http://music.msn.com/music/remasters?GT1=7702

RAY MANZAREK INTERVIEW

Re: Masters is a monthly interview column dedicated to exploring a veteran artist's body of work

April 1, 2007

In September 1981, Rolling Stone published its famous cover of Jim Morrison with the unforgettable cover line "He's Hot, He's Sexy, and He's Dead." The world was in the grips of a Doors revival, spurred by the use of the band's music in "Apocalypse Now," the publication of the best-selling Morrison biography "No One Here Gets Out Alive" and the release of the "Doors Greatest Hits" album. Doors-mania seemed to peak a decade later when Val Kilmer's portrayal of Morrison in Oliver Stone's movie "The Doors" sealed the singer's romantic rebel image for yet another generation.

It's a single-song world, and I don't think the album is more important than the individual songs, which I think is how young people listen today.

Twenty-five years later, the second coming of the Doors seems never to have waned. The hits collection was just certified 10 times platinum; the band recently received both a Lifetime Achievement award at the Grammys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and, next month, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is mounting "Break on Through: The Lasting Legacy of the Doors" to commemorate the band's 40th anniversary.

The latest Celebration of the Lizard King also includes the release of all six Doors studio albums in newly remastered and expanded versions: "The Doors," "Strange Days," "Waiting for the Sun," "The Soft Parade," "Morrison Hotel" and "L.A. Woman." (The discs came out last year as the "Perception" box set.)

Listen to the "Perceptions" sampler

The new editions contain some revelatory moments, including the restoration of the true speed and pitch of the band's debut album -- which was slowed down in playback and never fixed -- and Morrison's previously censored yelps of "She gets high!" in "Break on Through (to the Other Side)." Revisiting the Doors catalog -- passionate, inconsistent, sometimes inspired and sometimes maddeningly dated -- is a reminder of the wild peaks and valleys these "missionaries of apocalyptic sex" (as Joan Didion once called them) were able to reach in a career of just four years.

Keyboardist Ray Manzarek continues to tour with guitarist Robby Krieger as Riders on the Storm, after litigation with drummer John Densmore over use of the Doors' name. (Ian Astbury recently stepped down as the band's vocalist, and has been replaced by former Fuel singer Brett Scallions.) Manzarek expresses wild enthusiasm about the new remasters and the legacy of the definitive Los Angeles band. The cozmik hippie-speak he often slips into, entirely irony-free, jumps out of the phone across three time zones.

"We were four guys who opened the doors of perception, and said come join us in a state of freedom," says Manzarek. "You listen to that band and you can sense that they are free men, beholden to no one but the love in their own hearts."

MSN Music: After all the reissues, repackagings, box sets and compilations of the Doors material through the years, is it hard for you to return to these albums as individual works?

Ray Manzarek: Going back to the single discs, the way we recorded them in the first place, really means reliving those existential moments. You can only make your first disc once -- it's an absolutely thrilling event, yet it's fraught with danger because you don't know if the public will accept it, and you don't find out for a while. Those are your little babies, your little creations, and we didn't know for six months if that first album was going to be accepted. The album came out in January 1967, and "Light My Fire" wasn't really a hit until that summer. It got to No. 1, I think, in July, knocking the Beatles out of that spot.

So I relived that entire experience when we were listening to that album and remastering it. And to hear the albums in such pristine quality is stunning.

Is there any danger that after the reissued version and then the remastered version and the expanded edition, what an album actually is gets blurred? That if you and I are both talking about, say, "Strange Days," we could be talking about different things?

I don't think you can ever alter the thing in and of itself, because the conception of "Strange Days" -- there's no other way for it to be other than as it is. But it's a single-song world, and I don't think the album is more important than the individual songs, which I think is how young people listen today. Then maybe they go back to the full albums.

You can only write one song at a time, you can only record one song at a time -- in the studio, you don't know what order it will be, in the same way that you don't shoot a movie in sequence. "What do you want to play today?" "I don't know; what do you feel like?" "'Strange Days?'" "OK!" -- it's in tune with exactly what is going on today, that Zen moment in time pulled out of the ether and made into reality. That's why it's still valid today -- we tried to grab that moment in time and capture it, or else come back and try it another day. When we got it, we would smile and nod at each other, we knew, and (producer) Paul Rothchild would say, "That's it, you got it!" And then he'd say, "But let's do one more just for the hell of it." He was always exceedingly meticulous and we loved him madly, but we would never get it again after that one time.

How was it for you to listen to the 30 minutes or so of the band rehearsing "Roadhouse Blues" included on this edition of "Morrison Hotel"?

It's like a documentary film taking place inside my head. People ask me if I learned anything new doing these remasters. I learned that we sometimes had to really work to get it. With that song, you'd figure it's a blues, it would be nice and easy. But something about that song just needed chipping away, like Michelangelo's David. Folks, this is how it goes in the recording studio -- making a record is a very hard thing to do.

I'm surprised you say that realization was new for you -- I'd think the hard work might be the thing you would remember most.

That's the part you let go of -- like my bad experiences in the military, in Okinawa and Thailand in '63 before the Vietnam War. I could tell you endless stories, but forgetting all the bad stuff. That's a great thing about the human mind, it lets go of that and holds on to the wonderful stuff, like that final version we did get of "Roadhouse" with John Sebastian playing that harp. It was one hell of a funky version when we put it down.

Also, that rehearsal version of "Celebration of the Lizard," how some things didn't make it in the final version that was on "Absolutely Live." You go into the studio to try things -- Jim said, "Hey, let's go to the studio for the heck of it," though it still hadn't fully come together. Just to fool around, play with it, see how it sounds. And it didn't work. It wasn't there yet, it needed to cook some more, to heat up, go into the alembic.

You're creating a song from nothing to solidity, to gold, and that's a difficult transformation. So it's interesting to hear what didn't make it, to hear the Doors make mistakes. People who are improvising don't get it perfect. Charlie Parker got it as close to perfect as anyone could, and he still said if you don't make a mistake, you're not trying hard enough.

Perhaps more than any other band, the Doors pretty much nailed their mission with the very first song on their first album, which was "Break on Through (to the Other Side)." As you listen to the albums in sequence, what do you hear growing and evolving over time?

I don't know that there's linear progress, I don't actually think there is. It's an exploration of the other side. We broke on through and invited listeners to join us. We stuck our heads into the blue canopy beyond. And a lot came from ingesting certain hallucinogenic substances.

We explored music from blues to musique concrete -- the sounds we put behind "Horse Latitudes" were total chaos, pure sounds like Stockhausen and Boulez. There were love songs, ballads, happy ditties -- like "Hello, I Love You" came from a day on the beach when Jim and I saw this young Nubian princess with a café au lait color, and Morrison wanted to run up and talk to her and I said, "Don't do it, that's jailbait, that's trouble waiting to happen." And a couple of days later he came in with this sun-kissed ditty, saying, "Remember that girl? This is what I wanted to say to her -- hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?"

Out of the Doors catalogue, I admit that I have the most trouble with the "Soft Parade" album and its "jazzy" arrangements, which it seems a lot of people would agree with.

If you don't like it, it's completely my fault. I said, "Let's put horns and strings on." The Beatles had done it; this is like two albums after "Sgt. Pepper." "Let's get some lush strings, some jazz horns." And Paul Rothchild said, "How about a fiddle player and a banjo picker?" We tried to expand beyond that four-unit sound to bring in other players. But it violated the preconceived notion of what the band was -- "Well, how dare you? It's always the four, the dark, moody, mysterious Doors." Well, I don't think so. We are alive on planet Earth and we can do whatever we damn well want to.

I think it also depends when you come into the Doors. I just talked to a guy in Europe and he said it was the first Doors album he ever heard and that he loves it.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Doors?

Probably the Oliver Stone movie, the idea that Jim Morrison was a crazy drunk, totally out of his mind, drunk and insane. Halfway through the movie I turned to my wife and I said, if it was really like this, I wouldn't have made it, I would have quit.

That idea went over really well in the '90s, but the real Jim Morrison was much more literate and spiritual without that crazy bravado and insanity. Being in the band was fun -- it was the '60s, people smoked pot and they laughed, they got hungry. Marijuana releases your hunger and your risibility. And I didn't see any of that fun in the movie; it was all Sturm und Drang.

Do you think the movie version of the Doors helped keep the mythology growing?

That Anna Nicole Smith version is an easy thing to digest in this day and age; it makes it intriguing. The handsome, young, dark poet who dies early. And he's in a rock band, so you don't even have to read his poetry!

But the Doors were always more complex than that. When I met Jim on the beach and we decided to start the band, the most important thing for us was the words. We wanted to put the words and rock music together the way the beat poets married poetry and jazz. People still talk about the beat poets, and they still talk about Jim Morrison.

(thanks to Larry, Lou, and Dennis)

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