The best gig The Doors ever played, according to Ray Manzarek
It’s undeniable that The Doors fundamentally elevated the live show into a realm of violence, hypnotism, and utter captivation.
Plenty has been said about the rock and roll mythos surrounding frontman Jim Morrison’s life and career. While enduring as a poster boy for countercultural romance, many felt the ‘Lizard King’s stream of consciousness lyricism and volatile abandonment on stage masked a sophomoric self-indulgence not kept in check by the ‘anything goes’ mores of the 1960s underground. Music journalist Robert Christgau even dubbed The Doors as purveyors of “mystagogic middlebrow escapism”, further adding a “Rhetorical self-aggrandisement that made no demands on everyday life was exactly what the times called for.”
But, beneath all the valid accusations of pretension and narcissistic theatre indulged by the Los Angeles psych outfit, The Doors’ explosive live reputation wasn’t mere hyperbole. Soaking up the stormy lysergia swirling around the decade’s bad trip, Morrison and the gang instilled a danger to their sound and presence, coaxing the darker side of psychedelia and presaging the 1960s’ tumultuous slide into political chaos after the Summer of Love idyll died a nasty death. While some found his intoxicated shaman act embarrassing, others were jaw-dropped, a young Iggy Pop taking serious notes when The Stooges were in gestation.
Whatever your take on The Doors’ rebellion act, the band’s cosmic visions came to their most electric life on stage, erratic drunken mishaps and drug-fuelled antagonism and all. Boasting such a litany of notorious shows, gleaning the one performance that stuck in the band’s mind as a high point would seem a tall task. Yet, when keyboardist Ray Manzarek was asked which live moment stood as their peak, aside from all the countless headliners at Hollywood’s Whisky a Go Go, one key New York show immediately sprang to mind.
“I can remember Madison Square Garden,” Manzarek highlighted in a 2000 interview. “We were at the centre of the basketball court, the stage was set up and the lights were off, and we told the lighting man not to turn the lights on until The Doors start to play. We told the announcer ‘don’t announce us until we tune up, then after we tune up, we’ll give you the OK. Then you can say, ‘ladies and gentlemen from Los Angeles, California, The Doors’.”
The show business plan was scuppered, however. Aiming to unveil the band in all its arresting mystique after tuning their gear in the dark, such theatre was quashed by the announcer introducing The Doors prematurely, hitting the lights and capturing the band like a deer in the headlights.
“I’m saying ’no no no no no no’ and at the point in which she said ‘The Doors’, the audience in the dark had their little flash cameras and I was in the Milky Way,” Manzarek confessed. “It was like thousands of flash bulbs going off, and I just stood there and turned all the way around and saw these light bulbs going off, and it was like I was in the middle of the universe and it was going Nova.”
It was a huge show for the band. Playing to a crowd of 20,000 and telecast for national TV, The Doors pulled out all the stops, roping in a minor brass section in promotion of The Soft Parade album in 1969. The last before Morrison’s wayward beard phase, many longtime fans curse the lack of official documentation of The Doors’ finest live hour, their Madison Square Garden show often cited as the last hurrah of the psych-rockers’ classic era.
It was a show Manzarek certainly had never forgotten. “’Man, it doesn’t get any better than’,” he recalled thinking as the lights flashed up and they broke into the set opener ‘Touch Me’. “This was it, and we played a set man, was a killer!”
