The 1967 song Ray Manzarek called “the best lyrics I’d heard for a rock ‘n’ roll song”
Jim Morrison may be one of the greatest musical talents that this world has ever seen, and he left us far too soon.
For most people, it was his eccentric nature that won them over. For instance, Iggy Pop became renowned for his brazen attitude on stage, as his antics became what we now recognise as a precursor to punk. The formula was simple: Pop just didn’t give a fuck. He moved around on stage like he owned it and treated the crowd like they were lucky to be in his presence, and these were all tricks he picked up from Morrison.
When Morrison took to the stage that night, he wasn’t in the best of states, and probably shouldn’t have been performing at all, but he owned the chaos, totally leaning into it as he called the crowd out and rode their anger like a wave.
Most people were disgusted, but Pop was enthralled, recalling, “I loved the performance. Part of me was like, ‘Wow, this is great. He’s really pissing people off, and he’s lurching around, making these guys angry’. People were rushing the stage, and Morrison’s going, ‘Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank’. You can fill in your sexual comments yourself. The other half of it was that I thought, ‘If they’ve got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band’. It was sort of the case of, ‘Hey, I can do that’.”
Pop’s experience is similar to a lot of people’s, with Alice Cooper constantly in awe of Morrison, calling him a genius, but also saying that he wasn’t long for the world. He would recount The Doors frontman’s frequent onstage antics and the constant risks he took, and knew he was a spark soon to be snuffed, but that realisation didn’t dull his adoration for him.
The majority of people who met Morrison saw him onstage, confident as they come, changing the shape of music with his brazen attitude towards it, but as someone who would become his future bandmate, Ray Manzarek fell in love with him musically when he saw a much different side to the frontman. On a beachfront, the two sat, spoke about music, and Manzarek got a glimpse of the kind of artist he would eventually be working alongside.
When recounting the moment he knew they would be working together, Manzarek cast his mind back to one of their earliest songs, and one fateful night in Los Angeles. “Well, ‘Moonlight Drive’ is the first song Jim Morrison sang to me on the beach in Venice, when we put the band together,” he said.
Adding, “We graduated from the UCLA Film School together. We graduated in 1965. He was going to New York, and I was going to stay in Los Angeles. Then about a month and a half after graduation, in the middle of July 1965, walking down the beach as I’m sitting on the beach pondering my future, comes James Douglas Morrison.”
It turns out Morrison never went to New York, and instead he stayed in Los Angeles and worked at writing some songs. Everybody has to start somewhere, and in the case of The Doors, it started with a film graduate confused about what to do with his life. Manzarek asked to hear something, and the words that Morrison would soon utter changed his life forever.
He remembered, “He was very shy and very hesitant, but he finally got up his courage, and in a very haunted, deep, dark, kind of melodic voice, soft and haunting, he began to sing ‘Moonlight Drive’. I thought those were the best lyrics I’d heard for a rock ‘n’ roll song.”
I hate to say something cliché like the rest is history, but well…you know.
