Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger - 30 July 2010 - Morning Star online.co.uk

TITLE: INTERVIEW: RAY MANZAREK AND ROBBIE KRIEGER
AUTHOR: KARL DALLAS
PUBLISHED: 30 JULY 2010
AVAILABLE: Morning Star online.co.uk
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In 1793, William Blake wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."

Flash forward to July 1965. James Douglas Morrison, the son of a US navy admiral, and Raymond Daniel Manzarek Jnr, a former Chicago basketball player, both of them former students at the UCLA film school, meet by chance on a California beach and decide to form a rock and roll band. Taking a tip from Blake, they call their band The Doors. The band will go on to sell over 30 million albums in the US alone.

Flash forward again to July 2010, nearly 40 years since the alcohol-induced death of Jim Morrison in a Paris bathroom. Ray Manzarek (as he now calls himself) and Robbie Krieger, guitarist with the band and composer of the Doors' greatest hit Light My Fire, are in Britain to promote When You're Strange, a movie supposedly about the Doors, but concentrating on the life and death of Jim Morrison.

I met up with Morrison several times, first in New York, then at the time of their British concert at London's Roundhouse, sharing the bill with Jefferson Airplane in 1968, and finally at the disastrous Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. We always seemed to be talking about revolution, the subject of one of Morrison's most powerful songs, Five to One ("The old get old and the young gets stronger/May take a week and it may take longer/They got the guns but we've got the numbers/Going to win cos we're taking over/Come on!")

When we spoke in 1968, the left was still rocked by the Chicago police riot at the Democratic National Convention, when it seemed like it was the US Establishment that was taking over, I asked him how he now felt about the song.

"It's a song, man," he said. "It's how I felt when I wrote it. That's its validity; Now it's just a song. Chicago didn't change my memory of how I felt when I wrote the song."

Two years later, at the Isle of Wight, he was more upbeat: "Well, I don't want to say too much, cos I haven't studied politics that much, but it just seems to me you have to be in a constant state of revolution or you're dead, you know, so ... There always has to be a revolution.

"It has to be a constant thing. It's not something that's gonna change things and that's it. 'The revolution solves everything.' It has to be every day."

But it didn't happen, did it, I say to Manzarek on the phone to his London hotel the day he and Krieger were due to perform their music with the London Symphony Orchestra.

"No," he replies, "because we'd be going up against the entire Judaeo-Christian Islamic myth, which has yet to dissipate itself. But it will, it will soon, because we'll be moving into a new astrological age, and the revolution will come about through the revolution of the spirit, through the heart chakra, with each individual being the revolution."

What about the political implications?

"Of course there's political implications. We will overthrow the established structure which doesn't mean that we can't have democracy, and the vote and all of that, it'll be exactly the same. But [for] the individual populace there will be enlightenment, perhaps our leaders will actually be enlightened, some day. Not today."

The song was composed at the time of the Vietnam war, which ended rather disastrously, and since then there's been the Iraq war, and now Afghanistan .

Robbie Krieger: "We never learn, do we?"

But people don't seem to be on the streets to the same extent they were at that time.

"Well, things are cyclical I guess. You know every two hundred thousand years or so there's a new cycle that comes around, it's the tala yuga."

Huh?

Manzarek: "We're in, unfortunately, the tala yuga, which is the age of iron, and dullness, and darkness. But in that, each individual has a chance of seeing through the web of maya, and the veil of falsity that we live under and realising that we're all one. We're all the same, we're emanate from love, you know, the love of the Creator, that makes us all human beings, that we find that within ourselves."

So would they say the Doors were a left-wing band?

Krieger says: "No. The Doors were mirrors of society. You know, artists mirror society. They write about what they see.

"You know, we weren't proselytising about what you should do, we were just saying: Hey, look inside, see what you're doing." 

The DVD of When You're Strange is out in Britain on August 30. Audio of the full interview with Manzarek and Krieger can be heard at http://bit.ly/dpObH5.