That Fateful Venice Beach Day

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Thought to be July 8 1965 Ray Manzarek is sitting on the beach and who should wander by but Jim Morrison....'Hey man...etc....million dollars...etc...lets swim to the moon....etc....doors of perception....etc etc'.
Thats what I have always been led to believe anyways but in this forums last incarnation Jim Cherry came out with a rather interesting hypothesis that has had me pondering ever since.

What if Jim Morrison was wandering the beach actively seeking out Ray Manzarek?

As Jim pointed out Morrison knew Ray was a musician who had been playing to audiences for at least 4 years prior to 1965. His UCLA Trio and his current band Rick & The Ravens testament to Rays stage cred....

It puts a whole new slant on the introspective shy poet who had witnessed an acid fuelled rooftop concert in his head.
Was Jim 'Terminator-like' seeking out Ray because he knew that his rooftop dream would be in capable hands of his old UCLA buddy?
Maybe Jim was not quite as laid-back as he liked us all to think?
Interesting bit of original thought from Mr C...what do you guys think?

[ensenada]

yes good theory, perhaps he was pretending to be the hapless, go lucky dude, he orchestrated his ascent to stardom. he seeked him out and made it so. it wouldnt suprise me, jim was a very intelligent man. apart from being a little stoned he would know exactly what he was doing. cool

[jym]

Alex,
I don't know if it was terminator like. although I do like the image, "you have been poeted"

But I do think it was a very self-conscious act on Morrison's part. Ray was living at the beach, Jim was in Ray's movie so he knew where to find Ray, after he wrote the poems all he had to do was hang out nearby until Ray showed up & it didn't take all that long since after graduation Ray with a wife to support is going to meditation classes and sitting on the beach while Dororthy worked! Ray could even think Jim accidentally met him that day & Jim knowing the value of a good tale...from a man who was actively trying to spin a myth or legend around himself...well, it almost rules out accidental meeting.

[othercircles]

Sounds reasonable to me.

[kristyob]

I don't know, but it seems he could have knocked on Ray's front door of perception had he really wanted to find him. Call me crazy!!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

When you read some of the stuff here about Jim before The Doors you get a sense that perhaps Jim had some kind of plan when he came to UCLA.

He was writing and even reading poetry to an audience and had made his first film back in Alexandria.

Obviously I am not saying he 'planned' to be a rock star.
But when he went onto the rooftop and saw all this stuff in his head the germ of a seed could well have become transplanted in his head.

He had the words and we know he had an interest in music and was familiar with how powerful a force it was becoming in 1965.

He was indeed shy and unsure about his vocal talents but he knew Ray's worth as a musician and had even appeared with the band on a couple of occasions so had experienced the power of a concert first hand.

All these pieces would fit perfectly together in this scenario.
We can only use conjecture here as only one person knew the answer. But it makes a lot of sense that Jim Morrison would actively seek out Ray.
The year before he had talked about forming a band called The Doors: Open & Closed with Dennis Jacobs.
They had two songs 'Hunger' and 'Want' and planned to perform these as their set.

Ray was someone he knew and it made sense to make his pitch to him.
Obviously neither he nor Ray would have any idea of the consequences of this meeting on the sand but the more I learn the more I gravitate toward this more than interesting hypothesis.

[casandra]

I also think that Jim had some ideas in mind about founding a group before his meeting with Ray on the beach. Perhaps he didn't know how to materialize them for his lack of musical knowledge, or ignorance of rock bands business. Like he had other ideas about going to New York for being a writer o filmmaker, which he dismissed after his graduation during the summer or he definitively ruled out when he decided to dedicate to music.

So as you've already said before: “who found who?”. Anyway, the beach story is a nice way to tell the story. I think it really happened, but I also believe that is a bit imaginative summary of some meetings or conversations between Jim and Ray, prior to deciding to join a group and thinking if the plan had a future. I find interesting that John told about Ray spoke with him after the meditation class and said him that he would call John in a couple of months because it was too early. It's like if Ray was kind of “Pigmalion” then and that he wasn’t completely sure about the plans, or he didn’t know if his “pupil” could really become a singer.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

That's a very good point.
Morrison seemed unsure at the early Doors gigs so maybe Ray was uncertain that the band would work out.
It shows how Morrison chose well to link up with Ray.
Ray was a greedy man but he had qualities that were essential to getting The Doors up on that ladder to stardom.

I don't like Ray it's true to say but I recognise his part in the early days of The Doors.

Jim did not have the drive Ray had in 65/66.
It tells you a lot about Ray when you consider that his brothers thought the band was going nowhere and left.
Ray stuck with Jim and John not his kinfolk.

Ray saw something in the three of them and persevered.
John did his bit as well in finding a suitable guitar player even if Robby had been second choice but Ray was the piston that drove them forward.

I used to describe Ray, in my old Doors fanzine, as the engine room of The Doors, John and Robby were the sinew, bone and muscle and Jim was the heart and soul.

Even after years of strife in The Doors world I still hold that to be true.

[adam]

in angels dance/die there's the tale of jim playing ukulele to an audience, is this true?

also, doesn't the original venice beach tale involve the words "playing to a big audience" (admittedly when ray tells it)

i've got no personal experience to base this on (!) but i doubt you can be a huge rock star by accident, & morrison doesn't seem at ease with doing things he didn't want to do....

@kristy, maybe he was on the way to ray's place when he saw him coming !!!!

[darkstar3]

Break On Through
Page 68

After Morrison received his Bachelor’s Degree in Cinemography from UCLA, he told his friends he was going to New York to get into films and make a living at what he’d learned. But he never left because he discovered he’d been classified A-1 after graduation and figured he’d be drafted any time. Instead, he wandered to Venice and moved in for a time with Dennis Jacob, a friend from college. He and Jackob used to joke about forming a rock duo called The Doors: Open and Closed. Their repertoire was to consist of two songs, “I’m Hungry” and “Want.” Morrison’s inspiration for the name The Doors came from a quote from William Blake, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, infinite.” Jim used to say, “there are things known and things unknown and inbetween are The Doors.” He also had read a book by Aldous Huxley entitled The Doors of Perception after the Blake line. Huxley’s book is basically an account of his experience with mescaline.

Page 69

While he was sharing a place with Jakob, Morrison took his physical for the army. Hoping to flunk his physical, he ingested a healthy quantity of various drugs and, when this failed, told the army doctors he was homosexual. Much to his relief, he was refused service. It is uncertain why at this point, Morrison did not leave for New York as previously planned. Most likely it was because he knew how difficult life there would be. “Film is a hard medium to break into,” he later said. “It’s so much more complex than music, you need so many more people and so much equipment.”

Instead, Morrison began staying on a rooftop of a decaying, deserted office building in Venice, seeking solitude and a place to let his mind roam free. College was over and it was time to take the step into manhood. It was also time to answer the questions of childhood. For Jim, Venice was the perfect place to do both.

Morrison now realized that he had come to this rooftop searching for answers. And for something more. For himself. He was doing what each of us has to at one time or another: Leave our past behind and search for our niche, our special role in the future.

Morrison settled into a period of deep reflection. It was time for all the words he had read to come to life.

Jim Morrison: I was living in this abandon office building, sleeping on the roof. And all of a sudden I threw away most of my notebooks that I’d been keeping since high school and these songs just kept coming to me. It was a beautiful hot summer and I just started hearing songs. This kind of mystic concert that I heard…I thought I was going to be a writer or a sociologist, maybe write plays. I never went to concerts – one or two at most. I saw a few things on TV, but I’d never been part of it all. But I heard in my head a whole concert situation, with a band and singing and an audience – a large audience. Thos first five or six songs I wrote, was just taking notes at a fantantic rock conert that was going on inside my head. And once I had written the songs, I had to sing them.”

END.

Jim Morrison (Rolling Stone (Interview 1969)


About three years ago.I wasn't in a group or anything.I just got out of college and I went down to the beach.I wasn't doing much of anything.I was free for the first time.I had been going to school,constantly,for fifteen years.It was a beautiful hot summer,and I just started hearing songs.I think Istill havethe notebook with those songs written in it.This kind of mythic concert that I heard...I'd like to try and reproduce it sometime,either in actuality or on record.I'd like to reproduce what I heard on the beach that day.


Vanity Fair
August 1 2006
Sheila Weller
(Excerpt)

Malibu's Lost Boys; Surfing was still a strange and exotic art in 1961, when Mike Nader, Duane King, and Larry Shaw escaped their troubled homes for the beach at Malibu


There was a new guy at State Beach that summer of '65, a U.C.L.A. film-school student named Jim Morrison. "He was always there, almost every day," remembers his then best friend, Robbie Freeman, a pal of Larry Shaw's. Freeman and Morrison were going to be in a band together, but Morrison couldn't play a single instrument, so by default he became lead singer, in spite of his unsteady and unproven voice. "Jim believed he was a poet," Freeman remembers. "He wanted to reach people. He thought he had a profound message to communicate." Miki Dora and Jim Morrison were like rival messianic ships passing each other in the surf-sparked night.

During one party at the designer's house, Morrison, on acid, started to gleefully, methodically tattoo his girlfriend's bare skin with a lit cigarette, but Nader confronted him and tried to talk him out of it. Another night, there was a head-on collision on Pacific Coast Highway right outside the house, and surfers in woodies were killed and injured. During one live performance, Morrison would use his acid-enhanced witnessing of that accident in an improvised lyric for his hoary "The End."

www.surfwriter.net/the_lost_boys.htm

Jim Morrison Before "The Doors".

The Summer of 65'

The summer of 1965….Jim Morrison was taking a film class and Robbie Freeman was taking a photography class at UCLA with Edmund Teske.

Jim Morrison was re-editing his UCLA end of term Workshop 170B Film.

Often Jim and Robbie would slip into Bungalow 3K7a trailer behind Gypsy Wagon snack bar and smoke a joint…..

Throughout the summer, Robbie carried his manual Minolta 35mm camera as a requirement for his class with Teske.

Robbie and Jim would get high and take photos while they cruised around Los Angeles area: Will Rodgers State Beach, The Self Realization Center, The Red Log House and at Morrison’s apartment on Goshen Ave.

“Jim would never pose for a photo unless he was making an odd motion or a bold statement”.

That fall of 1965 Jim came to Robbie’s home in Topanga Canyon and played a demo of six songs with Ray and his brothers

(Rick and the Ravens). Jim had written the lyrics himself and “The Doors” had asked Jim to sing them himself.

It was before the revolution.

Truly, this special and important work documents the months before Jim Morrison joined the Doors.

The photos of Jim playing with a gas mask, climbing a fire escape as well as hiding behind a Jacket, smoking a joint, passing a joint and lying on the beach all make a statement of who Jim was and became to be.

These photos are a true piece of American history.

www.aceross.com/morrison.htm

More UCLA Days Stories can be found at Richard Blackburns' "Gypsy Wagon" website
www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/scholarship/richard-blackburn/

[adam]

thanks Sara, thats great info & imho good proof that jim wanted to be in band long before the ray on the beach moment & had tried to form a band with other people

[casandra]

If Frank Lisciandro thought that during the Doors first performance at The London Fog in 1966, Jim was terrible, I think that at the summer of 1965 Jim was singing much more terrible. So I think at that time Ray saw something in him that prompted him to follow, although perhaps he was not completely sure. Ray saw the talent and charisma, but Jim needed many rehearsals and performances for becoming a real singer.

The Calm Calculus of Reason: A Conversation with Frank Lisciandro, By Steven P. Wheeler, p. 4.

Ironically, by 1965, Ray and Jim had formed a band of their own called the Doors. Were you around them at time?

That was a great summer. I was hanging out at the film school and I was hanging out with friends in Venice. Ray had a house there, so I’d go and watch them rehearse sometimes because we were still hanging around that summer.

And later I saw the Doors at their very first performance on the Sunset Strip. I think it was the early part of ’66. All of film students went to the London Fog on that first night.

And what was your initial impression of them onstage?

Well, I thought Jim was terrible. For the most part, he was still pretty shy, so he kept his back to the audience, he really did. I just didn’t think he could sing very well. Shows you how much I know about discovering new musical talent [laughs].

A few years later, after we became friends, I told Jim about my first impression of him at that first show, and I said, “I thought you were terrible that night”. I remember he gave me a look that seemed to suggest that he didn’t like the word “terrible” [laughs].

But then I told him he had improved tremendously and he was like a Frank Sinatra crooner who could also sing rock, and I asked him, “What changed?” He just said, “I just kept practicing and I kept practicing, practicing, practicing”. And obviously he had been doing something to improve. If you listen to their first demo and then their first album, there is such a difference and you can hear it. But they rehearsed a lot and they played a lot, too. I guess you can’t really help but improve if there’s the will and the talent, right?

newdoorstalk.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=display&board=grave&thread=1608&page=1

[kristyob]

"While he was sharing a place with Jakob, Morrison took his physical for the army. Hoping to flunk his physical, he ingested a healthy quantity of various drugs and, when this failed, told the army doctors he was homosexual. Much to his relief, he was refused service. It is uncertain why at this point, Morrison did not leave for New York as previously planned. Most likely it was because he knew how difficult life there would be. “Film is a hard medium to break into,” he later said. “It’s so much more complex than music, you need so many more people and so much equipment.”

I remember reading in John Densmore's book that John drove Morrison to his physical. I'm sorry but I don't have the book handy to reference, am I remembering this correctly ?

I do know that Ray describes daily practices in the UCLA music rooms. I think it's not fair to say that Morrison was not ambitious...he certainly but in a lot of work and preparation.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Mar 22, 2011 17:04:09 GMT kristyob said:

I remember reading in John Densmore's book that John drove Morrison to his physical. I'm sorry but I don't have the book handy to reference, am I remembering this correctly ?

"July 14th (1966) Bastille Day, I took Jim downtown for his physical."
John Desnmore #56 ROTS

Mar 22, 2011 17:04:09 GMT kristyob said:

I do know that Ray describes daily practices in the UCLA music rooms. I think it's not fair to say that Morrison was not ambitious...he certainly put in a lot of work and preparation.

As with the word 'fame', 'ambition' can have more than one meaning.
I agree Jim was ambitious and he sought fame (renown) from the people he admired.
But that is not the same as the portrait Tom DiCillo and The Doors paint in WYS.
The vain preeening superstar of both WYS and Stones movie was over exaggerated.
Of course Jim liked a bit of attention. We all would.
But Jim's concept of fame and his idea of ambition were more geared toward becoming an artist than becoming a rock legend.
Where is the evidence for this?
Morrison's words and his actions.
He could not have made it more clear but still we Doors fans are unable to see what is right in front of our faces.
Sadly it has been obscured by 30 odd years of milking the legend and as a result we can't see the man.

[casandra]

Mar 22, 2011 17:19:09 GMT TheWallsScreamedPoetry said:

Mar 22, 2011 17:04:09 GMT kristyob said:

I remember reading in John Densmore's book that John drove Morrison to his physical. I'm sorry but I don't have the book handy to reference, am I remembering this correctly ?

"July 14th (1966) Bastille Day, I took Jim downtown for his physical."
John Desnmore #56 ROTS

It says here that some information about draft record is public.

www.sss.gov/RECORDS2.HTM

[kristyob]

Thanks Alex. All my books are in Miami, making them hard to reference.

But I agree with your assessment of what fame meant to Jim. However, I think he may have gotten a little caught up with his image at the height of their fame. Afterall, who wouldn't at that age?!

Nothing prepares you for such a strange life of adoration. However, he was an artist of substance and he was kind and appreciative of his fans (except when really drunk. Again, in John's book there are examples of this).

[kristyob]

...and he grew to see that fame for fame's sake was meaningless and unsatisfying in the grand scheme of things.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

As you say becoming the singer in top group in America would go to anybodys head.
So of course it is fair to say Morrison embraced fame which is a point made by DiCillos film WYS.
But of course it is not fair to then extrapolate from there to Morrison needed fame which is what happens in that silly film.

Jim says it himself that he saw his own image as ironic. He could not have been plainer in saying this but after his death his words were used as tools to paint very different pictures.
Sara Darkstar made that very point on the John Desnmore board about WYS.

Being ambitious is not the same as being fame hungry.
I think Morrison came to realise that he had released his own Genii, which ironicallly enough is where we get the word Genius from, and it had a mind of it's own and decided it liked being free.
It still haunts him to this day.

Seeking and finding Ray may well have been a central plank of his plan but it all soon went awry.
Jim summed it up in San Diego in 1970 when he said "It all started with rock and roll. Now it's out of control!"

It is a shame that Jim is seen by a great many as this one dimensional rock star character when the guy was so much more complex.

[kristyob]

It is a shame...BUT, thanks to the internet, info and opposing viewpoints aren't so hard to supress anymore. History is built on those who will construe it to suit their own needs but every once in awhile truth kicks it's ass.