by Ray Manzarek
“If he was here,” John said wryly.
“Asshole, he’ll probably show up tomorrow,” Robby said. “After we get the take.”
“And he’s the one who was all hot to do it live,” John said.
“Asshole,” Robby said again.
Bruce quickly set up a microphone on a boom stand in front of my organ/piano bass station. Paul had me do the standard. “Testing, testing. One two three testing,” and then a few yells for volume, “Hey! Hey! Yeah! Yeah! Testing.”
The disembodied voice said, “Is that okay in everybody’s cans?” John, Robby, and I all nodded. “Well, let’s get it, then. ‘When the Music’s Over,’ take one!”
And we dived in. I started with the long organ intro, then John came in with his machine-gun splatters, bending the time and holding back the first ejaculation, until it was time for the release. Finally, he hit the rat-a-tat pattern and Robby exploded in! I shouted as Robby hit a big E minor power chord and the piano bass boomed into action. It was a magnificent explosion. We rode the repeating pattern, vamping for the vocal entrance, for the words to begin. I was almost tranced out by the mesmerizing figure we were playing…and then I realized…I’m the singer. And “Screaming Ray” came back from his self-imposed limbo state. I leaned into the mic….
When the music’s over
When the music’s over
When the music’s over
Turn out the lights
Turn out the lights
Turn out the lights
And Robby and John were right with me, hitting the variations of “turn out the lights” just as they would if Jim were singing. It felt good. This was going to work. And we were playing with an intensity I hadn’t felt in the song since the Fillmore. We were on a mission. We had something to prove and, man, we were storming on it. We were hot!
The first two verses and the chorus…
Music is your special friend,
Dance on fire as it intends,
Music is your only friend,
Until the end.
…went great. But now the improvisational parts were coming! This was going to be the task. This was going to require mind-melding of the highest order. This was going to be virtually impossible…but we sucked it up and went for it anyway. Robby and John were right with me.
Cancel my subscription to the resurrection,
Send my credentials to the house of detention,
I got some friends inside.
We were doing it! And I dived into the next phrases:
The face in the mirror won’t stop,
The girl in the window won’t drop
And then the “Scream of the Butterfly.” What I thought he’d say and where I thought he’d say it; with Robby and John in perfect sync. The communal mind of the Doors was honed and operating. I even think the muse had joined us. I think she was standing off in the corner, undulating slowly to the beat, but I didn’t have time to pay attention to her. I was too busy…and the real monster bear was coming up. I closed my eyes and said Jim’s Native American words.
What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her,
Stuck her with knives in the side of the dawn,
Tied her with fences and dragged her down.
Pause for air, for breath. Let a few measures go by, then continue…
I hear a very gentle sound,
With your ear down to the ground…
The band got very soft. For the “gentle sound.” And for the impending explosion to come. I waited…stretched it…paused…hoping this was where Jim would feel it…and finally shouted out…
We want the world and
We want it…
Now!…Now?
NOW!
And all hell broke loose. Feedback banshees on the guitar. Atonal Schoenberg screaming chords on the organ. Cannons and bombs and cymbal lightning from the drums. And we played our wanting of the world like the possessed patriots of freedom that we really were. No wonder the Establishment was afraid of us. We had gone Dionysian! Pan was with us. The maenads were with us. The muse Euterpe was with us. Her sisters Calliope and Terpsichore and Polyhymnia had joined us. And they were all whirling and dancing in a delirium of ecstasy, of exhilaration, of joy. We were in the divine moment and all pretense was abandoned. We were our real, naked selves and we were playing our instruments with our souls. Everything was on the line, and because it was…everything was alive. That’s the reward you get when you make the leap into the void. Into the energy! And the ancients are just waiting for us to “reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages.” And then they’ll dance with us. And we need that dance of love now more than ever.
And for a moment, we had it in that studio on Sunset Boulevard in the fall of 1967, and it was good.
The wild solos concluded themselves, and Robby, John, and I brought the music back down to earth. We vamped on the repeat of the opening passage and I sang the concluding…
When the music’s over
Turn out the lights
and the final chorus…
Music is your special friend,
Dance on fire as it intends,
Music is your only friend,
Until the end.
A retard…a pause…and then one last explosion to finish the piece. A Densmore button on the explosion and we were done. Eleven minutes of music. On the fly, on the natch, in the space. We were spent. There was no reason for another take. We had done it and now all we could do was wait for Jim. For the moment of truth.
The next day he arrived at the studio at two o’clock. Right on time, but a day late.
“Oh, man. I thought it was supposed to be today.” He grinned. “Did I miss a day?”
What a liar! He was so full of baloney and malarky and hooey and bunkum that you couldn’t get mad at him. Especially when he smiled. And he was smiling white enamel that afternoon.
“I guess you guys got the track already, huh?”
“Yeah, we got it, Jim,” said Robby. “Now you gotta go sing it!”
“How am I supposed to know where to come in?”
Robby grinned back at him. “That’s for you to figure out.”
John smugly added, “We did our part…now you do yours.”
“But I wanted to sing with you guys.”
“Then why weren’t you here yesterday?” John said, and everybody in the room leaned forward. We all wanted to hear his flapdoodle excuse. The man could really feed the bull when he had to. And the bull was now hungry.
“I, uhh…uhh…I had some personal business.”
That was it? No filigrees, no arabesques.
“Like what?” said Krieger the skeptic.
“Robby, that’s what I said…it’s personal. You understand?”
“No,” Robby said.
“Well, I’m not gonna tell you. It’s personal.”
Robby waved his hand at Jim like the producer on the Ed Sullivan Show. “Ahh” was all he could say.
“Well fuck where he’s been, let’s just make a record,” said Paul the pragmatist Rothchild.
Jim turned to Paul, relieved but still worried. “But how am I gonna know where to come in?”
My turn. “I’ll guide you through it. Don’t worry. Just sing it like you feel it. Where you think you should come in…come in…”
“Easy for you to say, Ray.” He grinned again.
“…and where you think you should lay out…”
“Yeah, I know…lay out.”
“Exactly!” I said, and grinned back at him. He seemed to feel more secure.
“Okay, man. I’ll try it. But I can’t guarantee the results.”
“Just feel it, man. You’ll get it fine. I know.”
He headed out to the vocal booth, put his cans on, Bruce hit “play/record,” and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t in the pocket, in the groove, in the space. He was hitting all the cues, all the pauses. He
was singing like me. Or, I had been singing like him. Either way, he was in it. And he was great. And he got it in two takes! Eleven minutes of singing and screaming and poetry and passion…and he nailed it in two takes. It was an impossible task but he got it. All the pauses and all the entrances, he nailed them. As if we were all doing it together.
And on the psychic plane, we were.
In mid-September our first royalty check arrived. Bob Greene, our recently hired accountant, called me in to his office and handed me an Elektra Records check. He sat back and grinned.
I quickly looked at the amount and said, “Wow! Fifty thousand dollars! That’s what, twelve thousand and change for me? I love this…talk about easy money. Man, ‘Light My Fire,’ huh?”
Bob laughed. “Take a closer look, Ray.”
I did and it said $50,123.75 in big, official, stamped-in—actually cut-in—perforated numbers.
“It says fifty thousand. Split four ways that’s twelve K apiece. Do you have my check ready? I want to show it to Dorothy.”
“That is your check. Look at the name.”
And then I saw it. The official check with its Elektra Records logo and corporate address and eye-dazzling, multicolored, cut-in $50,123.75 was made out to one RAYMOND MANZAREK! Holy shit. My check…for me? My eyes did a Froggy the Gremlin “boiinng”!
Jim, in his wisdom, said we should—when it came time to figure out who wrote what and how to divide up our yet-to-be-realized loot—simply cut the pie four ways. He said it would be easier and incur no bickering. There would be no talk of “Why don’t we do my song,” and we’d never fight over money. He was right. We never did fight…about money.
“This is mine?” I stammered.
“All yours, Ray.”
“This doesn’t get divided four ways, like everything does?”
“Elektra already did that. They send a check to each individual, not the group.”
“I don’t believe this. Was ‘Light My Fire’ that big?”
“This is only up till the end of June,” Bob said. “You get a royalty check twice a year. End of June, end of December. If you like this one, wait until you see the next one!”
“Man, I don’t believe it. Let me take this home and show it to Dorothy. She’ll freak.”
Bob grabbed the check from me. “Oh, no, this is going right into the bank. I’m not taking any chances. What if you lose it?”
“I’m not gonna lose it. I’m responsible.”
He became official and fatherly. “Ray…this is going into your account, now.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll just tell her, then.”
“Good. And while we’re discussing Dorothy…it’s none of my business, and please don’t take offense, but…do you plan to stay with her?”
What the hell was he getting at? “Yes,” I said. “We’ve been together about five years now. Why shouldn’t it continue?”
“I’m not telling you what to do…but, uhh…if you marry her, I can split your income and save you a lot of money in taxes. Especially with December’s check coming.”
And there it was. Cards on the table. I no longer had any excuse not to ask Dorothy to marry me. I was now flush. I could support a wife. Hell, I could spoil a wife. I could support her in a manner to which she’d never been accustomed. It was time to bite that damned bullet of responsibility. It was time for the final commitment. Marriage. I had tossed the coins for the I Ching—the Chinese divination Book of Changes. I had asked the question, “Is Dorothy the woman for me?” The coins, in unbelievable synchronicity, fell to six consecutive broken lines! The second hexagram in the Book of Changes. The female principle. (The first hexagram is six solid lines; the male principle.) It meant, not only was she the woman for me—she was, for me, the ultimate female.
I arrived at our apartment on Sycamore in a total dither. I was almost shaking.
“Honey, I just got my royalty check from Elektra,” I said as I walked in the door. “Guess how much.”
She scrunched up her face in her too-cute way, thought hard, and said, “Around, ohh, ten thousand?”
“That’s what I thought, too.” I said. And I just stood there. Grinning…and dithering.
“Well…,” she said. “Did you just eat a canary, or what?”
“Get ready for this…fifty…thousand…dollars!”
“For the Doors?”
“For Raymond Daniel Manzarek!” I said.
She squealed and grabbed me. “We’re rich!”
I wrapped my arms around her, lifted her in the air, and spun her around. “We sure are,” I said. And she smothered me with kisses.
I stopped spinning and just held her, in the air, off the ground. “Now I want to ask you a very serious question,” I said. She went limp for an instant. The kissing stopped. She seemed almost worried….
“What, Ray?”
I swallowed the canary, grinned again, and said, “Will you marry me?”
She shrieked and said, “I do!”
We both laughed and started spinning and kissing and hugging and holding and clinging and laughing and kissing some more.
“I will,” she said, laughing and kissing and crying all at the same time. “Yes…I do!” And she was mine.
And we were.
And we did.
And we still are.
Two weeks later Strange Days was released. We moved all around the country, playing and promoting the new album for the people in Des Moines, Iowa; Denver, Colorado; New York, New York; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Danbury, Connecticut; Nantucket Beach, Massachusetts; Baltimore, Maryland; Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania; Berkeley, California; the University of Michigan homecoming dance (What a disaster! Jim got drunk, John and Robby stormed off the stage in a fit of pique, I played guitar until the football players—men of great bulk in black broadcloth—and their diminutive dates in pink taffeta started booing and throwing paper cups of punch at the two stoners on the stage playing John Lee Hooker Chicago blues. It was a total fiasco but Jim Osterberg, a.k.a. Iggy Pop, was there and it changed his life. The sheer outrageousness and audacity of Jim Morrison convinced Iggy that a life of anarchic rebellion was the only way to fly…and he’s been doing it ever since.); Williamstown, Maryland; UC Santa Barbara, California; San Diego, California; Vancouver, British Columbia; Corvallis and Eugene and Portland, Oregon; the Fillmore and Winterland, San Francisco; Hunter College, New York; and Washington, D.C. Jim’s mother and his brother, Andy, were at that concert.
Now, the first time I spoke to Jim about his parents, back in Venice, on the beach, he said, “My parents are dead.”
I was shocked.
“You mean, you’re an orphan?”
He hemmed a bit. “Well, you know…it’s like, uh…”
“How long have they been dead? Since you were a kid, or what? I mean, who raised you?”
“Ohh, my parents raised me.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thank God for that.” I paused. “I’m sorry, man. They died just recently, huh?”
He nodded.
“What happened…a car or something?”
“No, nothing like that.”
My mind went dramatic.
“Jesus, it wasn’t…it wasn’t a murder, was it? Or suicide?!”
“No, man. Don’t be silly.”
“I’m not being silly, just tell me…I mean if you want to.”
He looked away. Kind of turned his back to me.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?”
He didn’t respond. He just looked out at the water, then he spoke softly, to the ocean.
“They’re not really dead.”
I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the waves. “What did you say?”
He turned to me.
“They’re not dead. I just made that up.”
I couldn’t believe it. What a thing to say about your family.
“Why?” was all I could muster.
He hemmed and hawed again. “I just…I, uhh…I don’t want to see them.”
And then the real shocker. “Ever again.”
And I began to understand. Must have been some kind of intolerant, antagonistic upbringing. Nothing like my family’s nurturing, encouragement, and love.
“What does your father do?”
“He’s in the Navy….” He shuffled his feet, embarrassed. “They just made him an admiral. He’s in Vietnam.”
And there it was. Death. Vietnam. Military. Professional killers. Admiral! No wonder Jim was conflicted.
“Military, Jesus. Must have been hard on you, huh?” I said, softly.
“Fuck yes, he was.”
“You want to talk about it?”
He started to walk along the beach. “Not really.”
I didn’t say anything. I just walked with him, in case he needed a friend. A shoulder.
“He was real strict,” he finally said. Probably glad to unburden some of the weight. “He ran the house like he ran his ship. When I was a kid he was the captain of the Bonhomme Richard.” Jim laughed. “They called it the Bonny Dick.”
I laughed, too. “That’s funny…the pretty dick.”
“We had to be all shipshape and correct.” The blockage was slightly opened. “We had to call him ‘sir’ and my mother ‘ma’am.’ He wouldn’t stand for any fucking around; no goofing off.”
“And your mother?”
“She had to go along with him. I mean…he was her husband, after all.”
And then he closed up. The blockage back intact. Holding in the anger, the fears, the resentment, the demons. We walked on in silence, Jim kicking at the water…and his memories.
He later told me that his grandfather on his mother’s side, in contrast to the Morrison clan, was a civil liberties lawyer in the thirties. A defender of Communists and liberal causes. Jim was proud of that. I’ll leave it to you to divine which DNA helix, which genetic strain, which side of the family produced…Jimbo.
Back in D.C. Jim gave our crew strict orders to keep his mother away from him. The task fell to Rich Linnel, a promoter friend of Robby’s and Bill Siddons, our surfer roadie. They did it only too well. He never spoke to his mother that night, but at least she got to see her son perform. Her husband, Admiral Steve, never did. I don’t know that they ever spoke but there is a rumor that Jim had talked of visiting his parents and letting bygones be bygones once he came back from Paris. Today, his mother loves him dearly. I suppose she always did. I think even the Admiral is proud of his son…in spite of his being a poet.