“What a jerk”: The musician Ray Manzarek always hated
The entire mentality behind the California rock scene circa 1967 was supposed to be about peace, love and understanding. The Beatles had already taught everyone that the way forward was through love and respect rather than putting barriers up, but that didn’t help matters when the Vietnam War raged in what seemed like a virtual Hell on Earth. The Doors may have been instrumental in showing everyone the real problems going on in the world, but Ray Manzarek knew that meant picking up a few detractors along the way as well.
That said, no one could deny that the group had some chops behind them. As much as people were enticed by the spectacle of Jim Morrison, Manzarek’s keyboard lines were always more sophisticated than anything else coming out of Los Angeles at the time, almost like he was throwing in a Bach-like fugue in the middle of a typical blues joint every time he played off Robbie Krieger’s guitar.
But the minute that ‘The Lizard King’ took his spot at centre stage, there wasn’t a soul in the room that wasn’t transfixed by him. Even though Morrison did have a commanding presence about him, a lot of what he said came from his love of poetry. It wasn’t out of character for him to go on long spiels in verse halfway through tunes like ‘The End’ and ‘When the Music’s Over’, and those moments were normally a cue for the band to lay low in the background.
That kind of spectacle brought a lot of danger to all of their performances, but that didn’t stop many people from not getting it. There was always the common quote that Morrison was a drunken buffoon disguised as a poet whereas Iggy Pop was a poet disguised as a drunken buffoon, but it didn’t take David Crosby long to figure out the person who was singing songs like ‘Light My Fire’.
Despite coming from a totally different world, Crosby was more than happy to say his piece about Morrison being nothing but a wannabe hippy god. As much as may people fawned over every one of his lyrics or marvelled at the raw sensitivity of their softer tunes like ‘The Crystal Ship’, ‘Morrison’ was Crosby’s retort to that kind of behaviour, talking about how he wasn’t so sure about the mythic status that everyone made Morrison out to be.
Crosby was entitled to say whatever he wanted to about the rock god, but Manzarek was not happy about the idea of his singer’s name being dragged through the mud, saying, “Gee, that’s odd coming from David ’cause he’s really an obnoxious guy too. I know David, he’s really an obnoxious guy. He is, I’m sorry, Jesus Christ, what a jerk.”
Regardless of what Crosby had to say, though, there’s no question that Morrison helped change the entire landscape of rock with the way he acted. He may have been obnoxious by some people’s definition of the word, but there were plenty of times where there was some genuine social commentary going on, like at the end of their first album when Morrison describes the Flower Generation as being “lost in a Roman wilderness of pain/and all the children are insane”.
As much as Crosby may have seen the blind drunk stumbling his way into iconic status, that was never the intention. He may have enjoyed a drink or two or six when the time called for it, but underneath that boozy rock and roller was a tortured soul willing to share the darkest corners of his mind with the world.
