RAY MANZAREK OF THE DOORS!

Raymond Daniel Manczarek, Jr., known as Ray Manzarek (February 12, 1939 – ∞)  was an American musician, singer, producer, film director, and author, best known as a founding member and keyboardist of The Doors from 1965 to 1973. He was a co-founding member of Nite City from 1977 to 1978, and of Manzarek-Krieger from 2001 to his death. Manzarek died on May 20, 2013. May he rest in peace and his brillian music live forever!

From left to right Jim Morrison, John Densmore, Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger

Ray Manzarek was one of the most individual and influential musicians in rock history. In a genre dominated by guitars, his sinuous, rhythmic, weaving keyboards, replete with jazzy flourishes, Gothic arpeggios and colourful splashes, provided the rich, fluid, ever-expanding backdrop to the greatest American rock band of the Sixties, perhaps of all time. 

                      'The music lives on. It may be a cliché but that doesn’t make it any less true.'

Manzarek was both the root of The Doors sound and its highest, wildest branches, providing slinky, funky bass with his left hand and noodly, hypnotic, surging, flowing, melodic and rhythmic adornment with his right. He was a dazzling musician, certainly, but he was a lot more than that – a bespectacled, thoughtful intellectual who approached rock music as he approached life, as a vehicle for self-exploration and higher possibility.

The Doors were a finely balanced group, one of those special units where every member counts, even if they are chiefly remembered now for the beautiful, brilliant, tragic Jim Morrison, the shamanistic frontman who established some of the abiding myths of rock and roll, a wayward, poetic archetype for living fast, and burning bright. 

                                              'The Doors should be taught in schools.'

That rather prosaic band name was actually a reference to Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception, itself drawn from a quotation by William Blake. Morrison effectively lived by Blake’s dangerous notion that the road to excess leads to the gates of wisdom. Sadly, wastefully, what he found there was alcoholism, heroin use and death at 27. Morrison’s self-destruction brought a premature end to a phenomenal musical unit while ensuring their immortality as symbols of rock’s dangerous power for both transcendence and destruction. Today, The Doors are almost celebrated more as an idea than a band but they left behind a lot of astonishing

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