Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jan 6, 2005 13:33:23 GMT
Ray guested on Darryls 1993 album Beat Existentialist before collaberating with him for Freshly Dug a 30 minute fusion of poetry and music that saw Ray creating spontaniously to Darryls reading live in the studio.
Working with Ray Manzarek
How do you describe working with the greatest rock n' roll keyboard player in the world, in one word: intense!
I first met Ray Manzarek back in 1981. It was purely by chance, as I was living in Hollywood just a few streets away. Previous to this and again by coincidence, I was in Paris working with a Parisian rock group in 1980. Having just started to groove on the Doors due to my Japanese girlfriend who had turned me onto them, I asked the bass player of the group to take me to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Eventually after pestering him he took me down to Pere-Lachaise.
Strangely when we arrived at the cemetery, we found graffiti arrows pointing to Jim's grave. Upon arrival, we saw twenty or so Doors fans sitting round the grave, ghetto blaster's pumping Doors tracks and people smoking joints and like us - drinking wine. I said to my friend, "Wow this is wild, does this happen daily?" He didn't seem to know. After some time we were told we had arrived on July the third, which was a celebration for Jim, the party was cool and with no security to bug us.
It was strange to be back there again in 2001, and a reminder of my first trip there. Since 1981 my friendship with Ray has grown, he had In the eighty's sent me round to meet John, Robbie, Danny, and Paul Rothchild, and encouraged me to produce more music.
In 1988 by again by chance I found myself living in Hollywood, working with my group The Hearts of Darkness. Within the first week of our arrival in L.A., Ray invited us to play a couple of songs with him at a gig at the variety arts centre, as like most work I've done with Ray it was marred. On this occasion by some official chick putting the event on, who had at rehearsals created some drama saying there would be no time for us to play, Ray jumped to the rescue and put her in her place. We did the gig around 2000 people showed up to see Ray, and all the other guest artist's and the show was a success, and I got some great photo's.
The next time I worked with Ray was in 1990 when I cut the Beat Existentialist album with The Mighty Hornets, again in Hollywood.
Ray showed up to the session with his keys saying, "where do I set up man?" People started showing up at the studio trying to enter the session on the pretence of viewing the recording room, when really they just wanted to catch a glimpse of Ray, I quickly put a stop to that.
Ray played great keys on 'Blue Fandango man' 'the Vipers of Harlem' and 'Shake off the Devil' all original compositions.
The next time we were to work together again was in 1999, on the Freshly Dug album of my poetry and Ray's music, again in Hollywood.
How I became to write poetry was through Ray's influence; I had been playing concerts in Berlin around 1997. Ray was making a trip to the Venice film festival and we arranged to meet there. I trained to Venice and we met at Grand hotel, had drinks on the veranda, when within seconds a torrential thunderstorm broke out; we moved inside and talked poetry and film, as Ray said "well you're a poet man you could have done some with me at the festival." Mike Mclure couldn't make it.
I agreed, but the fact was I wasn't a poet, but Ray as he had done so many times before had sewn a seed.
So I went back to London and slowly started to write poetry. By late 1998, with the encouragement of my friend Clive Zone and Ray's seeds, I had thirty five odd works. I had bugged Clive on the phone nightly reciting them and he seemed to think they were cool. So I phoned Ray in December 1998 with the idea of cutting some poetry inserts into a rock album I was making. Ray said ok, but wanted to check the work out before we recorded it, so I sent some hand written stuff.
I called Ray the nest January and asked if we could record some of the work. Ray said "yeah I'm around man." So we fixed a schedule up and I flew in to L.A., on the condition that we went through the works again before we recorded it. Ray came over to meet me at the Hilton and we sat down and went over the works, then selected twelve off them, Ray invited me to a poetry reading he was doing in Brentwood village. I sat for the next three days in my room at the Hilton, going over the work and re-writing it so Ray could read it off, (my handwriting is almost incomprehensible to myself).
We both showed up at the Wondershop studios, downtown L.A. The studio was run by black people who also owned a junk shop underneath, as we walked through the shop smells of joss sticks filled the air and for a brief moment, I thought id been transported back to 1967, as I perused the funky setting. But the place had a perfect vibe for the recording.
Ray got strait on the case, checking the keys and taping my poems to the keyboard stand, and started to direct the whole proceedings. I couldn't help smiling to myself and watching Ray getting together in this funky down town studio, in an area where you would think twice about going around the block.
But then Ray was always a face that would eliminate stuff like that from his mind, and get to the art. I could have imagined it being the same if Jim had been around. The session got off to a rocky start as I was nervous. I had told Ray before that; I would probably blow and fluff words as I had never performed poetry before and may have to overdub the text back in England.
After a few aborted takes I got it together, the work flowed, we were laying take after take strait down and live, with two versions of each title, the atmosphere was electric and you could hear a pin drop, as we performed the work.
After eight tracks had been completed, Ray suggested we wet our whistles with a beer break. We sat in the funky Wondershop and had a beer, not talking about the work, I suppose in fear of blowing the Magic.
The session ended around twelve thirty we had completed thirty works - sixteen which were released. Ray said "I'm beat, I'm going home to sleep, great poetry man!" we had instead of twelve track completed sixteen, a total of thirty takes down live with no mistakes.
After hustling the tapes in Germany to no avail, I did finally secure a small deal in England. I mixed the tracks with no overdubs in London with my friend Clive Zone, who told me the tracks had the Magic.
The work as I listened to it recently as it was played in a Berlin club was special, blending English poetry with the King of the keys Ray Manzarek and not at all sounding like a Jim Morrison impersonation, in other words unique.
The album gave further fuel to my fire, resulting in my selection of poetry works book called, 'Set' which was illustrated by the great George Underwood. George also illustrated album covers for David Bowie and Marc Bolan. The book sold well in Paris, thanks to Jochen Maassen who not only prints up all of my books (including a new photo journal project out soon!) but insisted that I brought copies of 'Set' with us to Paris this year.
My last words on the works are, as I said before everything I've worked on with Ray has outside problems, but lets put it this way: you may see the alternate versions to the 'Freshly Dug' tapes on a different label in the near future... We'll keep all of you Strange Days readers up to date!
I'd like to say to all you cool Doors people "Get the kick's in!"
love from Darryl.
From DCM.
Working with Ray Manzarek
How do you describe working with the greatest rock n' roll keyboard player in the world, in one word: intense!
I first met Ray Manzarek back in 1981. It was purely by chance, as I was living in Hollywood just a few streets away. Previous to this and again by coincidence, I was in Paris working with a Parisian rock group in 1980. Having just started to groove on the Doors due to my Japanese girlfriend who had turned me onto them, I asked the bass player of the group to take me to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Eventually after pestering him he took me down to Pere-Lachaise.
Strangely when we arrived at the cemetery, we found graffiti arrows pointing to Jim's grave. Upon arrival, we saw twenty or so Doors fans sitting round the grave, ghetto blaster's pumping Doors tracks and people smoking joints and like us - drinking wine. I said to my friend, "Wow this is wild, does this happen daily?" He didn't seem to know. After some time we were told we had arrived on July the third, which was a celebration for Jim, the party was cool and with no security to bug us.
It was strange to be back there again in 2001, and a reminder of my first trip there. Since 1981 my friendship with Ray has grown, he had In the eighty's sent me round to meet John, Robbie, Danny, and Paul Rothchild, and encouraged me to produce more music.
In 1988 by again by chance I found myself living in Hollywood, working with my group The Hearts of Darkness. Within the first week of our arrival in L.A., Ray invited us to play a couple of songs with him at a gig at the variety arts centre, as like most work I've done with Ray it was marred. On this occasion by some official chick putting the event on, who had at rehearsals created some drama saying there would be no time for us to play, Ray jumped to the rescue and put her in her place. We did the gig around 2000 people showed up to see Ray, and all the other guest artist's and the show was a success, and I got some great photo's.
The next time I worked with Ray was in 1990 when I cut the Beat Existentialist album with The Mighty Hornets, again in Hollywood.
Ray showed up to the session with his keys saying, "where do I set up man?" People started showing up at the studio trying to enter the session on the pretence of viewing the recording room, when really they just wanted to catch a glimpse of Ray, I quickly put a stop to that.
Ray played great keys on 'Blue Fandango man' 'the Vipers of Harlem' and 'Shake off the Devil' all original compositions.
The next time we were to work together again was in 1999, on the Freshly Dug album of my poetry and Ray's music, again in Hollywood.
How I became to write poetry was through Ray's influence; I had been playing concerts in Berlin around 1997. Ray was making a trip to the Venice film festival and we arranged to meet there. I trained to Venice and we met at Grand hotel, had drinks on the veranda, when within seconds a torrential thunderstorm broke out; we moved inside and talked poetry and film, as Ray said "well you're a poet man you could have done some with me at the festival." Mike Mclure couldn't make it.
I agreed, but the fact was I wasn't a poet, but Ray as he had done so many times before had sewn a seed.
So I went back to London and slowly started to write poetry. By late 1998, with the encouragement of my friend Clive Zone and Ray's seeds, I had thirty five odd works. I had bugged Clive on the phone nightly reciting them and he seemed to think they were cool. So I phoned Ray in December 1998 with the idea of cutting some poetry inserts into a rock album I was making. Ray said ok, but wanted to check the work out before we recorded it, so I sent some hand written stuff.
I called Ray the nest January and asked if we could record some of the work. Ray said "yeah I'm around man." So we fixed a schedule up and I flew in to L.A., on the condition that we went through the works again before we recorded it. Ray came over to meet me at the Hilton and we sat down and went over the works, then selected twelve off them, Ray invited me to a poetry reading he was doing in Brentwood village. I sat for the next three days in my room at the Hilton, going over the work and re-writing it so Ray could read it off, (my handwriting is almost incomprehensible to myself).
We both showed up at the Wondershop studios, downtown L.A. The studio was run by black people who also owned a junk shop underneath, as we walked through the shop smells of joss sticks filled the air and for a brief moment, I thought id been transported back to 1967, as I perused the funky setting. But the place had a perfect vibe for the recording.
Ray got strait on the case, checking the keys and taping my poems to the keyboard stand, and started to direct the whole proceedings. I couldn't help smiling to myself and watching Ray getting together in this funky down town studio, in an area where you would think twice about going around the block.
But then Ray was always a face that would eliminate stuff like that from his mind, and get to the art. I could have imagined it being the same if Jim had been around. The session got off to a rocky start as I was nervous. I had told Ray before that; I would probably blow and fluff words as I had never performed poetry before and may have to overdub the text back in England.
After a few aborted takes I got it together, the work flowed, we were laying take after take strait down and live, with two versions of each title, the atmosphere was electric and you could hear a pin drop, as we performed the work.
After eight tracks had been completed, Ray suggested we wet our whistles with a beer break. We sat in the funky Wondershop and had a beer, not talking about the work, I suppose in fear of blowing the Magic.
The session ended around twelve thirty we had completed thirty works - sixteen which were released. Ray said "I'm beat, I'm going home to sleep, great poetry man!" we had instead of twelve track completed sixteen, a total of thirty takes down live with no mistakes.
After hustling the tapes in Germany to no avail, I did finally secure a small deal in England. I mixed the tracks with no overdubs in London with my friend Clive Zone, who told me the tracks had the Magic.
The work as I listened to it recently as it was played in a Berlin club was special, blending English poetry with the King of the keys Ray Manzarek and not at all sounding like a Jim Morrison impersonation, in other words unique.
The album gave further fuel to my fire, resulting in my selection of poetry works book called, 'Set' which was illustrated by the great George Underwood. George also illustrated album covers for David Bowie and Marc Bolan. The book sold well in Paris, thanks to Jochen Maassen who not only prints up all of my books (including a new photo journal project out soon!) but insisted that I brought copies of 'Set' with us to Paris this year.
My last words on the works are, as I said before everything I've worked on with Ray has outside problems, but lets put it this way: you may see the alternate versions to the 'Freshly Dug' tapes on a different label in the near future... We'll keep all of you Strange Days readers up to date!
I'd like to say to all you cool Doors people "Get the kick's in!"
love from Darryl.
From DCM.
anyway i like the poems in it and the george underwood dude does good illustrations. i aint never heard of darryl read long before paris, but he's pretty cool and a nice fella 
