by Ray Manzarek
strange days
On the first day of our recording sessions for our second album, Strange Days, Paul and Bruce had a surprise for us. Well, actually for Robby and me—this was decidedly out of the province of our two Sagittarians. Paul called the two of us into the command module of the starship Sunset Sound, pointed to a big new Ampex tape recorder and said, “Check this out, you guys!”
“What is it?” Robby asked.
“A new Ampex!” Bruce said.
“I can see that, Bruce. What’s the big deal?”
Paul jumped in. “It’s eight tracks, man!”
Robby got it immediately. “Eight tracks? No shit?”
“Here it is, brother,” said Paul. “Your wildest dreams come true. A quantum leap in technology.”
“And we have it for the new record!” Bruce gleefully said.
“Wow, eight tracks. That’s groovy,” said Robby.
Now it was my turn to exult, “You mean we can do everything we did on the first album and still have four more tracks for overdubs?”
“Exactly,” said Paul.
“Holy shit,” I said. “We could do anything!”
“Exactly,” said Paul.
“Well, let’s get started,” I said. “I got a million ideas.”
Robby laughed. “So do I!”
“What do you want to start with?” Paul asked.
Robby and I looked at each other and almost spoke simultaneously….“‘Strange Days,’” we said.
And thus began our plunge into the laboratory. We were making a record, making music, but we were also mad scientists manipulating the aural spectrum for our diabolical creations. What fun! And what wonderful material we had to work from: “When the Music’s Over,” “You’re Lost, Little Girl,” “Horse Latitudes,” “Moonlight Drive,” “Unhappy Girl,” “People Are Strange,” “My Eyes Have Seen You,” “Love Me Two Times.”
Jim’s and Robby’s songwriting abilities were in top form. They were churning out small masterpieces and the group mind was arranging and manipulating their creations into a fine new block of Doors songs. American songs. Songs from the terminus. Songs from the end point of the West. From the meeting point of the continent and our mother, the sea. Songs from the end of the Western Dream of expansion…but songs from the new dream of the expansion of consciousness. The new global dream. The music of the new man. The overman. The lover. The dreamer. The caretaker of the new Garden of Eden. The poet. The warrior. The god-man.
And it belongs to everybody. We are all the new caretakers. We are all the Übermensch. We are all the poets of the New Age. My friends, we are all the lovers. And as soon as we realize it, the divine age will begin. As soon as we cast off the bonds of orthodoxy, the delight will begin again. As soon as we can break the conservative chains around our hearts and conquer our fears, the freedom and joy will begin again. Like Adam and Eve, we will be lovers in an earthly paradise again. And it only requires the courage to try an unorthodox approach. To go with something a little different, off the beaten track. The courage to follow the dictates of your heart. To trust your emotions, your instinct for the good. And that will invariably lead you to love. The divine Christ within you. The radiant heart chakra. The one.
So we took the energy and went to work. The recording went smoothly and quickly. No TV sets in the studio, no fires that needed to be extinguished. Just sonic creativity. For instance, one of the first uses of the Moog synthesizer in rock. Paul Beaver brought his huge modular Moog system into the studio and began plugging a bewildering array of patch cords into the equally bewildering panels of each module. He’d hit the keyboard and outer space, bizarre, Karlheinz Stockhausen–like sounds would emerge. He would then turn a mystifying array of knobs placed in rows around the patch cord receptacles and more and different space would emerge. He did this for about a half hour and we sat as if at an electronic music concert by some mad German composer. Who knew what he was doing? And then he turned to us, all huddled in the control room, and said, “If you hear anything you want to use, just stop me.”
“Well, yes,” Paul said. “Actually, that sound you had about three sounds back was very usable. Could you go back to that?”
“Which sound was that?” said Paul Beaver.
“That crystalline sound,” Jim jumped in. “I liked the sound of broken glass falling from the void into creation.”
“Which sound was that?” said the Beaver.
“A couple back from where you are now,” Rothchild said.
“It reminded me of the Kabbalah,” said Jim. “Kether, the I AM, creating duality out of the one. All crystalline…and pure. You know, that sound.”
“Did I make a sound like that?”
“Sure,” Jim said. “A couple back.”
“Just go back to where you were,” said Rothchild.
And Paul Beaver began to unplug and replug patch cords, and twist little knobs, and strike the keyboard, which emitted strange and arcane and unearthly tones that sounded nothing like the Kabbalah or Kether, the crown of the Sefiroth. None of the sounds he was creating sounded pure and crystalline. And then we realized…he couldn’t get back. He couldn’t get back because he had no idea where he had been. He could only go forward, on to the next patch. Ever new, ever forward. You had to stop him as soon as you heard something you liked. He was a mad scientist.
Finally, with Paul Beaver ripping and tearing at his cords and twisting knobs at an increasingly furious pace, sweat dripping from his forehead, ungodly shrieks emanating from his keyboard, Rothchild shouted out, “Stop! Wait a second. Just stop there.” Paul was breathing as if he had just run the 200-meter hurdles. It was his idea and it was turning into a fiasco of “sonic creativity.” He had to get the control back or Paul Beaver would drive us all mad. Even as he appeared to have driven himself mad. The possibilities were endless. The permutations were infinite. And the Beaver seemed as if he were going to try them all, as we watched, going slowly insane.
“Just stop, Paul. That’s a good sound there. I think we can use that.”
A great sigh of relief emitted from the Doors group mind. We used the electronic wind sound Beaver had created on “Spanish Caravan” and then another sound on Jim’s voice—with Jim striking the keyboard as he sang each word like a mad space captain himself—on the title cut, “Strange Days.” What an experience of electronic mayhem. Into the infinite!
Another bit of over-the-top creativity in the studio was my playing of an entire piano track backward on “Unhappy Girl.” I overdubbed a piano part with the multitrack tape put on the Ampex upside down. Everything came into my earphones backward. The entire song started at the end. Fortunately, it had a good, steady beat for me to follow…backward or forward.
I wrote out the entire score, measure by measure. It was an insane idea. And we were doing it just so we could have a piano part with that odd thwuck at the beginning of each note. Almost a sucking sound before the chords kicked in. It was the decrescendo at the end of the note, the diminution of the sound coming in first rather than at its proper place at the end. It was an interesting effect. And, besides, in that moment of recording we had a great visitation of energy…so why not try it? So I did. And by God it worked.
I sat at the piano and put on the headphones, and Bruce flipped the tape and hit the red “record” button. I was on a separate track—one of the four extras—so it didn’t matter if I made a mistake. And we were off. The song started on the button at the end, and the beat was steady but the sound was bizarre as shit. The whole song was backward, including Jim’s work vocal. I started reading at the lower right and listened to the time of John’s drums as hard as I could. One line went by, it seemed to be working. On to the next line up from the bottom of the page, and it was still working. I was counting measures furiously and the harmony of my piano against the backward song in my headphones was not clashing, so I must have been in the right spot. Or so I hoped. The next line went by and then I was at the top. At the far right-hand side
of the top line. Only a few more measures to go. I was reading, counting, and improvising furiously. My brain had gone incendiary. If the music would end at the beginning as I counted my last four beats of the first bar, I would have done it. And goddamn, it did! As I finished, the music in my headphones finished. I had done it. I had played the entire song backward and in sync.
I took off my cans, turned to the control, and said—to much whooping and applause from mis compadres, “Bruce, Paul, please…don’t ever let me do that again.”
Next we rocked out on “Love Me Two Times,” Robby’s great blues/rock classic about love and loss, or multiple orgasms, I’m not sure which. I played harpsichord; a most elegant instrument that one does not normally associate with rock and roll. It worked like a champ. We used a bass player for the first time on Strange Days and for all the subsequent albums to come. The Fender Rhodes keyboard bass just didn’t record that well. It lacked the high-end pluck of a bass guitar string. It had plenty of bottom and was great in person, but in the studio it lacked articulation. Doug Lubahn, a member of the band Clearlight, came on board as our fifth Door bottom man. I showed Doug the bass parts that I was playing with my left hand and then he put his own spin on them. And he did a brilliant job, too. He was a real pleasure to work with. A solid bass bottom that John locked into immediately, and a good human being.
Then we attempted “Horse Latitudes.” It was one of Jim’s poems. Something he told us he had written when he was sixteen years old. I never believed it. The words were too mature. It was about the doldrums, the area of becalmed winds in the Atlantic Ocean, and the throwing overboard of horses to lighten the load in the days of transatlantic sailing ships bearing cargo from the Old World to the New.
When the still sea conspires an armor
And her sullen and aborted currents
breed tiny monsters…
True sailing is dead.
Awkward instant and the first animal is jettisoned.
Legs furiously pumping their
stiff, green gallop.
Heads bob up, poise delicate, pause, consent
In mute nostril agony,
Carefully refined and sealed over.
The horses are tossed overboard, they swim in the ocean with a stiff, green gallop until they eventually exhaust themselves…and sink in quiet agony beneath the still sea.
The group mind decided on a musique concrète score to accompany Jim’s impassioned reading of the poem. He recorded his part first and then we all took to the studio, including a friend of ours from UCLA, Alain Ronay, and Robby’s brother, Ron Krieger, his nonidentical twin. Ron helped us out in the early days with equipment hauling and general roadie stuff, and was an all-around good guy, albeit slow of foot and brain. We jokingly called him “Lightnin’ Krieger.” Robby got most of the IQ of that split ovum of Marilyn Krieger’s, but Ron was always cool. We had him in the back of the studio as part of the “yelling brigade,” along with Pam and whoever else happened to be walking by the studio that day. There were at least a half dozen of them and they were to scream their heads off on the phrase “Awkward instant” and keep screaming until the end of the piece. They loved it and did a horrific job.
I was going to play the inside of the grand piano. The lid had been opened on the seven-foot Yamaha and I took a pair of John’s mallets and started pounding on the strings while applying and releasing the damper pedal. It was the sound of chaos. Random and mad. I had Alain join me with a pair of soft-tipped mallets of his own. Together we beat the hell out of those bronze strings in that great harp set inside that elegant instrument.
Robby conjured strange and eerie death sounds out of his Gibson and John and Jim sat on the floor slamming coconut shells on the parquet to simulate the sound of horses’s hooves on a deck.
Bruce hit the red “record” button and we went into it. We pounded and plucked and eeried and screamed and slammed out our version of fear and chaos and drowning and death in the Sargasso Sea…in a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. A studio that had become a becalmed sailing vessel somewhere beyond the West Indies, in the nineteenth century…and we were the crew on board that death ship.
We did two takes. It was impossible to do any more. It was too psychically exhausting. We had to break free from that tomb, that chamber of horrors, that recording studio. We all fled into the light of Sunset Boulevard; the revivifying light of Southern California. And we left the Sargasso Sea behind us as we shared a joint and drank beers concealed in paper bags. Within an hour we had flushed the chaos and disorder out of our psyches. Paul and Bruce had stayed behind to begin their alchemical manipulations of the two takes we had performed. They were going to apply advanced electronic techniques to the tracks to add their own bit of death and anguish to the brew. And did they ever. When we finally went back into the control room we heard such caterwauling and such banshee howling that was definitely not of this earth. We were amazed at the horror those two sweethearts of ours had generated. Bruce could only grin like a demented ax murderer and Paul cackled like a furnace stoker from hell. They had gone mad with eight tracks but they had produced brilliance. The inspiration continued, unabated. All was well in Sunset Sound, and all was well with the Doors.
And the last song left to do was “When the Music’s Over.” For this one we would not use a bass player. This one was going to be à la the Whiskey-a-Go-Go. Live. Like the first album. Just Jim, Ray, Robby, and John. No overdubs. No mad, lab-coated-scientist absurdo backward piano overdubs. Just the four Doors. Pure Doors. And Jim was very excited. This is the way he loved to record. We lay it down, all of us, together. Existentially. Either we get it or we don’t. The moment of truth for all of us.
Personally, I thought the moment of truth was always with us. Every take was its own little “ultimate act of creation.” We were creating a new universe every time we put on the headphones. Jim, however, didn’t necessarily see it that way. If the truth be known…he mainly didn’t care for the overdub process. It was too laborious for him. It was the musician’s raison d’ětre. It was “birdman” stuff. Robby and I exulted in the overdubs. What profound fun the extra four tracks enabled us to have. But it wasn’t “word man” fun. Poets need talking. Preferably in bars with alcohol-oiled tongues all greased and lubricated for the advent of the bon mot. He wasn’t having his kind of fun in the studio; consequently, he wasn’t always there. Until, of course, it was time for his vocals. And then he was a monster of creativity. He loved to sing. He loved the sound of his own voice in his headphones with a little reverb from Sunset Sound’s live echo chamber and a touch of Elvis Presley slap-back tape echo. Bruce made him sound big and full and fat in the cans and Jim loved it. He sang his butt off, ripping and tearing at his vocal cords until he got the take to his demanding standards. Sometimes he would walk out of the vocal booth virtually unable to speak…but grinning like a Cheshire, knowing he nailed the vocal part.
But when guitar or keyboards or the occasional percussion overdubs were going on, and they did take some time, Jim was off at some bar, usually Barney’s Beanery or the Palms on Santa Monica, knocking back a few cool ones and searching for the apt phrase with the ne’er-do-wells-of-the-week club.
“When the Music’s Over,” however, demanded his presence. It was improvisational. We needed Jim there, to follow him, to weave the music around his words. We couldn’t create the tapestry without him. And he knew it and was most excited. This was going to be fun. We had played the song virtually every night onstage at the Whiskey, and Ondine, and the Scene, and the Fillmore, and the Avalon, and now we were going to put it down on tape. Yes! One time for the ages. We were all excited.
The day of the recording came. John and Robby and I got there early—one o’clock for a two o’clock call—and started fiddling and tuning and tweaking our instruments. We were like a 400-meter relay team, all twitchy and antsy, waiting for our anchor. Our Carl Lewis, our Jesse Owens. We stretched and twisted and loosened ourselves. Killing as mu
ch time as we could with sound adjustments by Bruce and Paul of a minuscule but important nature. We were primed and ready for the starting pistol. The sound was perfecto, the incense was lit, the lights were appropriately dimmed…and no Morrison. It was two-thirty and he hadn’t shown up yet. I nursed a beer, John and Robby had apple juice, Paul and Bruce paced in the control room, and the hands on the wall clock slowly rotated. Two forty-five…three o’clock. Shit! Where was he? He’s the one who was all excited and now he’s an hour late.
“If he’s not here by three-thirty, I’m going to call the session,” Paul said through the talk-back.
We were slammed!
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I want to play.”
“Me, too,” said John.
“I’m ready to go,” said Robby.
The disembodied talk-back voice came on again: “Go where?” it said. “Jim’s not here…and he’s probably not going to be here. You can’t go without him.”
“Oh, yes, we can,” I said.
John and Robby looked at me most quizzically.
“What do you mean?” Robby asked.
“We know the song. We know what he’s probably going to say…where he’s probably going to come in.”
“Well, maybe,” said Densmore.
“I don’t know about that, Ray,” said Krieger.
I shouted to the control room, “Bruce, set up a vocal mic for me on a boom. I’m going to do a guide vocal and we’re going to play this fucker.” I turned to the guys, “Okay? What do ya say?”
They brightened. “Well, shit. Why not?” Robby said. “Let’s try it, then!”
John fluttered his sticks and whacked at his drums. “I’m game,” he said. “Let’s go for it!”
“Okay!” I said. “I’ll try to approximate where Jim would come in and I’ll sing the words I think…he’d probably sing.”