Light My Fire by Ray Manzarek Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.94 You Save: $8.06 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.49 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Light My Fire
Book Review: Friendships/Love
Summary: 5 Stars
"Light My Fire" was an informatative book on the life of Jim Morrison and The Doors. Ray has a way of writing that draws you into his own life, and then at the same time explains what he is thinking about breaking into music world. He has an enormous love for Jim, John, and Robby, and of course his wife Dorathy, what a huge heart! He explained what really happened, nothing like the Oliver Stone movie. "The Doors" movie had nothing to do with what really happened (as I am finding out from the three books I have read about the Doors so far). Ex: At Warhol party I could not see Jim's band mates leaving him there when he (Jim) begged them to stay. Still I like the movie because, as I read in another book, it's the "longest music video", of course GREAT music!! Ray was there while all this wonderful music was being made, the ups and downs of making it in this world.Book Review: Good book for some people
Summary: 3 Stars
I have read probably 4-5 books on the Doors and Jim Morrison. I think it helps to have read or be familiar with these books, the beat poets and other artists from the past (and books like On the Road and personalites such as Neal Cassady). Arguably some knowledge of the drug culture and playing music also helps. I personally enjoy this book and after all its nice to hear about more than just Morrison, I am interested in the other Doors and how they got to where they were musically and spritually. They were more on Jim's page then people realize. So anyway, the fact that I'm already saturated with knowledge of the Jimbo and the Doors and my musical (and otherwise) background makes this a very enjoyable book to me...I would give it 5 stars personally, but for the civilians looking for pure facts or detailed dirt on Morrison this is NOT the book for you so I will put it at 3 stars. It IS a book for wanna-be artists like me. I like Manzarek's quotes so much I highlight them (and I have only ever done that to one other book, The Doors of Perception, which BTW would be useful in appreciating this book).Book Review: Great Book
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book after watching Oliver Stone's movie. I love the fact that Manzarak clears up events and how they happened. I reccomend this book. It is a mixture of great poetry and great writting. Bye it today!Book Review: Great Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
"We don't know what happened to Jim Morrison in Paris," Ray Manzarek insists in his autobiographical memoir of Morrison and the Doors, titled, perhaps inevitably, "Light My Fire." "To be honest, I don't think we're ever going to know. Rumors, innuendoes, self-serving lies, psychic projections to justify inner needs and maladies, and just plain goofiness cloud the truth." Manzarek was "musical leader" and keyboard player for The Doors, but his book, as it must be, is overwhelmingly about crazed, quixotic, muddle-headed Jim. "It really doesn't matter how an artist exits on the planet," Manzarek thinks. "It's the ART ... that matters. It's only the art that matters ... For me, that's what making music is all about. Plucking the notes out of the void. And for Jim it was about plucking the words out of the ether ... Images. Deep and penetrating. Confessional. Sometimes mundane, often profound. Never without meaning." Manzarek and Morrison met at the UCLA Film School in 1963, and much if not all of "Light My Fire" concerns the powerful, quasi-mystic bond the two men formed as students. Morrison came to California from swampy Florida and Manzarek from Chicago, but both had read the same books, seen the same movies and dreamed the same dreams. Morrison was "in love with the possibility that he could be an artist," Manzarek says. "In love with the idea of freedom! Freedom of expression, freedom of thought." Although Manzarek has written a conventional narrative that includes his own childhood and the multiple peregrinations of the four Doors up until Morrison's death in 1971, it is to Jim the Artist, Jim the Poet, Jim the Prophet that he always returns, writing in a tone so elegiac and in prose so thick with wonder it begins to fog your brain -- appropriately enough, when you think about the Doors. The band's life was short, and the mystique that still attaches to its name is in the nature of an urban legend. The bulk of the Doors' work seems badly dated, and the cultlike following they still enjoy says more about nostalgia than about music.
"We were inside the song," Manzarek writes of the Doors' first musical session in Santa Monica. "And we were inside each other. We had given ourselves over to the rhythm, the chord changes, and the words. We had let go of our individual egos and surrendered to one another in the music ... There was only the music. The diamond was formed and it was clear and hard and luminous." Almost any page of "Light My Fire" contains similarly high-flown riffs: "We'll never make art again. We'll never make love on stage again. Jim and I will never do our Dionysius-and-Apollo dichotomy thing again." Manzarek writes of Morrison as an almost diagnosable split personality -- good boy/bad boy, "Jim" and "Jimbo" -- and attributes Morrison's drug-soaked demise plain and simple to "that rotter, Jimbo. The Doppelgänger." It's as convincing a description of a whacked-out artist as any other. And when he isn't eulogizing, or lambasting Oliver Stone, or lamenting the triumph of materialism in America, Manzarek provides a reliable inside account of the Doors and their era. We may not ever find out what happened in Paris, but there's enough rock history here to keep Manzarek on the shelves.
All in All, This was a wonderful book to read.
Book Review: Hippy dippy Doors
Summary: 3 Stars
This book is a must-read only because Ray Manzarek wrote it. He was in the band, so I'm willing to overlook his many "hippy-dippy" tangents. I don't particularly care for Manzarek's writing style, but there are some interesting anecdotes. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Jim, Ray and Dorothy Manzarek all living together, during the "starving artist" years before the Doors broke on through. They go to the grocery store to buy dinner and Jim shoplifts!!! Ray comes off as an easy-going, amiable guy with a pretty good sense of humour. But he does gloss-over a bit. It sounds like Jim was closest to Manzarek, out of all the Doors. When Jim tells Manzarek he's having a nervous break-down and needs to rest, Manzarek doesn't want to hear it. I guess he couldn't understand what Jim was going through, Manzarek is so stable and never had the demons Jim had. But he does come off as a bit insensitive, someone who just wanted to keep on rolling in the big bucks, no matter what Jim's frame of mind, although he won't admit it. At least John Densmore admits his mistakes, saying he was taken over by greed and the one thing Jim taught him was integrity. Don't pass Manzarek's book up, just read John Densmore's "Riders On The Storm" first. It's a more enjoyable, well-written, at times funny book. Manzarek's book has too many hippy-dippy ramblings, absolutely nothing to do with the Doors, that should have been edited.