Post by darkstar3 on Jan 14, 2011 17:26:52 GMT
Through The Doors Again
Manzarek,Krieger and Densmore Today
By: Bob Matheu
Creem Magazine
1981
(In May, CREEM person Bob Matheu put down his usual Nikon and conducted an interview in Los Angeles with remaining Doors, Ray Manzaek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. Their talks ranged from exploring their feelings about the past – often conflicting – and revealing their future projects, Doors related and otherwise. – Ed.)
RAY MANZAREK
Creem: What have you been working on lately?
Ray: I just finished producing the X album, and I have to answer the phone. Do you know Iggy?
Creem: Yeah.
Ray: I worked with him for three months off and on, and we came up with some GREAT songs. I only whish we’d get more of a chance to do it. A real shame. He was really singing for the first time in his life, and he said, “Ray, I don’t sing.” And I said, “What do you mean you don’t sing?” He was hitting middle C, high C and an E or even an F which is a real hard thing to hit on a keyboard and he was holding it for like 12 beats. And I was doing chord changes behind it when he’d hit the top of that note. He’s a real talent. The guy’s got some real things to say.
Creem: When you were working with him, what was association?
Ray: Just writing some songs together. We thought maybe we’d make an album or put a band together. Whatever.
Creem: I remember right after Jim’s death the mention of getting another singer to take over.
Ray: Right. Jess Roden. Howard Werth who sang with Audience. And Iggy was definitely one of the names.
Creem: What happened with that?
Well, we went to England because Iggy was there, but after the Doors went to England, the band decided to break up. I did two solo albums after the Doors broke up and Danny Sugerman was a good friend of Iggy’s acting as sort of a manager for him, and he said, “Hey, why don’t you get together with Iggy?” I liked it, and I don’t really know what happened.
Creem: Was Williamson involved with this?
Ray: No. Williamson wasn’t involved until near the end of it. Iggy said, “James has to be involved.” And I said OK. “Here’s the songs I’ve been working on” – (makes heavy metal/bomb-like sound effects) I said wait a minute. This is impossible. You don’t need anything. You hardly need a bass or drums with that much guitar, for God’s sake. Wher am I going to put keyboards? I couldn’t put my fingers on a piano with a guitar that fills up the entire sonic spectrum. So he said, “I want to work with James,” and I said OK. So we never did. It never happened. We played one gig together – “The Death Of Glitter Rock,” 1975 at the Palladium and Iggy and me and Gary Mallaber who was playing with Steve Miller, James Willamson, and Nigel Harrison of Blondie. We played half a dozen Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones songs. It was fucking great. Iggy kicked a chick in the teeth. She came up on stage towards him, and he just kicked her – right in the chops, she fell over backwards. It was horrible. He was so great, he’s in control of the whole audience. Everybody there said this is the band of the future, and it never happened. I really thought we had a chance of doing something. If anyone from a record company had been there, we might have made a record.
Creem: Was that before Nite City?
Ray: That was just before Nite City with Nigel. You see, I worked with Nigel on the last Ray Manzarek solo album, and then Nigel sort of bridged the gap between those two things. He was around when Iggy and I were working together. And we auditioned a few drummers and stuff, but Iggy said “I wanna go off with James Williamson.” So then it was time to put Nite City together. Oddly enough, about a month and a half later Iggy and I had parted company, Danny Sugerman said, “Hey, I found this fantastic singer,” and this guy just blew my mind. His name was Noah James, and he wrote some just GREAT songs. And we started Nite City with Nigel and Paul Warren and Jimmy Hunter. And that’s how Nite City came into being.
Creem: So what happened then?
Ray: Well, Nite City self destructed. Nite City exploded. The sum of the parts was in fact greater than the whole, so subsequently the band exploded. Everyone went crazy. Pail and Noah didn’t get along. I didn’t get along with anybody. And we just fought all the time. We made great music, a great bunch of guys, but the center just wouldn’t hold. Too many divergent personalities. We rehearsed at a place called SRI Studios. It’s a rehearsal studio with five or six rooms. Nite City rehearsed there and we blew out the power in the whole fucking place. No one has ever done that before. We exploded, just blew the power. There was so much raw, psychic energy coming out of Nite City that we short circuited the entire place. We did it two or three times. I don’t know why, because we never used large amplifiers. It as just psychic. Another example – once Noah was ending a song coming down with his left hand. Meanwhile, Paul Warren’s standing on the other side and comes up with the guitar, and in clean karate chop, Noah severed the head of Paul’s solid oak guitar. It was a $3500 guitar - a Les Paul original. You can’t do that with a human hand! So that was the kind of energy that was going on with Nite City. The whole band was crazed. We played New York and blew out all the amplifiers. And I think that’s why the band eventually broke up. There was too much energy and the band exploded.
Creem: Do you ever think about working in a group situation again?
Ray: I don’t think so. Not at the moment anyway. Maybe something will come along in the next five years. But at the moment, no. I don’t want to work in a band. I’d like to do some more production, and, if anything, do a solo album doing everything myself. Maybe do some background music for a movie or tv show. Play with X. What I’d like to do is sit in with X every now and then, or sit in with some of the local acts from L.A. – some of the blues and rock bands. Lot of really good bands in Los Angeles right now.
Creem: What was the last Doors tour like – the one without Jim?
Ray: It was probably enough to make me say, “I quit!” He died, but I quit.
Creem: Well, you were actually the one who first called it quits.
Ray: That’s right. Thanks a lot, you guys, but it’s not the same without Jim. Yeah, that happened over in London. We were in England looking for a new singer, a new bass player, and additional guitar player, whatever. Something to give some new life and change to The Doors. But it just got old. It got boring. We’d been together too long. Without Jim, the Doors just weren’t the Door anymore. It wasn’t the same band. So we went to England to see if we could change things, but we really didn’t find anybody. A couple of guys we worked with were good, but I thought it was just time to put the Doors to bed – to close the Doors. So I said to John and Robbie, “ Listen, you guys, let’s just pass on this and end it.” And we did.
Creem: There’s been speculation that when Jim went to Paris that was actually the end of his association with The Doors.
Ray: We finished L.A. Woman for Elektra, and it fore filled our contract with the company. So we were suddenly free agents, free to sign with whoever we wanted. But rather than do that immediately, Jim said, “Hey, I’m going to Paris. Let’s take some time off. There’s no reason to make any decisions right now. The album’s finished. Let’s put it out and take time to cool off. I’m going to Paris to relax and get away from Miami, from Los Angeles, to get away from the Doors, to get away from Jim Morrison, superstar, superstud – the Lizard King,”…all the thing the press was calling him, the kind of acid rock, or orgasmic rock. Ya Know, people constantly coming down on him. So he said, “Pam and I are going to Paris to just hang out there for a while.” And we were all for it. We wanted him to relax and get himself together. In the meantime. John, Robbie and I stayed in L.A. We weren’t really in the center of things. By that time, we were Morrison’s backing band – it was Jim Morrison and The Doors. Poor Jim had to take the brunt of everything. He was the center of attention. And he just needed to take some time off. So meantime we were working on new songs, and waiting for Jim to either come back or say I’m never coming back. The last thing I heard from Jim – he talked to John Densmore on the phone – and he asked how L.A. Woman was doing. And John said it was doing great. So Jim was very excited about that, and he said when he got back, he was ready for the next one. There were definitely things to do. He’d been getting some new ideas and working on his poetry and stuff. And everyone was real optimistic including Jim and Pam about the future of the Doors and about the future of Jim Morrison, poet, rock star, novelist, script writer, and even film actor. Everyone felt pretty positive about the whole thing. And then July 3, 1971, I got a phone call from Bill Siddons saying Jim Morrison is dead. This story was like the sixth or seventh time Jim Morrison had died. And he said, No, I think this one is for real, Ray. Well, OK man, but go to Paris because I’m got going to France to check out a rumor. You’re the acting manager, so get your ass over there. And he said that’s exactly what he was going to do. He got over there, and he found a sealed coffin, Pamela in hysterics, and a doctor’s certificate saying that Jim Morrison was indeed dead of a heart stoppage. And of course, when anyone dies, their heart stops. There was no autopsy. But what caused his heart to stop was never said. And it was sealed coffin, and he looked at Jim as though he was a superior being or at least a father figure. So he never said open it because he suddenly had that intense déjà vu from when his own father had died. So that’s what I know. That’s all know. I saw Pamela maybe six or eight months later after she’d come back from Europe, and a lot of people said why don’t you ask her. And when I saw her, she was just totally broken up. It was across a restaurant, and it was like, “Pam”….”Ray?”..Some Enchanted Evening.” You know, these two people come together, and all I could do was hold her, because this chick was crying. Jim Morrison was her total life, and she was devastated by either Jim’s staged death or if he was actually dead. If Pamela was any indication, then Jim was dead. She was not faking it. This was a woman totally broken up. So I assume Jim was dead from her reaction and from the fact that the coffin was put in the ground and no one has ever said otherwise.
But you know, who knows? If anyone could have done it, if anyone could have said, “I’m getting out of rock and roll, I don’t like what’s happening in Miami.” He was the still up in Miami and they were going to put his ass in jail. They wanted to get that guy, and they wanted to make an example of him. So he was scared; we were all scared. That was weighing heavy on his mind. The fact that the audience had changed, that it was no longer that mystical spiritual union of musician and audience - that was no longer happening anymore. People were coming to see Jim Morrison – that guy in leather, the acid king, the lizard king, the freak out king, the freak show. Let’s go see a geek. Hey, you know, that guy’s stoned all the time, and he puts on a hell of a show, but it wasn’t because he was stoned. It was a psychological horror, freak show. It was a freak show in the sense of the shaman – the sense of possession, the sense of participating powers of the universe that Jim Morrison was capable of doing. The people who came to the early Doors shows came to see that. So Morrison was like the shaman who took people on mystical journey to a darker psychic realm that people today would just be scared shitless to enter. It definitely had something to do with the hallucinogenic drugs people were taking at the time.
Creem: What was it like for you to be involved in these performances?
Ray: Time would be suspended. Time would actually stop. The only thing that would exist would be the energy, the feeling generated between the audience and the band. The one common thing was the rhythm – the power of the beat. It became a hypnotic drone. It can capture your conscious mind and lull it into a non-state and allow you to sink down a little lower into your subconscious mind. That’s what happened at a Doors’ concert. It’s bizarre to talk about it now, but I was there and I could feel it. Jim was in control of these people, and the allowed him to take them on a psychic journey – to suspend reality and the universe and to examine the depths of human psyche.
Creem: When do you think it started to change?
Ray: It started to change as the Doors became more successful, as the media picked up on the Doors. If you went to see the band in early 1967, you knew nothing about them, and all of a sudden you’re being tripped out. Morrison was the leader, the road man who would take you on the trip, while the rest of the band was supplying the needed energy – this hypnotic, sensual sort of rhythmic thing. The whole thing was like a snake coiling around your body, and Morrison would work your mind. After the Doors became successful and Jim fell off the stage – he did do that, he was so gone one time and twirling around like a whirling dervish – the media caught up on that. Hey, this guys stoned. The Doors are stoned all the time. Let’s go see them. They’ll do something outrageous. And after Miami, it became hey, this guy’s going to pull his pants down. Maybe he’ll pull it out on stage. The chicks got all excited, and so did the guys. And that’s what they came for. And when they came for that kind of thing, how are you going to hypnotize them? They want their eyeballs excited. They came to WATCH, they didn’t come to listen.
Jim Morrison was a personification of Dionysus and he once said the Dionysus enters through the ears, not through the eyes. At a Doors concert, you were suppose to close your eyes and feel Jim taking you on that trip, and the rest of the Doors taking you somewhere you’d never been before. At one point, Jim just finally said, “Phooey on you.” That was Miami. You’ve come to see a show, haven’t you? You’ve come to see a spectacle like you’ve never seen before, something to blow your minds. Well, what’s going to blow your minds? You didn’t come here to listen to a rock ‘n’ roll band. You came to WATCH something. Well, I’m going to show you something. Watch this. How about if I pull out my cock? Will that do it for you? Would you like to see me pull my dick out and shake it? Will that do it for you? And they went crazy. I don’t think he ever really did it. I wish he would have told somebody else what he was planning to do. Then it would have been cool. Because we didn’t know what he was doing, either. And the audience definitely didn’t know.
Miami was like his death. No one knows for sure. No one really knows for sure. I was five to eight feet away from Jim on stage, and I always had a tendency to close my eyes and put my head down. I’m not concerned with what Jim was doing physically on stage. We didn’t have to look at each other. We weren’t communicating on that plane. So same thing in Miami. I wasn’t really looking.
I remember Jim taking his shirt off holding it in front of him, and doing sort of a mock striptease. He was naked to the waist. He did have boxer shorts on, and they were folded over the top of his leather pants. He held his shirt at waist level by the collar, it was covering his crotch. And he moved his shirt back and forth, saying, “I’m going to show to you, now watch.” And with one hand, he’d reach behind and kind of feign opening his fly and pulling it out. “There it was! Did you see it? Did you see it? And then he’d bring the shirt back in front of him. That’s all I remember him doing.
Creem: Jim never said to you whether he did it or not?
Ray: That motherfucker, that son of a bitch…and I’m the kind of guy who’ll defend Jim Morrison to the end…said to me the next day, “Did I do anything wrong?” And he played along, Whether he was putting us on or not, we’ll never know, because he looked us right in the eye and said, “I don’t remember a thing. I had a lot of drinks and don’t remember getting to Miami.” Who knows? He may have been absolutely honest in that he didn’t remember anything. So here we are.
OK, let’s talk technical. When you open it up, you have to unzip your pants and get it through the opening in your shorts. And he was wearing shorts that day, and he was doing a lot of twisting and turning. So he’d have to unzip his leather pants, in through the shorts, find it – it was huge thing to pull out – you’d think it would have gotten caught around his knee somewhere, for God’s sake. I didn’t see him do it. But I did see him intimate to the audience that he was going to do it.
And again, the psychological factors enter the picture. This was Tennessee Williams territory. Hot southern night, too many people, loads of nervous tension, the place held eight to ten thousand people and there were maybe 12 to 15 thousand crowded in to the place. They knew Jim Morrison was from Florida and it was like a native son returning home from Los Angeles – that weird place – who’d taken acid to become the Lizard King, the lizards and snakes play a large pat in the subconscious mind of Florida. There are a lot of snakes and lizards in that part of the country. Jim Morrison – a naïve son. They didn’t know what to expect. They thought, something was going to happen tonight. And Jim Morrison instilled into that crowd a mass hallucination. That’s what I think happened.
I don’t think what happened there is a hell of a lot different than people who saw the vision of Fatima or vision of Lourdes when the Virgin Mary appears to the children and people come and claim to see it. I think that’s what happened in Miami. They wanted to see the primordial snakes and that Jim represented and talked about. A combination of snakes, sex, devil, acid, penis: I think that all went together to make up this incredible concert that Miami was. That’s all I have to say about Miami.
Creem: As a photographer, I have to say I’m disappointed that nobody got a shot of it.
Ray: It could have put a lot of things to rest.
Creem: Several years ago, I got a shot of Iggy dropping his pants in Detroit. He said he was disappointed that I got the wrong angle and it didn’t look as big as it really ws.
Ray: I must say, Jim Osterberg did have a magnificent penis. It was indeed a tool, an avenging angel without mercy. During a rehearsal we once did with Dick Wagner, Iggy, Nigel and Gary when we were trying to get a band together, Iggy entered the rehearsal stark naked. Not a stitch on. And I thought I’d walk around naked too if I had a body and a schlong like that.
One more Miami story. The judge in Miami – I won’t say his name for publication so he won’t get into any more trouble than he’s already in – the judge would not allow us to sue all kinds of evidence. We wanted to show that even if Jim had exposed himself – and we don’t believe he did – so what? Hair was in town. Hair had full frontal nudity. Jim was obscene on stage, but so were the comics playing the Miami strip – you know foul mouthed comics. The striptease girls. There was lots of nudity going on in Miami – of all places, Miami. It’s the fifth city of America, and they busted Jim Morrison.
That was going to be our defense. The judge said inadmissible evidence. This judge just blew our whole fucking case. And we didn’t know why he was doing it other than to make political hay, but then a few years later we found out the judge himself had been convicted of taking a bribe from a child molester, he was going to send to jail.
Creem: Did you see a big change in Jim over the years you knew him?
Ray: Yeah. I’ll tell you what they did, man. They sucked his energy. They sucked it right out of him. The last gig we ever did was in New Orleans, and Jim had already been sucked dry. It was sad. When I first met him, he was just full of energy, life, power and potency and intellectual knowledge, and by the time it was over, he was bloated and weak. They had just sucked it out of him, because they demanded a show out of him. They demanded a geek. And this was not Jim’s trip. Jim would do something outrageous if the situation called for it, but if you asked him to do something outrageous, no. He was basically shy, and very quiet, a very down to earth guy.
Creem: Did he get caught up in his own image?
Ray: Well, it’s always easy for someone on the outside to say, “Hey man, why don’t you call it quits.” But on the inside, it never feels that way. I think he came to the point where he came to believe that it wasn’t going to continue on that way because we had too many good memories from the beginning. Simply incredible gigs. During our first two years of existence, each gig was incredible. We played the Whisky A Go Go with Them and Van Morrison and Jim Morrison jammed together and sang together on stage. And then we played with Frank Zappa’s Mother s of Invention, and the Buffalo Springfield, and the Byrds. There was something about the times that were absolutely magical. Great times, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68. It started to go wrong around ’68, the Democratic Convention in the summer of ’68. But up until that time, the Doors and everyone else were floating on psychedelic cloud of just magic. Then little by little, things started to go bad. And you didn’t want to think about bad things. We didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t want to hear an audience coming to see Jim Morrison because he freaks out and falls off the stage. Bullshit. But you’re aware that things have changed because nobody’s heart and minds changed.
We wanted to change the world, make the world a better place to live in. And we were trying to do it. And the fact that it wasn’t happening – OK, a temporary setback – it was still going to happen. It finally got to the point, though, where Jim said, “Fuck it, I’ve got to go to Paris. I’ve got to get away.” And that was March, 1971. And by July 3 1971, he was gone – wherever he went.
Creem: What do you think would have happened if he hadn’t left?
Ray: I think the Doors would have been making music very much like An American Prayer. I think we’d have been doing real poetry and music things. I think songs would have still been important, but we’d have probably gone to poetry, music, song, another song, more poetry, a keyboard playing by itself, a guitar playing by itself.
Creem: More like a jazz base?
Ray: I think so. It would have fragmented itself from strictly songs to a much more theatrical thing. An album would have been a 45 minute presentation of a body of ideas, as series of pieces. Very much like An American Prayer. I think An American Prayer is very much like what the Doors would be doing had Jim not disappeared.
We’d probably have done two more albums in the vein of L.A. Woman, and then moved on to An American Prayer. Because Jim actually recorded “An American Prayer” just before he left for Paris, on his birthday, December 8 1970. And he had the idea to do an extended poem piece of some sort or another, and working with sound effects, whatever. He really didn’t have that part of it finalized in his mind yet, but he did want to do something that dealt with an extended poetry piece.
Creem: Is there any more unreleased material?
Ray: Yep.
Creem: Any plans to do anything with it?
Ray: Well, there are no definite plans at the moment, but we’ve definitely got some stuff, and we’d like to see if we can put it all together into an interesting album. We’re not going to do anything unless we can make it very exciting and interesting and unusual album. I will say that we have the dirtiest version of “Gloria” that’s ever been recorded.
Creem: More so that the live Hendrix one they released a year or so ago?
Ray: I don’t know. God, Hendrix did it, too? Jesus, I’ll have to check it out. Well, let’s put it this way. It’s the dirtiest version any white man has ever done of “Gloria.” It’s a live thing we did as a warm up sound check at the Aquarius Theatre when we recorded the Absolutely Live album. This was part of that that we never used because it was too dirty.
At that time – 1969, 1970 – we couldn’t do anything like that and release it. God, we couldn’t even fart without getting busted. Narcs on one side of the stage and a vice squad on the other side of the stage. I remember seeing those guys. They were there with their little clipboards with names, and they were just waiting for the offense so they could bust us. They wanted to bust Morrison – Morrison and The Doors. They did it in Miami, well, by God, we’ll bust them in Cincinnati, we’ll bust them in St. Louis, we’ll bust them in Chicago, Minneapolis; I mean, name your major city, and they were all out to bust the Doors. They were going to stop the Doors.
They couldn’t bust the Beatles because they were nice – “All you need is love” – and the Stones were from England, also, and yeah, they were bad, but those fuckin’ Doors those were the ones. They all wanted to stop Morrison. They wanted to show him that they couldn’t let him get away with it – from going too far. But he always said to the establishment, “Fuck you. You’re not going to stop me. The only thing that can stop me is death.” I think death has probably stopped him, but boy, he went all the way. If there was any guy who ever went all the way to the edge – reached over the line, and said, “I’m going to step over that line and you ain’t going to stop me” – it was Jim Morrison. And thank God America had him, because if we hadn’t had him, we’d be lost today. There’d be nobody heavy.
America hasn’t produced anybody heavy in rock ‘n’ roll as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan did some real good stuff, no doubt about that. He’s since become a little weird as far as I’m concerned. I don’t hold with his religious affiliation, let’s put it that way, but Dylan did some real good stuff. But Morrison, man, Morrison took it all the way. That’s the thing I think America loves about Morrison. “I woke up this morning and got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” And that’s the way he lived.
Creem: Are there still plans for a movie?
Ray: Oh yeah. There will be movies. Doors movies. In fact there should be one coming out about the time your special comes out – a Doors interview, tribute to Jim Morrison that we’re doing for cable tv, HBO, whatever. And then we’ve got the live documentary footage and we’re going to put that together into an hour and a half, hopefully a network TV special of some sort. Try to get Jim Morrison into the living rooms of America. I don’t think it will be easy getting the Lizard King onto NBC.
And there’s also eventually going to be something based on the book No One Here Gets Out Alive. There’s also going to be a French movie about a girl writer – rock ‘n’ roll writer – who is obsessed and possessed by the spirit of Jim Morrison, and things that happen to her in Paris. And hopefully there will be a Jim Morrison biography on screen, but that won’t happen for awhile. And it won’t be John Travolta.
Creem: Is there an established actor that you would like to see do it?
Ray: No. But you know who I’d like to get? I’d like to get Robert De Niro at age 25. That’s who I see playing Jim Morrison. Somebody unknown who can move and act like Jim. Nobody knew De Niro until the Godfather, and then everyone said, “God, who is that?”
Creem: I heard that Frank Sinatra wants De Niro to play him in the Sinatra movie biography.
Ray: Frank Sinatra is great. He’s really a great singer. (Begins singing High Hopes) Well, Jim liked Sinatra. His favorite singers were Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Creem: What did you think of Sugerman’s book?
Ray: I liked the book. It’s the first book. The Morrison story is so complex and so deep, and so psychological that one book only starts it. That’s the beginning book – the Joe Friday one. The beginning facts – at 2500 hours the man did take his penis out and shake it in Miami. They did say that. It’s like the hokey pokey – “Take it out and shake it all about.” The book is the facts, and it IS very factual. There’s not one lie in the book. Nothing in the book is made up. Everything happened that happens in the book. There were some things that had to be cut from the book. Danny had a whole list of things that had to be cut, and I hope we can put those things out. They’re just hysterical, man. Finny as hell. It’s all the things that Warner Books said, “You cannot print that” –you know, it was all libel things. And he’s got five pages of that kind of stuff.
Creem: The book helped the album sales.
Ray: Yeah. The albums are doing real well. 1980, 1981 is like 1967, 1968 in terms of record sales. A whole new generation of people are picking up on the Doors. I’m happy. I’d hate to be assigned to the dust bins. “Oh, remember them? Weren’t they cute? They sang about snakes and took acid. But I don’t care about them, I want Adam & the Ants.” Sorta like Cream. A lot of groups.
Creem: Who do you like now?
Ray: X, The Blasters. I really like the Alley Cats. They have some good things. Devo, Kraftwerk.
Creem: Do you still want to be involved in movies? I know that’s where you started?
Ray: Oh Yeah. I’m working on a script right now about punk rock in Chinatown. I’d like to direct. I don’t care about the business aspects. The business aspects of anything – I could care less about.
Creem: Have you done anything yet?
Ray: No I haven’t done anything since UCLA. I haven’t had time. One of these days. I’ve got a lot of ideas. So that’s what the future holds. Ray Manzarek’s producing good local L.A. acts. I might do a solo album. Music for movies and TV productions. And probably doing my own movie. That’s what I figure I’ll be doing the rest of my life. Also, the other day I had a great idea, and that is I’d like to do The Golden Scarab as a black musical. That’s an album I made in 1973. I’d also like to do it as a ballet. That album needs the visuals. I’d love to see dancers dancing it. But I think The Golden Scarab could be the new Wiz – a black musical on stage on Broadway. A bunch of black guys in Harlem waiting for the messiah. And then this guy goes on a journey trying to get back to the place where he originally came was.
Creem: Would you do it if Jim Morrison walked in the door ten minutes from now?
Ray: Well, I’ve had dreams like that – that Jim is back. We’d probably pick right up where we left off. Ok, man. Got any songs? Robbie? John? Got any songs? We’d go right back to work. We’d work out a couple of the old tunes. We would definitely do “L.A. Woman” and “Riders On The Storm.” One of the saddest aspects of my life – other than Jim leaving the planet – is that we never got to play “L.A. Woman” live. Man, we were all set. After completing the album, we all looked at each other and said, “Man this is great.” We were going to take Jerry Scheff with us, and we were even thinking of taking a rhythm guitarist with us so the Doors would go from four pieces to a six piece band. And we were going to do “L.A. Woman” and “Love Her Madly.”
I was really looking forward to that because Jerry Scheff would have played bass, and that would have freed me. Leave the rhythm to the bass and drums. I’m going to play keyboards. Let me play organs, synthesizer, string synthesizer, clavinet, Fender Rhoades piano. Play all the stuff. We were really looking forward to that. Even Jim was excited about it. He definitely wanted to take it on the road. After all L.A. Woman was a live album. We recorded it live in the studio – virtually live; there were very little overdubs. The only overdub on the song “L.A. Woman” was that I overdubbed some acoustic piano. All the rest of it – vocals, bass, guitars, other keyboards – was live.
ROBBY KRIEGER
Creem: What was the last Doors tour like when you traveled as a three piece?
Robbie: It wasn’t as bad as you might think. The crowds were real good and everything. We had a couple of extra people with us –a rhythm guitarist and a bass player and they did some singing. Jack Conrad and Bobby Ray. It was kinda fun, really. And then we did a European tour with that same set up and it was real fun. And we decided to play only every third day in Europe, so we could all see the sights and stuff. Usually when you tour Europe, it’s one city a day. But we didn’t really care about making money because we wanted to see the place. We actually played as a trio one time in Amsterdam before Jim died. Jim got real sick just as we were about to go on – smoked a bunch of hashish or something and passed out – so we decided to go on ourselves. The Jefferson Airplane was playing with us at the time. And at that time, the European audience didn’t really know the whole Jim Morrison superstar trip – it was just The Doors. They didn’t even really know who was the lead singer, and they loved it. But I do think that the main reason we broke up was not because the fans missed Jim but because we as a group missed him and we couldn’t function as three people because our balance was all off.
Creem: If Jim hadn’t gone to Paris and died, what do you think would have happened to the Doors?
Robbie: Well, I know that Jim really wanted to do more blues, so I think the next step would have been blues – solid blues. He had always wanted to do a real blues album.
Creem: What was it like performing during the years when things were really peaking for The Doors?
Robbie: It was kind of fun, but we were in such big halls then that it was sort of hard to get the right sound and all that. I really liked it more when we were on the way up – at clubs like the Whisky and in New York Once we started in with the concerts., it was more showtime and I didn’t like it as much. With the Beatles and the Stones stuff, it was more chicks going crazy. But with the Doors, there was actually young guys going nuts with high energy releases and destroying stuff. – more like you see in the punk scene right now. We just seemed to evoke that in an audience. But it was still a positive energy. I was never scared by it onstage. I’d be more scared today with all the spitting and bottle throwing. I’m actually afraid for my life at some of the concerts today. I just stay back.
Creem: When was the last time you talked to Jim?
Robbie: I suppose I probably talked to him a day or two before he left for Paris.
Creem: When Jim left, was he leaving the band?
Robbie: No, not at all. He was just going on an extended vacation. But we didn’t say OK, let’s break up. When we heard how good L.A. Woman was going to be, we were all ready to get to it.
Creem: What do you think would have happened as far as progression if Jim hadn’t left when he did?
Robbie: We’d have probably done the blues thing for at least one album or two, and after that, who knows? Bug I don’t know I don’t really think I could have seen The Doors existing in the 1970’s. It was too boring. I think we’d have probably given up music and gone into movies or something.
Creem: Did Jim change over the years that you knew him? Did the popularity really affect him?
Robbie: No, not at all. He was always the same. Crazy.
Creem: Was he annoyed by the demands of stardom placed upon him.
Robbie: I guess he was, but actually he was much more wild and crazy even when he wasn’t on stage. He was always mad that he didn’t become bigger faster. He thought success should have come faster like the Beatles or something like that. That as his only complaint. He didn’t mind people bugging him about being a star because that’s what he was trying to be. He did find it hard to live up to some of the legends especially with the girls. They expected him to have a four foot cock or something like that.
Creem: Over than The Soft Parade, most of the compositions were credited solely to The Doors. I know that you composed a lot of the Doors songs and didn’t receive credit. Do you have any bad feelings about that?
Robbie: I never felt bad about it because I ended up writing about a fourth of the songs, so it pretty much evened out.
Creem: You wrote, “Light My Fire.” What other songs were you responsible for?
Robbie: “Love Me Two Times,” Love Her Madly.” Those were the biggies. “Wishful Sinful,” Yes The River Knows,” that’s one of my favorites. “Spanish Caravan,” “Your Lost Little Girl.” I wrote the music to a bunch of them, “Touch Me,” “Tell All The People,” that one was probably why Jim got us all separate credits on The Soft Parade because he didn’t like singing those lyrics. Thought they were too political. “Touch Me” was originally written as “Hit Me” which would have made those lyrics more applicable today. But Jim said, “No way am I going to sing those lyrics.” So we changed it to “Touch Me.”
Creem: Do you think the book had a lot to do with the sudden resurgence of the Doors?
Robbie: I think it helped. There were three or four things – there was the book, there was the Apocalypse Now thing, and there was the fact that Elektra reduced the price on a bunch of albums. And there was An American Prayer.
Creem: What was your reaction when you first read the book?
Robbie: Well, I thought it was great reading. I couldn’t put it down. The facts were pretty straight. Some things were changed around a little bit here and there. I’m just glad someone finally did a book. There probably will be other books coming out now. The thing about Jim is that everyone who knew him knew him for about ten minutes, but they’d be under the impression that they were his best friend. There’s an article like that right now in High Times. It’s probably because he was so open with people. But these people get offended sometimes when they read something about him that might not share their own viewpoint.
Creem: Who’d you like to see play Jim in the movie they’re going to make of his life?
Robbie: Well, they’re not going to make a movie as far as I know. I wouldn’t want to see anyone play Jim. I think it would be ridiculous to have anyone play Jim. I’d go for a total unknown. Even if it was a great movie, though , it would stereotype Jim because people would say, “Oh, that’s what Jim Morrison was like.” It’s the same thing with Castenada. They wanted to make a movie out of Don Juan, and he said, “No, way. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody could play Don Juan. It’s the same type of thing.
Creem: Do you think if Jim hadn’t died he would have concentrated more on his poetry?
Robbie: That was the general idea. It turns out that he actually wrote some of best stuff towards the end.
Creem: The stuff he did, do you thin in 50 years time, it’ll be like Rimbaud or William Blake?
Robbie: Yeah. I think so. I’m not that big of a poetry buff or anything like that, but I think Jim had it as much together as those guys. I’ve never seen anybody else from our generation that could put words together like Jim could. I think if he’d have been more disciplined he would have done even greater things.
Creem: Did anyone like management ever try to slow Jim down?
Robbie: Yeah, but there was nothing you could do about it. People would tell Jim he should drink less and Jim would take them out and get them drunk.
Creem: Are there any plans to release anymore unreleased stuff – live material?
Robbie: It’s possible. There are tapes of the lives stuff we did at the Isle Of Wight. There’s a couple of things we have, but right now I don’t think there’s enough for an album, so we’re trying to collect more things. I hope we can bring out some sort of a live album.
Creem: Ray mentioned a version of “Gloria?”
Robbie: Yeah. That’s pretty amazing.
Creem: Are the any groups that you like right now?
Robbie: The Pretenders, that’s my favorite album right now. Oingo Boingo. A lot of the new groups I like.
Creem: Do you think there’s anybody right now doing anything as relevant as what the Doors did for their time?
Robbie: The only one I can think of since is the Wailers.
Creem: Do you think a lot of the Doors’ magic then had to do with the times?
Robbie: Yeah. There was something to fight for the 60’s. But still it takes a guy like Jim or Marley to get the whole thing together. As far as today goes. I don’t know. There’s a lot of good music going on today for sure.
Creem: Did you see Jim take his pants down?
Robbie: No, and I was right there. He may have taken them down, but I don’t think he whipped it out. You know for Jim to take his pants down, I wouldn’t even have thought of it twice. But actually whip it out? I don’t think so.
JOHN DENSMORE
Creem: You and Robbie were together in the Butts Band. What was your reaction to that experience?
John: It turned me onto the Wailers and the great Bob Marley, who died yesterday. We did that album in England,a dn we went to Jamaica to do part of it. Robbie and I got into reggae immediately. We later saw the Wailers at the Roxy, and they were second billed to Cheech and Chong the first time they were there. And nobody was there. But it was great.
Creem: What are you up to now?
John: I’ve been taking acting lessons for a few years, but that sort of took a back seat because I started drumming with this dance company. And I’m doing that, going to New York in the fall. It’s sort of a small underground dance company – there’s several of them in L.A. And then I just got an acting role, so I’m an actor again. I’m also trying to write my side of it all.
Creem: Do you have anyone interested?
John: Yeah, but they want to take it away from me, have me write it with someone. They want sex and drugs – and yeah, there as a lot of that – but more. So I’ve stopped pursing the business end of it. I started writing it originally as a sort of therapy.
Creem: What did you think of No One Here Gets Out Alive?
John: It’s all there. It’s all true. Danny meant well and did great, but how could it be more than a story from someone who was slightly outside? That may sound pompous but unless you’re totally involved, it’s something you really haven’t gone through. There’s a lot more to it.
Creem: Would you like to see a movie made?
John: No. The definitive movie is very frightening. The guy who made The Rose is running around trying to make a Morrison picture his next one, and we finally said, ‘no’ to him. But still, he might be making The Lizard soon. With a big Hollywood movie, our control would go ‘bye-bye” and that would be frightening. We’re read a lot of scripts and talked to a lot of people for several years. We’ve got a lot of real footage, but it’s not a movie. I saw the Elvis movie the other night. For what they had, it worked. It was well done.
Creem: Have you seen the finished product for the cable Doors Special?
John: Yeah. It was real good.
Creem: What was the final Doors tour like for you?
John: It was great and it was terrible. One night was great, the next terrible – the worst. It was great because we played “Riders On The Storm” for the first time – I don’t think it was out yet – and the audience loved it. The next night, Jim was drunk as hell. It was pathetic, horrible. Telling bad jokes on stage.
Creem: Did you think at that point that it might have been the end of the band?
John: No. Because L.A. Woman was so fun to do. After Jim went to Paris, he called me and we talked about how great L.A. Woman was. I think we would have made another album in that direction.
Creem: What do you think would have happened later on as far as direction goes?
John: I think musically it have been great, but I don’t know how much longer we could have hung together. Jim was bent on self destruction, I guess.
Creem: Did you guys ever make any attempt to change that?
John: Well, I know he knew that I disapproved. For awhile, I though he might be one of those old Irish guys who party until they’re in their 70’s.
Creem: Do you think part of it was Jim was getting caught up in what he had created?
John: Yeah, but its not as simple as that. He was really complex. He was obviously trying to break the mold when he grew the beard, gained the weight and stuff. He was interested in films and writing poetry. I don’t think the way he was going he’d have been starring in films. Originally he would have been. My God, what a great, instantly charismatic movie star. But then he started looking like…well, a beatnick. So, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to direct. I know that he loved films, that’s for sure.
Creem: It was obvious them, that he wanted to take it further than music, that he wanted to be more than just a singer in a band writing songs.
John: Yeah, but obviously, it was even more than that because he disintegrated. It wasn’t just breaking the mold. It was something he lost control of. But that’s all sort of negative. When I’m in a philosophical mood, I just think he was meant to be around quick and intense.
Creem: You were the last one to talk to him in Paris. What was he like then? He was excited about the new record?
John: Yeah. He wanted to record another one. He said he’d been writing. The rest of us had been rehearsing. That was about it. Our Elektra contract had just run out, so it was a good time to take several months off.
Creem: I saw Feast Of Friends for the time the other day, and there were those scenes where the crowds when wild and the police were on stage and everything. Was that at all frightening?
John: It was a lot of fun. I don’t know. I was never scared. It looks intense. I mean, I haven’t been to that many concerts lately, but I know they still have hordes of police. Back then, though it was like, “We’re got to protect this group,” and there’d be this wall of cops. And it would alienate everyone so they’d go charge the stage. It was so stupid. I was never afraid much though. I always figured that at the last second I could jump off the stage and get away. So it as kind of fun. Usually when people did get on the stage they didn’t do anything, although I am more afraid now with the fucking lunatics shooting people. It’s pathetic to say I’m surprised it hasn’t happened until now.
Creem: If Jim was suddenly to mysteriously reappear, do you think the Doors would start all over again?
John: (Laughs) I’d have to qualify that because what shape would he be in when he popped back into sight? I’d say that I’ve never met anyone in my life who would be capable of it but him. But I don’t know whether he’d come back as Alan Gingsberg or Baryshnikov. I don’t know. What would he want to do? I’d love to see him. I’ve had ten years now, and I feel like I could understand him a lot more. I’d have a lot to say. When I first met him he was just a powerhouse of intensity, and I didn’t really understand him or his lyrics at first. I did love them because they were fluent and rhythmic.
Creem: Did he change a lot over the years you knew him?
John: Yeah. He didn’t change in his persona that much. But in the beginning he was more like, I hate to say this, a college fraternity person – full of pranks, and fun. A little abusive to certain people, but in a fraternity kind of way. But then he got more into himself, a bit more distant.
Creem: Did he start to feel more hostile to things like demands and stuff?
John: No.
Creem: Ray mentioned that Jim was disappointed at the end by the people yelling for the hits and wanting to see a show.
John: Yeah. But he knew what he was doing. As we played bigger arenas, he became more theatrical, but he was so natural that it didn’t matter. It wasn’t every night. Sometimes he’d do absolutely nothing at all. Fame and fortune meant little. I read a quote ofhis once where he said something like if he had it to do all over again he’d be a quiet monk in the hills somewhere. He just lost his spark to live. I guess. He was really complex.
END.
Manzarek,Krieger and Densmore Today
By: Bob Matheu
Creem Magazine
1981
(In May, CREEM person Bob Matheu put down his usual Nikon and conducted an interview in Los Angeles with remaining Doors, Ray Manzaek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore. Their talks ranged from exploring their feelings about the past – often conflicting – and revealing their future projects, Doors related and otherwise. – Ed.)
RAY MANZAREK
Creem: What have you been working on lately?
Ray: I just finished producing the X album, and I have to answer the phone. Do you know Iggy?
Creem: Yeah.
Ray: I worked with him for three months off and on, and we came up with some GREAT songs. I only whish we’d get more of a chance to do it. A real shame. He was really singing for the first time in his life, and he said, “Ray, I don’t sing.” And I said, “What do you mean you don’t sing?” He was hitting middle C, high C and an E or even an F which is a real hard thing to hit on a keyboard and he was holding it for like 12 beats. And I was doing chord changes behind it when he’d hit the top of that note. He’s a real talent. The guy’s got some real things to say.
Creem: When you were working with him, what was association?
Ray: Just writing some songs together. We thought maybe we’d make an album or put a band together. Whatever.
Creem: I remember right after Jim’s death the mention of getting another singer to take over.
Ray: Right. Jess Roden. Howard Werth who sang with Audience. And Iggy was definitely one of the names.
Creem: What happened with that?
Well, we went to England because Iggy was there, but after the Doors went to England, the band decided to break up. I did two solo albums after the Doors broke up and Danny Sugerman was a good friend of Iggy’s acting as sort of a manager for him, and he said, “Hey, why don’t you get together with Iggy?” I liked it, and I don’t really know what happened.
Creem: Was Williamson involved with this?
Ray: No. Williamson wasn’t involved until near the end of it. Iggy said, “James has to be involved.” And I said OK. “Here’s the songs I’ve been working on” – (makes heavy metal/bomb-like sound effects) I said wait a minute. This is impossible. You don’t need anything. You hardly need a bass or drums with that much guitar, for God’s sake. Wher am I going to put keyboards? I couldn’t put my fingers on a piano with a guitar that fills up the entire sonic spectrum. So he said, “I want to work with James,” and I said OK. So we never did. It never happened. We played one gig together – “The Death Of Glitter Rock,” 1975 at the Palladium and Iggy and me and Gary Mallaber who was playing with Steve Miller, James Willamson, and Nigel Harrison of Blondie. We played half a dozen Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones songs. It was fucking great. Iggy kicked a chick in the teeth. She came up on stage towards him, and he just kicked her – right in the chops, she fell over backwards. It was horrible. He was so great, he’s in control of the whole audience. Everybody there said this is the band of the future, and it never happened. I really thought we had a chance of doing something. If anyone from a record company had been there, we might have made a record.
Creem: Was that before Nite City?
Ray: That was just before Nite City with Nigel. You see, I worked with Nigel on the last Ray Manzarek solo album, and then Nigel sort of bridged the gap between those two things. He was around when Iggy and I were working together. And we auditioned a few drummers and stuff, but Iggy said “I wanna go off with James Williamson.” So then it was time to put Nite City together. Oddly enough, about a month and a half later Iggy and I had parted company, Danny Sugerman said, “Hey, I found this fantastic singer,” and this guy just blew my mind. His name was Noah James, and he wrote some just GREAT songs. And we started Nite City with Nigel and Paul Warren and Jimmy Hunter. And that’s how Nite City came into being.
Creem: So what happened then?
Ray: Well, Nite City self destructed. Nite City exploded. The sum of the parts was in fact greater than the whole, so subsequently the band exploded. Everyone went crazy. Pail and Noah didn’t get along. I didn’t get along with anybody. And we just fought all the time. We made great music, a great bunch of guys, but the center just wouldn’t hold. Too many divergent personalities. We rehearsed at a place called SRI Studios. It’s a rehearsal studio with five or six rooms. Nite City rehearsed there and we blew out the power in the whole fucking place. No one has ever done that before. We exploded, just blew the power. There was so much raw, psychic energy coming out of Nite City that we short circuited the entire place. We did it two or three times. I don’t know why, because we never used large amplifiers. It as just psychic. Another example – once Noah was ending a song coming down with his left hand. Meanwhile, Paul Warren’s standing on the other side and comes up with the guitar, and in clean karate chop, Noah severed the head of Paul’s solid oak guitar. It was a $3500 guitar - a Les Paul original. You can’t do that with a human hand! So that was the kind of energy that was going on with Nite City. The whole band was crazed. We played New York and blew out all the amplifiers. And I think that’s why the band eventually broke up. There was too much energy and the band exploded.
Creem: Do you ever think about working in a group situation again?
Ray: I don’t think so. Not at the moment anyway. Maybe something will come along in the next five years. But at the moment, no. I don’t want to work in a band. I’d like to do some more production, and, if anything, do a solo album doing everything myself. Maybe do some background music for a movie or tv show. Play with X. What I’d like to do is sit in with X every now and then, or sit in with some of the local acts from L.A. – some of the blues and rock bands. Lot of really good bands in Los Angeles right now.
Creem: What was the last Doors tour like – the one without Jim?
Ray: It was probably enough to make me say, “I quit!” He died, but I quit.
Creem: Well, you were actually the one who first called it quits.
Ray: That’s right. Thanks a lot, you guys, but it’s not the same without Jim. Yeah, that happened over in London. We were in England looking for a new singer, a new bass player, and additional guitar player, whatever. Something to give some new life and change to The Doors. But it just got old. It got boring. We’d been together too long. Without Jim, the Doors just weren’t the Door anymore. It wasn’t the same band. So we went to England to see if we could change things, but we really didn’t find anybody. A couple of guys we worked with were good, but I thought it was just time to put the Doors to bed – to close the Doors. So I said to John and Robbie, “ Listen, you guys, let’s just pass on this and end it.” And we did.
Creem: There’s been speculation that when Jim went to Paris that was actually the end of his association with The Doors.
Ray: We finished L.A. Woman for Elektra, and it fore filled our contract with the company. So we were suddenly free agents, free to sign with whoever we wanted. But rather than do that immediately, Jim said, “Hey, I’m going to Paris. Let’s take some time off. There’s no reason to make any decisions right now. The album’s finished. Let’s put it out and take time to cool off. I’m going to Paris to relax and get away from Miami, from Los Angeles, to get away from the Doors, to get away from Jim Morrison, superstar, superstud – the Lizard King,”…all the thing the press was calling him, the kind of acid rock, or orgasmic rock. Ya Know, people constantly coming down on him. So he said, “Pam and I are going to Paris to just hang out there for a while.” And we were all for it. We wanted him to relax and get himself together. In the meantime. John, Robbie and I stayed in L.A. We weren’t really in the center of things. By that time, we were Morrison’s backing band – it was Jim Morrison and The Doors. Poor Jim had to take the brunt of everything. He was the center of attention. And he just needed to take some time off. So meantime we were working on new songs, and waiting for Jim to either come back or say I’m never coming back. The last thing I heard from Jim – he talked to John Densmore on the phone – and he asked how L.A. Woman was doing. And John said it was doing great. So Jim was very excited about that, and he said when he got back, he was ready for the next one. There were definitely things to do. He’d been getting some new ideas and working on his poetry and stuff. And everyone was real optimistic including Jim and Pam about the future of the Doors and about the future of Jim Morrison, poet, rock star, novelist, script writer, and even film actor. Everyone felt pretty positive about the whole thing. And then July 3, 1971, I got a phone call from Bill Siddons saying Jim Morrison is dead. This story was like the sixth or seventh time Jim Morrison had died. And he said, No, I think this one is for real, Ray. Well, OK man, but go to Paris because I’m got going to France to check out a rumor. You’re the acting manager, so get your ass over there. And he said that’s exactly what he was going to do. He got over there, and he found a sealed coffin, Pamela in hysterics, and a doctor’s certificate saying that Jim Morrison was indeed dead of a heart stoppage. And of course, when anyone dies, their heart stops. There was no autopsy. But what caused his heart to stop was never said. And it was sealed coffin, and he looked at Jim as though he was a superior being or at least a father figure. So he never said open it because he suddenly had that intense déjà vu from when his own father had died. So that’s what I know. That’s all know. I saw Pamela maybe six or eight months later after she’d come back from Europe, and a lot of people said why don’t you ask her. And when I saw her, she was just totally broken up. It was across a restaurant, and it was like, “Pam”….”Ray?”..Some Enchanted Evening.” You know, these two people come together, and all I could do was hold her, because this chick was crying. Jim Morrison was her total life, and she was devastated by either Jim’s staged death or if he was actually dead. If Pamela was any indication, then Jim was dead. She was not faking it. This was a woman totally broken up. So I assume Jim was dead from her reaction and from the fact that the coffin was put in the ground and no one has ever said otherwise.
But you know, who knows? If anyone could have done it, if anyone could have said, “I’m getting out of rock and roll, I don’t like what’s happening in Miami.” He was the still up in Miami and they were going to put his ass in jail. They wanted to get that guy, and they wanted to make an example of him. So he was scared; we were all scared. That was weighing heavy on his mind. The fact that the audience had changed, that it was no longer that mystical spiritual union of musician and audience - that was no longer happening anymore. People were coming to see Jim Morrison – that guy in leather, the acid king, the lizard king, the freak out king, the freak show. Let’s go see a geek. Hey, you know, that guy’s stoned all the time, and he puts on a hell of a show, but it wasn’t because he was stoned. It was a psychological horror, freak show. It was a freak show in the sense of the shaman – the sense of possession, the sense of participating powers of the universe that Jim Morrison was capable of doing. The people who came to the early Doors shows came to see that. So Morrison was like the shaman who took people on mystical journey to a darker psychic realm that people today would just be scared shitless to enter. It definitely had something to do with the hallucinogenic drugs people were taking at the time.
Creem: What was it like for you to be involved in these performances?
Ray: Time would be suspended. Time would actually stop. The only thing that would exist would be the energy, the feeling generated between the audience and the band. The one common thing was the rhythm – the power of the beat. It became a hypnotic drone. It can capture your conscious mind and lull it into a non-state and allow you to sink down a little lower into your subconscious mind. That’s what happened at a Doors’ concert. It’s bizarre to talk about it now, but I was there and I could feel it. Jim was in control of these people, and the allowed him to take them on a psychic journey – to suspend reality and the universe and to examine the depths of human psyche.
Creem: When do you think it started to change?
Ray: It started to change as the Doors became more successful, as the media picked up on the Doors. If you went to see the band in early 1967, you knew nothing about them, and all of a sudden you’re being tripped out. Morrison was the leader, the road man who would take you on the trip, while the rest of the band was supplying the needed energy – this hypnotic, sensual sort of rhythmic thing. The whole thing was like a snake coiling around your body, and Morrison would work your mind. After the Doors became successful and Jim fell off the stage – he did do that, he was so gone one time and twirling around like a whirling dervish – the media caught up on that. Hey, this guys stoned. The Doors are stoned all the time. Let’s go see them. They’ll do something outrageous. And after Miami, it became hey, this guy’s going to pull his pants down. Maybe he’ll pull it out on stage. The chicks got all excited, and so did the guys. And that’s what they came for. And when they came for that kind of thing, how are you going to hypnotize them? They want their eyeballs excited. They came to WATCH, they didn’t come to listen.
Jim Morrison was a personification of Dionysus and he once said the Dionysus enters through the ears, not through the eyes. At a Doors concert, you were suppose to close your eyes and feel Jim taking you on that trip, and the rest of the Doors taking you somewhere you’d never been before. At one point, Jim just finally said, “Phooey on you.” That was Miami. You’ve come to see a show, haven’t you? You’ve come to see a spectacle like you’ve never seen before, something to blow your minds. Well, what’s going to blow your minds? You didn’t come here to listen to a rock ‘n’ roll band. You came to WATCH something. Well, I’m going to show you something. Watch this. How about if I pull out my cock? Will that do it for you? Would you like to see me pull my dick out and shake it? Will that do it for you? And they went crazy. I don’t think he ever really did it. I wish he would have told somebody else what he was planning to do. Then it would have been cool. Because we didn’t know what he was doing, either. And the audience definitely didn’t know.
Miami was like his death. No one knows for sure. No one really knows for sure. I was five to eight feet away from Jim on stage, and I always had a tendency to close my eyes and put my head down. I’m not concerned with what Jim was doing physically on stage. We didn’t have to look at each other. We weren’t communicating on that plane. So same thing in Miami. I wasn’t really looking.
I remember Jim taking his shirt off holding it in front of him, and doing sort of a mock striptease. He was naked to the waist. He did have boxer shorts on, and they were folded over the top of his leather pants. He held his shirt at waist level by the collar, it was covering his crotch. And he moved his shirt back and forth, saying, “I’m going to show to you, now watch.” And with one hand, he’d reach behind and kind of feign opening his fly and pulling it out. “There it was! Did you see it? Did you see it? And then he’d bring the shirt back in front of him. That’s all I remember him doing.
Creem: Jim never said to you whether he did it or not?
Ray: That motherfucker, that son of a bitch…and I’m the kind of guy who’ll defend Jim Morrison to the end…said to me the next day, “Did I do anything wrong?” And he played along, Whether he was putting us on or not, we’ll never know, because he looked us right in the eye and said, “I don’t remember a thing. I had a lot of drinks and don’t remember getting to Miami.” Who knows? He may have been absolutely honest in that he didn’t remember anything. So here we are.
OK, let’s talk technical. When you open it up, you have to unzip your pants and get it through the opening in your shorts. And he was wearing shorts that day, and he was doing a lot of twisting and turning. So he’d have to unzip his leather pants, in through the shorts, find it – it was huge thing to pull out – you’d think it would have gotten caught around his knee somewhere, for God’s sake. I didn’t see him do it. But I did see him intimate to the audience that he was going to do it.
And again, the psychological factors enter the picture. This was Tennessee Williams territory. Hot southern night, too many people, loads of nervous tension, the place held eight to ten thousand people and there were maybe 12 to 15 thousand crowded in to the place. They knew Jim Morrison was from Florida and it was like a native son returning home from Los Angeles – that weird place – who’d taken acid to become the Lizard King, the lizards and snakes play a large pat in the subconscious mind of Florida. There are a lot of snakes and lizards in that part of the country. Jim Morrison – a naïve son. They didn’t know what to expect. They thought, something was going to happen tonight. And Jim Morrison instilled into that crowd a mass hallucination. That’s what I think happened.
I don’t think what happened there is a hell of a lot different than people who saw the vision of Fatima or vision of Lourdes when the Virgin Mary appears to the children and people come and claim to see it. I think that’s what happened in Miami. They wanted to see the primordial snakes and that Jim represented and talked about. A combination of snakes, sex, devil, acid, penis: I think that all went together to make up this incredible concert that Miami was. That’s all I have to say about Miami.
Creem: As a photographer, I have to say I’m disappointed that nobody got a shot of it.
Ray: It could have put a lot of things to rest.
Creem: Several years ago, I got a shot of Iggy dropping his pants in Detroit. He said he was disappointed that I got the wrong angle and it didn’t look as big as it really ws.
Ray: I must say, Jim Osterberg did have a magnificent penis. It was indeed a tool, an avenging angel without mercy. During a rehearsal we once did with Dick Wagner, Iggy, Nigel and Gary when we were trying to get a band together, Iggy entered the rehearsal stark naked. Not a stitch on. And I thought I’d walk around naked too if I had a body and a schlong like that.
One more Miami story. The judge in Miami – I won’t say his name for publication so he won’t get into any more trouble than he’s already in – the judge would not allow us to sue all kinds of evidence. We wanted to show that even if Jim had exposed himself – and we don’t believe he did – so what? Hair was in town. Hair had full frontal nudity. Jim was obscene on stage, but so were the comics playing the Miami strip – you know foul mouthed comics. The striptease girls. There was lots of nudity going on in Miami – of all places, Miami. It’s the fifth city of America, and they busted Jim Morrison.
That was going to be our defense. The judge said inadmissible evidence. This judge just blew our whole fucking case. And we didn’t know why he was doing it other than to make political hay, but then a few years later we found out the judge himself had been convicted of taking a bribe from a child molester, he was going to send to jail.
Creem: Did you see a big change in Jim over the years you knew him?
Ray: Yeah. I’ll tell you what they did, man. They sucked his energy. They sucked it right out of him. The last gig we ever did was in New Orleans, and Jim had already been sucked dry. It was sad. When I first met him, he was just full of energy, life, power and potency and intellectual knowledge, and by the time it was over, he was bloated and weak. They had just sucked it out of him, because they demanded a show out of him. They demanded a geek. And this was not Jim’s trip. Jim would do something outrageous if the situation called for it, but if you asked him to do something outrageous, no. He was basically shy, and very quiet, a very down to earth guy.
Creem: Did he get caught up in his own image?
Ray: Well, it’s always easy for someone on the outside to say, “Hey man, why don’t you call it quits.” But on the inside, it never feels that way. I think he came to the point where he came to believe that it wasn’t going to continue on that way because we had too many good memories from the beginning. Simply incredible gigs. During our first two years of existence, each gig was incredible. We played the Whisky A Go Go with Them and Van Morrison and Jim Morrison jammed together and sang together on stage. And then we played with Frank Zappa’s Mother s of Invention, and the Buffalo Springfield, and the Byrds. There was something about the times that were absolutely magical. Great times, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’68. It started to go wrong around ’68, the Democratic Convention in the summer of ’68. But up until that time, the Doors and everyone else were floating on psychedelic cloud of just magic. Then little by little, things started to go bad. And you didn’t want to think about bad things. We didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t want to hear an audience coming to see Jim Morrison because he freaks out and falls off the stage. Bullshit. But you’re aware that things have changed because nobody’s heart and minds changed.
We wanted to change the world, make the world a better place to live in. And we were trying to do it. And the fact that it wasn’t happening – OK, a temporary setback – it was still going to happen. It finally got to the point, though, where Jim said, “Fuck it, I’ve got to go to Paris. I’ve got to get away.” And that was March, 1971. And by July 3 1971, he was gone – wherever he went.
Creem: What do you think would have happened if he hadn’t left?
Ray: I think the Doors would have been making music very much like An American Prayer. I think we’d have been doing real poetry and music things. I think songs would have still been important, but we’d have probably gone to poetry, music, song, another song, more poetry, a keyboard playing by itself, a guitar playing by itself.
Creem: More like a jazz base?
Ray: I think so. It would have fragmented itself from strictly songs to a much more theatrical thing. An album would have been a 45 minute presentation of a body of ideas, as series of pieces. Very much like An American Prayer. I think An American Prayer is very much like what the Doors would be doing had Jim not disappeared.
We’d probably have done two more albums in the vein of L.A. Woman, and then moved on to An American Prayer. Because Jim actually recorded “An American Prayer” just before he left for Paris, on his birthday, December 8 1970. And he had the idea to do an extended poem piece of some sort or another, and working with sound effects, whatever. He really didn’t have that part of it finalized in his mind yet, but he did want to do something that dealt with an extended poetry piece.
Creem: Is there any more unreleased material?
Ray: Yep.
Creem: Any plans to do anything with it?
Ray: Well, there are no definite plans at the moment, but we’ve definitely got some stuff, and we’d like to see if we can put it all together into an interesting album. We’re not going to do anything unless we can make it very exciting and interesting and unusual album. I will say that we have the dirtiest version of “Gloria” that’s ever been recorded.
Creem: More so that the live Hendrix one they released a year or so ago?
Ray: I don’t know. God, Hendrix did it, too? Jesus, I’ll have to check it out. Well, let’s put it this way. It’s the dirtiest version any white man has ever done of “Gloria.” It’s a live thing we did as a warm up sound check at the Aquarius Theatre when we recorded the Absolutely Live album. This was part of that that we never used because it was too dirty.
At that time – 1969, 1970 – we couldn’t do anything like that and release it. God, we couldn’t even fart without getting busted. Narcs on one side of the stage and a vice squad on the other side of the stage. I remember seeing those guys. They were there with their little clipboards with names, and they were just waiting for the offense so they could bust us. They wanted to bust Morrison – Morrison and The Doors. They did it in Miami, well, by God, we’ll bust them in Cincinnati, we’ll bust them in St. Louis, we’ll bust them in Chicago, Minneapolis; I mean, name your major city, and they were all out to bust the Doors. They were going to stop the Doors.
They couldn’t bust the Beatles because they were nice – “All you need is love” – and the Stones were from England, also, and yeah, they were bad, but those fuckin’ Doors those were the ones. They all wanted to stop Morrison. They wanted to show him that they couldn’t let him get away with it – from going too far. But he always said to the establishment, “Fuck you. You’re not going to stop me. The only thing that can stop me is death.” I think death has probably stopped him, but boy, he went all the way. If there was any guy who ever went all the way to the edge – reached over the line, and said, “I’m going to step over that line and you ain’t going to stop me” – it was Jim Morrison. And thank God America had him, because if we hadn’t had him, we’d be lost today. There’d be nobody heavy.
America hasn’t produced anybody heavy in rock ‘n’ roll as far as I’m concerned. Maybe Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan did some real good stuff, no doubt about that. He’s since become a little weird as far as I’m concerned. I don’t hold with his religious affiliation, let’s put it that way, but Dylan did some real good stuff. But Morrison, man, Morrison took it all the way. That’s the thing I think America loves about Morrison. “I woke up this morning and got myself a beer/The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.” And that’s the way he lived.
Creem: Are there still plans for a movie?
Ray: Oh yeah. There will be movies. Doors movies. In fact there should be one coming out about the time your special comes out – a Doors interview, tribute to Jim Morrison that we’re doing for cable tv, HBO, whatever. And then we’ve got the live documentary footage and we’re going to put that together into an hour and a half, hopefully a network TV special of some sort. Try to get Jim Morrison into the living rooms of America. I don’t think it will be easy getting the Lizard King onto NBC.
And there’s also eventually going to be something based on the book No One Here Gets Out Alive. There’s also going to be a French movie about a girl writer – rock ‘n’ roll writer – who is obsessed and possessed by the spirit of Jim Morrison, and things that happen to her in Paris. And hopefully there will be a Jim Morrison biography on screen, but that won’t happen for awhile. And it won’t be John Travolta.
Creem: Is there an established actor that you would like to see do it?
Ray: No. But you know who I’d like to get? I’d like to get Robert De Niro at age 25. That’s who I see playing Jim Morrison. Somebody unknown who can move and act like Jim. Nobody knew De Niro until the Godfather, and then everyone said, “God, who is that?”
Creem: I heard that Frank Sinatra wants De Niro to play him in the Sinatra movie biography.
Ray: Frank Sinatra is great. He’s really a great singer. (Begins singing High Hopes) Well, Jim liked Sinatra. His favorite singers were Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.
Creem: What did you think of Sugerman’s book?
Ray: I liked the book. It’s the first book. The Morrison story is so complex and so deep, and so psychological that one book only starts it. That’s the beginning book – the Joe Friday one. The beginning facts – at 2500 hours the man did take his penis out and shake it in Miami. They did say that. It’s like the hokey pokey – “Take it out and shake it all about.” The book is the facts, and it IS very factual. There’s not one lie in the book. Nothing in the book is made up. Everything happened that happens in the book. There were some things that had to be cut from the book. Danny had a whole list of things that had to be cut, and I hope we can put those things out. They’re just hysterical, man. Finny as hell. It’s all the things that Warner Books said, “You cannot print that” –you know, it was all libel things. And he’s got five pages of that kind of stuff.
Creem: The book helped the album sales.
Ray: Yeah. The albums are doing real well. 1980, 1981 is like 1967, 1968 in terms of record sales. A whole new generation of people are picking up on the Doors. I’m happy. I’d hate to be assigned to the dust bins. “Oh, remember them? Weren’t they cute? They sang about snakes and took acid. But I don’t care about them, I want Adam & the Ants.” Sorta like Cream. A lot of groups.
Creem: Who do you like now?
Ray: X, The Blasters. I really like the Alley Cats. They have some good things. Devo, Kraftwerk.
Creem: Do you still want to be involved in movies? I know that’s where you started?
Ray: Oh Yeah. I’m working on a script right now about punk rock in Chinatown. I’d like to direct. I don’t care about the business aspects. The business aspects of anything – I could care less about.
Creem: Have you done anything yet?
Ray: No I haven’t done anything since UCLA. I haven’t had time. One of these days. I’ve got a lot of ideas. So that’s what the future holds. Ray Manzarek’s producing good local L.A. acts. I might do a solo album. Music for movies and TV productions. And probably doing my own movie. That’s what I figure I’ll be doing the rest of my life. Also, the other day I had a great idea, and that is I’d like to do The Golden Scarab as a black musical. That’s an album I made in 1973. I’d also like to do it as a ballet. That album needs the visuals. I’d love to see dancers dancing it. But I think The Golden Scarab could be the new Wiz – a black musical on stage on Broadway. A bunch of black guys in Harlem waiting for the messiah. And then this guy goes on a journey trying to get back to the place where he originally came was.
Creem: Would you do it if Jim Morrison walked in the door ten minutes from now?
Ray: Well, I’ve had dreams like that – that Jim is back. We’d probably pick right up where we left off. Ok, man. Got any songs? Robbie? John? Got any songs? We’d go right back to work. We’d work out a couple of the old tunes. We would definitely do “L.A. Woman” and “Riders On The Storm.” One of the saddest aspects of my life – other than Jim leaving the planet – is that we never got to play “L.A. Woman” live. Man, we were all set. After completing the album, we all looked at each other and said, “Man this is great.” We were going to take Jerry Scheff with us, and we were even thinking of taking a rhythm guitarist with us so the Doors would go from four pieces to a six piece band. And we were going to do “L.A. Woman” and “Love Her Madly.”
I was really looking forward to that because Jerry Scheff would have played bass, and that would have freed me. Leave the rhythm to the bass and drums. I’m going to play keyboards. Let me play organs, synthesizer, string synthesizer, clavinet, Fender Rhoades piano. Play all the stuff. We were really looking forward to that. Even Jim was excited about it. He definitely wanted to take it on the road. After all L.A. Woman was a live album. We recorded it live in the studio – virtually live; there were very little overdubs. The only overdub on the song “L.A. Woman” was that I overdubbed some acoustic piano. All the rest of it – vocals, bass, guitars, other keyboards – was live.
ROBBY KRIEGER
Creem: What was the last Doors tour like when you traveled as a three piece?
Robbie: It wasn’t as bad as you might think. The crowds were real good and everything. We had a couple of extra people with us –a rhythm guitarist and a bass player and they did some singing. Jack Conrad and Bobby Ray. It was kinda fun, really. And then we did a European tour with that same set up and it was real fun. And we decided to play only every third day in Europe, so we could all see the sights and stuff. Usually when you tour Europe, it’s one city a day. But we didn’t really care about making money because we wanted to see the place. We actually played as a trio one time in Amsterdam before Jim died. Jim got real sick just as we were about to go on – smoked a bunch of hashish or something and passed out – so we decided to go on ourselves. The Jefferson Airplane was playing with us at the time. And at that time, the European audience didn’t really know the whole Jim Morrison superstar trip – it was just The Doors. They didn’t even really know who was the lead singer, and they loved it. But I do think that the main reason we broke up was not because the fans missed Jim but because we as a group missed him and we couldn’t function as three people because our balance was all off.
Creem: If Jim hadn’t gone to Paris and died, what do you think would have happened to the Doors?
Robbie: Well, I know that Jim really wanted to do more blues, so I think the next step would have been blues – solid blues. He had always wanted to do a real blues album.
Creem: What was it like performing during the years when things were really peaking for The Doors?
Robbie: It was kind of fun, but we were in such big halls then that it was sort of hard to get the right sound and all that. I really liked it more when we were on the way up – at clubs like the Whisky and in New York Once we started in with the concerts., it was more showtime and I didn’t like it as much. With the Beatles and the Stones stuff, it was more chicks going crazy. But with the Doors, there was actually young guys going nuts with high energy releases and destroying stuff. – more like you see in the punk scene right now. We just seemed to evoke that in an audience. But it was still a positive energy. I was never scared by it onstage. I’d be more scared today with all the spitting and bottle throwing. I’m actually afraid for my life at some of the concerts today. I just stay back.
Creem: When was the last time you talked to Jim?
Robbie: I suppose I probably talked to him a day or two before he left for Paris.
Creem: When Jim left, was he leaving the band?
Robbie: No, not at all. He was just going on an extended vacation. But we didn’t say OK, let’s break up. When we heard how good L.A. Woman was going to be, we were all ready to get to it.
Creem: What do you think would have happened as far as progression if Jim hadn’t left when he did?
Robbie: We’d have probably done the blues thing for at least one album or two, and after that, who knows? Bug I don’t know I don’t really think I could have seen The Doors existing in the 1970’s. It was too boring. I think we’d have probably given up music and gone into movies or something.
Creem: Did Jim change over the years that you knew him? Did the popularity really affect him?
Robbie: No, not at all. He was always the same. Crazy.
Creem: Was he annoyed by the demands of stardom placed upon him.
Robbie: I guess he was, but actually he was much more wild and crazy even when he wasn’t on stage. He was always mad that he didn’t become bigger faster. He thought success should have come faster like the Beatles or something like that. That as his only complaint. He didn’t mind people bugging him about being a star because that’s what he was trying to be. He did find it hard to live up to some of the legends especially with the girls. They expected him to have a four foot cock or something like that.
Creem: Over than The Soft Parade, most of the compositions were credited solely to The Doors. I know that you composed a lot of the Doors songs and didn’t receive credit. Do you have any bad feelings about that?
Robbie: I never felt bad about it because I ended up writing about a fourth of the songs, so it pretty much evened out.
Creem: You wrote, “Light My Fire.” What other songs were you responsible for?
Robbie: “Love Me Two Times,” Love Her Madly.” Those were the biggies. “Wishful Sinful,” Yes The River Knows,” that’s one of my favorites. “Spanish Caravan,” “Your Lost Little Girl.” I wrote the music to a bunch of them, “Touch Me,” “Tell All The People,” that one was probably why Jim got us all separate credits on The Soft Parade because he didn’t like singing those lyrics. Thought they were too political. “Touch Me” was originally written as “Hit Me” which would have made those lyrics more applicable today. But Jim said, “No way am I going to sing those lyrics.” So we changed it to “Touch Me.”
Creem: Do you think the book had a lot to do with the sudden resurgence of the Doors?
Robbie: I think it helped. There were three or four things – there was the book, there was the Apocalypse Now thing, and there was the fact that Elektra reduced the price on a bunch of albums. And there was An American Prayer.
Creem: What was your reaction when you first read the book?
Robbie: Well, I thought it was great reading. I couldn’t put it down. The facts were pretty straight. Some things were changed around a little bit here and there. I’m just glad someone finally did a book. There probably will be other books coming out now. The thing about Jim is that everyone who knew him knew him for about ten minutes, but they’d be under the impression that they were his best friend. There’s an article like that right now in High Times. It’s probably because he was so open with people. But these people get offended sometimes when they read something about him that might not share their own viewpoint.
Creem: Who’d you like to see play Jim in the movie they’re going to make of his life?
Robbie: Well, they’re not going to make a movie as far as I know. I wouldn’t want to see anyone play Jim. I think it would be ridiculous to have anyone play Jim. I’d go for a total unknown. Even if it was a great movie, though , it would stereotype Jim because people would say, “Oh, that’s what Jim Morrison was like.” It’s the same thing with Castenada. They wanted to make a movie out of Don Juan, and he said, “No, way. Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody could play Don Juan. It’s the same type of thing.
Creem: Do you think if Jim hadn’t died he would have concentrated more on his poetry?
Robbie: That was the general idea. It turns out that he actually wrote some of best stuff towards the end.
Creem: The stuff he did, do you thin in 50 years time, it’ll be like Rimbaud or William Blake?
Robbie: Yeah. I think so. I’m not that big of a poetry buff or anything like that, but I think Jim had it as much together as those guys. I’ve never seen anybody else from our generation that could put words together like Jim could. I think if he’d have been more disciplined he would have done even greater things.
Creem: Did anyone like management ever try to slow Jim down?
Robbie: Yeah, but there was nothing you could do about it. People would tell Jim he should drink less and Jim would take them out and get them drunk.
Creem: Are there any plans to release anymore unreleased stuff – live material?
Robbie: It’s possible. There are tapes of the lives stuff we did at the Isle Of Wight. There’s a couple of things we have, but right now I don’t think there’s enough for an album, so we’re trying to collect more things. I hope we can bring out some sort of a live album.
Creem: Ray mentioned a version of “Gloria?”
Robbie: Yeah. That’s pretty amazing.
Creem: Are the any groups that you like right now?
Robbie: The Pretenders, that’s my favorite album right now. Oingo Boingo. A lot of the new groups I like.
Creem: Do you think there’s anybody right now doing anything as relevant as what the Doors did for their time?
Robbie: The only one I can think of since is the Wailers.
Creem: Do you think a lot of the Doors’ magic then had to do with the times?
Robbie: Yeah. There was something to fight for the 60’s. But still it takes a guy like Jim or Marley to get the whole thing together. As far as today goes. I don’t know. There’s a lot of good music going on today for sure.
Creem: Did you see Jim take his pants down?
Robbie: No, and I was right there. He may have taken them down, but I don’t think he whipped it out. You know for Jim to take his pants down, I wouldn’t even have thought of it twice. But actually whip it out? I don’t think so.
JOHN DENSMORE
Creem: You and Robbie were together in the Butts Band. What was your reaction to that experience?
John: It turned me onto the Wailers and the great Bob Marley, who died yesterday. We did that album in England,a dn we went to Jamaica to do part of it. Robbie and I got into reggae immediately. We later saw the Wailers at the Roxy, and they were second billed to Cheech and Chong the first time they were there. And nobody was there. But it was great.
Creem: What are you up to now?
John: I’ve been taking acting lessons for a few years, but that sort of took a back seat because I started drumming with this dance company. And I’m doing that, going to New York in the fall. It’s sort of a small underground dance company – there’s several of them in L.A. And then I just got an acting role, so I’m an actor again. I’m also trying to write my side of it all.
Creem: Do you have anyone interested?
John: Yeah, but they want to take it away from me, have me write it with someone. They want sex and drugs – and yeah, there as a lot of that – but more. So I’ve stopped pursing the business end of it. I started writing it originally as a sort of therapy.
Creem: What did you think of No One Here Gets Out Alive?
John: It’s all there. It’s all true. Danny meant well and did great, but how could it be more than a story from someone who was slightly outside? That may sound pompous but unless you’re totally involved, it’s something you really haven’t gone through. There’s a lot more to it.
Creem: Would you like to see a movie made?
John: No. The definitive movie is very frightening. The guy who made The Rose is running around trying to make a Morrison picture his next one, and we finally said, ‘no’ to him. But still, he might be making The Lizard soon. With a big Hollywood movie, our control would go ‘bye-bye” and that would be frightening. We’re read a lot of scripts and talked to a lot of people for several years. We’ve got a lot of real footage, but it’s not a movie. I saw the Elvis movie the other night. For what they had, it worked. It was well done.
Creem: Have you seen the finished product for the cable Doors Special?
John: Yeah. It was real good.
Creem: What was the final Doors tour like for you?
John: It was great and it was terrible. One night was great, the next terrible – the worst. It was great because we played “Riders On The Storm” for the first time – I don’t think it was out yet – and the audience loved it. The next night, Jim was drunk as hell. It was pathetic, horrible. Telling bad jokes on stage.
Creem: Did you think at that point that it might have been the end of the band?
John: No. Because L.A. Woman was so fun to do. After Jim went to Paris, he called me and we talked about how great L.A. Woman was. I think we would have made another album in that direction.
Creem: What do you think would have happened later on as far as direction goes?
John: I think musically it have been great, but I don’t know how much longer we could have hung together. Jim was bent on self destruction, I guess.
Creem: Did you guys ever make any attempt to change that?
John: Well, I know he knew that I disapproved. For awhile, I though he might be one of those old Irish guys who party until they’re in their 70’s.
Creem: Do you think part of it was Jim was getting caught up in what he had created?
John: Yeah, but its not as simple as that. He was really complex. He was obviously trying to break the mold when he grew the beard, gained the weight and stuff. He was interested in films and writing poetry. I don’t think the way he was going he’d have been starring in films. Originally he would have been. My God, what a great, instantly charismatic movie star. But then he started looking like…well, a beatnick. So, I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to direct. I know that he loved films, that’s for sure.
Creem: It was obvious them, that he wanted to take it further than music, that he wanted to be more than just a singer in a band writing songs.
John: Yeah, but obviously, it was even more than that because he disintegrated. It wasn’t just breaking the mold. It was something he lost control of. But that’s all sort of negative. When I’m in a philosophical mood, I just think he was meant to be around quick and intense.
Creem: You were the last one to talk to him in Paris. What was he like then? He was excited about the new record?
John: Yeah. He wanted to record another one. He said he’d been writing. The rest of us had been rehearsing. That was about it. Our Elektra contract had just run out, so it was a good time to take several months off.
Creem: I saw Feast Of Friends for the time the other day, and there were those scenes where the crowds when wild and the police were on stage and everything. Was that at all frightening?
John: It was a lot of fun. I don’t know. I was never scared. It looks intense. I mean, I haven’t been to that many concerts lately, but I know they still have hordes of police. Back then, though it was like, “We’re got to protect this group,” and there’d be this wall of cops. And it would alienate everyone so they’d go charge the stage. It was so stupid. I was never afraid much though. I always figured that at the last second I could jump off the stage and get away. So it as kind of fun. Usually when people did get on the stage they didn’t do anything, although I am more afraid now with the fucking lunatics shooting people. It’s pathetic to say I’m surprised it hasn’t happened until now.
Creem: If Jim was suddenly to mysteriously reappear, do you think the Doors would start all over again?
John: (Laughs) I’d have to qualify that because what shape would he be in when he popped back into sight? I’d say that I’ve never met anyone in my life who would be capable of it but him. But I don’t know whether he’d come back as Alan Gingsberg or Baryshnikov. I don’t know. What would he want to do? I’d love to see him. I’ve had ten years now, and I feel like I could understand him a lot more. I’d have a lot to say. When I first met him he was just a powerhouse of intensity, and I didn’t really understand him or his lyrics at first. I did love them because they were fluent and rhythmic.
Creem: Did he change a lot over the years you knew him?
John: Yeah. He didn’t change in his persona that much. But in the beginning he was more like, I hate to say this, a college fraternity person – full of pranks, and fun. A little abusive to certain people, but in a fraternity kind of way. But then he got more into himself, a bit more distant.
Creem: Did he start to feel more hostile to things like demands and stuff?
John: No.
Creem: Ray mentioned that Jim was disappointed at the end by the people yelling for the hits and wanting to see a show.
John: Yeah. But he knew what he was doing. As we played bigger arenas, he became more theatrical, but he was so natural that it didn’t matter. It wasn’t every night. Sometimes he’d do absolutely nothing at all. Fame and fortune meant little. I read a quote ofhis once where he said something like if he had it to do all over again he’d be a quiet monk in the hills somewhere. He just lost his spark to live. I guess. He was really complex.
END.
