The Doors Part 2

John Densmore is easily one of the best percussionists to ever grace popular music. A wide-ranging set of influences impose upon him a massive talent that overtakes the senses with such grace in The Doors' music. Densmore is the least happy by most account with the ongoing 'product' of his band's work. The sometimes stale message of excess for excess' sake that eminates from people who laughingly call themselves Doors fans while at the same exhibiting little better than a hooligan's social standards are surely one element of John's virtual abondonment of his time with the band. When he does speak or write of it, he's is hesitant, and occasionally condemning of his band's great leader. Understandably so to a degree; for what he is condemning is as much the misinterpretation of his band's message as opposed to his friend Jim's message.

For John, the creation of the myth is probably one of the most irksome elements of the whole thing. For the average fan like me, the myth is easily shaken off, knowing the truth as we do. For John though, whether he likes it or not, The Doors will always be the biggest, the best, the greatest thing he ever was involved in creating - it is certainly the most substantive, and to see it ripped to shreds by corporations and idiots in equal measure surely pains him greatly. You see, there are The Doors as sponsored by Warner Bros. in 2007 - a lurid horrid t-shirt logo with a big blank nothing behind it and there are The Doors in your mind, behind which Jim, Ray, Robby and John used to play (and still do, for generation after generation of new fans for whom the philosophy is as legitimate to us as it was to those who first embraced it and then abandoned it in the late 60's and early 70's).

Robby Krieger. I've met him. He's a lovely lovely person. A real bright spark; kind, sociable, funny and humble. And ironically, as the man who wrote Light My Fire, the one with the most right to be an arrogant son of a bitch! But he's a guy who holds no stock with arrogance and naval gasing. Robby, along with Ray, still continues to play the music of The Doors in a live setting, and he plays it and feels it with the same standards and passion that he did first time around. For me, Robby never did drop the batton of The Doors. He's always quietly believed in the beautiful side of the band's message. The idea of living your moments in life to their brilliant best and not letting the accounting process of your life interfere with the living of it. He is as a result, the only one of the band alive who hasn't yet put pen to paper to describe his life as a Door. He has jokingly said he wouldn't publish a biography in his own lifetime as it would be too much legal trouble! Robby is the spirit of The Doors as much as anyone. His happiness is the greatest way this band sells itself - there isn't a person alive that I know about who has anything bad to say of him and it's not because he's avoided controversy in his life. He is controversial, but not with words. His music has received radio bans more than most. His controversy is his guitar, his lyrics and as a lyricist, it is amazing that what he has written and achieved has merited only a fraction of the acclaim that the work of his comrade Morrison's has done.

Ray Manzarek. A man so controversial that half the time, there's an argument about what his name is, let alone what it stands for in the history of music! He is in full, both Raymond Daniel Manzarek and also Raymond Daniel Manzcarek or to his former drummer 'my Polish keyboard player'!!! To those of us who like him, he's just plain ol' Ray. He's been accused of being a liar, a fantasist, a fool and a clown, and they're some of the nicer insults thrown at him. But frankly, they're the insults thrown at him by idiots, who seek only to minimise the profound positive influence he had on Jim Morrison and the overarching message of The Doors. Ray Manzarek was, and still is The Doors. Jim said so himself. Morrison was once asked by a journalist: "So, you're The Doors, Mr. Morrison?" Morrison said "No." He pointed at Ray and said: "That man's The Doors". Never a truer few words spoken in my opinion. The Doors' music was crafted by all four members in equal degree. But the message, the voicebox, the loudspeaker that told the world to wake up and listen - that was (and still is) Ray.

I've met this guy too. He's not what you think you'll meet. Not in the least. He isn't loud, he isn't particularly sociable frankly. He's certainly not rude or anything, but he's quiet, maybe because he's tired of being shouted down by naysayers and insult-artists. It's a shame if that's the case. He has an unusually kind quality in his body language and his way of looking at you that belies his image as 'uber-uncle of hippies' the world over. The waters that ran deep through Jim Morrison run equally deeply in Ray. Despite his willingness to give interview after interview over the years, he has given little away about who he really is and what inspires him the most. What has inspired him for over 40 years however is his wife, Dorothy, who in The Doors time, influenced the band as much as anyone else. Without her, we would not have the best versions known of 'Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)' and 'Back Door Man.' She was the one who placed these songs in front of a young Jim Morrison and said to him 'try these out.' To understand Ray Manzarek, you have to try and understand that he has a duality in his life - he is both The Doors and the husband of Dorothy and father to their children, and grandfather too. He is a complex figure of a man, a genius most of all as an organist but also a genius of myth-creation.

I would speculate that John Densmore's legendary disliking of Ray Manzarek as a person stems as much from Ray's ability and willingness to spin the myth of Jim Morrison as much as Ray the personality. Ray's an eminantly likeable guy; there's no real way to call him a bad person on that level. It is the biggest criticism fans have of Ray - that he is as responsible for the creation of The Lizard King persona and mythology of Jim Morrison as anyone is. Maybe he is. But he wasn't the creator of the whole myth. Ray only helped create the part of that myth that referred to poetry, Dionysian excess as opposed to excess writ large, and song, the joys of women, and wine, and beauty in all its forms, no matter how philosophically terrible the end product might appear to others less willing to suspend disbelief and normal rules of reason and morality that hold us back from realising our true potential as existent creatures in an all too finite human experience. Manzarek didn't create 'Morrison the drunk' - Jim pulled that trick off by himself and no-mark hangers on sold the 5-buck tales to pay their bar and heroin tabs. If people want to lay blame for the misrepresentations of The Doors' philosophy and Morrison's message, then I tell you this, they're way wide of the mark when they lay that blame at the door of Casa Manzarek. Without Ray, The Doors would have been at best, a curious footnote in the history of California sub-culture.

Go take a look at this band. You'll be opening The Doors. But not just of your musical mind. Your whole perspective, the whole range of your experience has the potential to be bent and then shattered into new truths, not by some promise of salvation or peaceful resolution that other more foolish people have offered to those scared enough to want simple closed answers, but into a new realisation, a 'new-born awakening' if you will, of the world you live in. The Doors music had that effect on people in 1965, in 1971, in 1978, in 1991 and for me in 1996. It still continues to do the same for people in 2007, and will always do so. Its message is universal and eternal. It speaks truth to powers subtle, to old-held falsehoods, to new-found fads and to any aspect of your life that you dare apply it to. And if I haven't made it clear for you already, there is joy as well as fear in The Doors.

I hope it doesn't scare you too much...

Footnotes:

1 James Douglas Morrison: The Lords And The New Creatures (1969)