Light My Fire by Ray Manzarek
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Book Reviews of Light My Fire
Book Review: Almost unreadable but...
Summary: 5 Stars
I've never read a book like this before. This book is almost unreadable but it's insightful. It's also very, very heavy in the metaphysical so be ready! This is the best account of the inner-workings of The Doors: how the songs were formed, etc. and Jim's personality. And who better to recount it than Ray? I had always figured Jim was absent-minded or scatter-brained but Jim actually connected with people well, especially Ray (at least in the early days). And he made perfect sense when he wasn't smashed. Ray does gloss over a lot of things like how he hooked Dorothy (wife) and he hardly mentions Pamela Courson or Patricia Kenneally. He details the day he met his wife then the next mention of the two is when they're living together in Venice Beach. He doesn't mention his child. I figured this was a Ray Manzarek autobiography so I'm going to get to read what kind of family man Ray is. He doesn't spend a lot of time talking about travel and concert playing except for the concerts that went wrong. Ray doesn't chronicle anything in the book extremely too heavy, not the way Patricia Kenneally did in her book. She almost had a day-to-day, blow-by-blow account of things. This isn't really like that. He does go into the intervention he tried with Jim which was interesting.
There is way, way, way too much attempt at description, metaphor, analogy, imagery. Overuse of adjectives. Ray is deeper than a whole monastery of Tibetan monks put together. Ray doesn't stop with one description. He goes on and on, two times over, five times over, ten. He does this with everything in the book! Every few sentences! Tangents, tangents, tangents! The reader is completely drowned (like the Bismark) in the English language and Eastern words/phrases. I thought "oh my god, stop!". (But as Jim wrote "Take it as it comes!"). In passing, Ray said he would drop in on Jim where he lived near school and there was a cafe nearby where everyone hung out. He then proceeds to spend half a page describing this cafe: the entire menu, the ingredients of the tacos, the smells, the drinks, the cook, the decor, etc. He also does this when he describes his LSD trips. Halfway thru the book Ray says that Jim and an old buddy who was a soldier were moving in with him and Dorothy. Then all of a sudden he goes "oh yeah, I spent two years in the military and I did this and that, and went here and there" and on and on. He is all over the place. I felt like Ray was trying to make me trip without ever having me swallow a pill. For every sentence I read in the first half of the book I had to skip at least fifty more. Putnam must have pulled a hell of an all-nighter to edit this book (they must have called up the entire payroll for this).
The only reason I finished this book was because of the great stories and to understand how Jim truly was around people. Patricia Kenneally made him out to be a complete sex and booze fiend and I knew there had to be more to him than that. I mean those songs didn't write themselves. It was also exciting that Ray remembered all of the conversations he had, almost verbatum. The funniest part of the book is when they were peddling their demo and they went to Capitol Records and saw the secretary there and she asked them their name and they said "The Doors". She's like "what do you mean?" and they tried to describe the "doors within your mind" but she couldn't catch on to save her life. Jim was dumbfounded. I wish this book was longer but in the end I'm very glad I ran across it. The Doors were truly unbelievable. Ray/Robby's devotion to the music of the Doors today is a testament to that. The Rolling Stones don't nearly have the joy in their music today like the Doors do. The Stones worship something different called "Fame".
Book Review: Great Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
"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.
All in All, This was a wonderful book to read.
Book Review: Intellectual, Psychedelic & The Desert Song
Summary: 5 Stars
.What impressed me very much about Ray Manzarek's book are both his observations of the 1960's time era and his knowledge of Greek and Nietzschian thoughts pertaining to Morrison and Dionysian darkness within the Doors music and creativity. His descriptions of Morrison's early acid trip where he envisioned a Satyr following him down the street; that would be the theme of his Dionysian career in the spirit of music, tragedy, dithyrambs and poetry. And Manzareks thoughts on the 1960's, drug use - it's psychedelic spiritual meaning as opposed to the designer drugs of escapism and the comparison of alcohol, the fundamentalism of the government contrasted the peace loving flower movement of mind expansion are worth reading the book by itself. It was like I was saying such things. His further description on the Satyr and Bacchius; this is coming from an intellectual from the 60's, with perception to see "behind" surface societal and cultural conditioning.
I truly became subjective inside the story, and that's what a good novel is supposed to do. And here it was actual history, a time era, a band, the people, and of course, Jim Morrison, his friend and someone you can see he deeply loved. I felt as though I was sitting in his car with him and Dorothy the day he first heard a Doors song on the radio - "Light My Fire" - and shouted out the window, "There playing our song!" "We're on the f----n' radio!"
Manzarek tells of Jim verses "Jimbo," and I can't help but think of Nietzsche's other personality, the shadow side, that finally consumed him in the end into his 11 last years of insanity. This "Jimbo" is someone spoken of objectively and there is no malice here, but brotherly affection and you can really see that after reading Denzmore's account, which has some accounts not mentioned by Manzarek: one example - that of Jim coming into the Manzarek house/studio late at night, drunk, obnoxious, gesturing, smashing and standing on Manzarek's records with his sandy feet at the beach house they rented where Manzarek lived and the band rehearsed.
I also very much enjoyed Denzmore's "Riders on the Storm" and can say a lot of positive traits of his account. However, I favor Manzareks book for his insights on his experiential meditations, trips, Dionysian comparisons and ultimately his warmness that permeates through the pages. Now Denzmore also had very insightful experiences and thoughts to convey, on the love generation, Edith Hamilton, Michael Harner, Jim Hillman, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, a host of others and of course Nietzsche and I also highly recommend Denzmore's book. Both Denzmore's and Manzarek's books complement each other significantly.
I once met Ray Manzarek at a Sci-fi/Movie/Music convention in New Jersey. He was sitting at his own table along with host of other artist's tables. I was with my young son and introduced myself, shook hands, made eye contact. I could feel his energy and that for me is enough. Nothing was said; as if words are ultimately meaningless, unless much is said, and even then, it's only the non-verbal, the power, the Dionysian and essence that has real meaning. All else is interpretation; and lacking at that.
Book Review: "Light My Fire" will light your fire!
Summary: 5 Stars
Ray Manzarek, the author of Light My Fire, used literary devices in his book effectively to tell the story of the crazy life of the Doors. The dialect, flashbacks, and the characters in the story all give a genuine feel for what life was like living in the sixties and forming one of the first psychedelic rock bands. The dialect of the novel is one of the predominate devices to show the language of the 1960's when the book took place. Words like man, groovy, brother, love and anti-establishment are seen throughout the book. For example When describing their new tape recorder Robby Krieger exclaims "'Wow, eight tracks. That's groovy,(p. 254)'" And again when Ray tells Jim Morrison " This music, our music, is called...psychedelic.(p. 102)"
In addition the characters also represent the time well. The members of the Doors lived the life of rock stars. Ray Manzarek, Jim Morrison, Robby Krieger, and John Densmore were all dynamic characters. Each of these characters live the average life of a kid, but with the band they made many changes. Along with playing their music they would drink, smoke joints, occasionally trip acid, and Jim would even take trips to the desert to smoke peyote. Along with the drugs, the band also had many women. Groupies were always following the band trying to meet the members. (The changes they made in their liberated lifestyles allowed them to create songs listened to by generations, and also to create a new type of music the nation had never heard, psychedelic.)
While telling the story Manzarek used the flashback style. He began by describing the death of Jim Morrison and wrote " We would always have a piece of us missing. For the rest of our lives.(p.18)" Then he began to describe his life and how e came to be part of the Doors. "I didn't even know that piece was going to be missing back on the corner of bell and 34th avenue in Chicago Illinois, the city of my birth-on February 12, 1939-and the corner of my home and my grammar school. All I knew was that I was alive and the adventure began at that intersection.(p. 19)"
Another device Manzarek used is when telling his story is he adds a couple of lines from different songs. These lyrics coincide with the specific event happening at that point in his life. For example he hoped that someday everyone would live together in harmony. He then has this quote from a song:
Let's reinvent the gods.
All the myths of the ages.
Celebrate symbols from deep, elder forests.
Light Fire My is definitely worth reading. The reading is enjoyable and it is very interesting. I liked the book a lot. The literary devices used add greatly to the reality factor of the novel. Manzarek presents the time and the life of the band very accurately, and being such a wild group of musicians it was intriguing. Not only is a lot learned about the Doors but it also depicts the era of the sixties historically.
Book Review: Manzarek Takes You With Him
Summary: 5 Stars
Of all the books I've read about The Doors, my favorite has always been "No One Here Gets Out Alive," by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman. Until now. Now, unequivocally, it's "Light My Fire: My Life With The Doors," by Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player and co-founder (along with Jim Morrison) of The Doors. What makes this book so great is that Manzarek has a way of making you feel like you're there with him, and Morrison and the others, as he recounts that magical, psychedelic period of time between 1965 and 1971. As he puts it: "In that year we had an intense visitation of energy. That year lasted from the summer of 1965 to July 3, 1971." And as he writes, he as much as welcomes you into their lives, sharing their most intimate and personal moments. You're there with them on the beach in Venice, California, when Morrison first mentions to his friend Ray that he's been writing some songs; and it is in that moment that "The Doors" are born, and you're there, and it's as if it is one of your own memories. Manzarek writes with such obvious joy and fondness of this period of time in his life; of his memories of Jim Morrison, the charismatic and enigmatic poet whom he loved as a brother and still misses to this day; of his then girlfriend (now wife of all these many years), Dorothy Fujikawa, whom he adores; of finding guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore and making The Doors a reality; and it's all done with such a Bradburyesque style and flair that by the time you're through you feel as though you're one of them, part of that unique inner-circle of friends. Of course, there's the down side, too, about which he is equally as candid as he is about the rest of it. How devastating it was, for example, to watch Jim Morrison's decline, his descent into the void of the bottle; how it began and why, and the reasons neither he, nor anyone, could help Morrison. He discusses quite frankly how his friend, Jim, the gentle poet with an exuberant love for life, would become "Jimbo," the self-destructive, counter-productive redneck. But throughout, Manzarek manages to remain upbeat and positive, concentrating on the love and good times, debunking many of the myriad myths about Morrison and the others, while painting an intimate portrait of who The Doors really were, and are. "Light My Fire," is poignant, incisive and alive; it is one of those books you are sorry to see come to an end. Like the short life of Jim Morrison, it's a shame there isn't any more.