The first band Ray Manzarek was truly knocked out by: “I think he was probably my favourite”
Some bands and artists are simply too influential to be confined by genre labels. Their impact is too significant, their presence too defining in the evolution of music. The Doors are undoubtedly one of those acts – and it was Ray Manzarek who first sparked their fire.
The short answer is that The Doors were a rock and roll band. They’ve got guitar riffs and classic drums enough to lock that in. But the long answer is more complex. Jim Morrison was always deeply inspired by blues, bringing elements of true deep south music in as he looked towards the originators.
He was also greatly influenced by poetry and spoken word, leading to his unique approach to frontmanship, which was more like that of a priest than a typical singer. Sure, he had the classic rock and roll bravado, but it was less of a typical ego and instead something more spiritual, as if he were a leader and his audience was always his cult.
Mostly, though, it was Manzarek who seemed to be the part of the recipe that pushed it. Without his keyboard playing, The Doors would definitely fall more neatly and easily into the typical rock world. But when heading a song like ‘Light My Fire’, it’s the incredible and attention-grabbing keys on the track that make things fresh and different. They add a new dimension; something distinctly modern, as if Manzarek had somehow time-travelled to the 1980s, heard pop music then and brought it back to the 1960s.
So it never feels good enough to nearly package the band. Nor does it feel right to label The Beatles just one thing, and part of that surely comes down to the inspiration that those two bands, as well as so many of their other pioneering peers, shared.
“Little Richard’s band, I think he was probably my favorite. He was just… that band playing ‘Lucille’, God almighty,” Manzarek once said, recalling the importance of Little Richard in his life.
That quote feels familiar because so many other 1960s and ‘70s legends have said basically the same thing. “Little Richard came screaming into my life when I was a teenager,” Paul McCartney once said, adding, “I owe a lot of what I do to Little Richard and his style, and he knew it. He would say, ‘I taught Paul everything he knows’”.
Talking about his own love for Little Richard, Keith Richards said, “That was the stunner. I’d never heard it before or anything like it.” The list keeps on going. Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones even took it as far as purposefully buying a bass guitar once owned by Little Richard’s band, simply to keep the power close.
He was a super muse, as it seems that Little Richard was responsible for the entire next generation, breaking through onto the radio waves as a lightning strike, inspiring so many. Part of that comes down to the same reason why The Doors are so inspirational, as they never stayed in one neat box.
In a similar vein, Little Richard is granted the big label of ‘rock and roll’, but he was so much more interesting and nuanced than that. So much more wild and electric and exciting, and that’s why so many artists had their passion sparked by him, and why he inspired so many new bands to push boundaries too.
