Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek
David B. Moye
LOS ANGELES (TNA) – It’s been 40 years since The Doors lit a fire in the music world, but while other folks who lived through the Summer of Love have renounced their youthful indiscretions, the band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, continues to revel in them.
Case in point: The band recently released “The Doors Live In Boston,” a complete concert taken from their last tour in 1970, and Manzarek is able to enjoy it as a musician and, more importantly, as a fan.
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Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek |
Manzarek has listened to countless concert tapes of the band, and despite this, he still gets into the recordings without nit-picking over what he might have played instead.
“Whenever I hear a concert, it takes me right back,” Manzarek said. “I’m stage right, Jim’s in the middle and Robbie [Krieger] is on the left and John [Densmore] in the back makes a perfect V-shape.
“I also listen to see how well we’ve executed the music and how well the audience receives the anarchy.”
That last remark is key to Manzarek, who has spent his adult life trying to recreate the spirit found in the music that helped him “break on through” to the other side when he was a young musician growing up near Chicago, Ill.
“My own doors were first opened by the Muddy Waters’ song ‘Hoochie Koochie Man,’ and then by Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Rite Of Spring,’ and when Elvis Presley performed `Blue Suede Shoes’ on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’”
Waters, Stravinsky and Presley definitely performed different styles of music, but Manzarek says they all had one thing in common: Their compositions reflected both “precision and abandonment.”
“Take Presley doing ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” Manzarek said. “He must play the exact chords on those songs and yet there is this sense of abandonment, like anything can happen. Call it ‘primitive passion.’ That’s why we used to describe our music as ‘primordial.’”
But while Manzarek’s life has been one of musical expression, this former UCLA film school student says the visual arts have always been key to his compositions.
“Our music was definitely created as a soundtrack,” Manzarek said. “One of our biggest influences was director Joseph Von Sternberg, who did films like ‘The Blue Angel,’ and discovered Marlene Dietrich.
“His films were dark, brooding and intelligent, and depicted adult sensuality and sexuality.”
Manzarek looks back on each Doors album like they are movies, but says the feeling he gets from them is different than what he gets from listening to live performances.
“[The studio] is like a laboratory where the mad scientists get together to create this strange creature, this Frankenstein,” he said. “The concerts are where you let it loose.”
Fans of the band will get a chance to hear many of those “lab experiments” in a new form starting Sept. 25. On that day, the band will release a new compilation album, “The Very Best Of The Doors,” featuring 34 of their best known tracks, many in remixed versions.
“We’re always upgrading the sound,” Manzarek said. “There’s more emphasis on the bottom and there are little things that were cut out of the original recordings, such as Jim singing, `Everybody loves my baby. She gets high during ‘Break On Through.’”
In addition, there is “The Doors Vinyl Box,” which compiles the band’s six official studio albums on virgin vinyl, along with a second version of their debut album in mono.
Some audiophiles believe vinyl sounds better than CD, but Manzarek figures each has its benefits.
“There’s an overall warmth to vinyl, but CDs have a crispness,” he said.
Although Manzarek is proud of his Doors past, he still keeps the music alive by performing the classic tunes in Riders On The Storm, which features Krieger, Fuel member Brett Scallions on lead vocals, Ty Dennis on drums, and Phil Chen on bass.
The band tours regularly and Manzarek enjoys the chance to hear his songs sound new each night.
“Your fingers are going where they will,” he said, “And I tell them, `Hey! Astonish me!’”