Only a couple dozen seats open…

Yes, that Ray Manzarek. Of The Doors. Those Doors. The ones in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The ones Oliver Stone did a movie about. They were a band. So much so that the songwriting credits only list “The Doors,” not individual members. To this day, The Doors are huge. Even amid the cratering of the music business these past four years, what artists have had their entire catalog remastered and respectfully restored? The Beatles and The Doors.

It’s a rare occasion when Manzarek and Rogers do a show together. This year they are only playing Santa Barbara, San Diego, Seattle … and Bakersfield. It’s just the two of them, Ray on piano, Roy on guitar. Word is they will do some Doors songs, some blues and even some classical pieces. At the end of the show, Ray will take questions from the audience.
For many of us who grew up in the ’60s, The Doors’ music resonates somewhere within. Maybe that’s why this story has been so hard to write. The best approach I can think of is to write my own Doors story and direct it to someone who loves music but wasn’t around in the ’60s, my oldest son Matthew, who is about to turn 18 and plays drums in the Garces band. Thankfully, this isn’t 1967, when The Doors released their first album and turning 18 meant  young men, like my older brothers, were exposed to the possibility of heading to Vietnam.

Back in 1967, when I was 8, the Evans house still had four years to wait before we would hear an album that Mom did not buy. She woke us up with collections of the best-known classical pieces and kept it snappy with periodic additions by Dean Martin, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Andy Williams and Bobby Darin. But when we went to play at our friends’ houses we were hearing AM radio. KAFY and KERN (it actually used to play music) were broadcasting two-and-a-half minute wonders by groups like The Supremes, The Beatles, The Turtles, and The Young Rascals. Pop music was pretty “up,” musically and lyrically, quite a contrast to the increasing awareness of what war and racial tension really looked like during the years following the nightmare of Kennedy’s assassination.

Mom was raised in Iowa. Her mom came out to visit in the early ’60s and left some money intended to finance music lessons for us boys. Momma tried. My older brothers on melodicas was a pitiful sight and even worse sound (melodicas are a wind instrument that had black and white keys on it. Never seen or heard of one since.). Mom cut her losses and pooled the rest of the music lesson money with a group of North High teachers who were jumping into the new world of hi-fi. I remember the day North’s young electronics teacher brought over the system and hooked it up.  Mom had no idea that we now had the stereo equivalent of a Ferrari. Back when nice houses had record player-radio-speaker consoles made by companies like Zenith, RCA and Motorola, our Oildale home had this little living room made even smaller by a pair of custom-made 4-foot-by-3 foot-by-2-foot concert level cabinets driven by a top-of-the-line Kenwood receiver, well before regular people would hear of Kenwood. And the folks at Kenwood were too proud of their receiver to allow it to be soiled by AM radio’s substandard signal. Our receiver only trolled the FM band. All Mom knew was that her Montovanni and Singing Nun albums sounded really nice.

It was against this backdrop, over Easter Break in 1967, when I first heard The Doors, courtesy of the ingenuity and acrobatics of my older brothers. They were forced to let me tag along for a morning of chasing lizards and throwing dirt clods in the oilfields.  Rain sent us home to find that our parents and younger brothers were not there. So Marty climbed up the Carolina cherry tree and jumped from a branch onto the roof. Steve threw a coil of antenna wire up to him. Marty attached the wire to the TV antenna while Steve ran the other end across the patio through the bedroom window to Mike. Steve held the receiver out of the hallway closet while Mike attached the antenna wire. Steve put the receiver back and Mike turned the reception dial. It was dark and forbidding outside. Static. Static. Mike locked onto the frequency of an L.A. station and we heard the end of “Western Union” by the Five Americans, still one of my favorite songs.  There was a thick electricity in the living room. Those boys knew they would all swing if caught. I was too young to be charged. No one had to tell me not to squeal. To this day I know exactly where I was kneeling on the living room floor, staring at the huge speakers when it happened: The next song was not only one we had never heard, we had never heard anything like it. John Densmore’s single drum snap.  Ray Manzarek’s eerie keyboard lines.  And Robby Krieger’s guitar notes interspersed with Jim Morrison’s recklessly rebelious vocals.

You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn’t get much higher

This song broke all the rules. Two and a half minutes?!  Try seven. After the first chorus, there is a four-and-a-half minute mind-blowing instrumental. In order to get AM airplay, The Doors eventually released a chopped down version. In an era when songs were sweet and safe, Morrison’s delivery made people fidget. The Doors released six albums as a quartet, before Morrison’s death in 1971. As cool bands do, instead of getting a new lead singer, they disbanded. Krieger, Densmore and Manzarek have remained very active with numerous projects ever since.

Rogers and his band have visited Bakersfield three times to play the series. It’s always easy to recognize the uninitiated at those shows. They look like their mouths are stuck open. Actually, they’ve just never seen a guitarist that appears to have two left arms and three right.
Rogers’ professional recording career began with his work on the soundtrack to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He spent several years playing in John Lee Hooker’s band as well as producing Hooker’s albums. Rogers has received two Grammy awards so far.  His 14th album, “Split Decision,” just hit our shelves.

Hey, Matthew: There’s a chance your uncles Mike and Steve are traveling to town for the show. See if your grandmother lowers the boom on them 43 years later!