Rays Light My Fire

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

LIGHT MY FIRE
My Life with The Doors
With the Turbulence and Psychedelia of the Sixties as a backdrop, this is the untold story of the wild and liberated life of The Doors and lead singer Jim Morrison, by the only one who was there FROM THE BEGINNING.



Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors
by Ray Manzarek Putnam, 1998

"[The] jewel-like passage is one of the most moving and exhilarating portraits of white boys succumbing to the power of black music this reviewer has read, worthy of Kerouac's stunning prose on jazz clubs....[An] engaging read."
-- The Washington Post Book World

"A refreshingly candid read...a Doors bio worth opening."
--Entertainment Weekly

"Literate, perceptive and thoughtful...may be the best rock bio of the year."
--Booklist

"Manzarek, musical leader of and keyboard player for the Doors, takes us back to the strange days of 1960s L.A. in a striking personal memoir and ode to Jim Morrison. After singer-lyricist Morrison's untimely demise, the band drifted apart, but its music and Morrison's leering public persona get dredged up periodically by new generations of fans. Manzarek and fellow UCLA film graduate, budding poet, and aspiring lizard king Morrison were the band's nucleus, to which Manzarek added guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, whom Manzarek found in a transcendental meditation group. As the Doors, the four captured the orgiastic mood of the Age of Aquarius, L.A. style, by mixing mystical lyrics and extended musical jamming with the signature sound of Manzarek's carnival-like electric keyboard stylings. They enjoyed a commercial success rooted in the singles charts, which provoked dismissive criticism from the album-oriented rock-critic cognoscenti of the time. Manzarek posits that if Morrison had not fallen in with the wrong crowd (a problem then as now), he would have enjoyed an enduring career either as poet or rocker (like, perhaps, Henry Rollins?). Literate, perceptive, and thoughtful, this is the best book yet about the Doors and their legendary singer, not to mention Manzarek, and may be the best rock bio of the year, on a par with Dave Davies' Kink last year."
Mike Tribby review from Booklist


July 07, 1998 | "We don't know what happened to Jim Morrison in Paris," Ray Manzarek insists in his autobiographical memoir of Morrison and the Doors, titled, perhaps inevitably, "Light My Fire." "To be honest, I don't think we're ever going to know. Rumors, innuendoes, self-serving lies, psychic projections to justify inner needs and maladies, and just plain goofiness cloud the truth." Manzarek was "musical leader" and keyboard player for The Doors, but his book, as it must be, is overwhelmingly about crazed, quixotic, muddle-headed Jim. "It really doesn't matter how an artist exits on the planet," Manzarek thinks. "It's the ART ... that matters. It's only the art that matters ... For me, that's what making music is all about. Plucking the notes out of the void. And for Jim it was about plucking the words out of the ether ... Images. Deep and penetrating. Confessional. Sometimes mundane, often profound. Never without meaning."

Manzarek and Morrison met at the UCLA Film School in 1963, and much if not all of "Light My Fire" concerns the powerful, quasi-mystic bond the two men formed as students. Morrison came to California from swampy Florida and Manzarek from Chicago, but both had read the same books, seen the same movies and dreamed the same dreams. Morrison was "in love with the possibility that he could be an artist," Manzarek says. "In love with the idea of freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of thought." Although Manzarek has written a conventional narrative that includes his own childhood and the multiple peregrinations of the four Doors up until Morrison's death in 1971, it is to Jim the Artist, Jim the Poet, Jim the Prophet that he always returns, writing in a tone so elegiac and in prose so thick with wonder it begins to fog your brain -- appropriately enough, when you think about the Doors. The band's life was short, and the mystique that still attaches to its name is in the nature of an urban legend. The bulk of the Doors' work seems badly dated, and the cultlike following they still enjoy says more about nostalgia than about music.


"We were inside the song," Manzarek writes of the Doors' first musical session in Santa Monica. "And we were inside each other. We had given ourselves over to the rhythm, the chord changes, and the words. We had let go of our individual egos and surrendered to one another in the music ... There was only the music. The diamond was formed and it was clear and hard and luminous." Almost any page of "Light My Fire" contains similarly high-flown riffs: "We'll never make art again. We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Dionysius-and-Apollo dichotomy thing again." Manzarek writes of Morrison as an almost diagnosable split personality -- good boy/bad boy, "Jim" and "Jimbo" -- and attributes Morrison's drug-soaked demise plain and simple to "that rotter, Jimbo. The Doppelgnger." It's as convincing a description of a whacked-out artist as any other. And when he isn't eulogizing, or lambasting Oliver Stone, or lamenting the triumph of materialism in America, Manzarek provides a reliable inside account of the Doors and their era. We may not ever find out what happened in Paris, but there's enough rock history here to keep Manzarek on the shelves.
by Peter Kurth for Salon Books

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

I love the book...my fave Doors book....funny and entertaining....who cares if most of it is some fantasy world Ray chooses to live in...got to be daft to believe half of what Ray says anyway.... but nontheless a cool look at the earliest days of The Doors...and after all HE was the only person left alive who was there at the beginning...

[ensenada]

believe it or not, this is the only book i have read by any member of the doors, i aint even read ROTS by john! but i consider it a pretty cool book, even if its from the master of tall stories himself! ;D gives a pretty good insight into what happened behind the scenes and what jim's personality was really like.

There is no doubt that Ray, really did love Jim...shame he couldnt warn him of his self destructive actions, unless he did and jim didnt listen?

[peter]

great book if you ask, one to read!!

i like the part about oliver stone ;D and the end of the book is really nice a proof that there is no doubt that Ray, really did love Jim like ensenada says

[moses]

Not the first book I would suggest to someone wanting to get started on their Doors knowledge. It's most interesting compared side by side with John's.

Ray or Adolph as his new nick name is, seems to be a fella that likes to use big words, simply for the sake of using big words.

Adolph Manzarek®, sorta has a nice ring to it. Wish I could be the one to lay claim to inventing that moniker since I got a feeling it's gonna stick.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

There is a bit of talk on a few other message boards of Ray doing a part 2 to LMF featuring the story from where he left off and exploring some of the stuff he did in the 70s/80s/90s....
As a big fan of his solo work I would like to see that myself........Nite City, his work with McClure and his foray into production with X....all interesting stuff...
Anyone else like the idea of LMF2?

[stuart]

Very Much so, I'd love to read more about the work done on AP.

[jym]

Probably wouldn't sell. How you gonna sell it to a mass audience, "you've read about the turbuluent Jim Morrison years, now read about the laid back years of Adolph Manzarek's life & how he produced X to a mid-line band, & how he decided to live off Jim's bones."


Oh yeah, I queried Ray's agent for The Last Stage she didn't even send me a rejection slip! So, all this is sour grapes I suppose.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Pretty much everything our Ray has put out has sold poorly but that is hardly an excuse not to do it.....Scarab, WTSWR&R, his McClure stuff all sold shit but is damn fine stuff......
Ray is not a selling point unless he has Jim on board and even then still only sells poorly....
LMF2 would be a cool bit of Doors history after all the Doors did have some history after Jim....the 70s had some great stuff....he has hinted at it and it would be nice if for once he followed thru with the crap he talks......

[jimbo]

Alex I'm sure Ray would include everything involving the D21C. The lawsuits, the organization of a new album, the partial backlash to the project (maybe you'll get a cameo mention!) and everything else since 2002. What would you think of that?

[jym]

I doubt he would mention lawsuits, & make D21c the greatest success since, if not over shadowing The Doors.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jimbo said:

Alex I'm sure Ray would include everything involving the D21C. The lawsuits, the organization of a new album, the partial backlash to the project (maybe you'll get a cameo mention!) and everything else since 2002. What would you think of that?

Matt you dork fans seem to think that we anti dork fans spend every waking moment worrying what these sad losers will do next......I am a Doors fan and have been for twice as along as you have been alive mate and I have better things to occupy my mind.
First off I don't think you are correct as the market for the dorks is very limited as well you know.
Ray would be dumb to mention the lawsiuit and the anti dork faction as he would need all Doors fans on board to sell the thing....alienating half your potential customers would be stupid and Ray is not stupid
Of course he could possibly include the dorks as they are part of his life but I doubt they would get as much importance in a LMF2 as you seem to think.
His most productive period was the 70s and dwelling on the post Doors albums, GS and TWTSWR&R along with his work with poets such as McClure and Ford would have more general appeal than some silly dork album.
To you and your ilk the dorks are kinda important but to my kind they are annoying, insulting but not really of a great deal of importance in The Doors story.......Nite City are far far more important and a damn sight more interesting.....
Ray knows that if he was ever to do a follow up to LMF the break up of The Doors and his subsequent solo career would be of a lot more appeal to Doors fans......
Of course if he was bringing the story up to date he would probably mention the 2002 dork story but I totally doubt he would embroil himself in controvery by insulting Doors fans in the book as he does in interviews or for that matter bringing up the law suit as it might backfire on him as someone might point out his lying about Jim and the Buick add under oath on the stand last year.
Ray is a businessman and whilst I accuse him of being a liar and a hypocrite I would never accuse him of being stupid or of being anything BUT an excellent musician.
If he just wrote a dork book I would not waste a penny on it but if he told his story fom where he left off and filled in the gaps Doors fans have been crying out to hear about for years now on the post Jim Doors and his solo stuff and I'd buy it in a heartbeat......
Will it ever happen? I'd like to see it but like much of what Ray promises I doubt it will really happen. He said he would make a Jim/Doors documentary to counter Stones vision but all we got was the laughable Love Her Madly movie which one reviewer described
'Others may find themselves resisting the urge to blow their brains out after about ten minutes of this. A must-avoid film.'

There lies Rays biggest problem......he CAN'T sell stuff without Jim and even then he CAN'T sell stuff.
Book, film, solo albums.....all have sold disatrously which is why there is sadly so little Ray Manzarek solo stuff in the last 30 years and so many Doors compilation albums.....
His only success was the LMF book (which I think is excellent by the way) and EVERY other project including the latest has met with disdain......bear in mind the audience go to see Doors music at dork shows and it will be interesting to see what happens when dork music replaces classic Doors music.....
So will a LMF2 (if it every came to pass) be your vision or mine?
We will see mate.....but the smart moneys not on you...

[jimbo]

well I just figured LMF2 would include more an honorable mention. His solo material covered alot longer span that the last three years. I'd like to see this book get made, as I feel there is a lot of interesting things to be read and learned.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

I agree totally!
Ray's career has been very diverse and is of tremendous interest to Doors fans.
For all his faults (and he has plenty) he has always been a colourful character and his story is well worth telling.....
So that's 2 of us that would buy it Ray....so hows about it?

[othercircles]

Just got a hardbound 1st edition on an internet shop!

:-)

Can't wait to read it. I read some excepts on "amazon.com" and it seems pretty cool.

[othercircles]

I liked it alot. A bit drawn out though. It doesnt even really get into the doors until about 100 pages in.

He had 40 page chapters about going downtown with his dad.. but each section about recording or something he zips right thru.

No mention of anything after morrisons death. He has all this pointless crap about his childhood but when Morrisons dead, the book is over. I would have liked to seen a chapter about the post morrison years and maybe talk about An American Prayer some. That way he still could have closed the book talking about Jim.

Ah well.

[darkstar]

At the conclusion of discussing the Miami fiasco you end up on page 335. With only 17 pages left of the book it would seem the book ended in mid-1969.

[othercircles]

Yea it kinda jumps around.

If they talked about post morrison stuff he wouldnt be able to end it on Jim... which I'm sure was a must for Ray... but then with American Prayer in addition, they could still end on Jim AND discuss the post years.

[darkstar]

Good point, Othercircles. In my opinion the reason The Doors Management doesn't pursue releasing the two post Morrison albums in volume is these two releases won't bring a great profit. Everyone knows the $ is more important to Doors management than what the fans would like released. Hopefully that will change in the future.

[ensenada]

admin said:

There is a bit of talk on a few other message boards of Ray doing a part 2 to LMF featuring the story from where he left off and exploring some of the stuff he did in the 70s/80s/90s....
As a big fan of his solo work I would like to see that myself........Nite City, his work with McClure and his foray into production with X....all interesting stuff...
Anyone else like the idea of LMF2?

i agree with jym..this LMF2 possibly wouldnt sell as well, since it wont be heavily laden with stories of the doors and Jim...lets face it people wanna read about Jim. although i wuld buy it myself because i like his solo work, or what i've heard of it. would be interesting to read of his experiences after the doors...