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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 13, 2005 16:00:53 GMT
Ray Manzarek on Morrison, Psychedelics, Cheezy Organs, Death and The Doors Forget Oliver Stone: Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek was there as the seminal '60s art rock band delved into the dark corners of America's psyche. But the patriarch of L.A. psychedelia is more concerned these days with the responsibilities of young musicians than with the shadows of the past. Check out this provocative view of things to come, and his historic handiwork on three classic transcribed Doors solos (Transcriptions of L.A. Woman, Riders On The Storm, and Light My Fire were included in magazine). Los Angeles hasn't changed much since the '60s. As always, days drift by like smog banks in a starless sky. Nights are threaded by headlights in procession, searching for the gloom for invisible dreams. Out in Venice and Santa Monica, the ocean darkens at sunset as restless vagabonds scan the horizon one last time for the perfect wave, as their fathers and mothers did before them. Further east, atop the long slow incline that climbs from the coast into Watts and crests in Hollywood, the Whiskey A Go Go still stands amidst a wreckage of billboards, bottles, and trash, a shrine even now for rock and roll's rootless pilgrims, locked in the communion of youth, with its passionate rituals and vague apprehensions. This is the Los Angeles of banshee Santa Ana windstorms, of furtive shadows stealing across the green lawns of suburban complacence, or riots on Sunset and rumbles in Venice. Its seductive terrors are recounted in Less Than Zero, in drooling media rehashes of the Manson escapades, and most vividly of all in the words and music of The Doors. While most young fans perceive '60s bands as amusing relics, The Doors' appeal remains immediate. Their disturbing images and cool style seem more in tune with the post-punk '90s than with good-time jangle of folk-rock and San Francisco psychedelia. Of course, much of the credit for the public's lingering fascination with The Doors traces to singer Jim Morrison-specifically, to his gifts as a lyricist and to his death at 27 in 1971, before middle age could tarnish his legacy. The Morrison eulogized by Oliver Stone, by Doors drummer John Densmore in Riders On The Storm, by Billy Idol's remake of "L.A. Woman," and by the mourners who still gather at his grave in Paris, escaped into posterity without turning into a fat Elvis. But there's more to The Doors than Morrison. Formidable as his gifts were, his patricidal fantasies in "The End" would probably have languished unread in poetry book bins if not for the musical setting provided by his colleagues. This remarkable experiment in interactive recitation succeeds because Densmore's melodramatic drumming, Robby Krieger's slithering guitar, and Ray Manzarek's hypnotic organ tune in perfectly with Morrison's text and delivery. The same is true for every cut on the group's debut album, from the nightmarish cabaret lope of "Whisky Bar" to the hallucinatory "Crystal Ship." Even now, the entire record is an eerie and compelling as the dark side of the American dream. It was Manzarek who largely defined The Doors' musical identity. No one sounded like him. His fluid lines snaked over pedal drones in mandala-like symmetrical patterns. His tone was deliberately thin, as if to draw attention to the economy of his improvisations. Even on those rare occasions when Manzarek would record with a Hammond organ instead of his trademark anemic Vox Continental, he avoided the emotional excess and hand-me-down churchiness embraced by most rock keyboardists of his day. In his pre-minimalist approach, Manzarek found the pulse of future tastes, as Morrison had done in his free-associative verse. The Manzarek style was spawned by an interplay of influences: the classical lessons he began before the age of 10 in Chicago, the blues he sought out in the city's South Side clubs, the intellectual underpinning of his economics major at De Paul University, and subsequent studies in law and film at UCLA. His encounter with fellow film student Morrison in 1965 led to an oceanside commitment to begin collaborating. As Manzarek put it to writer Digby Diehl, "We talked a while before we decided to get a group together and make a million dollars." That they did, at the expense of a few indecent exposure arrests and other escapades. Of those who survived the band's rise and fall, Manzarek was best able to pursue intriguing solo projects. These included stints as producer for the L.A. punk band X, leader and keyboardist with a promising proto-stadium band called Nite City in the late '70s, and reorchestrator of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, a '30s-vintage opera which Manzarek and Phillip Glass adapted for electronic ensemble. Yet today, nearly two decades after Morrison slipped into unconsciousness in a Paris bathtub, these projects are dwarfed by The Doors, who stubbornly persist as a contemporary phenomenon. Like spirits in an endless seance, they revive again and again in books, on screen, on the radio, in Manzarek's life, and even in his current projects: Currently, he's shopping an original script and soundtrack demo through Hollywood. The subject? A performance artist working in contemporary clubs around southern California. The title? L.A. Woman. But while the group endures, like the City of Night that spawned them a quarter-century ago, time won't stand still for Manzarek. He's older now, his hair grayer, his face lined behind the familiar rimless glasses. Gone is the funky flat he shared with Morrison in Ocean Park. Home now is uptown, in Beverly Hills-a spacious place with room for a modest pile of keyboards (Roland D-50 and RD-1000, rack-mounted Yamaha TX816, his son's Dynacord drums), a loudmouthed tropical bird, and shelves groaning with books on art, music and metaphysics. Gone, too, is the frenzy of stardom. Manzarek's activities now involve home studio projects with his son Pablo, and occasional appearances as piano accompanist to poet Michael McClure in recitals. He bemoans his generation's yuppification, shaking his head in bewilderment, then in the next breath predicts that today's young musicians can pick up the gauntlet dropped by their parents and "save the world" with rock and roll. His voice, a deejay-quality baritone, sinks into a conspiratorial whisper as he chuckles over old drug experiences and follows free-associative reflections that scatter unpredictability across the landscape of ideas. Few can evoke Woodstock, anticipate the Millennium, and marvel at modern materialism while sunk into a couch in Beverly Hills without some loss of credibility. But Manzarek pulls it off for the same reason that Pete Townshend does: He's a believer, a 20-year-old enthusiast in a wiry 52-year-old shell. Like L.A., like L'America, the Manzarek that matters remains untouched by time and unrepentant at heart.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 13, 2005 16:03:21 GMT
In your work with the Doors, and in such later projects as your adaption of Carmina Burana with Philip Glass, you seem to reflect a preference for modernistic, anti-Romantic approaches to music. Didn't you ever go through, say, a Chopin phase as a piano student?
Never went through a Chopin phase. It had to be twentieth-century, outside of Beethoven's Ninth and a few other things. I didn't enjoy playing Tchaikovsky. Bach's Two- and Three-Part Inventions were fun. Their metrical sense was nice: Just keep it on the beat, even if it's not a rock and roll beat. But then Russian classical music got to me, because those guys had so much soulfulness. The Rite Of Spring, where they hit that rhythmic section-wow, is that powerful.
So even as a teenager, you were into the more adventurous contemporary repertoire.
That and jazz, since I grew up on the south side of Chicago. Blues and jazz-African-American music-really got me going. The first time I heard Muddy Waters and those guys, it was the same minor melancholy sense that some of the Russian composers had, but translated into music that had a beat and a blue note-those flatted sevenths. So it was a combination of the blues, and Russian classical, and then of course Miles [Davis] with his modal stuff. When I figured out what he was doing, it was so much fun to play. Eventually, all of these influences became the way I play the piano.
Were you an annoyance to teachers who wanted you to play traditional pieces?
No. I played what they told me to play until I said, "That's enough of this. I quit." Okay, those pieces are great for your site-reading, great for your chops. But it got to the point where I said, "Why do I want to play somebody else's music? It's got to have a beat." That's Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones: "Got to go!" It was the '50s, man. In the '50s, you had to go. It had to rock. It had to move. If it didn't, there was no point in playing it. Yet your work with the Doors didn't really rock in that sense. Compared to everybody else on the charts in those days, your playing was pretty cerebral.
That comes from being here in California. I always think of the Doors as an extension of the California cool jazz school of [baritone saxophonist] Gerry Mulligan and [trumpeter] Chet Baker. It was the beach, and the Pacific Ocean water over you, and living down in Venice, but with a Chicago kind of intensity added to the style to put it in a cooler area, and Miles's modality, and John Coltrane working with the same kind of thing in his solo albums. And Bill Evans too. Boy, what a master!
There is kind of a parallel between his sound on piano and your sound on organ.
I always tried to play like Bill Evans. If there's one thing I want in my life, it's to be able to play like him, and like McCoy Tyner comping behind Coltrane. They both had that Debussy-like thing that I love so much.
Did you ever transcribe their solos?
Not really. I just listened and tried to imitate their sound in my own playing.
Judging from your remarks about California, you must believe that where you are geographically his a direct impact on how you play.
Absolutely, man. That affects anybody. When you eventually find who you are as a player, a lot of that comes from the flora and fauna of the region where you live.
So if you had stayed in Chicago, for example, you might have wound up playing piano and Hammond organ with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Exactly. I probably would have been playing that Hammond sound. I wouldn't have had that smaller California sound: the Vox, the Farfisa, and like that-what Lester Bangs called "The Doors' cheezy organ sound." It's not cheezy, it's California!
And if you had been raised in L.A., would you have wound up playing "Fun,Fun,Fun" with the Beach Boys?
No, because intensity and power is the whole thing for me. There is an incredible power to music, like the power of playing sports as a kid. I played a lot of basketball, football, and baseball, pumping iron, working out. That's what the strength of music is all about. That's why I loved X.
You produced several of X's albums. With your background in relatively sophisticated musical forms, was it difficult for you to plunge into the maelstrom of punk with them?
Yeah. You listened to punk, and you had to say, "For God's sake, would somebody put an major seventh in there, or a minor ninth? Please! okay, you guys don't do that? Fine, I understand." But their poetry was very sophisticated. John [Doe] and Exene [Cervenka] were doing beatnik poetry. I loved what Bruce Botnick once called their "Chinese harmonies," and Billy Zoom was the king of rockabilly guitar. It was amazing that one guy could get so much noise out of one guitar. So when I got together with them, it was "I play what I play. You guys play what you play, as long as you play it with the intensity and integrity and power and passion that I love." I'll take any music, as long as real passion is there. Poetry seems a constant thread in your music, from Morrison through X up to your current work with Michael McClure. If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with [the books of Jack] Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road-that's what I wanted in my own work. Specifically, how do you attain those elements in music? Well, let me tell you one interesting story from Kerouac. There's one section in On The Road where he goes into a bar, and there's a quartet with a saxophonist-maybe somebody like Gene Ammons, with that big, fat sound. Kerouac listens to the music a bit, and later he writes, "He had it that night. And everybody in the club knew he had it that night. That was what I wanted to get." I'm reading this around 1957 or '58, and I think to myself, "He had it? Had what? What did he have? And how did everybody in the club know he had it? What is 'it' anyway?" I never understood what "it" was until the Doors got together for their very first rehearsal. We played "Moonlight Drive." I showed Robby the very simple chord changes, he put his bottleneck guitar on, we smoked a little cannabis, as people were wont to do in 1965 or '66, and we started to play. By the end of the song, man, it had all locked in. I said to John, Robby and Jim, "Man, I've played for a long time, but I've never actually played music until right now." Then I said to Jim, "You know that section of Kerouac where he said the guy had 'it'? I know what 'it' is now: It's what we've just done." It's an undeniable thing, a sinking down into a lower state of awareness, so that your everyday consciousness is no longer in charge. You tap into, as Jim would call it, a more primordial consciousness. It's the collective unconscious that permeates all of our lives. We all slip right down into it, using all of our intellectual abilities and our knowledge of music to effortlessly play, and allowing ourselves to go into a heightened state of awareness. Boy, it was good.
In a recent issue of Interview, Val Kilmer, who plays Morrison in the Oliver Stone movie, said something interesting about your work with the Doors: "I used to say that the organ on the Doors music really irritated me. I didn't get that it was comedy, Brechtian style." Was that, in fact, the effect you were going for?
"I didn't like the organ sound." When I read that I thought, "Jesus Christ! Where the hell were you, Val?" The truth was that I didn't want to use a Hammond organ, because I didn't want to sound like Jimmy smith. As far as I was concerned, Jimmy Smith was absolutely brilliant, the master, and I wasn't about to get into a race to play against a guy like him and Charles Earland and all the other great jazz organ players. I could never play that well. Also, the technicalities of hauling one of those damn things around from gig to gig were too much to handle. What was lovely about the little Vox Continental was that it was a portable suitcase-type instrument. You put it through a good amp, crank up the reverb, and you've got some real power. When we played at the Whisky, I could split eardrums with that California-style organ. I would squeeze down on the volume pedal until the sound became unearthy and people's heads would start turning. I could see their pain, and just at the point where I knew I was going over the edge, I would begin the lick and we would get into "Summer's Almost Gone" or something. But what about Kilmer's observation on the comic or ironic elements of your organ sound?"
There was an ironic edge to the Doors, but I don't think there was necessarily an ironic edge to the sound. "Oh, show me the way to the next whisky bar....I tell you, we must die." Yeah, that was humorous. If you didn't know that came from Brecht and Weill, you'd say "Why is a rock and roll band playing an oom-pah song? What the heck is that all about? That's gotta be funny." Well, yeah, we were being funny, but we were also saying that death lurks right around the corner, the future is uncertain, and the end is always near, so you'd better make friends with your death. Otherwise you'll be constantly running from it. What kind of a way is that to live your life-running away from death? Death is coming... Val! [Laughs.] The organ sound of yours was instantly recognizable, though, especially since so many other organists were playing the meatier-sounding Hammonds.
My sound was the sound of the instrument. My style was the result of all the studies, all the influences, going to UCLA, reading all the books that I read, and the ingestation of controlled substances, which put it all together and said, "Western civilization is crumbling before your very eyes, Ray. So reinvent your life, reinvent the world, on the basis of the fact that you have three score and ten, more or less, to live on this planet. What are you going to say through your music? How are you going to affect the world through what you're playing?" Having the technique and the knowledge of the structure of music that I had enabled me to take the consciousness and, when I put my finger on a note, let it come through. That's basically what it is: Each person has to find his or her consciousness on this planet. Then, when you play your instrument, you'll get individuality out of it. It doesn't matter whether you've got all the sounds in the world in your synthesizer. If I play the synthesizer, I'm still gonna sound like me. Even if it's the ocarina stop and I'm playing an ocarina piece, I'm still gonna be playing who I am, because every time I put my finger down, the infinite consciousness infuses what I do. That's what every artist has to strive for. All of that stuff that went together to create you infinite and totally unique at the same time, and it will infuse whatever you do, whether it's playing keyboards, playing guitar, writing, painting, or anything else.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 13, 2005 16:04:42 GMT
Do you think that the easy availability of killer sounds and samples has made it harder to develop an individual style today than it was in the '60s?
Yes, absolutely, man. I mean, what did I play onstage? I had a Rhodes keyboard bass with 32 to 37 notes on it, and a Vox organ. That's all I had. I could turn on a vibrato or a tremolo, and pull a couple of drawbars to make it more bassy. But all I could do was basically a cheezy California organ sound. So the sound was the sound: what could I do? Invent the melody! The melody, together with the rhythm, is the most important thing. That's what music is. The sound only augments the melody. As a keyboard player, you must create the melody first.
So you approached your parts with the Doors in terms of lines, rather than chords?
Yeah, although the chords are a melody too. They have a melodic structure. Every Am7 is composed of the notes that it's composed of. So even if you play a chord, you're playing a melody. Where you voice the chord is a melodic voice. Then it becomes a rhythmic choice: Where do I play that chord?
The Vox enabled you to voice chords within a wider range of harmonic choices than you would have had with the Hammond, since the Continentals thinner sound allowed you to hear each note relatively clearly.
Right.
Do you still have your old Continental?
No. I went through quite a few of them, about a half dozen. They would only hold up for so long. Then the keys would stick when you played 'em too hard, so I'd find myself playing and trying to lift them up at the same time. All my Voxes died. They weren't meant to be in this world for a long time. You did do some recording on Hammond with the Doors too.
Yeah, on quite a few cuts. We had room for an organ in our rehearsal studio, so just before the last album, John and Robby and Jim said to me, "Hey, we're gonna get you a Hammond as a birthday present!" I said, "Cool!" And boom, one day there it was: a good old C-3. The C-3 and the B-3 were exactly the same instrument, except the C-3 had little Maltese cross decorations around it.
You also ran your Vox through Leslie speakers on occasion, to kind of mix characteristics of both organs.
Right. Actually, in a way I'm glad synthesizers didn't exist at the time. I would have tried everything.
You did seem to use the keyboard resources of the day to their fullest extreme.
Yeah: "Gimme a harpsichord; I'll play it. I'll play a celeste. I don't care. I'll play anything." "Love Me Two Times" was harpsichord. "Spanish Caravan" and the introduction to The Soft Parade, "Can You Give Me Sanctuary," were both harpsichord on the lute stop.
Pianos turn up a lot on Doors tunes as well, although frequently you seemed to go for a tacky, vaudeville-type instrument rather than the more elegant and traditional grand piano.
Right. But I never thought of the tack piano as a vaudevillian sound. Elektra had the greatest tack piano on earth. It was an incredibly bright Yamaha, and somebody had very carefully and laboriously put a tack on the right spot of each of it's hammers. When you hit those strings, the harpsichord-like glassiness was just wonderful. I still love that sound. Although it had a funky, roadhouse quality too.
Exactly. You had both characteristics. But after all, the Doors were basically a roadhouse blues band with intellectual pretensions [Laughs].
One of the more interesting keyboard parts in the Doors catalog was in the tune "L'America."
A great song. Jim wrote the words, and Robby and I wrote the music together.
The organ part was unusually dissonant when played against the descending line in the chorus.
It was supposed to be. The piece was for the movie Zabriskie Point. [Director Michaelangelo] Antonioni actually came to our rehearsal studio to hear the song but when we played it for him he went running out and never contacted us. I don't know what the hell he was expecting. Ultimately, he went with Pink Floyd for the movie, which made sense; he was a European, and so were they. But the song was intended to be the opening theme for Zabriskie Point, so that dissonance was for the danger of going across the highway. And the blues section, of course, was "the Rain Man's coming to town. Change your luck. Teach your women how to f-f-f-f...find themselves." Ooh Jim! We thought you were going to say fuck [laughs]. Good lyric!
There seemed to be a lot of variety from one Doors song to the next in terms of how much room you had. On "Light My Fire," for example, you could solo and comp pretty freely, whereas you had to stick to a very minimal part "Riders On The Storm." Exactly. That's why Jim objected to doing "Light My Fire." He had to do it the same way every night, but we got to stretch out for 15 or 20 minutes-however long we wanted for our solos. We would do indian improvisations, we would trade fours and twos and ones with John, anything. And Morrison, unfortunately, had to do the same thing [in resigned singsong voice]: "You know that it would be untrue...." There was nothing he could do about it: That's the way the song goes. But everything had freedom within it. Everyone in the band had the freedom to improvise, as long as the basic structure was adhered to.
What about your current work with Michael McClure? How much freedom to you enjoy in your duo performances?
We do maybe 15 to 20 poems. Each piece has a rhythmic foundation that I've preesablished: Is this going to be bluesy? Is this going to be lyrical? Am I going to put some Balinese gamelan things in here? I know the rhythmic structure and perhaps the chordal structure for each piece. But I don't know how I'm going to get from one section to another; that's the improvisation, just like when Coltrane would play "My Favorite Things," he knew what he was going to play but he didn't know where it would go. Michael reads his poems and listens to what I'm playing, then gives me spaces. For instance, one of his poems starts with the word "osprey," so I plan an osprey; I don't even know what key I'm doing it in, but it's a written part. Another piece starts, "I'm the eagle in the whirlpool," so I play an Em9, whirlpool kind of sound.
It sounds very similar to jamming on a jazz chord chart.
It's exactly the same thing. The only difference between jazz and poetry as the beats did it in the '50s and what we do is that I'm not blowing. I'm accompanying his poetry. I'm playing his poetry. I've got his poems in front of me, he has his poems on a music stand, and I read the poetry as he's reading it. I've got little notation marks showing where I'm going with it.
Does McClure improvise at all?
He sticks pretty much to the text. He changes tempos, he changes spaces, he changes emphasis, and he changes the tone of the reading. But he's playing the melody, and the melody is his spoken words.
Why are you working with McClure as opposed to any other poet?
Mainly because he's an American transcendentalist. He's spiritual, he's ecological, he understands the vibrations of the planet and what it's gonna take to heal this planet. We try to add a little balm to the fractured psyches of the young people who come to see us. It's getting kinds tragic out there. Kids are just lost, man! We play at various universities, and kids come up to me after the concert and say, "We weren't there for the '60s. Do you think we missed out on it?" I say, "No, you haven't missed anything. You can create the same thing we did." What exactly was created in the '60s?
When we were college students in the '60s, we were saying, "Why should we go along with the world the way it is? Why should we go along with rape of the environment and exploitation of the workers? Let's change the world, give everybody a fair break, and nurture the planet." This is the Garden of Eden, if that's what we want it to be. We are the caretakers of this planet. We were not put here to dominate the Earth; we were put here to make sure that it works perfectly in harmony. That's what the intellect can do. That's what our spirituality can do. That whole thing has been lost, but all you have to do is snap your fingers and say, "By God, we're gonna do it." The future starts tomorrow, and it belongs to us. We can do anything we want with it. You want to heal the planet? You want to dance and sing and have joyous sex and men and women living together in beautiful loving harmony? Or do you want to fight and have war and chop the trees down? Stop it! Stop chopping the trees down. Stop putting artificial fertilizer on the ground! Stop eating junk foods! Eat what's in season! And the world will keep functioning. It's very simple.
Many of the problems you describe were on the '60s agenda as well. Does this mean that your generation dropped the ball?
That's one of the big questions that my wife Dorothy and I talk about every once in a while. What happened? When we were in college, thousands of people ingested psychedelics and broke on through to the other side and experienced the timeless story of man's quest for enlightenment. Thousands of acid heads joined the ranks of the spiritual people. Then something happened. Materialism turned their heads around or squashed that spirituality out of them.
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Post by TheWallsScreamedPoetry on Jun 13, 2005 16:06:02 GMT
Maybe all these spiritual acid heads eventually got too old for college and had to start earning a living and paying taxes in the real world.
You're right. When you have to go out and get a job, then the little compromises begin. One leads to another, and pretty soon you've lost your soul, and kundalini has slipped back down. When that kundalini power uncoils itself up your spine and your unconsciousness, and your crown chakra explodes into the universe, and you realize that we are all one and we are all God and we are all the universe, it's a marvelous feeling. But it can slip back down into the lower three chakras, and I guess that's what happened. Plus, a lot of people wanted to get stuff for free in the '60s. Life was free, therefore everything should be free. People would come to our concerts saying, "Hey, we're hip! Let us in for free!" They didn't want to pay, but you must pay the piper. You can dance to the piper's tune, but you also have to pay the piper. So now the hero's journey is to fight the bastards, to fight the corruption to fight those subtle things they lay on you for a couple of bucks: "Hey, come on! Ya wanna go for the big bucks?" Well, what the hell are you gonna do with those big bucks? Get a bigger car? You don't need a bigger car. The whole point is to get a smaller car that runs more efficiently. You don't need a big house. You don't need to live in a mansion.
It seems that the Doors confronted this same problem years ago, when you considered selling the rights to "Light My Fire" for Buick to use in a commercial.
We thought it would be a good idea, not so much to make money off of the song but to get rock and roll on television. At that time, in '67, rock and roll was not on television. They had a couple of little Saturday afternoon dance shows, where you would see rock and roll. But for rock and roll to actually penetrate the mainstream, that could be one of the most subversive things you could do. Right in your living room, right in America's living room, here's psychedelic rock and roll! Jim Morrison, God bless him, said, "No, man. Let's not do it, because that's the ultimate trap." And of course, he was right. Falling in with those guys would have led us to what's happening today. I mean, there's Eric Clapton, man, playing for a beer commercial.
So idealism and naivete went hand-in-hand in those golden days.
Yeah. We had no idea how terrible it could actually be, and just how powerful the Devil could be-that dark, greedy, rapacious, grasping side of humanity. But now we're seeing it, man. We're cutting down the fucking rainforests! What are we gonna breathe? Where's the oxygen gonna come from? They don't care, man. Nobody cares. They just gotta get more money, so they can get-what? A bigger house? For what? I get scared in a big house. Night comes, and it's spooky. The wind blows....
How does this dark side of humanity manifest itself in today's music?
Well, for one thing, when I listen to songs on the radio, I can't tell who the soloist is anymore. Nor can I pick out the band. I can identify jazz musicians and classical pieces, but with rock I have a tough time saying, "Oh, that's so-and-so." Now, I love what's happened with synthesizers. It's absolutely fabulous. For the most part, urban contemporary music has great dance beats and great synthesizer sounds. But who's playing it all? I have no idea?
Are you saying that's because the emphasis today in mainstream rock is on conforming to commercial ideas, rather than developing riskier unique approaches?
I guess it is. Or is it conforming to what we think reality is supposed to be? See, I look on this in psychedelic terms, and I see that it goes deeper than just conforming to what's going to sell. I think it's toeing the line of Western civilization-the Judeo-Christian-Moslem myth. Because the Millennium is coming. We're finished.
Exactly how is all this reflected in modern music?
Spirituality, psychologically, you will not go over the line. This is how heavy metal is supposed to be. This is how rap is supposed to be. Contemporary dance music must be this way. You cannot vary that, unless you're an iconoclast. And if an iconoclast actually does vary these standard musical forms, he or she may actually be varying the standard musical forms of civilization as we know it. I don't think anybody is willing to take that chance, man. I don't think anybody is willing to take the hero's journey-to vary not only the urban contemporary dance mix [falls into dramatic whisper] but to vary the whole...fucking...thing!
So times are even tougher now for creative artists than they were in the Doors era?
Absolutely, because we broke through. For a moment, the young people said, "Hey, we're taking over, man!" It was a real battle. The adult world had no idea how much power we had. Now they do know. Now they know that these kids, these artists, must be stopped. The first thing a fascist regime must do is to stop the artists, because the artists are the free thinkers, and invariably along with free thinking goes free love. If you think free, perhaps you won't consume. And if you don't consume, then commercial advertising goes down the toilet. Then what happens to our television and radio shows? They have to go off the air. But that's what we've got to do. We've got to have more public access. It's got to be unsponsored. Art should be unsponsored. Either that, or give the artist some bucks and say, "Hey, support yourself, man."
Your point is that although speed metal, for instance, might sound raucous and incendiary, it has very little destabilizing impact within a society that has learned to recognize, label, and thereby emasculate it.
Exactly.
So since you can make practically any kind of music these days and still not be perceived as a threat to the social order, what would you do if you were a young musician today? How would you approach playing music?
I would go neo-psychedelic, and I would take every member of the band on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. I would find the truth of the ancient myths in today's society. Jim Morrison had a great line: "Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages. Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests." We've got to go pantheist.
Is this a tactic you're following on any specific projects?
Well, my son Pablo and I have been getting the bamboo jungle together. He's my percussionist and computer expert. I'll do sampled and synthetic sounds of the equatorial belt around the world. Here's the good side of what's happening: World music is coming. World beat music is the most exciting thing I've seen in the past 15 years. I can't get enough of this blending of India and Africa and Polynesia.
Of course, people were exploring polycultural music in the '60s too. The difference was that George Harrison bought a sitar and plucked away on it, whereas today we're hearing the practitioners of world music first hand.
Right. We can play with them, and they can play with us. Africa! The power of Africa and the Nubians, our black brothers! Somebody said to me, "Ray, what do you think of rap?" I said, "I gotta tell ya, I'm waiting for the Nubians."
Are you talking specifically about people from Nubia?
No, Nubia meaning the American Pan-Africa movement. The people who call themselves Nubies. It's a generic term for the seeds of Africa, the pollen of Africa, the shaman of Africa, the pantheistic deities. It's time to let Dionysus and Pan break loose. When that starts to happen, it's going to be very scary for the Establishment, the same way the Doors and the Stones and were scary for the Establishment. We, who are getting behind it, are going to say, "This is a music of love and fun and excitement. Sure there's danger, and there's weirdness in there, and it gets spooky, and you talk about death. But in confronting death, you find an incredible joyousness and strength to live your life, in a harmonious way. Music has got to have that spooky element. It's got to have power. The music is gonna have the power, because the baby boom will be relinquishing power soon-certainly aesthetic power. They have financial power, and they'll come into political power, and they'll take over the corporations. But their younger brothers and sisters and their children are the ones who will look back on the '60s and say, "That's what we want to do. That is the spiritual emphasis that's lacking in our lives."
Yet it's the elder siblings and the parents, the targets of this youthful revolt, who defined that spiritual emphasis in their own adolescence.
Ain't that a bitch, man? Robert Frost came to the crossroads and took the road less traveled. And Robert Johnson too! The hellbound is there, and he's on your trail. The city lights are too the right, and the forest is to the left. You can choose to run to the safety of the city lights, where the hellbound can't get you, or you might go off into the forest. As an artist, certainly as a reader of Keyboard, since everybody who buys your magazine is an aspiring artist, you have to travel the road less traveled. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.
When you buy a new instrument, you're buying the same package of sounds you hear being played by artists you can't distinguish on the radio. How do you use these tools to follow the less-travelled path?
First of all, you have to play the licks you've heard on the radio. You have to be as good as the guys who are playing, so you go for that. There's nothing wrong with imitating other people's styles when you're starting out. Then, at some point-it doesn't matter what age it happens-you begin to become an adult artist. Now, what does it mean to be an artist? An artist is a person who dares to bring the messages of his unconscious into reality. As musicians, we affect the body more directly than any other artist. The painter affects the eyes, the writer affects the mind, we affect the body. We have the ability to change the vibrational patterns of the body. We can harmonize with the body, heal the body, or put it into a negative state, or a frenzied state. By echoing, through music, the status quo, we can even put the body into a strange consumptive state. But as artists, we have to go beyond the status quo. You do that by examining yourself and by reading some books. Musicians have to read, man. I don't find enough musicians reading poetry. Somewhere in one of those books, either in philosophy or poetry, you're gonna find some passage that says, "The saxophone player had It." That is when you become an individual musician-when you begin to explore what It is.
Are you talking about actually reading published books, or about a more metaphorical absorption of life's experiences?
There you go, man. Perfect. The Book of Your Own Life Experience. Since everybody who buys your magazine is a reader, I would highly advise reading books. But of course, ultimately you're gonna read the Book of Your Own Experiences. Once you do that, your life will come out of your own fingers as you play. You're playing your life! And you have to play it like it's the last time you're ever gonna play. Death is always there. Not that you need to think about that all the time, but music is serious. You as an artist, as a keyboard player, have to be one of the most serious people on the planet-so serious that what you do with your music is a matter of life and death. When we start to get people into that frame of mind, the music will take on a richness and an energy and a power, even if you're playing the same D-50 Hammond organ sound that everybody else is playing. If you play it knowing that you are a spiritual power, that's gonna happen. It's coming, man. It's coming very quickly, and it'll be brought in by the power of the primitive cultures. When those spirits begin to speak to contemporary America, man, it's gonna be exciting. That's what I'm hoping for: an exciting America.
That seems an especially elusive goal these days. In the '60s, enemies were easy to target: a war, a couple of presidents, and so on. These days, there's a much more vague and imprecise feeling of impending catastrophe. Maybe that's why you feel there's not much vital art happening: Given the climate of anxiety, it's too exhausting to fulfill the artist's obligations and joust with these spectres.
It's also too dangerous to be an artist. But your readers have to experience the joy of creating art. Once you get your nut, once you get off playing with a bunch of other people or composing by yourself at home, the upside of being an artist is that it's so joyous. You can never go into art to make money. That's absurd. You say, "The hell with it. I'm not gonna make money, I'm gonna make art." If you make good art, you'll get by. It's a difficult road, but what could be better than being a keyboard player in a contemporary society, taking advantage of all that modern technology has brought us?
Is playing music different for you now, in middle age, than it was when you were a 20-year-old rocker?
No, man. Once you hit that passion, it never changes. Once you've experienced the joy of creating, and how good it is to play music, and what a thrill it is to play it well enough that you think what you're doing is good, that never leaves. For me, that's the whole point: to bring as many other people as I can into that joyous state of creation. Whoa, that is fun! If we can all do that together, not only can we make great music and enjoy listening to records, we can save the planet. We can take that same energy and go into politics with it. We can affect the direction of America and the world. That's what artists can do.
Who is your best audience now: people your age, or the current generation of rockers?
I hate to say it, but it's the younger people. They haven't succumbed to temptation. Like Luke Skywalker, they have not been seduced by the dark side of the Force. Although it is good to talk to people in their 40s: "Yeah, man! Remember how it was?" Bunch of old guys getting together to kick around war stories, except we're talking psychedelic. Maybe our problem was that even though we broke through to the other side, it's up to today's young people to implement that breakthrough. They've got to keep runaway business in America from exploiting Third World countries. We're saying, "Hey, chop everything down, give it to us, and we'll pay you five cents." Take care of the Third World! The Third World is going to give us the healing plants and the healing rhythms. The Nubians are all out there. They're everywhere. They're lurking! The forces of Dionysus! See, that's it: Nothing ever changes. The Greek gods are not Greek. They infuse everything and keep on going. Pan is always in the forest. When you go on the road less travelled, you're going to find Pan. You're looking for Pan and Dionysus in the forest. You're not going into the city, because the city has bright lights, pollution, and a lot of money. What does that get you? You're probably going to become a dope addict. As Jesus said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And the enemy is within you too. Don't think that it isn't! That's what we, the artists, must fight: the enemy within us. The one who will give in, the one who will be soft, who will say, "I want to make so much money I can't believe it." That's the enemy! Maybe so, but it must be noted that you do live in a rather nice house yourself, and in a very exclusive neighborhood.
Absolutely, but I'm not talking about the way you live. Fortunately, through the grace of the energy, I happened to meet Jim Morrison, John Densmore, and Robby Krieger, and we formed a rock and roll band that's still successful enough to support this nice lifestyle. But what I'm saying would be no different than if we were living in a little one-bedroom house somewhere. Sure, you must have some bucks. The last thing in the world I would say is that you do it solely for art. Money is a convenience, but it's hardly a thing to worship. The ideal situation is for the artist to be rewarded for his or her art. So what do I spend my money on? I spend on [works by abstract painter] El Lissiszky, and on this poster for [the Fritz Lang Film] M, and on these Natalia Goncharova posters announcing the Paris Artist's Ball of 1923, and I've got a bunch of books. I surround myself with the works of other artists, so I can keep those guys and girls going. You buy my record, I'll buy your book.
Have you seen any advances of the Oliver Stone movie about the Doors?
I have no idea what the film is going to be like.
Any trepidations?
Yes. Deep and grave.
Are you afraid that future generations may measure the Doors by how they are depicted in this film?
[Smiling, with a psychedelic gleam in his eyes.] I'll bet they wont.
Waiting For The Nubians By Robert L. Doerschuk Keyboard Magazine, February 1991
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