Light My Fire: My Life With The Doors by Ray Manzarek Search Amazon for other books by or about Ray Manzarek. Rating: Reviewed by: Richard Hawkins

Ray Manzarek's biography of The Doors is a passionate, proselytizing, polemic - a jolt of energy shedding light on this fascinating period of Rock history. As such, it's an worthy foil to John Densmore's Riders on the Storm and, interestingly, Manzarek seems to bear some animus towards his former colleague. (Perhaps the more conservative tone of Densmore's recollections irritates Manzarek's more fervent sensibilities.) In his reminiscences of the glory days of the '60s, he's rightly convinced that he and his band played a pivotal role in shaping the soundscape of those special and turbulent times. Even the two books' titles reflect the antithetical essence of the writers as much as they emphasize the differences between the two Doors songs that the books' titles came from. "Light My Fire" was the first smash single by The Doors - a deliriously joyous celebration of sexuality and a testament to the power of rock as a clarion call to youth in 1967. "Riders on the Storm" succinctly chronicled the end of that era - it was a desultory jazz-tinged and world-weary ode, with Morrison's vocals throwing into stark relief his descent into alcoholic destruction.

The trade-off for sharing Manzarek's enthusiasm for the zeitgeist is his slightly gauche style - obviously there were no ghost writers tidying things up here! The repeated references to chakras and kundalini coils can be bewildering if not distracting, but Manzarek's ability to cut to the chase makes the book an easy and rewarding read. An added bonus is the many musical references. Manzarek doesn't talk down to his readers in describing the musical process of the Doors' songs, so we get discourses, for example, on the use of a major seventh chord in the minor-keyed "Crystal Ship" (indeed every Doors song was in a minor key, hence the brooding undercurrent that marked their sound as something more complex and sinister than the other "summer-of-love" rocksters).

Manzarek comes across as a sensible older brother to Jim Morrison (there was a 4-years age difference), and although they both indulged in psychotropic substances - marijuana mainly, and LSD, until Manzarek had a terrifyingly bad trip - Manzarek quickly realized that kid-brother Morrison's most self-destructive behavior was influenced by alcohol. He and the other band members tried to get Morrison off booze but the singer seemed to believe it was his fate to live a bright, short life:

"How long do you think you'll live Ray?" He snapped me out of my reverie. My mind raced back from the sea blue/sky blue horizon line, where it was doing a tightrope dance, and tried to lock itself into what it had just heard. It couldn't.
What a question! We were just pups. Just starting out. The future was infinite, and even then, at that fecund moment in time, at the just-realized conception of the Doors ... even then he was aware of his own mortality.
"Ohh, God ... probably ... uhh," I stammered, trying to project myself from that golden day into a distant future. Probably ... uhh, like ... eighty-seven."
"Whoa, not me, man. I'll never make it that far." And he spoke matter-of-factly, without any fear in his voice. "I see myself like a shooting star. You know, like when you're out at night, at the beach with a bunch of people, and somebody points up at the sky and says, 'Hey, look! A shooting star and everybody stops talking. And they see it, and say 'Ahh!' And it holds them for a brief moment ... and then it goes out."
And he looked at me with his deep and trusting eyes. His wise and prescient eyes...
"That's how I see myself, Ray."

It was heroin that eventually killed him in Paris at the age of 27.

Light My Fire is essential reading for Doors fans and required reading for anyone interested in the ferment that was the '60s. Above all it is a loving portrait of the friendship and artistic collaboration of two essentially opposite personae. Manzarek believes in the '60s - that it was a watershed decade and that people of his and subsequent generations still have the ability to rekindle the fire of all that was great about that era.