THE DOORS

“It was amazing. It was two years from meeting on the beach in Venice and deciding to get the rock n' roll band together, to "Light My Fire" becoming the number one song in America.”

Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger - 1994

AChance Meeting

The story that's become so famous is a chance meeting with you (Ray) and Jim on the beach after having not seen each other for a long time. He sat down and you two were shooting the shit a little bit. He started telling you he'd like to make music and he had all these poems that he had written and "Moonlight Drive" was one blew you away.

Ray Manzarek: That's it exactly. That's the story. Great lyrics. The lyrics were terrific: "Let's swim to the moon, let's climb through the tide. Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide. Let's swim out tonight love, it's our turn to try, parked besides the ocean on our moonlight drive." And we sang it. We sang it with this haunted voice, and it was like a haunted and spooky and moon light...moon light drive along the ocean side. I could hear all the organ stuff and the keyboards that I could put in there and thought, ‘Wow, this is fabulous.’ Man, it was psychedelic.

The Beatles and the Stones were big at the time, but The Beatles were a teeny-bopper band and the Stones were playing Chicago blues. They were fabulously successful, and we would look at their pictures on the front page of the newspapers. The Beatles in America like a rock n’ roll band was on the front page of the newspaper for God's sake! ‘Gosh, I would sure like to do that. That looks like an awful lot of fun.’ When Jim wrote those lyrics, I thought. ‘This is it, here we go. There is nobody else doing this. This is called psychedelic.’

Did he write that amongst others allegedly sitting on top of this rooftop?

Manzarek: Yep, that's right. That's the story. He was up there on Dennis's rooftop, like Jesus in the desert. He was up there 40 days and 40 nights. More or less a month and a half after graduation until we met on the beach. [We] reconvened on the beach so within that 40 days in the wilderness all this stuff was pouring out of him.

Now before this happened, you and your brothers had a band and you invited Jim along?

Manzarek: Yeah, Rick and the Ravens, a local surf band that played The Turkey Joint West, and Jim would come on stage and sing occasionally. Along with Paul Farerra, who later became our cameraman, and a couple of other good friends from the UCLA film department. We would do "Louie, Louie," maybe a blues or two, and everybody would get on stage—drunken film students—and they would just be singing away. I would invite some special guests from the audience, ‘Come on! Here they are, direct from the UCLA film department, here's Jim Morrison! Paul Farerra, I see you out there too!’

What I'm hearing is when you invited Jim to join you, there were some people, let's say questioning your judgment?

Manzarek: Yes. Yes, there certainly were. I said, ‘I'm going to get a rock n’ roll band with Jim Morrison.’ And a couple of people said, ‘Are you kidding? Jim Morrison, he's nothing but a punk!’ Ah, well, that's the old Jim Morrison. You don't know Jim Morrison like I know Jim Morrison.

Why is it do you think that no one else saw this creative genius at that time like you did? Or had that creative genius been tapped yet?

Manzarek: Probably hadn't been tapped. He needed to get out of school and get up on Dennis's rooftop to sing those songs. And even then, it would have taken a pretty gosh darn good musician who really knew his rock n’ roll to be able to do something with that music and do something with those lyrics and Jim's singing. Alright, what do you do with this? You could play stupid behind it or you could play folk rock behind it, or you could have a whole classical jazz background. You add a flamingo guitar player (Robbie Krieger) to it, and a jazz drummer (John Densmore) and then you got The Doors. That's where Jim and Robbie come in and their brilliance too. So, you know if I can be so egotistical as to say four brilliant guys. That's what came together man, four brilliant guys.

Behind the Music

What I would like for you to give me is of Jim Morrison the musician, because you read and hear so much about Jim Morrison the singer/ performer, Jim Morrison the poet, Jim Morrison the shaman, his drug use etc.

Manzarek: Well, for us of course Jim was the lead singer in the band. Jim was the singer. There were musicians and a singer. It was like the John Coltrane playing the sax, but without Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison and McCoy Tyner on piano, John Coltrane wouldn't have had the same sound that he had. Those guys were all brilliant players. They didn't look at each other as Coltrane's backup band. They were four equal entities and that's how it was with The Doors.

Jim's job was to be the word man and the singer. That was his job and his job was no more important than anybody's job. So, from a musical standpoint, Jim had a good sense of pacing and timing. He knew when to wait for a musician to finish their solos. He was well versed musically that way. So, it was not as if he was just a poet. He was a poet with a good musical ear too, and that's what made it great to work with him because he knew when to lay out. Okay, we're going to play now, let us play. Let the solo finish and when we start to vamp then you come back in and he would know when to do that. He had a good instinct for it, so he had a good instinct for music along with his word ability. It was always good to work with him that way. He would never step on your solo or come in at the wrong place. He knew where to come in just like a musician, so form that perspective Jim was very musical.

I gather there was a lot of collaboration when it came to the music part of the songs?

Robby Krieger: Yeah. We worked the songs together. Primarily the first album—a lot of those songs were kind of already in the world by the time I got into the band. When I got there, I changed them around a bit, but a lot of that stuff was already pretty much there. Jim and I started working together more, and we would come up with the basic song, then we would all work it out together.

Jim would do lyrics, not just music. I would say 70% then the other 30% I would just write the whole thing. Sometimes he could hear a song in his head and then he had no way of getting it down on tape unless he had someone to do it for him. Ray was pretty good with that.

Manzarek: [The music] was our job and, of course, we all criticized each other but very rarely. Hell, we would all know when it worked and when it didn't work. See, that's what the psychedelics would do for you. You would know when it worked and when it didn't work. And when it didn't work we said, ‘Nah, that doesn't work,’ or ‘Let's just save that for something else. That one part is good but that's not working here. Let's try something else.’

Krieger: Usually, if there was tweaking, Jim would do it. Although as time went on it became harder and harder to get him to do that in the studio because he was losing interest. So, Paul Rothchild, our producer, helped a lot. He and Jim would sit down and go over it, it was poetry and they came up with a few songs that way.

Manzarek: There was very little criticism in the band, it was just like that doesn't work. That's not working, and everyone would know when it didn't work, and you'd try something else instead. Let's try a different beat. Let's try some different chord changes. We'd have to accommodate the key that we were playing in to fit Jim's vocal range.

Krieger: Like I said, Jim and I would get the song down to where it was a song and then Ray and John and I would start working on it. That’s how most of the time they came about. Some of the songs I would have a definite idea of the arrangement already like “Love Me Two Times.” It could only be one way. Then other songs, for instance, like “Moonlight Drive” started off as a totally different song than you hear today. It was really soft and spooky at first.

Was Jim’s approval of your lyrics important to you?

Krieger: Oh, yeah, of course. Even in the early going we all knew he was something special lyric-wise. I knew that for him if he was going to sing one of my songs, it better be pretty heavy duty.

Would you write with Jim’s voice in your head?

Krieger: Not really. When I write a song, I would always have an idea of how it should be sung, and I would try to get Jim to sing it that way but he could never do it. He wasn’t musical that way where you could tell him exactly—he would always change it but usually for the better.

Any song that stands out in your mind?

Krieger: The main one would be “Peace Frog.” It was just a poem that Jim had and we had the music all down. I came up with this music, and I didn’t have any words for it, so I just figured Jim would do it. By the time we recorded it, he still hadn’t come up with anything. So, him and Paul just sat down and looked in their book and they pieced it together.

How did you guys get on the same bill as Simon and Garfunkel?

Krieger: I think we had the same agent. Ashley-Famous. Simon and Garfunkel weren’t that big yet, so we played at Forest Hill and it was a weird gig. You couldn’t see the audience because the lights were right in our faces. It was like playing to nobody. One thing was that Paul Simon really loves The Doors. In fact, he said that “Strange Days” was the best rock n’ roll album he’s ever heard.

“The Doors”

Album

Songwriters: The Doors

Producer: Paul A. Rothchild

The Doors’ debut album was recorded in 1966 at Sunset Sound Recorders. It featured their breakthrough single, “Light My Fire,” and the 11-minute song, “The End.” Krieger had only been playing electric guitar for 6 months when he was invited to become a member.

Let’s talk about “Light My Fire.” The story is that you decided to write a song about one of the four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. From what I’ve read, you chose fire party because of the song, “Play With Fire.”

Krieger: Yeah, it’s true. I know, I’d always liked that song and it was one of my favorites. First time I heard it, although I wasn’t trying to recreate “Play with Fire” it was just a fact of fire. I liked the idea of talking about it in a song. I wanted to talk about something universal, something heavy duty.

I read that you wrote “Light My Fire” and “Love Me Two Times” in an hour. Is that true?

Krieger: “Light My Fire” probably took a couple of days. My main concept I came up with pretty quick. Now, “Love Me Two Times” might have taken a little longer. That was more of a structured kind of chord progression.

I also read that “Love Me Two Times” is about American boys going off to war and partially about The Doors on the road. Krieger: I would say it was more about going on the road. I hadn’t really thought about the war angle at the time. I just kind of threw that in later when it fit. I happened to be doing a benefit for the war veterans. Yeah, thinking about it, that’s what that song was about.

What was the other band member’s reactions to “Light My Fire” the first time you played it for them?

Krieger: They all liked it; they knew it was happening.

It’s July 1967 and “Light My Fire” hits number one. How do you feel?

Krieger: It was great, great. After working so long trying to get songs on the radio and finally get one not only on the radio but number one, it was amazing.