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Overview
"A refreshingly candid read...a Doors bio worth opening." —Entertainment Weekly No other band has ever sounded quite like the Doors, and no other frontman has ever transfixed an audience quite the way Jim Morrison did. Ray Manzarek, the band's co-founder and keyboard player, was there from the very start—and until the sad dissolution—of the Doors. In this heartfelt and colorfully detailed memoir, complete with 16 pages of photographs, he brings us an insider's view of the brief, brilliant history...from the beginning to the end. "AAn? engaging read." —Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
With the turbulence and psychedelia of the sixties as a backdrop, this is the untold story of the wild and liberated life of The Doors and lead singer Jim Morrison, by the only one who was there from the beginning. Ray Manzarek, a gifted musician heavily influenced by the Chicago blues sound back home, arrives in southern California and enters the UCLA film program. There he befriends a fellow film student from Florida named Jim Morrison. From the beginning, Manzarek and Morrison click, sharing the same literary, music, and film influences. They not only become friends but are rarely apart, until Morrison moves to Paris shortly before his death in 1971. Together with Robby Krieger and John Densmore, they create a sound, an original mix of jazz, classical, California surf, Flamenco guitar, and Chicago blues, that makes an irreversible impact on the music of the day. His story lays to rest the rumors that have abounded about the band, and gives illumination to the dark, shamanic myths that have surrounded the incendiary life of Jim Morrison.
Peter Kurth
"We don't know what happened to Jim Morrison in Paris," Ray Manzarek insists in his autobiographical memoir of Morrison and the Doors, titled, perhaps inevitably, Light My Fire. "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." Manzarek was "musical leader" and keyboard player for The Doors, but his book, as it must be, is overwhelmingly about crazed, quixotic, muddle-headed Jim. "It really doesn't matter how an artist exits on the planet," Manzarek thinks. "It's the ART ... that matters. It's only the art that matters ... 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 ... Images. Deep and penetrating. Confessional. Sometimes mundane, often profound. Never without meaning."
Manzarek and Morrison met at the UCLA Film School in 1963, and much if not all of Light My Fire concerns the powerful, quasi-mystic bond the two men formed as students. Morrison came to California from swampy Florida and Manzarek from Chicago, but both had read the same books, seen the same movies and dreamed the same dreams. Morrison was "in love with the possibility that he could be an artist," Manzarek says. "In love with the idea of freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of thought." Although Manzarek has written a conventional narrative that includes his own childhood and the multiple peregrinations of the four Doors up until Morrison's death in 1971, it is to Jim the Artist, Jim the Poet, Jim the Prophet that he always returns, writing in a tone so elegiac and in prose so thick with wonder it begins to fog your brain -- appropriately enough, when you think about the Doors. The band's life was short, and the mystique that still attaches to its name is in the nature of an urban legend. The bulk of the Doors' work seems badly dated, and the cultlike following they still enjoy says more about nostalgia than about music.
"We were inside the song," Manzarek writes of the Doors' first musical session in Santa Monica. "And we were inside each other. We had given ourselves over to the rhythm, the chord changes, and the words. We had let go of our individual egos and surrendered to one another in the music ... There was only the music. The diamond was formed and it was clear and hard and luminous." Almost any page of Light My Fire contains similarly high-flown riffs: "We'll never make art again. We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Dionysius-and-Apollo dichotomy thing again." Manzarek writes of Morrison as an almost diagnosable split personality -- good boy/bad boy, "Jim" and "Jimbo" -- and attributes Morrison's drug-soaked demise plain and simple to "that rotter, Jimbo. The Doppelgänger." It's as convincing a description of a whacked-out artist as any other. And when he isn't eulogizing, or lambasting Oliver Stone, or lamenting the triumph of materialism in America, Manzarek provides a reliable inside account of the Doors and their era. We may not ever find out what happened in Paris, but there's enough rock history here to keep Manzarek on the shelves. -- Salon
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewJune 1998
In the summer of 1965, Ray Manzarek ran into Jim Morrison on the sands of Venice Beach. Morrison mentioned that he had written lyrics for a couple of songs; he sang them for Manzarek, who was amazed. He said, "Jim, man, with your words and my keyboard — there's nobody doing this. What we're gonna do, nobody on the planet is doing. This music, our music, is called...psychedelic." Combining with the talents of Robby Krieger and John Densmore, they went on to create an original sound that transformed a generation and spawned The Doors. "In that year we had an intense visitation of energy," Manzarek says. "That year lasted from the summer of 1965 to July 3, 1971."
For the first time, the only person who was there from the beginning tells the inside story of the wild life of The Doors and Jim Morrison. Light My Fire: My Life with the Doors goes behind the scenes to tell how The Doors came into existence. From gigs on Sunset Strip — home of the famed Whiskey-a-Go-Go — to a record deal with Elektra, from their first No. 1 hit, 1967's "Light My Fire," to their final recording session for "L.A. Woman," the book covers it all and lays to rest the many rumors that have surrounded the band and Jim Morrison for years. Manzarek gives an original, firsthand account that nobody else in the world could tell. Ray was there from the beginning and saw it all.
Peter Kurth
"We don't know what happened to Jim Morrison in Paris," Ray Manzarek insists in his autobiographical memoir of Morrison and the Doors, titled, perhaps inevitably, Light My Fire. "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." Manzarek was "musical leader" and keyboard player for The Doors, but his book, as it must be, is overwhelmingly about crazed, quixotic, muddle-headed Jim. "It really doesn't matter how an artist exits on the planet," Manzarek thinks. "It's the ART ... that matters. It's only the art that matters ... 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 ... Images. Deep and penetrating. Confessional. Sometimes mundane, often profound. Never without meaning."
Manzarek and Morrison met at the UCLA Film School in 1963, and much if not all of Light My Fire concerns the powerful, quasi-mystic bond the two men formed as students. Morrison came to California from swampy Florida and Manzarek from Chicago, but both had read the same books, seen the same movies and dreamed the same dreams. Morrison was "in love with the possibility that he could be an artist," Manzarek says. "In love with the idea of freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of thought." Although Manzarek has written a conventional narrative that includes his own childhood and the multiple peregrinations of the four Doors up until Morrison's death in 1971, it is to Jim the Artist, Jim the Poet, Jim the Prophet that he always returns, writing in a tone so elegiac and in prose so thick with wonder it begins to fog your brain -- appropriately enough, when you think about the Doors. The band's life was short, and the mystique that still attaches to its name is in the nature of an urban legend. The bulk of the Doors' work seems badly dated, and the cultlike following they still enjoy says more about nostalgia than about music.
"We were inside the song," Manzarek writes of the Doors' first musical session in Santa Monica. "And we were inside each other. We had given ourselves over to the rhythm, the chord changes, and the words. We had let go of our individual egos and surrendered to one another in the music ... There was only the music. The diamond was formed and it was clear and hard and luminous." Almost any page of Light My Fire contains similarly high-flown riffs: "We'll never make art again. We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Dionysius-and-Apollo dichotomy thing again." Manzarek writes of Morrison as an almost diagnosable split personality -- good boy/bad boy, "Jim" and "Jimbo" -- and attributes Morrison's drug-soaked demise plain and simple to "that rotter, Jimbo. The Doppelgänger." It's as convincing a description of a whacked-out artist as any other. And when he isn't eulogizing, or lambasting Oliver Stone, or lamenting the triumph of materialism in America, Manzarek provides a reliable inside account of the Doors and their era. We may not ever find out what happened in Paris, but there's enough rock history here to keep Manzarek on the shelves. -- Salon
Sinclair
. . .[I]f you can overlook Manzarek's predilection for New Age psychobabble. . .Fire provides a refreshingly candid read. . .an uncommonly revealing portrait of this paradigm-shifting group. . .— Entertainment Weekly