Light My Fire

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by Ray Manzarek


  That day, which you fear as being

  the end of all things, is the birthday

  of your eternity.

  —Seneca

  epilogue

  And so it ended in Paris. That journey into the creative impulse that started at the UCLA Film School. That joining that took us from the shore break of Venice Beach with Jim singing in a haunted, almost whisper voice the words of a liquid love song—“Moonlight Drive”—a love song of desire and death; from the two of us having nothing but our dreams…to the top of the pyramid. The top of the charts. We stole the eye from the top of that pyramid of rock and roll. We climbed the mountain. We ascended Olympus. We drank the nectar of the gods and became one of the elite. We danced the shaman’s dance together…and it was over. In the wink of an eye. In the flash of a thought. So brief, so quick; the snap of a finger and he was gone. Gone before he could even become a man. Twenty-seven years and six months; that’s all the time he did on this planet, in this incarnation. He was still an apprentice at life, still on the hunt, still on the search, still the wild child, still the enfant terrible. The dictionary says: “Enfant Terrible—anyone constantly vexing, startling, or embarrassing others, as, in the arts, by outraging conventional opinion or expectations.”…Is that Jim Morrison or what?

  And he was taken so quickly. Too quickly. But then he was, according to Chinese numerology, only a one. In his first incarnation. Dorothy found a little book of Chinese parlor divination that explained how to calculate your incarnation of this lifetime. Ultimately you get nine. Once you jump back on the wheel from the void, back into the “red dust,” back into life, you must ride the turning wheel of destiny nine times to get the point. Nine lifetimes—hence the nine lives of a cat—to realize the purpose of existence; the reason for your being. And then you’re free to step off. Or come back again, as you so choose. Here’s how you do the numbers: Add all the numbers of your birthday together and reduce them to a single digit. Jim’s is December 8, 1943. 12/8/1943. 1 + 2 + 8 + 1 + 9 + 4 + 3 = 28. Add 2 + 8 to reduce to a single digit =10. Reduce again 1 + 0 = 1. Jim was a one. Fresh out of the void! Just beginning the journey, again. Just beginning the quest, again. No wonder he didn’t know how far he could go before it would all be snatched out from under him. No wonder he was always trying to push things beyond the norm, beyond the pale. He was a one. An enfant terrible. A wild child.

  And I was there to balance that. To bring a sense of order to his wildness. My birthday is February 12, 1939. 2/12/1939 = 27. 2 + 7 = 9. My incarnation is 9. This is my last time on the wheel. Jim Morrison, a one—Ray Manzarek, a nine—equals the Doors. The Dionysian and Apollonian balancing act. The synthesis of alpha and omega turning back on themselves. The snake biting its own tail. The Ouroboros. The wholeness.

  So Jim came kicking and screaming and wild out of the void. Wild in the night. Filled with a desire for life and art. Filled with poetry.

  Awake, shake dreams from your hair,

  My pretty child, my sweet one.

  Choose the day and choose the sign of your day,

  The day’s divinity,

  First thing you see.

  And the first thing he saw, when his eyes were opened by the ingestion of the psychedelic soma substance, was the divinity of the day. The purity, the holiness of this moment in time. The infinite holiness of this instant. This heartbeat. This tick of the clock. This clap of the hands. It’s both infinite and time specific. It’s divine. All things. And he tried to convey his visions through his poetry.

  I tell you this…

  No eternal reward will forgive us now

  For wasting the dawn.

  He tried to bring us some of his enthusiasm and excitement at just being alive! Being alive on this planet…in the holy now. In the infinite instant. He loved life. He loved being alive. It delighted him. He could see God in everything. Alive in everything!

  A vast radiant beach in a cool jeweled moon.

  Couples, naked, race down by its quiet side.

  And we laugh like soft, mad children,

  Smug in the woolly cotton brains of infancy.

  The music and voices are all around us.

  And he was alive in the music. And we were alive in him. The four of us, together. The Doors. Our music. Made in the infinite moment when we immersed ourselves in the waters of our deepest selves. Basking under the radiant sun of our father and drifting contentedly in the water of our mother. One with the universe, the rhythm, the energy. One with the great pulse of existence.

  In the beginning was the rhythm

  And Jim knew these things. That’s what drew me to his words in the first place. That’s what drew me to him. And his joy. And his delight. And his craziness.

  But because his enthusiasm was so boundless, because his joy was so all-encompassing, death was also lurking nearby. Waiting to claim the wild child. The overexuberant first incarnation.

  Death, old friend.

  It was as if he were familiar with death. And he wasn’t afraid of it. It was as if he knew what was coming. And it didn’t bother him. He was a one. And he must have had vague remembrances of his pre-one existence, brief flashes of his time before time; intimations of his being in infinity before stepping back into the red dust. Back onto the wheel. And it comforted him. Supported him. For, after all, isn’t it heaven? Pure potentiality. Pure energy. The I Am.

  And he knew that was our final destination. He knew that was the point of our existence. But was he trouble? Oh, yes he was. That damned wild-child enfant terrible was a handful and a half. What a commotion! What chaos! What anarchy! Could that guy cause a ruckus? Wow!

  I am interested in anything about

  revolt, disorder, chaos.

  Man, I’ll say he was. But what fun. What a riot. What a crazed and wild existence. Damn, we had a good time. Big fun. Except for the aberration. The problem.

  Shall we attempt to give it a name, this malady, this Jimbo? How about compensation for a perceived inadequacy (he could never live up to his father’s expectations, hence he created a persona his father might like and understand) or emotional immaturity (he was a one) or perhaps emotional instability (his shamanic inclination) or societal maladjustment (Miami, for example) or antisocial hostility (arrested for inciting a riot in New Haven) or psychoneurotic Oedipal complex (“Father, I want to kill you, Mother, I want to fuck you”) or obsessional moral deficiency (“There are no rules, no laws,” as he said in Miami) or dementia praecox (multiple-personality disorder) or simply old-fashioned, Victoriana, fin de siècle “unsoundness of mind”? Or all of the above. Or none of the above. Why don’t you pick one, if you really need that sort of summing up. A summing up that would put a neat bow around Jim Morrison and then allow us to file him away. To safely put him in a pigeonhole. To categorize him and then to be rid of him and his damnable charisma.

  Well, it can’t be done. He’s been haunting me for some thirty years now. And I love it. He was wild and impetuous and overflowing with life. He was witty and charming, gracious and funny, elegant and sophisticated, but down in the trenches as well. He was literate and knowledgeable. He had an insatiable thirst for learning about the world. He wanted to know everything. The why of everything. The how of everything. The connection of everything. His brain was always in high gear, as were his emotions. It was always a roller-coaster ride, being with him. He created ecstatic highs for me. Joyous, transcendent moments. From Madison Square Garden, rocking in front of twenty thousand screaming Doors fans, to contemplative walks in the soft shore break of Venice Beach discussing Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Sonny Rollins’s tenor playing as compared with John Coltrane’s. From the outsize spectacle to the microcosm. He was a joy to be with. And if not always a joy…he was certainly stimulating.

  Was he obsessive? Of course. Was the obsessive behavior necessary? Of course. It’s what made him Jim. You had to take the good with the bad, the bitter with the sweet, the genius with the rotter, the poet with the prole. But that was Jim. I
t was love it or leave it. And who, except a coward, would want to leave it? My mother once said, “You’re living life to the fullest, Raymond.” And being with Jim was certainly a life fully lived. As was his. Overflowing. Filled to the rim with wild emotions…and then overflowing.

  Effusive, exuberant, crazed, manic. What a time, my friends. Those sixties. And what a guy. God, I loved him. And I sorely miss him, and his slightly Southern, goofy “heh, heh, heh.” And his shy/sly grin when he was caught in a fantastical exaggeration. And the leaning of his head to one side as he listened intently to a new idea. And his laconic yet defensive “mmm” before answering a too-direct question. And his subtle modulation of weight from one hip to another as he shape-shifted before your very eyes. And his languid stretching of arms and body and tossing of his lion’s mane of hair. And his leaping up out of a chair when adventure was proposed, for adventure was his métier. His reason for being. His main purpose for being here. And didn’t he bring that sense of adventure to us? All of us. God, he was fun to be with.

  There are times when I have this recurring dream about him. And he’s back, and everything is cool. And we’re all making music together. Inspired music. Doors’ music. But every once in a while he tries to float away, carried off by the inspiration, into the blue canopy, off into the light. But I bring him back with a firm hand on his ankle and a cool blues line on the organ. And he’s grounded again. Centered again. And Robby plays a snake slide line on his guitar and John does a rim shot whack on his skins and Jim is back where he’s supposed to be. In the center of the maelstrom, in the eye of the sun, at the heart of the Doors. And for me everything is good again. All the parts are in place. Jim is young and vibrant and alive again. He is the poet again. He is the young god of the vine and he is leading us in an ecstatic dance around a bonfire, on a hillside, on a warm California night. And we are filled with potency. Filled with potential. The world is ours for the taking. For the loving. For the creating. The universe is ours. All things are ours, are of us, and we are all things. We are all one. In the energy.

  And then I wake up, enveloped in warmth and contentment. And I wonder if the dream is my life…or if my life is a dream. Either way, Robby, John, and I are still together. Despite our minor differences of opinion and occasional aesthetic clashes. (Hell, that’s par for the course in a rock band, isn’t it?) We’re still rabid supporters of the genius of Jim Morrison and each other. We all love the music and poetry we created together and, at bottom, we all love each other. We’re still in love. With the Doors, with life, with existence. We are the Doors. For the rest of our lives.

  And Jim is always with us. In the air, in the ether, in the electricity. In the sounds and rhythms of Doors’ music. In the images of his poetry. In the joys and anguish of his soul, which he so publicly bared to us. In the hundreds of photos of the “young lion” that wink out at us from the collective media. In the radio’s playing of “Riders on the Storm” on rainy days across America. In a blurb in a newspaper, or a book title, or a film title using one of his lines, one of his catchphrases. And his face on the T-shirts being sold from Venice Beach, California, to San Marco Square in Venice, Italy. I have seen them. And in each new generation’s discovery of The Doors and Jim’s plea of: “Please, please, listen to me, children. You are the ones who will rule the world.” In each new generation’s quest for its own freedom, Jim is there. The Doors are there.

  He asked me once, as we walked along the beach to our monkey rings workout on a midsummer’s California morning, through the light, filled with excitement at our newly conceived plan of destiny, filled with youth and joy and potency, “How long do you think you’ll live, Ray?”

  He snapped me out of my reverie. My mind raced back from the sea blue/sky blue horizon line, where it was doing a tightrope dance, and tried to lock itself into what it had just heard. It couldn’t.

  “What?!” was all I could say. Shocked.

  “You know. How old will you be when…you…well, when you die?”

  What a question! We were just pups. Just starting out. The future was infinite, and even then, at that seminal moment in time, at the just-realized conception of the Doors…even then he was aware of his own mortality.

  “Ohh, God…probably…uhh,” I stammered, trying to project myself from that golden day into a distant future. “Probably…uhh, like…eighty-seven.”

  “Whoa, not me, man. I’ll never make it that far.” And he spoke matter-of-factly, without any fear in his voice. “I see myself like a shooting star. You know, like when you’re out at night, at the beach with a bunch of people, and somebody points up at the sky and says, ‘Hey, look! A shooting star!’ And everybody stops talking. And they see it, and say ‘Ahh!’ And it holds them for a brief moment…and then it goes out.”

  And he looked at me with his deep and trusting eyes. His wise and prescient eyes…

  “That’s how I see myself, Ray.”

  In that year, in our youth, we had an

  intense visitation of energy.

  I shall always miss him.

  Dad and me

  Jim, Rick, and Ray Manzarek as muscle men

  My first piano recital

  Me—adolescent pimples, peach fuzz, and Mr. B. Collar

  The “Hoyne Giants”: Joe Niese is holding the football. I’m upper left.

  A Polish wedding in Chicago with Mom and Dad. I’m sixteen.

  Me, the hambone, as Prince Charming in Cinderella high school play

  The Manzarek family: Ray Sr., Helen, Ray Jr., Jim, and Rich

  Mom and me, college graduation. De Paul University, 1960.

  Rick and the Ravens

  Me in the first month of my life in California

  Screamin’ Ray Daniels

  Jim, my mom, Dorothy, and Thor the Doberman

  The Doors’ first photo session. New York, 1966.

  More jamming and transcending on “Gloria” by the Doors and Them. Photo by George Rodriguez. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Jim Morrison and Van Morrison onstage at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, jamming on “Gloria.” Photo by George Rodriguez. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Romeo and Juliet in San Francisco, 1967. Photo by Robert Klein. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Our wedding, 1967. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Into the Mystic, East Coast, 1967. Photo by Mike Barich.

  A Lincoln dog, D.C., 1967. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Reading the Lincoln plaque, Washington, D.C., 1967. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  San Jose Rock Festival, 1968. Jim: “What do you want to play next?” Ray: “I don’t know, but first hand me that joint.” Photo by Ed Caraeff. Used by permission of Ed Caraeff.

  A backstage discussion on the literary merits of a fanzine. New Jersey, 1968. Photo by Michael Montfort/Gunter Zint. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The Lizard King, damn right! 1968 photo shoot. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Jim at the Harry Houdini mansion ruins, Laurel Canyon, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Mr. and Mrs. Manzarek Photo by David Sygall/e-shot.com.

  James Dean at the Observatory, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Himself in Russian poet shirt, Hollywood Hills, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Waiting for the Sun recording session, 1968. Paul Rothchild in Borsalino hat.

  Waiting for the Sun recording session, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  “Screaming Ray” background vocals on “Hello, I Love You,” 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Flash Gordon in China—at home, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Relaxin’ Krieger. At home in Malibu, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The UCLA Fil
m School grads at a press conference. Europe, 1968. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The auteur and guitar god. Europe, 1968. Used by permission of the Doors.

  A low-angle, Orson Welles shot. Europe, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Europe, press conference, 1968. Bored. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The shaman’s dance, 1968. Photo by Paul Ferrara. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Quetzalcoatl and the shaman, Mexico, 1969. Photo by Jerry Hopkins. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Supporting the Colossus in Mexico at the Forum Club, 1969. Photo by Jerry Hopkins. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The Doors at the Lucky U. Photo by Henry Diltz. Used by permission of the Doors.

  The Manzareks in Mexico, 1969. Photo by Jerry Hopkins. Used by permission of the Doors.

  Venice beach, Morrison Hotel photo session, 1969. A rejected cover shot. I wonder why. Photo by Henry Diltz. Used by permission of the Doors.

 

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