Ray Manzarek, magical musician who kept alight the fire

Ray Manzarek was the chief disciple of a man he likened to “an Indian deity” – the singer Jim Morrison, with whom he founded one of the key rock bands of the 1960s and in whose shadow the keyboardist lived until his death this week in Germany at 74.

The Doors were the product of two related strands of Californian life: mysticism and hedonism. The band’s origins, as related by Manzarek, were a scene from a hippy New Testament, the gospel according to Ray, with Morrison as the tousle-haired messiah.

It was 1965. Manzarek, a newly graduated University of California Los Angeles film student, was hanging out in the bohemian Galilee of Venice Beach. “I’ve always been taken with sun worship,” he later remembered, “ever since I lay out on that beach at Venice one day high on acid, infused by the power of the huge orange disc.” Morrison, an acquaintance from film school, wandered into view, barefoot, in skin-tight jeans, from which he pulled a sheaf of paper with scribbled verses. He sang the lyrics, an ode to cosmic beachside sex that became the song “Moonlight Drive”.

Manzarek recognised he was in the presence of “the most sinuously suggestive sex symbol since Sinatra” and The Doors were conceived. With the recruitment of guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, the band took form.

The Doors – named after Aldous Huxley’s encomium to mescaline – came of age in 1967, the year the doors of perception swung open for the psychedelic generation. Their self-titled debut album, launched by the hit single “Light My Fire”, cast a haunting, trippy spell over the Summer of Love, a wild West Coast counterpart to Sgt Pepper.

Morrison was the band’s focal point, an intellectually intense, classically beautiful, insatiable sensualist. At his leather-trousered peak, he was the perfect rock frontman. Girls wanted to sleep with him, boys wanted to be him, cops wanted to bust him. Controversies involving a combination of intoxication, lewdness and prurience gave “The Man” every encouragement.

The Doors would have been just another blues-rock band without Morrison – but Morrison would have been just another would-be Baudelaire without Manzarek. Despite different backgrounds – Manzarek from a working-class Chicago family, Morrison the estranged son of a US Navy rear admiral – the pair catalysed each other’s talents. Manzarek, older by almost five years, gave Morrison the confidence to sing and encouraged him to channel his poetry into a frenzied act of performance.

Their music was weighty – “The End” imagines Freud’s Oedipus complex as a 12-minute bad trip, an LSD-activated psychosexual crisis – yet the songs also had a flamboyant, catchy side. Krieger’s expressive guitar playing was crucial but the main driver of the sound was Manzarek’s keyboards; organ chords swirling mysteriously like a cape, bass notes from a Fender Rhodes piano anchoring the harmonies.

Raymond Daniel Manczarek (he later dropped the C) was born on February 12 1939 and studied piano at the Chicago Conservatory. Songs such as “Riders on the Storm” were infused by his love of jazz, while the twirling organ in “Light My Fire” sounded like Bach suffering a hallucinatory episode at a fairground. The musicianship served as launch pad for Morrison’s trips into the unknown, the self-styled “Lizard King” barking incantatory lyrics to the adoring throng – when he could remember the words. The singer’s volatility was fuelled by drugs and drink, the latter a thirst that Manzarek loyally ascribed to
a “genetic predisposition”.

Despite their frontman’s waywardness The Doors were industrious, recording six albums in four years. Manzarek and bandmates rode the Morrison-generated tempest without letting it destroy them. “Riders on the Storm”, released in 1971, showed they could still turn it on even as Morrison slid towards his alcoholic death aged 27 in Paris.

Manzarek, whose survivors include his wife Dorothy and son Pablo, continued making music but never came close to the heights he scaled with his “shaman”. In a memoir he ascribed Morrison’s drugging and boozing to an alter ego called Jimbo, a demon who possessed the idealised Jim of his memories. He also flirted with the theory that Morrison’s death was staged, a piece of wish fulfilment he expounded in a novel.

There was an obvious commercial motive for keeping Morrison alive for younger generations. No shame there – although many fans were appalled by the crass tribute band Manzarek created with Krieger in 2003.

But Manzarek’s devotion to Morrison, his encouragement of the cult that grew up around the singer, was more than a vocation. It was a calling; a reluctance to close the door on the energies unleashed by that encounter on Venice Beach.