Ray Manzarek
on
The 60'sExcerpts From his book, Light My Fire
I sure hope the fundamentalist fascists don't win.
I hope the lovers win. Don't you ?I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed. It opened the floodgates and we read everything we could get our hands on -- Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Gasoline, Gregory Corso; A Coney Island of the Mind, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Peyote Poem, Michael McClure...All mind-benders, soul-twisters, heart-openers, foot-tappers, bone-crushers, eye-wideners... and general fine things. I suggest you read them all. Ray Manzarek, Light My Fire, 1997.
The floodgates were open. The Doors were hot and offers for gigs were many. Nineteen sixty-seven was a great performing year for us. We played San Francisco for the first time. Talk about psychedelic - that whole city seemed to be on acid. Our first weekend up there coincided with the legendary Human Be-In. The first love-in. The first great gathering of the tribe. Fifty thousand heads in Golden Gate Park. More long hair and love than had ever been brought together before. Of course the Doors were there. We had to be there. We were in the swirl of it and, man, it felt good. Hippies everywhere. No aggression in the air, no power trips, no mind games. Just, dare I use the the now-archaic word, love! Just fucking L-O-V-E. It could be done back then. Today it would be considered naive and corny, old-fashioned and a bit immature. But of course, it's the one thing we're all so desperately desire. And the irony of it is - in this era of irony - we can't find it! We're going mad because we can't find love. We're over-amped and hyperagitated because we can't find love. What an age of anxiety we live in. If only we could relax. Huh?
Music was being pumped out over the audience from a temporary stage through the Grateful Dead's huge P.A. system, and people were whirling and twirling and swaying and sashaying everywhere. Indian clothes, tie dyed jeans, beads and jewels, long flowing hair, head bands, soft suede moccasins, bare-breasted women. A fantasia of colors and forms and bodies and music. Music from the Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Poems and prosody from Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Timothy Leary. What a spectacle! We had never seen anything like it. Jim, Robby, John, and I all believed that it was the beginning of a spiritual revolution. A revolution of consciousness. The true revolution of Jesus Christ . . a revolution of love. For that one afternoon, in that park, in San Francisco, a gathering of lovers and taken place. And it is one of the sweetest memories of my life. Kundalini had broken free of the chains of the lower three chakras and worked its way up to the collective heart of the assembled multitude. Consequently there was a great outpouring of love and compassion and beauty. We were all alive! And we knew it, and it was good. pp. 231-232
We took stage next and gave a very hot and intense performance. the kids at Beverly High were intellectual and hip. They got it right away. They were a great audience. Again, how we got to perform inside an official high school auditorium I'll never know. A band of subversives like the Doors? Playing their Dionysian music in the halls of academe? It shouldn't be allowed. Ever. Once again, the kids had slipped it past the officials.
The power that be were simply not yet hip to psychedelia. They didn't know that they were supposed to hate the counterculture. Hell, they didn't even know what the counterculture was. They do now! And for them it's a battle tot he death. A battle for the control of the destiny of America. For the control of the hearts and minds of the populace of America. God, I sure hope the fundamentalist fascists don't win. I hope the lovers win. Don't you? p. 240
It was a good time for America, however, Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Martin Luther king had been assassinated. There were riots in the streets of Chicago of the Democratic Convention. Young people were trying to stop the war and eventually the old people, the warmongers, would be killing us. Kent State University was the scene of a slaughter. The National Guard fired their rifles into a group of antiwar demonstrators and killed four students and wounded thirty. It was the beginning of the end of the dream of peace and love and equality. We realized that our own fathers would kill us. Jim Morrison acted out his Oedipal problems in "The End." It was a catharsis. But this was reality! And they would shoot us if they had to. The fascists were winning. And then they elected Richard Nixon. We began to rot from the top down. and then Charles Manson worked his evil voodoo on a group of runaways who became killers themselves . . . disemboweling Sharon Tate and the others in Roman Polanski's house. It was a despicable act. And act of madness. And we began to rot from our white trash roots up. Things would never be the same again. The war in Vietnam had driven the country mad. And there was no way out. We bear the burden of that madness even today. We are less than we could have been. the powers that be have put the fear into us. And we are their slaves. Except this time they have put the chains inside out brains. They control our imaginings, our desires. Our hearts are bound. Love does not prevail. And our dreams of the future are materialistic and, therefore, mundane. The Establishment has won. The fascists have won. The religious fundamentalists have won. For now! p. 300
We did the Smothers Brother's television show. "Wild Child" and "Touch Me," complete with horns and strings from the Smothers Brothers' pit band. . . . And you can also see Robby's black eye. Jim and Robby both got punched out by some anti-long hair, hippie-hating rednecks a day or two before the TV show. Wearing long hair in those days was dangerous. It meant you were against the prevailing order of things. Against the war in Vietnam. Against the :"decent, wholesome Christian values that have made this country great!" And, therefore, you had to be killed. Like the American Indians. Kill the hippies, kill the Indians . . kill anything, as long as the white man prevails.
So Jim and Robby took a few blows for freedom of expression at a bar down the street on Santa Monica Boulevard. Unfortunately, Robby took one in the eye and it turned black. p. 303
The sixties were a non-confrontational time. You didn't get in someone else's face. You let everyone "do their own thing." Whatever that might be. An entire generation didn't want to become authorities with one another. Saying "do this, don't do that." That was bullshit. That was for the Establishment. For the fascists, the military, the generals, the admirals, the organized religions, the industrialists, the politicians. For Nixon, our new president. For all of them. They would tell you what to do. Hell, they loved telling other people what to do.
But not the new people. Not the psychedelic people. We left each other alone. Free to go about our own business in our way. Free from moral confrontations. p. 320
Jim Morrison turned himself into the FBI . . . they opened a file on him. And on Janis and Jimi and John Lennon and all the other rock and roll, left-wing pinko players. It was definitely "us against them." The lovers, artists, and poets against the powers of the Establishment. We lost. They won. And here we are today . . . waiting for the end of the world. Waiting for the first or second coming of the Messiah, depending on whether you're a follower of Jewish or Christian mythology. Waiting for the end times. Waiting for the apocalypse. Waiting for death. The death of all things. And while we wait, the only thing we've accomplished is the death of joy. We've succeeded only in killing our euphoria. We live in a garden of earthly delights and we're slowly dying of ennui, whimpering about our impotence and inability to change anything. We're Adam and Eve in the Garden of Paradise . . . and we've forgotten it.
Have you forgotten the keys to the kingdom?
Have you been born yet, and are you alive?
Let's reinvent the gods,
All the myths of the ages,
Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests.
We need great, golden copulations.We could take it all back at a moment's notice. We could reclaim our joy. We could reclaim our natural, God-given birthright to joy and delight and happiness and adventure and danger by merely stepping into the energy. By trusting in the energy. By trusting in "the Father," if you need to call it that. The Essene rabbi of Jerusalem called it that two-thousand years ago.
I and the Father are one.
- John 10:30And so can you be. So can we all be. All you have to do . . . is do it! Immerse yourself in the energy. the divine energy of creation.
Please, please listen to me, children,
You are the ones who will rule the world.And perhaps we will. Perhaps one day the world will belong to the lovers. I'd like that. Wouldn't you? pp. 324-325