Light My Fire Read online

  “This is the best book yet about the Doors and their legendary singer, not to mention Manzarek. 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.”

  —Booklist

  “Engaging.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A great story.”

  —Maxim

  “[Readers] will likely get caught up in the heady joy of the early ’60s as described by Manzarek….An earnest, engaging read.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Evocative…[Manzarek] recalls his formative encounters with the blues in his native Chicago, and he re-creates the freewheeling art and film scene around UCLA, which he and Morrison attended in the early 1960s. In telling the Doors’ story, he also charts Morrison’s physical decline with painful clarity, especially the singer’s excessive drinking.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Offers an insider’s glimpse at one of rock’s most intriguing and endearing bands….It’s an autobiography, a look at American history from the shadows, a confessional…and, most effectively, a buddy book. Indeed, Morrison served as a perfect foil to Manzarek; Dean Moriarty to Kerouac’s self-styled Sal Paradise.”

  —San Francisco Examiner

  “Spellbinding stories.”

  —The Indianapolis Star

  Most Berkley Boulevard Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

  For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ray manzarek

  my life with the doors

  LIGHT MY FIRE: MY LIFE WITH THE DOORS

  A Berkley Boulevard Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / June 1998

  Berkley Boulevard trade paperback edition / October 1999

  The author acknowledges permission to quote lyrics and quotations from the following:

  “Rock Me”

  Written by Muddy Waters.

  © 1957, 1984 Watertoons Music (BMI)/Administered by Bug Music.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man”

  Written by Willie Dixon.

  © 1957, 1964, 1985 Hoochie Coochie Music (BMI)/Administered by Bug Music.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “I’m Ready”

  Written by Willie Dixon.

  © 1954, 1982 Hoochie Coochie Music (BMI)/Administered by Bug Music.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “Back Door Man”

  Written by Willie Dixon

  © 1961, 1989 Hoochie Coochie Music (BMI)/Administered by Bug Music.

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  “American Prayer” (40 line poem) from The American Night by Jim Morrison. Copyright © 1990 by Wilderness Publications. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “Snakeskin Jacket.” Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from The Lords and the New Creatures by Jim Morrison. Copyright © 1969, 1970 by Jim Morrison.

  Alabama Song by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht.

  © 1928 (Renewed) Universal Edition.

  Renewal rights assigned to The Kurt Weill Foundation For Music and Bertolt Brecht. All rights administered by WB Music Corp. (ASCAP)

  All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

  Excerpt from Elektra Biography of The Doors by James Douglas Morrison.

  Used by permission of Doors Music Publishing c/o Wixen Music.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Ray Manzarek.

  Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate.

  Interior photo of lotus flower by Jonelle Weaver.

  Cover design © 1998 by Jack Ribik.

  Front cover photographs by Gloria Stavers/Doors Photo Archive.

  Back cover photograph © Todd Gray.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is http://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 978-0-698-15101-7

  BERKLEY BOULEVARD

  Berkley Boulevard Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY BOULEVARD and its logo are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Special thanks to John Densmore, Fiona Matthews, Maureen and Eric Lasher, Nanscy Neiman-Legette, Eric Deggans, Harvey Kubernik, Rick Schmidlin, Robby Krieger, Danny Sugerman, Rick Valentine, Michael McClure, and Todd Gray. Your help and support were invaluable.

  For Dorothy, my Love

  contents

  chapter one the death of jim morrison

  chapter two the south side of chicago

  chapter three destiny and the ucla film school

  chapter four the beach and LSD

  chapter five forming the doors

  chapter six on the pavement with our demo

  chapter seven the beach house

  chapter eight the sunset strip

  chapter nine sunset sound studio

  chapter ten n.y.c.—the heart of the beast

  chapter eleven the doors hits the street

  chapter twelve san francisco

  chapter thirteen back to the beast

  chapter fourteen strange days

  chapter fifteen waiting for the sun

  chapter sixteen europe and the soft parade

  chapter seventeen miami

  chapter eighteen the aftermath

  chapter nineteen the end times

  epilogue

  Photographs

  Take the highway to the end of the night. Take a journey to the bright midnight

  Jim Morrison

  In some way he had won a great victory, broken through into a world where he could finally live. His life had been a long, tense drama of resistance and of pressure against constraint. But now, in that moment, he had broken down the resistance and emerged loose and free in the night.

  D. H. Lawrence

  the death of jim morrison

  We don’t know what happened to Jim Morrison in Paris. 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. There are simply too many conflicting theories. He went to a movie (like Oswald). No, he didn’t go to the cinema, he went to a bar called the Rock & Roll Circus. Evidently a sleazy French noir place not unlike Van Gogh’s Night Café… “It was the kind of place where a man could go mad, or commit a crime.”

  We could plan a murder, or start a religion.

  He didn’t go to the Rock & Roll Circus—he was home with Pam. No, he was brought home by three French gentlemen of the evening. Comatose. He had done heroin. (To my knowledge, Jim had never tried heroin. Certainly not in the States. However, Pam had. And liked it. But then most people who try it like it…wouldn’t you?) No, he was drunk. They put him to bed. No, he hadn’t gone out at all, he was ill. He had seen a doctor the day before. A bad cough. Pam was going to cook dinner for the two of them. No, they were going out to dinner and then nightclubbing for the rest of the evening. No, he went to bed ear
ly and then woke up at about midnight, not feeling well, needing a bath to warm himself—everyone agrees on the watery aspect. The liquid. The waters of the unconscious. The womb. An immersion. A baptism. A cleansing. The sublime rest in the waters of the mother. Pam wasn’t even there. She had gone out to see the Count. He was always referred to simply as “the Count.” He was an aristocrat. Pam liked that; hobnobbing with royalty. His name was impossible to pronounce. We couldn’t speak any French. We were Americans. We knew about the art, the music, the poetry, and the films but we couldn’t speak the language. What the Count’s name was, I don’t know to this day. I do know he was Jim’s rival for Cinnamon Pam. But he’s dead, too. Heroin got him.

  No, Pam was in bed with Jim. She wouldn’t have left him if he wasn’t feeling well. No, he was in the bath. He called out his last words to her from the tub. She heard him through the door. (I saw her a year later at a seaside restaurant in Marin, across the bridge from San Francisco. She was completely distraught. Shattered. I could only hold her in my arms and try to comfort her. It was impossible to ask the necessary question: “What happened to him?” She was in tears. She could only tell me how much she loved him. How she needed him. How much she missed him and how lesser the world was without him. But then she said, “Do you know what his last words were?” I thought, “More light” or perhaps “Eureka.” Or best of all…“One.”

  I said, “No, Pam, what did he say?”

  She looked at me, tears on her cheek, frail, broken….“‘Pam, are you still there?’” she said. And then she repeated it. Softly, in her little girl’s voice, as if to herself…“‘Pam, are you still there?’”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said, trying to comfort this lost little girl. “His last thoughts were of you.” And she began to cry again.)

  And evidently she fell back asleep, probably content and happy. She had her man with her. She was in Paris. She was young and beautiful. He was a famous artist and he was going to write again. And she would be his muse. But she awoke with a start. An hour or two later. Alone. Jim wasn’t with her…in fear, she rushed to the bathroom.

  Now run to the mirror in the bathroom. Look!

  And her worst fears were realized. He was dead…and her mind began to unhinge. An overload. Emotions beyond control. Words flooding her psyche. “Alone! Never again! Empty! Hold me! My fault! He won’t ever hold me ever again! My fault! I’m lost! Afraid! Oh, God, why?! Why?! Jim!”

  In her panic, she called the Count. (Who else could she turn to?) And he came to their apartment in the Marais. But he came with, and this is odd, Marianne Faithfull. (Pam’s rival?) No, he didn’t come with her. Marianne Faithfull says she was never there. Then who was there? Was the Count even there? No, she didn’t call the Count. She called Alain Ronay, a UCLA buddy, and Agnes Varda, a filmmaker friend. They took care of everything. Called the police. The flics arrived at nine A.M. No, they came at five A.M. Who knows?

  Later, reports said that Jim had a smile on his face. I love that part. Whatever happened to him, he went out grinning.

  Death, old friend.

  Don’t they say death is sweet? Well, he deserved a sweet exit. Because of all the pressures, the pain, the trials, the dark nights of the soul that that too-young man went through, he deserved to “leap upward, into the loam” with a satyr’s leer covering his now smooth and substantial jowls.

  No. He’s not dead at all. He staged his own death. Hadn’t Agnes Varda been researching the story of a French accountant who staged his own death and disappeared in the Marquesas during the twenties? With a hundred fifty pounds of bricks in a coffin and a phony death certificate—add a paid-off Algerian doctor, with perhaps $5,000; a nice piece of change in 1971 money. The complicity of a friend or two—French friends, perhaps filmmakers themselves, to make the necessary arrangements. Well, anything is possible in Paris!

  So what is the story? Will we ever know the truth? Do we want to know the truth? Do we need to know the truth? And why? I mean, what difference does it make how he died, as long as it wasn’t murder? It really doesn’t matter how an artist exits the planet. It’s the ART that matters. It’s only the art that matters. It’s what we do, for cri-sake. Jim was an artist. He wants you to listen to the words. To take the words into your depths. Into those deep places. Those secret places. Those parts of your internal makeup where the vulnerable child lives. The terrified one. The frightened one. The soft one. The sweet and delicate and gentle one. We’re all in the same boat. We all have the same internal makeup. And we’re all frightened.

  But art is our salvation. We become the creators. We are the inventors. And the joy, and the escape, and the great leap out of ourselves—out of the closed circle we constantly occupy—out of the shell and armor of our ego, outward into a “cleaner, purer realm,” as Jim once said…that is our proper destination. To become enlightened creators. Knowing the oneness of all things. The divine and eternal one. (“Tat tvam asi.” “You are that,” as they say in India.) And then daring to snatch duality out of that oneness. Making the choice to create. Making the choice to exist. We are all the creator. And this existence is our creation. It belongs to us and we are responsible for the whole damned thing!

  That’s art. 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. Then placing them in an imaginative juxtaposition. Images. Deep and penetrating. Confessional. Sometimes mundane, often profound. Never without meaning. And usually a multilayered meaning. I used to love to listen to his words. What depth and what phrase turning. A word man, indeed.

  O great creator of being, grant us one more hour

  to perform our art and perfect our lives.

  I wanted that on his tombstone.

  Coda queen, be my bride.

  Rage in darkness by my side.

  Seize the summer in your pride.

  Let’s ride!

  That was for Pam.

  Wild child, natural child.

  Not your mother’s or your father’s child;

  you’re our child, screaming wild.

  That was for Danny.

  Well, she’s fashionably lean,

  And she’s fashionably late.

  She’ll never rank a scene,

  She’ll never break a date.

  But she’s no drag,

  Just watch the way she walks.

  She’s a twentieth-century fox.

  That was for Dorothy.

  Persian night, babe.

  See the light, babe.

  Jesus!

  Save us!

  That was for him.

  I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin

  raft. We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping.

  That was for John and Robby.

  Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain.

  And all the children are insane,

  Waiting for the summer rain.

  That was for all of us.

  His words. Always a place of magic. A refuge from the howling madness of the night. I knew we were human and strong and good and divine when I read his words. I knew we could all face the terror. His words proved the potency of creation. Of our willing the art of creation. Of our ability to rise upward, out of the mud, into that great golden orb of energy that warms and protects us. That sun. That molten disc. That manifestation of our original act of creation when we willed existence into existence. That energy. Divine and human. Ours. All of ours. And Jim’s words. For us. All of us.

  In that year we had an intense visitation of energy.

  That year lasted from the summer of 1965 to July 3, 1971.

  The last time I saw Jim Morrison was in the recording studio in the spring of 1971–8512 Santa Monica Boulevard, corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica. We had turned the Doors office/workshop into a studio for the L.A. Woman sessions. We knew the sound of the room. We felt comfortable there. The vibrations were well tuned through years of rehearsal, laugh
ter, drinking, philosophizing, and pot smoking. This was home for us. And this time we were going to be the producers.

  Paul Rothchild had bailed on the project. He used a great ploy to get us motivated. Paul was a real gambler. “I’m bored,” he said. “If this is the best you can do, I quit. You guys can just do it yourselves.” And he walked out of a very dull rehearsal. Yikes! Do it ourselves? Well…why not! Hell, we can do it. We’re capable. Bruce Botnick as co-producer. Of course he’s a virgin, too. But he knows our sound. He knows what we want. He’s been our engineer since the first album. He helped create our sound and now he’s our co-producer.

  So we made the existential leap together—John, Robby, Jim, Ray, and Bruce Botnick. And as is usually the case with anyone’s act of courage…we landed on our feet. A critically and aesthetically successful undertaking. The energy was with us.

  Bruce wheeled an eight-track recorder across La Cienega Boulevard from Elektra’s studio just down the street and around the corner. Also mics, cables, baffles, amplification…the works. And a big old tube board from Sunset Sound, where we cut our eyeteeth on the first two Doors’ albums; The Doors and Strange Days. No one used a tube board anymore. They were obsolete but, man, they were warm. What a rich, full sound. And this one looked like something left over from a Gene Krupa big band date, or the control panel from one of Flash Gordon’s sparkle craft. Big, black Bakelite knobs. No slide pots, but rotary knobs. A man could get his hands on those knobs. They had a heft to them that felt satisfying and good. Like you were in a continuum of past artists; advancing the art of recording but maintaining a sense of tradition, of continuity. And it was all black and silver with illuminated meters that we constantly bounced into the red zone, pushing that sweet-sounding board to its limits. And it never let us down.

  We placed the instruments downstairs, put up baffles for a bit of isolation, set the mics in front of the amps, put a vocal mic in Jim’s isolation booth—the downstairs bathroom—ran cables out the back door and up the back staircase, put the board and the eight-track upstairs in the office, plugged in the cables, and voilà! A recording studio in the Doors’ workshop. We were home and ready to go!