim.
“It had better be by the summer, John…or we’re fucked,” Jim said.
“We’re not gonna be fucked, we’re the Doors!” Robby shouted over the pumping music.
“Fuckin’ A! Robby’s right,” I said. “Light My Fire” hit the last chorus and Jim was blaring at us over the speakers. “We’re going all the way. I knew it from the beginning.” I hit Jim lovingly on the arm. “I knew it when you first sang me those songs on the beach, man.”
Jim grinned. “Well, here we go, Ray. I hope you’re ready for all the way.”
“I am…are you?” I hollered.
“Fuckin’ A!” he shouted. And we all laughed as the organ intro did its loop-de-loop at the end of Robby’s song and John put his signature button on the tail of “Light My Fire.”
Jim turned to Dorothy. “What do you think, Ms. Fujikawa?”
“I don’t like losing the solos”—Dorothy paused for emphasis—“but it sure sounds like a famous radio song to me.” She grinned.
“All right, Dorothy!” Jim shouted. And it was done. Unanimous agreement. Paul and Bruce were glowing.
I finally heard a Doors’ song on the radio. Dorothy and I were headed out to the beach, driving on Sunset in the VW. We had hit the curves of Westwood—all early-May green and tree lush on a glorious warm spring day. And we were headed west, to the ocean, to soak up some Aten rays in Santa Monica. And on it came! “Light My Fire.” Rocking out of the little German radio! We started screaming. Full-throated screams. I banged on the steering wheel. Dorothy was bouncing up and down in her seat like a pogo stick. More screaming.
“It’s us! It’s us!” I yelled.
“It’s ‘Light My Fire’!” she shrieked.
“We’re on the fucking radio!”
“I love it!” she said, and grabbed me around the neck and kissed my cheek for all she was worth.
I cranked the radio and went careening around those Sunset Boulevard curves with a cute Japanese chick hanging on my neck and my band’s rock and roll song blaring at me in the lush sunshine of Southern California. My friends, it doesn’t get much better than that!
And in the third week of July 1967, “Light My Fire” became the number-one song in America. That psychedelic band of acid-head, Jungian, shamanistic, Dionysian, Indian meditators had made it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. We had even knocked the Beatles out of first place. Rock jock DJs all across America were playing the single in heavy rotation. A day didn’t go by when “Light My Fire” wasn’t heard at least four times a day on some radio station in America. And that little 45 RPM disc was flying out of the retail record shops. To get to be number one you simply had to sell more records than anyone else. And we did! That week and for the next few weeks to come we sold more records than any other artists. Including the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. We were ecstatic. And Jac Holzman and Elektra Records went completely ballistic. They even had to contract new pressing plants to meet the demand. They had a plant on the East Coast and one on the West Coast…but the heartland had responded big-time. Jac had to employ a plant in Michigan and one in Nashville to supply vinyl to all the chains in the Midwest and the South. Elektra was simply overwhelmed. They had never had a number-one record before. We were all virgins who had spilled a bit of precious red blood in a wonderful coupling on our nuptial couch at the top of the charts.
Lying on stained, wretched sheets
With a bleeding virgin,
We could plan a murder
Or start a religion.
san francisco
The floodgates were open. The Doors were hot and offers for gigs were many. Nineteen sixty-seven was a great performing year for us. We played San Francisco for the first time. Talk about psychedelic—that whole city seemed to be on acid. Our first weekend up there coincided with the legendary Human Be-In. The first love-in. The first great gathering of the tribe. Fifty thousand heads in Golden Gate Park. More long hair and love than had ever been brought together before. Of course the Doors were there. We had to be there. We were in the swirl of it, and man, it felt good. Hippies everywhere. No aggression
in the air, no power trips, no mind games. Just, dare I use the now-archaic word, love! Just fucking L-O-V-E. It could be done back then. Today it would be considered naive and corny, old-fashioned and a bit immature. But of course, it’s the one thing we’re all looking for, the one thing we all so desperately desire. And the irony of it is—in this era of irony—we can’t find it! We’re going mad because we can’t find love. We’re over-amped and hyperagitated because we can’t find love. What an age of anxiety we live in. If only we could relax. Huh?
Music was being pumped out over the audience from a temporary stage through the Grateful Dead’s huge P.A. system, and people were whirling and twirling and swaying and sashaying everywhere. Indian clothes, tie-dyed jeans, beads and jewels, long flowing hair, head bands, soft suede moccasins, bare-breasted women. A fantasia of colors and forms and bodies and music. Music from the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Poems and prosody from Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Timothy Leary. What a spectacle! We had never seen anything like it. Jim, Robby, John, and I all believed that it was the beginning of a spiritual revolution. A revolution of consciousness. The true revolution of Jesus Christ…a revolution of love. For that one afternoon, in that park, in San Francisco, a gathering of lovers had taken place. And it is one of the sweetest memories of my life. Kundalini had broken free of the chains of the lower three chakras and worked its way up to the collective heart of the assembled multitude. Consequently there was a great outpouring of love and compassion and beauty. We were all alive! And we knew it, and it was good.
Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for
brethren to dwell together in unity!
—Psalm 133
That evening was our first set at a San Francisco psychedelic ballroom. The Fillmore, Bill Graham’s pleasure palace. We were the opening act behind the Sopwith Camel and the headliners, the Young Rascals. We took the stage to a light smattering of applause and a few scattered boos after Bill Graham’s announcement of “Ladies and gentlemen, from Los Angeles, California…the Doors!” You see, San Francisco didn’t like L.A. Too plastic, not a real city. And here was a band being featured as coming from L.A. And calling themselves the Doors? Well, how pretentious and how very plasticene. “Boo, hiss!”
We heard it, and we didn’t like it. Got the dander up. As we mounted our instruments, Jim whispered to me, “Let’s start with ‘When the Music’s Over.’”
“No,” I protested. “Too slow, we gotta do something fast.”
Jim insinuated his hand into the air, the psychic air. “It’ll work, Ray,” he said. “Just play the shit out of the intro. You know how.” He turned to John and Robby. “‘When the Music’s Over.’” And before they could protest, I smashed the Vox volume pedal to the floor and attacked the keys. The notes began to weave out into the audience. The power in my right hand contained all the energy of that afternoon at the Be-In. It was alive and electric. An entity unto itself. The opening passage, with its subtle variations, was burning its way into the crowd. Take this, San Francisco! The intro was more powerful than I had ever played it. “Here’s what we do in L.A. and you ain’t seen nothin’ like us.” And I had them. I cajoled and screamed and rocked and seduced through my fingers, into the keys, out of the amps, and into the hearts and brains of the soon-to-be converted faithful.
Oh, ye of little faith
—Matthew 8:26
And then I brought in the left hand on the piano bass. It was deep and rumbling and seemed to come up from some underground fissure. It was from the depths of the earth, from the unconscious of the multitude. And it was hypnotic. It demanded surrender. I pumped my left and right hand together, working contrapuntally and swirling the notes and sounds in a spiral around the Fillmore’s light-show-patterned walls. A swirl of notes and projected colors, all moving and undulating together, and the audience was gone. All skepticism about L.A….gone. All doubts about a plastic band from Southern California…gone. They were receiving what they had come for, transport. The music was now in control of their destinies, the liquid light show followed the lead of the organ and filled the auditorium in a glowing wash of melting colors, and the audience was ready for a trip…with the Doors.
And then John came in with the drums. Cannon shots on the toms and rifle cracks on his snare. Sharp reports and ominous thunder. Off time, out of meter, working against my repeating left hand. It was brilliant. It created an anticipation, almost an unease; a waiting for the next passage. Almost a need for the next passage. You knew it was coming, you just didn’t know when. And then he kicked it in. The cue for Jim and Robby to enter. A rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat pattern and everything exploded! Jim screamed into the microphone like a hellhound. Robby smashed an E minor chord on his Gibson with the volume knob set at kill. John crashed on his Zildjian cymbals like the Persian army in full attack mode and I smashed a corresponding E minor chord to Robby’s. It was like a battle on the plains of Har-Meggido summed up in one note. It was apocalyptic. And the audience went into full-on frenzy. They were shocked out of their trance and immediately started dancing. With the band in full-bore rhythm the entire audience took up the call to passion and joined us in the pulsation of the song and danced for the next twelve minutes of “When the Music’s Over.” And they loved it…and they loved us. At the conclusion of the piece there was wild applause and whoops and shouts of delight. The boos had been replaced by the all-American high-pitched squeal and howl of approval. “Who-eee!” We had been accepted.
We played the Fillmore many times after that. Bill Graham was always a gracious host to us, although he could be—when he flipped his rage switch on—the meanest man in San Francisco. I saw him freeze a gaggle of hippies at fifty paces with a mere shout. At a sound check one afternoon, four or five inquisitive hippies had worked their way into the Fillmore and were moving about in the shadows, giggling, at the far end of the auditorium. Bill Graham was on the stage with us when he suddenly picked up intruder vibrations. He peered into the darkness, locked on target, and let out with a bloodcurdling yell, “Hey, you motherfuckers! What the fuck are you doing in here?!”
The terror-stricken hippies went petrified. I went frozen. Jim, Robby, and John went flash-freeze immobile. It was the loudest, angriest noise I’ve ever heard come out of a human mouth.
“If you’re not with the Doors, and I know you’re not…then GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! NOW!”
They were off like a shot. Bats out of hell, fluttering a blind and hasty retreat. And Bill turned to us, his character completely changed back to the nice Bill, and said, softly and oddly personally, “Those darned hippies, they want everything for free. They don’t seem to understand, I’m running a business here. I’ve got to pay people, support people. You guys want to get paid, don’t you?”
We were allowed to breathe again. “Sure, Bill.” “Of course, Bill.” “Yeah, it’s a business, Bill,” “We understand, Bill.” Our heads were bobbing like dashboard Madonnas. We didn’t want Bill to holler at us like that, and he never did. Hell, he even went on to produce the movie The Doors. After he saw it he called me and said how sorry he was for how badly it turned out. That was a ballsy thing for him to do. He was a real mensch. And he was the only one who had the courage to tell me he was sorry for having participated in that filmic fiasco. Although I did run into Kyle MacLachlan, and he said, “You know, Ray, you were right. The script really wasn’t any good and neither was the movie.” I had to thank him for that. After all, he played me.
In addition to the Fillmore, we also played Chet Helms’s Avalon Ballroom. Another psychedelic light-show-infused venue. Chet was the opposite twin of Bill. Chet was the good guy. The nice guy. Bill was the hard, tough, mean but fair guy. A no-nonsense exterior with a heart of vanilla pudding. Bill and Chet both believed in the coming New Age and were doing everything to expedite its dawning…in spite of their vastly different personal styles. We loved them both and played many gigs for them both
.
It seems we played with just about everybody in San Francisco: the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, the Steve Miller Band, Doug Kershaw, Chuck Berry, Junior Wells, the Sons of Champlin, the Sparrow (soon to be called Steppenwolf after John Kay read the book by Hermann Hesse), Canned Heat, the Clearlight, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (Robby’s idols from his Back Bay Chamber Pot Terriers jug band days), Moby Grape, the Grass Roots, Tim Buckley, the Seeds, Tim Hardin, Richie Havens, James Cotton, Procol Harum, and those lovable freaks who personify San Francisco and the psychedelic love movement, the Grateful Dead.
The Dead’s support system was enormous. They had huge amps and many roadies, old ladies and groupies and yes-men, personal cooks and gophers and gurus and soundmen and manager types. Consequently, they had no need for normal human intercourse and/or discourse. They were completely insulated. It was a little world of its own and they were perfectly content to remain inside…with you locked out. I never did get to know any of them. I barely talked to any of them. I did try to communicate with their organ player, one “Pig Pen,” but that turned into a complete fiasco.
Here’s what happened.
The Doors and the Dead are playing together at some outdoor festival–type gig. The Dead are the headliners (it’s early ’67). They have a fucking wall of amplifiers. It’s like the wall in Fritz Lang’s Destiny. It dwarfs any human standing in front of it. And drum sets, two of them. And guitars everywhere. And…a Vox Continental Organ! Just like mine. Set up stage right. Just where I set up.