Rays Light My Fire

[othercircles]

He could re-release LMF in a revised a edition. It could have an extra chapter or two and a few extra pictures or something and people would buy it up. I know I would.

[eressie]

I have just started reading it and have read about 80 pages. So far I find it to be terribly boring, but hopefully it will get better. Of all the books about the Doors I have read so far (4-5 I think) this is the first one I find difficult to finish.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

I guess Ray is a love him or hate him kinda guy....me I do both
I like his style of storytelling.....ironically its an Oliver Stone style of storytelling that does not let things like the truth get in the way of a good tale.....John tells his stroy with true emotion and a high degree of honest reflection of his time with the band whilst Ray prefers the rosier chirpy view (which John mentions in his book that he admired that trait in Ray) which does not always reflect the actual truth...also he does a few nasty tricks as well in it ...especially his dissing of John and the totally unsubstantiated tale that many fans now take as Gospel that Jim wanted to get rid of JD.....that has never come from any other source but Ray....and his dislike of Jims chosen friends is obvious which make s abit of jealousy obvious in thetale......
but overall I enjoyed the book and rank it among the best Doors books....I may not like Ray as a person anymore but I do like him asa weaver of tales about The Doors....even if they may not always be exactly true....

[ensenada]

yeh his book is enjoyable, there is no doubt. but the fibs are slightly irritating, and must have pissed JD of a tad.
i suppose in a way its a shame ray is such a crap director cos he might have been able to turn his tall tales into reasonable films, but theres no fookin chance of that happening

[wyldlizardqueen]

I haVE IT I think it";s a great book

[eressie]

I have read about 120 pages so far and it is getting a bit better, but still I find it to contain too much bla-bla-bla and New Age talk for my liking. It irritates me and I just want him to get to the bloody point, what he actually wanted to say.

[jym]

Yeah, he's always trying to shove his agenda down people's throats, he may in fact be a true believer but it gets a bit old, especially after he writes a novel & doesn't have a distinction in character view points, & after he tries to rationalize the new Age of Aquarius is in hooking up with corporations!!!

[djmartins]

I just finished reading this book for the second time.
I was struck by quite a few things near the end.
It seemed Ray's attitude had changed when discussing things a bit before before Miami.
Got pretty damn mean if one reads it carefully through all the hippy dippy BS.
Throughout the book Ray comes off as a big time control freak.

Total put downs on Jim and Babe and Paul and Frank.
Like the total ego trip for Ray when he calls them the faux Doors!
The other Doors couldn't really hang with Jim outside of the music and it bothered them a lot.

I was not impressed by the fact Ray has split JDM into Jim, the one he likes, and Jimbo for anytime Jim does something he doesn't like.
For example, when discussing the Buick commercial incident, he talks all this shit about the Opel GT like it
was the greatest thing for the world and the environment as his excuse for selling LMF to Buick.
Reading between the lines Ray appears to be the driving force behind JD and RK behind selling LMF.
When Jim gets mad and tells them how it is, Ray DOESN"T GET IT!
Ray starts all this "Jimbo has possesed my friend and is killing him and saying mean things to me" trip.
Rather pissed me off.
Jim is RIGHTFULLY pissed about what they did and RIGHTFULLY tells them he can't trust them anymore.
Seeing how things have gone since Jim died, Jim would not be at all surprised by any of it since they were selling out to the man years before he died.
Jim was talking about artistic integrity and Ray couldn't comprehend it at all.
All Ray could go one about was "Jimbo is drunk and doesn't know what he is talking about"!

After reading the book I sadly came to the conclusion that Ray really doesn't have a clue about many aspects of Jim's personality or the artistic and intellectual issues that drove him.
Ray has this childish and mythical hippy viewpoint that he milks out of Jim's bones for a living.
Looking back to the time after Jim died it appears that the Doors really did think they could go on without Jim and really didn't appreciate Jim's contribution to "The Doors" until it was rammed down thier throat hard.

All I can wonder is how can these people spew all this shit and build this big old "Jim the shaman, Jim the genius, Jim the one and only, we were at the cutting edge" legend, yet whine so damn hard about
how mean and bad he was to them all!

That? Oh, that wasn't Jim, THAT was "Jimbo".

A lot of the time I wondered if everyone except Jim really wanted to join the Mammas and the Pappas.

Decades later the other Doors still don't understand too well and still don't really get "it"....

that's just my take,
DJ

[jym]

Yeah, Ray does go out his way to make himself the better person, I even noticed that Ray uses numerology to prove that he is a more advanced soul than Jim Morrison was. I think there's an undercurrent in the book Ray even say's something about his brothers that I thought was a little weird, like the band (Rick & Ravens) wasn't going anywhere & they knew it, something like that, it's been a while since I read it.

[djmartins]

Glad to know I'm not the only one who smells some fish....

I do think Ray WAS the main driving force behind the band.
His enthusiasm and drive seems to have started the whole thing and kept it going as long as it did.

At the end of the book I was coming to conclusions I hadn't come to before, and they weren't pretty....

John's book was interesting and he seems to be a lot more honest about a lot of things.

regards,
DJ

[darkstar]

I read Ray Manzarek's book one time and that was enough for me.

The hippy personification that Manzarek puts forth in alot of his writing style is questionable, looking at the old photos and his actions in 60's I fail to see where he embraced the so-called communal lifestyle. Maybe in this day and age Ray's so-called hippy past has been covered so thoroughly in the press reviews that its a moot-point but I have never seen Ray give away or share anything with people without some sort of monetary value attached to it.

You get to page 334 and the book has reached the Miami fiasco where the fallout of the event is briefly described in 12 pages. This would be what, 1969? The next chapter is the Epiloge comprised of 7 pages which re-introduces the Jimbo character, (in case one has not forgotten) and then the book ends. There is not much said about 1970 or 1971 unless you pick through the entire book for references. This was confusing to me, but then again maybe it is Manzareks' intention to confuse the reader.

When Ray got the phone call that Jim was dead, being the good friend that Ray claims to be, he should have got on the first plane to Paris. Of course we know he didn't do this but sent Bill Siddons instead. Siddons returns with his story and Ray doesn't believe him which leaves the door (pun intended) wide open for rumors to start swirling around. I can recall the Jim Ladd Radio Show from 1979, Bill Siddons says, if Ray wants to tell people Jim is alive well he can do that, but I was there and Ray was not, I carried his coffin and I buried him. There is no doubt that Jim is dead.

I can recall a series of college lectures that Ray did in Southren California in 1999, where people signed up to hear Ray tell his "Doors Tales." These lectures that Ray gave followed the public statements given to the press by the attorney Christopher Monsoon, who represented the Morrisons, who told Newsweek in Jan 1998 that there was no lease scheduled to run out on Jim's grave, the plot had a perpetual lease on it and Jim was there to stay forever. The cemetery officials verfied the information, newspapers retracted and corrected the information they had reported regarding "the Morrison is being moved" story...... regardless Ray continued to stir these rumors and he got compensated for his efforts.

I have one of these 1999 lectures on tape. People actually paid a fee to hear Ray tell his stories. Believe me, some of the tales he told on the tape that I have hinge on the obsurd. Jim will be dug up and re-buried at a military station in a San Diego desert or and then in the next few sentences he says there could be a pile of rocks in that coffin buried in Pere Lachaise.

Ray Manzarek didn't fully admit that Jim Morrison was dead til 2002. Prior to that date Ray gave incomplete answers....sometimes he was dead, sometimes he wasn't, sometimes he was going to be dug up and moved and other times he wasn't.....this fiasco went on until 2002 just about the same time as he put his tribute band together.

The Buick commerical incident was brought up in court and theres Ray on the witness stand being questioned about the events that took place after Jim Morrison found out LMF had been offered to a car commerical. Ray claimed on the stand, under oath, that the reason Jim did not go along with the Buick commerical was because Jim's dad drove a Buick. (Never heard that one before, have you?)

Attorneys' for Plaintiffs John Densmore and the Estate, produced a copy of Ray's auto-biography and asked him to recall pages 306 - 307 of his book. Was Ray Manzarek the author of these words describing the events surrounding the Buick commerical fiasco..............?

Ray Manzarek has been publicly reprimanded for telling "untruthful statements" so many times that it would take a book the size of a dictionary to house them all. Rays' trip now is comparing Astbury to Morrison by using an array of adjectives in the press, but then again, "Ians' not imitating Jim. Right Ray?"

No matter how many times his actions and words catch up with him, no matter how many times he has been exposed for not telling the truth, he still manages to slink away to re-tell the same fabrications again and again.

[ptlwp]

ensenada said:

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?

ROTS, John's book, to me is the real deal.

What disgusts me more than anything else in Ray's book is that he had a "drinking contest" with Jim...after playing Felt Forum in NYC.

Now, what in hell kind of friend engages in a drinking contest with a guy whom he alleges he knows "has a drinking problem" I mean, WTF?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

I love Ray Manzarek 'The Door' and I love Ray Manzarek the 'musician' but Ray Manzarek 'the man' is a liar a hypocrite and the biggest media whore in rock........need a quote about anything and anybody and Ray is there...does not matter if he ever even met them he is always there to give a eulogy!!!
His conduct at the trial should have landed him in jail but I guess the judge just wanted to get rid of these rich people arguing about fuck all .
He is well protected though and the reporters never give him a grilling and he just bores them shitless with his inane rambles.....I remember he said I could interview him for Scorpywag in 2001 and when i sent him 20 questions of which ONE mentioned Jim Morrison the rest were his solo stuff and post Doors period he told me that he did not want to think about that period.....so basically he is stuck in a Morrison timewarp which is what he accuses the fans who don't sign up to his shit of being.....a total arcehole in my eyes!!!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Ray's book was controversial to say the least but what do you folks have in terms of a 21st century perspective on the keyboard players view of a 20th century phenomenon

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Old fanzine review...circa 2000/2001...shows how much times have changed

Ray Manzarek– Light my Fire (my life with The Doors)

Arguably the best book ever written about The Doors. OK Ray does tend to get on your tits with his mystical droning on but nobody does it better (or with more passion and humour) than this guy.
We’ve read so many times about how the Doors got started but all these other accounts were second hand or by people who were on the periphery of the Genesis of this great American band. (some of them dubious at best) This guy was actually there. He was the only person other than Jim involved, which makes his story THE most important Doors viewpoint on the planet.
Does Ray let us down? Does he buggery. From his opening words dealing with all the endless stream of crap surrounding Jim’s death Ray rightly
concludes that it didn’t matter how Jim died.
It was far more interesting how he lived.
Ray then proceeds to give a truly amazing insight into both himself and his friend Jim Morrison.
From the true account of their meeting on the beach at Venice to their philosophy behind forming a rock band Ray takes us on an amazing trip to the End of the Night that would end in tears at a crappy little non-descript grave marker in a Paris cemetery.
We follow the bands futile attempts to get noticed by the record companies and the insanity of their early gigs which culminated in the extremely perceptive Jac Holzman signing the band after several nights at the Whisky.
Ray gives us the insider view on all The Doors recording sessions and the ups and downs of being a Door. From the delight of receiving his first royalty check to being blasted by Morrison for the ‘Buick’ fiasco
Ray pulls few punches and fills his narrative with humour and regret as only someone who cared so deeply could have.
Ray Manzarek is supreme when it comes to telling the story of America’s greatest band even if he gets over zealous sometimes.
He defends his friend Jim Morrison with a passion unequalled in rock, something Oliver Stone will certainly testify to. Perhaps he does go over the top sometimes with the mystical side of Jim but he nevertheless is always worth taking note of whether in interviews or with this his life story.
Giving credit to all his former band mates as well as Bruce Botnick, Paul Rothchild and Holzman for their part in making The Doors the force they became Ray has produced an exceptional Doors narrative compared to which all others (so far– what about it Mr Krieger) come in a poor second. Ray also ensures that wife Dorothy gets due credit for her part in the Doors saga. ( a true gent)
Scorpywag Rating 10 superb! AP