Ray Manzarek
Keyboard Magazine, February 1991
No keyboard player in the late Sixties through the mid-Seventies was unaware of Ray Manzarek’s long solo in “Light My Fire.” At the time, though, I don’t think it significantly affected how most of us played on our own gigs. In those days, like many of my peers, I had a Hammond organ, whose beefy sound and raw power felt more enticing than the thin, reedy tone Manzarek cultivated on his Vox electric organ with the Doors.
Two thoughts about that, looking back from my 21st-century perch. One, I think the fact is that we all knew how much easier it was to make an impression with a Hammond and a spinning Leslie speaker than with an electric Vox or Farfisa. In another definitive solo from that era, Felix Cavaliere blew the roof off with a bonehead simple 16-bar Hammond break, most of it consisting of a tremolo and some notes held down for a long time. It just sounded cool, so why not? On the other hand, Manzarek filled I don’t know how many minutes on “Light My Fire” with a sinuous improvisation, which made its impression not through effect but through thoughtful, and kind of spellbinding, lines that snaked and laced through two repeating chords like smoke through dim light. The truth is, that was a lot harder to do and especially to do it with such fidelity to the spirit of the tune.
And two, for me, his importance only started to become clear a few years later, when punk begat new wave — Jimmy Destri with Blondie and Steve Nieve with Elvis Costello’s Attractions, to name but two who had drawn from that well. This would extend and widen even more when artists such as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, the Human League, the Thompson Twins and Gary Numan based their work on that same aesthetic of straight and narrow, though sharpened timbre.
All of this had come to pass when I met with Manzarek at the house he shared in Beverly Hills with his wife Dorothy Aiko Fujikawa and their son Pablo. They lived on Rodeo Drive, half a block past the posh shopping district. The location seemed incongruous as I drove past the glittering storefronts: Cartier, Tiffany and so on. I was trying to square this with the images I’d developed of Manzarek over the years -- a ridiculous exercise rooted in my youthful tendency to impose my expectations on someone I hadn’t even met.
But once we had finished our interview, I realized that the essence of Manzarek, and how unalterably it had been forged by his association with Jim Morrison, was real and enduring. Out of everyone I’ve ever known, I think Ray might have been the truest manifestation of a psychedelic worldview. There was a touch of wonder in his voice, a resonant, radio-announcer baritone. I could imagine him asking questions about the menu in a restaurant as if he were quizzing a holy master about sacred scripture.
By the time we had finished, I knew that he had kept that flame burning. I saw it in his eyes. Somehow that felt good to know.
Note: I have deleted a significant amount of instrument-specific content, both to save space and to keep the appeal of this transcript as broad as possible.
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From your work with Jim Morrison in the Doors through your production of the L.A. punk band X and your duo performances with Michael McClure, poetry seems to be a thread running through your music.
If you’re working with words, it’s got to be poetry. I grew up with Kerouac. If he hadn’t written On the Road, the Doors would never have 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.
How did you apply 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 saxophone — 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 was what I wanted to get.” I was reading this around 1957 or ’58, and I think to myself, “He had it? Had what? What did he have? How did everybody in the club know that he had it? What is ‘it’ anyway?”
I never understood what “it” is until the Doors got together for their very first rehearsal. We played “Moonlight Drive.” I showed Robbie [Krieger, guitarist] 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, Robbie and Jim, “Man, I’ve played for a long time, but I 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 indefinable 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 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.
It also sounds very Sixties.
When we were college students in the Sixties, we were saying, “Why should we go along with the world the way it is? Why should we go along with the 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 the 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 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? You know you can’t 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.
Paradise Lost
Many of these problems you’re describing were on the Sixties agenda as well. Does that 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 acidheads joined the ranks of the spiritual people. Then something happened. Materialism turned their heads around or squashed that spirituality out of them.
“When you have to go out and get a job, then the little compromises begin.”
Maybe all these spiritual acidheads eventually got too old for college and had to start earning a living 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 consciousness, 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. I guess that’s what happened.
Plus, a lot of people wanted to get free stuff in the Sixties. 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.
The Doors confronted that 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 ’n’ roll on television. At that time, in ’67, rock ’n’ roll was not on television. They had a couple of little Saturday afternoon dance shows, but for rock ’n’ 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 ’n’ roll!
But 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 naïveté went hand-in-hand in those golden days.
Yeah. We had no idea how terrible it could be and just how powerful the Devil could be — the 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 …
Tyranny In Music
How does this darker 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.” 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.
Is that because the emphasis on music is on conforming to commercial ideas, rather than on developing riskier new 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. 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/Muslim myth. Because the Millennium is coming. We’re finished.
Exactly how is all of this reflected in modern music?
Spiritually, 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 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!
“The first thing a fascist regime must do is to stop the artists.”
So times are 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 disruptive impact within a society that has learned to recognize, label and thereby emasculate it.
Exactly!
Waiting For The Nubians
So since you can make practically any kind of music these days without being perceived as a threat, what would you do if you were a young musician now?
I would go neo-psychedelic. I would take every member of the band on Joseph Campbell’s hero 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.”
Here’s the good side of what’s happening: World music is coming. World Beat is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in the past fifteen years. I can’t get enough of this blending of India and Africa and Polynesia. 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 Stones 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. They’ll take over the corporations. But their younger brothers and sisters and their children are the ones who will look back to the Sixties and say, “That’s what we want to do. That is the spiritual emphasis that’s lacking in our lives.”
Yet it’s those elder siblings and the parents 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 hellhound is there and he’s on your trail. The city lights are to the right. You can run to the safety of the city lights, where the hellhound can’t get you. Or you might go off into the forest. As an artist, you have to travel the road less traveled. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.
“An artist is a person who dares to bring the messages of his unconscious into reality.”
Well, look. When you buy a new instrument, you’re acquiring the same sounds and features that get used by the artists you can’t distinguish on the radio. How do you use those same tools to follow the less-traveled 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 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.
Age and Passion
Is playing music a different experience for you in middle age than it was when you were a kid?
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 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, is that fun!
Who is your best audience now — people your own age or younger listeners?
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 forties: “Yeah, man! remember how it was?” Bunch of old guys getting together to kick around war stories, except we’re talkin’ 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! Pan is always in the forest. When you go on the road less traveled, you’re going to find Pan. You’re not going into the city, because the city is 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, as 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.
He's a trip.
Great interview, thanks for sharing. Ray played at a club about four miles from my house back in October 2011. I was out of town that night. Timing is everything.