Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Dec 22, 2004 18:09:58 GMT
In Eeeeeeeeee-gypt
Ray Man, wherefore art thou? It’s been so long since Ray made a real album--over 20 years, in fact. His keyboard playing has been influential among several generations of musicians, so it would be nice to hear a little more of it once and awhile. (I was in a Doors-clone band. It was odd but one could never quite learn a Ray solo. Whenever you tried to play along with the record you’d find out that he just wasn’t hitting exactly the notes you thought he was. Or his phrasing would trip you up every time. It was spooky. One could never quite sing along with Ian Anderson either, but that’s another story.)
Most of the Doors’ post-Jim output has had a certain haplessness to it (even on the cover of Other Voices they somehow looked sort of...lost), the happiest exceptions being Ray’s first two solo LPs, The Golden Scarab and The Whole Thing Started With Rock and Roll, Now It’s Out of Control. Both of these were brilliant. It’s wonderful that Scarab has been reissued on CD, with three extra tracks. What’s less wonderful is that those extras happen to be from The Whole Thing, which deserves a complete digital enshrining of its own, especially since the tracks in question were by no means the best to be found on that album. Where are the Japs when we need them most? They are taking up the slack for subsidizing the arts that we Americans--all too typically--don’t even have the good taste to appreciate...so I do hope that it occurs to them to bring out Ray’s 2nd album on CD even if we’ll have to pay $30 for it. Hey, if they could reissue Captain Beyond...
Anyway...the conventional wisdom regarding those post-Jim, three-Door (hatchback!) albums, Other Voices and Full Circle is that “they were...OK...but it just wasn’t the same without Jim.” Well, duhhhhhhh... This is the same attitude a friend evinced when Star Trek: The Next Generation first came out. “It’s not going to be the same without Spock.” It was different; some would say it was better. (If you hate Jimbo but like the band, you might enjoy their post-Jim work.) As it turned out, ST:TNG lasted twice as long as the original show; while the (Hatchback) Doors were canceled after two seasons. And it is indeed a shame that the (Hatchback) Doors managed only two LPs, since they were much better than OK. I’d much rather listen to either of those than something contemporaneous like, say, Bloodrock, who weren’t laboring under Jim’s shadow but who weren’t very good either. I’d rather listen to either of these than their dispirited effort of 1969, The Soft Parade.
Both albums had lesser tracks (usually sung by Robbie), but the Doors had never before put out an album without a weak link somewhere, so one can hardly pile up on them for staying true to form. Other Voices in particular was fine work; some of these songs would have been on their post-L. A. Woman album even if Jim had stayed. Others had been rejected by Jim but were no less Doorsy for that (Robbie wrote more material as time went on anyway). A good chunk of it must have been in the can already, awaiting vocals. Their last B-side (issued when Jim was in Paris) was a lame little blues throwaway sung by Ray. Jim died in July of 1971. Other Voices was in the stores by November, and didn’t sound particularly rushed. It sounded great, in fact. “Eye Of the Sun,” the first tune, was a better piece of music than a plenty of previous Doors tracks. The groove the three of them established was intriguing, as stark as anything on L. A. Woman. Then Ray opened his mouth to sing and turned out to be perfectly adequate as a vocalist. Perfectly adequate but not Jim. What a shocker that was.
If nothing else you had to give them credit for trying, and for making the effort to tie up loose ends. They toured without Jim, and the bootleg tapes attest that they were well worth going to see. It wasn’t nearly the desecration one might have expected, although Ray was known on occasion to call out to Jim from onstage. Hokey, I know. Just on the off chance that Jim was indeed present in whatever spiritual or physical form, Ray did everything possible to ensure he was present and accounted for. But what the hell--that was then and this is now. Once that bit of business was out of the way, all you had to do was close your eyes and hear the music to realize this was a perfectly valid evening of live rock and roll, well-performed by exceptional musicians, (as usual) much more so than many of the bands who were topping the charts at the time.
The fact that it was there to be heard didn’t mean that anybody was ever gonna hear it. People tired of craning their neck for the Jimbo who never came, and no matter how good the material and how perfectly adequate Ray was as a singer, so long as the three of them played together nobody would ever quite forgive them for being unable to open Door #4. By the time of Full Circle they’d come fully into their own, but public apathy was such that they could sustain themselves no further. (There was a final non-LP b-side, called “Treetrunk.” Does anybody own it or have a tape? It’s the only Doors release I’ve never heard.) I’ve wondered why they didn’t just retire the Doors name and carry on under another, but in retrospect it wouldn’t have done much good. Ray and Robbie were going in separate musical directions anyway. Both knew all too well, it’s a drag trying to make an album with someone who’d rather be elsewhere. (Still, if you’ve ever been curious what the Doors would have sounded like in the mid-70s, just bake Full Circle and American Prayer together in a pie along with four and twenty blackbirds, and you’ll know.)
So. Ray goes solo. Scarab came out, and it was a Concept Album. And just what the fuck is wrong with that, by the way? You always see the phrase rendered as “The Dreaded Concept Album.” Pisses me off. Many of them are crap, but not merely as many as the thousands of no-concept albums released every year. I like to see people displaying a little ambition whether they succeed or not. And it’d be a stretch to get much more ambitious than with an album based on Egyptian mythology, particularly the role of the scarab in the daily rebirth of Ra the sun god, rolling a ball of dung across the sky (“holy shit!,” said Danny Sugerman), and about how this relates to each and every one of us. The cover featured a portrait of Ray looking rather pleased with himself to be covered in gold paint and black eyeliner (hey, it was the glitter era). Since he looked equally cool and ridiculous, he had a right.
The music therein? A treasure trove of 70s psychedelia--all sorts of ethnic percussion was mixed into this thing (some of it of the giddy calypso variety, even), which prevented it from taking itself as serious as it looked (reminding us that we’re as mammalian as we are cerebral), and making it sound even better on acid than I would suspect it does anyway. I’ve had it over ten years now, and still remember the first week or so--my friends chanting “In Eeeeeeee-gypt...By the Niiiii-yull...In Memphis, Heliopolis...” Is it an album or a virus? Once this thing gets in your brain, be forewarned--it’s there for life. You won’t mind. It’s perfectly entertaining as muzak while you do the dishes, too. And it has Ray’s trademark keyboard playing throughout, augmented by such exotica as steel drums and African “thumb piano,” as well as utterly fine guitar work by someone who wasn’t even Robbie Krieger. Then there are Ray’s lyrics, which were at least as fun as Jim’s, and much more quizzical; warped perceptions emanating from a consciousness that was half again as twisted without being nearly so dark. Ray was a surprisingly strong songwriter--one suspects he would have had some sort of career even if he’d never met Jim.
Ray’s second LP (the one with the really long title), continued in more of a “rocking” vein (yes, the record company well and duly freaked out when they heard Scarab for the first time, see Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue for further details), with less World Music in the grooves, but otherwise a perfectly wonderful little product that also went nowhere.
With that, Ray’s ambition seems to have died. Even while still nominally a (Hatchback) Door, he had done some oddly anonymous session work with a UK band, Skin Alley, under the name “Krzysztof Juszkiewicz.” Or so I’m told. I’ve mentioned it to a hardcore Doors freak or two and they were unaware, but a hardcore vinyl junkie or two told me otherwise. The guy on the cover looks exactly like Ray, it was obviously a contractual pseudonym for somebody, and Ray is Polish. The music is more like Traffic, and not at all like Ray. He’s certainly capable of playing in other styles, but it’s still jarring to know Ray’s playing but be unable to tell. Two Quid Deal it’s called, a very fine album on its own terms.
A few years later there was an album or two by an even more anonymous disco band called Nite City (dreadful by all accounts). He followed that with production/session work for a new wave band or two (most notably for X), and then his Carmina Burana project, which gamely attempted to adapt Orff for a rock audience but just didn’t do it for me (most classical/rock fusion doesn’t either, for once I’m with the majority), oh, he’s kept busy. Just lately there’s been an album and video with poet Michael McClure. Then a double spoken-word CD, Myth and Reality, running through the history of the Doors and featuring one new song, as if for old times sake...Pleeeeez, Ray, give us another album of you. Singing Ray Manzarek songs. Please? Jus’ think about it. Even Steely Dan got back together one day, y’know...
--melodylaughter--
Ray Man, wherefore art thou? It’s been so long since Ray made a real album--over 20 years, in fact. His keyboard playing has been influential among several generations of musicians, so it would be nice to hear a little more of it once and awhile. (I was in a Doors-clone band. It was odd but one could never quite learn a Ray solo. Whenever you tried to play along with the record you’d find out that he just wasn’t hitting exactly the notes you thought he was. Or his phrasing would trip you up every time. It was spooky. One could never quite sing along with Ian Anderson either, but that’s another story.)
Most of the Doors’ post-Jim output has had a certain haplessness to it (even on the cover of Other Voices they somehow looked sort of...lost), the happiest exceptions being Ray’s first two solo LPs, The Golden Scarab and The Whole Thing Started With Rock and Roll, Now It’s Out of Control. Both of these were brilliant. It’s wonderful that Scarab has been reissued on CD, with three extra tracks. What’s less wonderful is that those extras happen to be from The Whole Thing, which deserves a complete digital enshrining of its own, especially since the tracks in question were by no means the best to be found on that album. Where are the Japs when we need them most? They are taking up the slack for subsidizing the arts that we Americans--all too typically--don’t even have the good taste to appreciate...so I do hope that it occurs to them to bring out Ray’s 2nd album on CD even if we’ll have to pay $30 for it. Hey, if they could reissue Captain Beyond...
Anyway...the conventional wisdom regarding those post-Jim, three-Door (hatchback!) albums, Other Voices and Full Circle is that “they were...OK...but it just wasn’t the same without Jim.” Well, duhhhhhhh... This is the same attitude a friend evinced when Star Trek: The Next Generation first came out. “It’s not going to be the same without Spock.” It was different; some would say it was better. (If you hate Jimbo but like the band, you might enjoy their post-Jim work.) As it turned out, ST:TNG lasted twice as long as the original show; while the (Hatchback) Doors were canceled after two seasons. And it is indeed a shame that the (Hatchback) Doors managed only two LPs, since they were much better than OK. I’d much rather listen to either of those than something contemporaneous like, say, Bloodrock, who weren’t laboring under Jim’s shadow but who weren’t very good either. I’d rather listen to either of these than their dispirited effort of 1969, The Soft Parade.
Both albums had lesser tracks (usually sung by Robbie), but the Doors had never before put out an album without a weak link somewhere, so one can hardly pile up on them for staying true to form. Other Voices in particular was fine work; some of these songs would have been on their post-L. A. Woman album even if Jim had stayed. Others had been rejected by Jim but were no less Doorsy for that (Robbie wrote more material as time went on anyway). A good chunk of it must have been in the can already, awaiting vocals. Their last B-side (issued when Jim was in Paris) was a lame little blues throwaway sung by Ray. Jim died in July of 1971. Other Voices was in the stores by November, and didn’t sound particularly rushed. It sounded great, in fact. “Eye Of the Sun,” the first tune, was a better piece of music than a plenty of previous Doors tracks. The groove the three of them established was intriguing, as stark as anything on L. A. Woman. Then Ray opened his mouth to sing and turned out to be perfectly adequate as a vocalist. Perfectly adequate but not Jim. What a shocker that was.
If nothing else you had to give them credit for trying, and for making the effort to tie up loose ends. They toured without Jim, and the bootleg tapes attest that they were well worth going to see. It wasn’t nearly the desecration one might have expected, although Ray was known on occasion to call out to Jim from onstage. Hokey, I know. Just on the off chance that Jim was indeed present in whatever spiritual or physical form, Ray did everything possible to ensure he was present and accounted for. But what the hell--that was then and this is now. Once that bit of business was out of the way, all you had to do was close your eyes and hear the music to realize this was a perfectly valid evening of live rock and roll, well-performed by exceptional musicians, (as usual) much more so than many of the bands who were topping the charts at the time.
The fact that it was there to be heard didn’t mean that anybody was ever gonna hear it. People tired of craning their neck for the Jimbo who never came, and no matter how good the material and how perfectly adequate Ray was as a singer, so long as the three of them played together nobody would ever quite forgive them for being unable to open Door #4. By the time of Full Circle they’d come fully into their own, but public apathy was such that they could sustain themselves no further. (There was a final non-LP b-side, called “Treetrunk.” Does anybody own it or have a tape? It’s the only Doors release I’ve never heard.) I’ve wondered why they didn’t just retire the Doors name and carry on under another, but in retrospect it wouldn’t have done much good. Ray and Robbie were going in separate musical directions anyway. Both knew all too well, it’s a drag trying to make an album with someone who’d rather be elsewhere. (Still, if you’ve ever been curious what the Doors would have sounded like in the mid-70s, just bake Full Circle and American Prayer together in a pie along with four and twenty blackbirds, and you’ll know.)
So. Ray goes solo. Scarab came out, and it was a Concept Album. And just what the fuck is wrong with that, by the way? You always see the phrase rendered as “The Dreaded Concept Album.” Pisses me off. Many of them are crap, but not merely as many as the thousands of no-concept albums released every year. I like to see people displaying a little ambition whether they succeed or not. And it’d be a stretch to get much more ambitious than with an album based on Egyptian mythology, particularly the role of the scarab in the daily rebirth of Ra the sun god, rolling a ball of dung across the sky (“holy shit!,” said Danny Sugerman), and about how this relates to each and every one of us. The cover featured a portrait of Ray looking rather pleased with himself to be covered in gold paint and black eyeliner (hey, it was the glitter era). Since he looked equally cool and ridiculous, he had a right.
The music therein? A treasure trove of 70s psychedelia--all sorts of ethnic percussion was mixed into this thing (some of it of the giddy calypso variety, even), which prevented it from taking itself as serious as it looked (reminding us that we’re as mammalian as we are cerebral), and making it sound even better on acid than I would suspect it does anyway. I’ve had it over ten years now, and still remember the first week or so--my friends chanting “In Eeeeeeee-gypt...By the Niiiii-yull...In Memphis, Heliopolis...” Is it an album or a virus? Once this thing gets in your brain, be forewarned--it’s there for life. You won’t mind. It’s perfectly entertaining as muzak while you do the dishes, too. And it has Ray’s trademark keyboard playing throughout, augmented by such exotica as steel drums and African “thumb piano,” as well as utterly fine guitar work by someone who wasn’t even Robbie Krieger. Then there are Ray’s lyrics, which were at least as fun as Jim’s, and much more quizzical; warped perceptions emanating from a consciousness that was half again as twisted without being nearly so dark. Ray was a surprisingly strong songwriter--one suspects he would have had some sort of career even if he’d never met Jim.
Ray’s second LP (the one with the really long title), continued in more of a “rocking” vein (yes, the record company well and duly freaked out when they heard Scarab for the first time, see Danny Sugerman’s Wonderland Avenue for further details), with less World Music in the grooves, but otherwise a perfectly wonderful little product that also went nowhere.
With that, Ray’s ambition seems to have died. Even while still nominally a (Hatchback) Door, he had done some oddly anonymous session work with a UK band, Skin Alley, under the name “Krzysztof Juszkiewicz.” Or so I’m told. I’ve mentioned it to a hardcore Doors freak or two and they were unaware, but a hardcore vinyl junkie or two told me otherwise. The guy on the cover looks exactly like Ray, it was obviously a contractual pseudonym for somebody, and Ray is Polish. The music is more like Traffic, and not at all like Ray. He’s certainly capable of playing in other styles, but it’s still jarring to know Ray’s playing but be unable to tell. Two Quid Deal it’s called, a very fine album on its own terms.
A few years later there was an album or two by an even more anonymous disco band called Nite City (dreadful by all accounts). He followed that with production/session work for a new wave band or two (most notably for X), and then his Carmina Burana project, which gamely attempted to adapt Orff for a rock audience but just didn’t do it for me (most classical/rock fusion doesn’t either, for once I’m with the majority), oh, he’s kept busy. Just lately there’s been an album and video with poet Michael McClure. Then a double spoken-word CD, Myth and Reality, running through the history of the Doors and featuring one new song, as if for old times sake...Pleeeeez, Ray, give us another album of you. Singing Ray Manzarek songs. Please? Jus’ think about it. Even Steely Dan got back together one day, y’know...
--melodylaughter--