Post by darkstar3 on Mar 5, 2011 23:12:26 GMT
E Music Magazine
eMusic Q&A: The Doors' Ray Manzarek
April 12 2010
by Barry Walters"
When Jim sang his first songs to me on the beach, I thought, "'We're going all the way with this,'" recounts the Doors' towering organist Ray Manzarek from the inside of a tiny hotel room in San Francisco's Japantown, his longtime wife Dorothy Fujikawa at his side. "'We're gonna fit right between the bluesy Rolling Stones and the pop Beatles. We're gonna be psychedelic.'"
The 71-year-old Chicago-born, Napa, California-based keyboardist is in town to introduce When You're Strange, a Johnny Depp-narrated documentary that he hopes will bring about a reappraisal of his band's compact but indelible catalog. For a monumentally successful quartet, this "Los Angeles decadent Bauhaus orchestra," as Manzarek puts it, has long been taken for granted. Its six Jim Morrison-era albums have been remixed and reissued with such regularity since the singer and lyricist died on July 3, 1971, that it's been easy to overlook the obvious: The Doors have never been away, and their constant presence in the marketplace and cultural landscape has opened countless gateways of musical possibility for many genres and generations.
This longevity is particularly notable for a group that received more than its share of negative reviews. Its middle-period albums — 1968's Waiting For the Sun, '69's The Soft Parade, and '70's Morrison Hotel — were all knocked by Rolling Stone, the fledgling hippie mouthpiece that could bestow only begrudging kudos on the Doors' 1971 swan song as a foursome, L.A. Woman. In that review, pioneering critic Robert Meltzer notes that Morrison "has been literally abandoned by the hippos of rock fandom during his darkest hours." First praised, then knocked for his overt poeticism and theatricality when psychedelia's flights of fancy reversed into a countrified, back-to-basics movement, Morrison was in his final days considered not the Lizard King he'd created, but a crooner that, as Meltzer cruelly put it, had "finally found complete security in caution-to-the-winds Hollywood lemonade singing, the midpoint between bubble gum and a good chance at being invited to sing an Oscar nomination at the 1972 Academy Awards."
"When we got negative reviews from San Francisco [original home of Rolling Stone], we thought, 'Hey, wait a minute," Manzarek recalls with wounded pride. "'We came out of John Coltrane and Muddy Waters and Miles Davis, out of Beat poetry, Sabicas' flamenco guitar, Coltrane's drummer Philly Joe Jones, Bill Evans on the piano. We're not underground?' I think it all had to do with 'Hello, I Love You,' which we consciously set out to make a hit single. People were like, 'Bloody damn hell, you can't manipulate things.' We're the masters of space and time, of course we can manipulate. 'You're not the underground anymore.' We're not starving. We made a hit. As a matter of fact, we hope you, the lovers, the hippies, join us. Let's take over the fucking world. Is everyone ready to do the hard work that it takes to run this country?" He pauses and shakes his hands. "They weren't."
Morrison passed away right after Meltzer's damning L.A. Woman review. And even though it's been rarely acknowledged, his influence blossomed immediately thereafter. Denim-clad, anti-theatrical roots rock had finally provoked its opposite — the flagrantly arty and unabashedly staged fabulousness of glam. The same month Morrison died, T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" began a four-week reign at the top of the U.K. charts that announced a changing of the guard. For Alice Cooper, David Bowie and many others, the Doors' dark dramaturgy and gloomy subject matter provided shadows to offset glam's flashes of light.
"I think LSD made you expand your feminine side, and men in America certainly needed to do that," Manzarek explains. "It was necessary for men to become a little more gentle, more spiritual, more in touch with the earth. England, on the other hand, did not need to embrace their feminine side because [he chuckles] they had done that well enough, although I always enjoyed it."
If Morrison's profanity and indecent exposure charges in the wake of his infamous 1969 Living Theatre-inspired performance in Miami had temporarily tempered rock's rebellious side, glam revitalized its flamboyant young dudes. A first-generation Morrison acolyte mentored by Bowie through the glam era, Iggy Pop grew even more confrontational in his shows with the Stooges. Sexuality became a major rock topic, and the same critics that snickered through Morrison's stage antics were forced to confront far more exotic peacocks like Gary Glitter and members of Sparks and Sweet who consciously created androgyny. Had Jim similarly constructed masculinity, something that had previously been considered simply natural?
"Jim Morrison was conscious of everything," Manzarek confirms. "For that classic photo of Jim, the 'Young Lion,' he was gonna out-Jean Shrimpton [Swinging London model] Jean Shrimpton. Boy, that hair was nice. And the pose he struck was amazing. You saw Jim in person and think he's a handsome guy — strong cheekbones and jawbone. But you never thought of him as pretty as he was in those photos. How handsome was Dionysus in the ancient Grecian days? That was one beautiful young man. And Jim Morrison, being a personification of the Dionysian impulse, was also that beautiful young man. The only thing he lacked was grapevines and a leopard skin. He was consciously doing 'Greek God,' yes he was." The Doors' molding of early '70s rock topography didn't end with its visuals. While Santana emphasized the percussive Afro-Cuban origins of jazz-rock jamming, proto-metal pioneers like Deep Purple turned up the volume on heavier guitars and organs that bypassed syncopated rhythms in favor of sledgehammer riffs. As psychedelia morphed into progressive rock, bands like the Soft Machine, Yes, Genesis, and Gentle Giant built on the Doors' instrumental mastery and abstract poeticism. Krautrock gave birth to bleak soundscapes via Can, Amon Düül II, early Tangerine Dream, and other Doors-derived acts, while similarly sinister rockers like Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult picked up on the labyrinthine lyrical threads Morrison left behind when he grew out his beard and killed the sex symbol he'd created.
"That was, 'People had looked at my body and have not read my poetry'," Manzarek says of Morrison's final physical transformation. "'And if I have to destroy that image to make you pay attention to my poetry, so be it.' That was why we put the band together, a marriage of poetry and rock 'n' roll the same way that the Beats up here [waving a hand toward the San Francisco skyline] merged poetry and jazz. We were both inspired by Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Jim was highly influenced by [fellow Beat poet] Michael McClure. They were good buddies, and he was also into [French Libertine poets] Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, plus the whole Southern Gothic/Tennessee Williams/Carson McCullers kind of thing. Those were our influences, our love, and people weren't hearing the poetry.
"We were the electric shaman's band and Jim Morrison was the shaman. 'Light My Fire' had that same hypnotic quality in the solo section, and people would just go into a frenzy. It would build and build until there was a three against four [rhythm] and then a release; the opening passage repeating itself. People were seeing Jim dancing around onstage in his black leather outfit. Dionysus had come down. All they cared about was the madness that the Doors' concerts engendered, and Jim said, 'I don't want any more of that. That's enough. It's time to make people listen to my poetry. I'll start with growing a beard and I'm gonna eat whatever the hell I want. I don't have to stay in shape anymore. Fuck it.'"
When punk came around and blew away the hippies with its initial Ramones-driven blast, most of rock's more experimental influences were wiped out, but not those of Doors: Morrison's deep baritone, Manzarek's undulating keyboards, and the band's improvisational skills lived on in the Damned, the Stranglers, and the Patti Smith Group respectively, while X sought production help from the elder Door.
"I had a great time with X, the greatest punk band America has ever produced," he asserts. "The power of Billy Zoom on that guitar. Don Bonebreak cracking that deep, fat marching band snare drum. And John and Exene with their Chinese harmonies were just fantastic. Real American, Los Angeles poetry. I immediately thought of Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, that '30s gangster stuff, and Jim is part of that tradition too."
As punk gave way to post-punk, the Doors loomed even larger over a new psychedelic wave. Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, the Cure, Bauhaus, and the Teardrop Explodes all drew from a kindred sense of dread, while Echo and the Bunnymen — the most explicitly Doors-like of the '80s Brit bands — enlisted Manzarek to play on their cover of "People Are Strange" for The Lost Boys' soundtrack.
Grunge generally took its cues from sources one step removed from the Doors — Black Sabbath, the Stooges, Led Zeppelin. But Soundgarden covered "Waiting For the Sun" in concert and acknowledged a lyrical debt with songs like "Get on the Snake," while Pearl Jam's curly-locked baritone Eddie Vedder resembled and even crooned like Morrison. Two other '90s music movements — the resurgence of space rock and the emergence of the Elephant 6 collective — helped psychedelicize another musical generation. Spiritualized, Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, Primal Scream, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Porcupine Tree and other alternative rock cosmonauts juxtaposed propulsive rhythms against otherworldly drones and melancholic vocalists. Elephant 6 bands like Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and of Montreal set themselves apart from the grunge mainstream by favoring melody above bombast. Bypassing the blues elements of the Doors that grunge celebrated, the Elephant bands instead embraced the foursome's bohemian whimsy. Reaching beyond the stoned jams of L.A. Woman, these retro-pop fetishists resurrected the alien cabaret of Strange Days.
Radiohead's ongoing popularity is both a symbol of and major reason why the Doors still loom large for countless indie rockers. With their lengthy songs and left-of-center sensibility, the Doors were one of the first bands embraced by both the AM mainstream and the FM counterculture. The same tensions between pop accessibility and rock adventurousness that kept their critics confused have maintained their freshness. In an era when American Idol turns amateurs into superstars while marginalizing everyone else, nearly every artist is a cult act. Top 40 airplay may never again happen for Radiohead, much less for the Animal Collectives and Interpols and the Nationals further down the Doors line, and yet they've managed to penetrate every other media. The first band to become bigger than ever once they ceased to exist, Morrison and his crew navigated a path of the virtual ever after by embracing a darkness that Manzarek emphatically qualifies.
"It's only dark in terms of a Freudian dive into the unconscious," he explains. "And with that, you're entering Dostoyevsky land, and Josef von Sternberg from our studies at UCLA — The Blue Angel and Morocco and Shanghai Express. And you could say those are very dark, but I'd rather watch a von Sternberg movie than a Doris Day/Rock Hudson Pillow Talk. It's very light and lots of fun, but there's no human emotion in it. Art's gotta have that darkness to it. The Doors experienced the full spectrum of human emotions and tried to bring you the listener along."
www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/2010_201004-qa-the-doors.html
eMusic Q&A: The Doors' Ray Manzarek
April 12 2010
by Barry Walters"
When Jim sang his first songs to me on the beach, I thought, "'We're going all the way with this,'" recounts the Doors' towering organist Ray Manzarek from the inside of a tiny hotel room in San Francisco's Japantown, his longtime wife Dorothy Fujikawa at his side. "'We're gonna fit right between the bluesy Rolling Stones and the pop Beatles. We're gonna be psychedelic.'"
The 71-year-old Chicago-born, Napa, California-based keyboardist is in town to introduce When You're Strange, a Johnny Depp-narrated documentary that he hopes will bring about a reappraisal of his band's compact but indelible catalog. For a monumentally successful quartet, this "Los Angeles decadent Bauhaus orchestra," as Manzarek puts it, has long been taken for granted. Its six Jim Morrison-era albums have been remixed and reissued with such regularity since the singer and lyricist died on July 3, 1971, that it's been easy to overlook the obvious: The Doors have never been away, and their constant presence in the marketplace and cultural landscape has opened countless gateways of musical possibility for many genres and generations.
This longevity is particularly notable for a group that received more than its share of negative reviews. Its middle-period albums — 1968's Waiting For the Sun, '69's The Soft Parade, and '70's Morrison Hotel — were all knocked by Rolling Stone, the fledgling hippie mouthpiece that could bestow only begrudging kudos on the Doors' 1971 swan song as a foursome, L.A. Woman. In that review, pioneering critic Robert Meltzer notes that Morrison "has been literally abandoned by the hippos of rock fandom during his darkest hours." First praised, then knocked for his overt poeticism and theatricality when psychedelia's flights of fancy reversed into a countrified, back-to-basics movement, Morrison was in his final days considered not the Lizard King he'd created, but a crooner that, as Meltzer cruelly put it, had "finally found complete security in caution-to-the-winds Hollywood lemonade singing, the midpoint between bubble gum and a good chance at being invited to sing an Oscar nomination at the 1972 Academy Awards."
"When we got negative reviews from San Francisco [original home of Rolling Stone], we thought, 'Hey, wait a minute," Manzarek recalls with wounded pride. "'We came out of John Coltrane and Muddy Waters and Miles Davis, out of Beat poetry, Sabicas' flamenco guitar, Coltrane's drummer Philly Joe Jones, Bill Evans on the piano. We're not underground?' I think it all had to do with 'Hello, I Love You,' which we consciously set out to make a hit single. People were like, 'Bloody damn hell, you can't manipulate things.' We're the masters of space and time, of course we can manipulate. 'You're not the underground anymore.' We're not starving. We made a hit. As a matter of fact, we hope you, the lovers, the hippies, join us. Let's take over the fucking world. Is everyone ready to do the hard work that it takes to run this country?" He pauses and shakes his hands. "They weren't."
Morrison passed away right after Meltzer's damning L.A. Woman review. And even though it's been rarely acknowledged, his influence blossomed immediately thereafter. Denim-clad, anti-theatrical roots rock had finally provoked its opposite — the flagrantly arty and unabashedly staged fabulousness of glam. The same month Morrison died, T. Rex's "Bang a Gong" began a four-week reign at the top of the U.K. charts that announced a changing of the guard. For Alice Cooper, David Bowie and many others, the Doors' dark dramaturgy and gloomy subject matter provided shadows to offset glam's flashes of light.
"I think LSD made you expand your feminine side, and men in America certainly needed to do that," Manzarek explains. "It was necessary for men to become a little more gentle, more spiritual, more in touch with the earth. England, on the other hand, did not need to embrace their feminine side because [he chuckles] they had done that well enough, although I always enjoyed it."
If Morrison's profanity and indecent exposure charges in the wake of his infamous 1969 Living Theatre-inspired performance in Miami had temporarily tempered rock's rebellious side, glam revitalized its flamboyant young dudes. A first-generation Morrison acolyte mentored by Bowie through the glam era, Iggy Pop grew even more confrontational in his shows with the Stooges. Sexuality became a major rock topic, and the same critics that snickered through Morrison's stage antics were forced to confront far more exotic peacocks like Gary Glitter and members of Sparks and Sweet who consciously created androgyny. Had Jim similarly constructed masculinity, something that had previously been considered simply natural?
"Jim Morrison was conscious of everything," Manzarek confirms. "For that classic photo of Jim, the 'Young Lion,' he was gonna out-Jean Shrimpton [Swinging London model] Jean Shrimpton. Boy, that hair was nice. And the pose he struck was amazing. You saw Jim in person and think he's a handsome guy — strong cheekbones and jawbone. But you never thought of him as pretty as he was in those photos. How handsome was Dionysus in the ancient Grecian days? That was one beautiful young man. And Jim Morrison, being a personification of the Dionysian impulse, was also that beautiful young man. The only thing he lacked was grapevines and a leopard skin. He was consciously doing 'Greek God,' yes he was." The Doors' molding of early '70s rock topography didn't end with its visuals. While Santana emphasized the percussive Afro-Cuban origins of jazz-rock jamming, proto-metal pioneers like Deep Purple turned up the volume on heavier guitars and organs that bypassed syncopated rhythms in favor of sledgehammer riffs. As psychedelia morphed into progressive rock, bands like the Soft Machine, Yes, Genesis, and Gentle Giant built on the Doors' instrumental mastery and abstract poeticism. Krautrock gave birth to bleak soundscapes via Can, Amon Düül II, early Tangerine Dream, and other Doors-derived acts, while similarly sinister rockers like Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult picked up on the labyrinthine lyrical threads Morrison left behind when he grew out his beard and killed the sex symbol he'd created.
"That was, 'People had looked at my body and have not read my poetry'," Manzarek says of Morrison's final physical transformation. "'And if I have to destroy that image to make you pay attention to my poetry, so be it.' That was why we put the band together, a marriage of poetry and rock 'n' roll the same way that the Beats up here [waving a hand toward the San Francisco skyline] merged poetry and jazz. We were both inspired by Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Jim was highly influenced by [fellow Beat poet] Michael McClure. They were good buddies, and he was also into [French Libertine poets] Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, plus the whole Southern Gothic/Tennessee Williams/Carson McCullers kind of thing. Those were our influences, our love, and people weren't hearing the poetry.
"We were the electric shaman's band and Jim Morrison was the shaman. 'Light My Fire' had that same hypnotic quality in the solo section, and people would just go into a frenzy. It would build and build until there was a three against four [rhythm] and then a release; the opening passage repeating itself. People were seeing Jim dancing around onstage in his black leather outfit. Dionysus had come down. All they cared about was the madness that the Doors' concerts engendered, and Jim said, 'I don't want any more of that. That's enough. It's time to make people listen to my poetry. I'll start with growing a beard and I'm gonna eat whatever the hell I want. I don't have to stay in shape anymore. Fuck it.'"
When punk came around and blew away the hippies with its initial Ramones-driven blast, most of rock's more experimental influences were wiped out, but not those of Doors: Morrison's deep baritone, Manzarek's undulating keyboards, and the band's improvisational skills lived on in the Damned, the Stranglers, and the Patti Smith Group respectively, while X sought production help from the elder Door.
"I had a great time with X, the greatest punk band America has ever produced," he asserts. "The power of Billy Zoom on that guitar. Don Bonebreak cracking that deep, fat marching band snare drum. And John and Exene with their Chinese harmonies were just fantastic. Real American, Los Angeles poetry. I immediately thought of Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, that '30s gangster stuff, and Jim is part of that tradition too."
As punk gave way to post-punk, the Doors loomed even larger over a new psychedelic wave. Public Image Ltd., Joy Division, the Cure, Bauhaus, and the Teardrop Explodes all drew from a kindred sense of dread, while Echo and the Bunnymen — the most explicitly Doors-like of the '80s Brit bands — enlisted Manzarek to play on their cover of "People Are Strange" for The Lost Boys' soundtrack.
Grunge generally took its cues from sources one step removed from the Doors — Black Sabbath, the Stooges, Led Zeppelin. But Soundgarden covered "Waiting For the Sun" in concert and acknowledged a lyrical debt with songs like "Get on the Snake," while Pearl Jam's curly-locked baritone Eddie Vedder resembled and even crooned like Morrison. Two other '90s music movements — the resurgence of space rock and the emergence of the Elephant 6 collective — helped psychedelicize another musical generation. Spiritualized, Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, Primal Scream, the Soundtrack of Our Lives, Porcupine Tree and other alternative rock cosmonauts juxtaposed propulsive rhythms against otherworldly drones and melancholic vocalists. Elephant 6 bands like Apples in Stereo, Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and of Montreal set themselves apart from the grunge mainstream by favoring melody above bombast. Bypassing the blues elements of the Doors that grunge celebrated, the Elephant bands instead embraced the foursome's bohemian whimsy. Reaching beyond the stoned jams of L.A. Woman, these retro-pop fetishists resurrected the alien cabaret of Strange Days.
Radiohead's ongoing popularity is both a symbol of and major reason why the Doors still loom large for countless indie rockers. With their lengthy songs and left-of-center sensibility, the Doors were one of the first bands embraced by both the AM mainstream and the FM counterculture. The same tensions between pop accessibility and rock adventurousness that kept their critics confused have maintained their freshness. In an era when American Idol turns amateurs into superstars while marginalizing everyone else, nearly every artist is a cult act. Top 40 airplay may never again happen for Radiohead, much less for the Animal Collectives and Interpols and the Nationals further down the Doors line, and yet they've managed to penetrate every other media. The first band to become bigger than ever once they ceased to exist, Morrison and his crew navigated a path of the virtual ever after by embracing a darkness that Manzarek emphatically qualifies.
"It's only dark in terms of a Freudian dive into the unconscious," he explains. "And with that, you're entering Dostoyevsky land, and Josef von Sternberg from our studies at UCLA — The Blue Angel and Morocco and Shanghai Express. And you could say those are very dark, but I'd rather watch a von Sternberg movie than a Doris Day/Rock Hudson Pillow Talk. It's very light and lots of fun, but there's no human emotion in it. Art's gotta have that darkness to it. The Doors experienced the full spectrum of human emotions and tried to bring you the listener along."
www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/2010_201004-qa-the-doors.html