Doorsobit: Ray Maznerak

The Doors official Twitter feed has just announced the death of Ray Manzarek:

Ray Manzarek, Founding Member of The Doors, Passes Away at 74 Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member (cont) tl.gd/n_1rkd4a7

— doorsofficial (@TheDoors) May 20, 2013

There's more detail in that Twitlonger post:

Ray Manzarek, Founding Member of The Doors, Passes Away at 74

Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of The Doors, passed away today at 12:31PM PT at the RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer. He was 74. At the time of his passing, he was surrounded by his wife Dorothy Manzarek, and his brothers Rick and James Manczarek.

Manzarek is best known for his work with The Doors who formed in 1965 when Manzarek had a chance encounter on Venice Beach with poet Jim Morrison. The Doors went on to become one of the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s, selling more than 100-million albums worldwide, and receiving 19 Gold, 14 Platinum and five multi-Platinum albums in the U.S. alone. "L.A.Woman," "Break On Through to the Other Side," "The End," "Hello, I Love You," and "Light My Fire" were just some of the band's iconic and ground-breaking songs. After Morrison's death in 1971, Manzarek went on to become a best-selling author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist in his own right. In 2002, he revitalized his touring career with Doors' guitarist and long-time collaborator, Robby Krieger.

"I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today," said Krieger. "I'm just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him."

Manzarek is survived by his wife Dorothy, brothers Rick and James Manczarek, son Pablo Manzarek, Pablo's wife Sharmin and their three children Noah, Apollo and Camille. Funeral arrangements are pending. The family asks that their privacy be respected at this difficult time. In lieu of flowers, please make a memoriam donation in Ray Manzarek's name at www.standup2cancer.org

The illustrated Friends: Jim Morrison

Really? Do we have to?

Morrison died in 1971, the same year as Michael Miles. A very bad year for Adam Ant's friends.

Here you are, then:

I think we were better off with PJ and Duncan.

[Part of the illustrated Friends]

Ian Astbury: Everyone is a robot EXCEPT ME If destroyed still true

Bloody hell, Ian Astbury's pissed off. If he's not raging at people not letting him do stuff, he's shaking his bony little fist at people who do let him do stuff.

Right now, he's angry that nobody stopped him from having a go at being in "The Doors":

"There wasn't a single American singer who stepped up to the plate and said: 'I want to do this. I'm an American artist – I demand to do this," He tells the HeraldSun. "Not Eddie Vedder, not Dave Grohl, not Trent Reznor, not Perry Farrell. Not Scott Weiland. Not one of them stepped up and fought for it. When The Doors needed that generation to surround them and support them, the cupboard was bare."

Trent Reznor turned down the chance to lead the freshly disinterred corpse of what was left of The Doors? Hard to believe, isn't it?

It doesn't, of course, occur to Astbury that there's a possibility some singers might have loved The Doors so much they felt that pretending to be Jim Morrison would be a bad thing to do. Or that Vedder, Grohl, Reznor and Farrell are from the generation-two-along from Jim and thus don't really have any sense that they 'owe' a few older guys anything when they started up their nostalgia trip pension fund.

Or perhaps they could just spot a shitty stick when they're being handed it.

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: The Doors

In the Guardian, Ben Myers suggests The Doors don't get the respect they deserve:

I think I like them for the same reason most others hate them: Morrison's pretentious poetry, his messiah complex and the underlying belief that rock music could actually change society. And because it annoys people. Even Oliver Stone's accidentally comical biopic or the fact that loads of backpacking Eurotrash students seem to like them, too, is not enough to put me off. It's their music I keep returning to. It's just so baroque and velvety. So dramatic. You can keep the later drunken bluesy stuff, but I'll never tire of the swaggering call-to-arms of Five to One or the anxiety-inducing Not to Touch to the Earth.

Myers has a point, sort-of, if you ignore the suspicion that had Morro lived, he'd not have had much more to offer in the way of inventiveness, and that - far from being forgotten and underrated, every few years there's a fresh bout of Morro-cultism, and for the last forty years that poster of him with his shirt off has sold pretty well at Fresher's Fairs. Far from being underrated, The Doors are probably the only band who get probably just about the amount of respect they deserve.

If Jim Morrison had lived

Let's imagine that Jim Morrison hadn't died at the age of 27. Okay, he'd probably have died at 28, or 29, or 30. But what if - somehow - he had lived. What would he look like today? Like Kurt Russell, reckon some scientists who have produced an computer-aged image of him. They've only done the face, though, and haven't gone as far as to stick him in a studio recording an album with Rick Rubin, or halfway down the Sunday bill at Glastonbury.

Doors slammed on Doors' appeal

The legal rumblings over the use of The Doors as a name for ex-Doors Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger when they toured with Ian Astbury have almost played themselves out: The Californian High Court have refused to hear the pair's appeal against a five million dollar judgement in favour of John Densmore, Jim Morrison's and Pamela Courson's parents.

The problem was with the use of the name and the logo:

"You can't call yourselves The Doors because you can't have The Doors without Jim Morrison," Densmore's attorney S. Jerome Mandel said.

Although, to be honest, you might wonder how Densmore is able to take action on behalf of the Doors when he doesn't have Jim Morrison either.

Fat undead guy in a bath

Given that Jim Morrison wasn't exactly hard to miss, it's surprising the number of people who are convinced that those who saw his corpulent, lifeless body in a tub are somehow wrong. Almost a year to a day after we were asked to believe that JimMo actually died in a pub toilet, Ray Manzarek has suddenly piped up that, you know, maybe he didn't even die at all:

"I often wonder if his death has been an elaborate charade.
"Jim was a restless soul, always looking for something else in his life, and even six years of success - and excess - with The Doors hadn't been enough for him.

"A year earlier, he had shown me a brochure for the Seychelles and said, 'Wouldn't this be the perfect place to escape to if everyone believed you were dead?'. At the time, I never thought anything of it."

Or, indeed, thought to mention it in the previous thirty-eight years for some reason. Perhaps he was afraid we'd laugh at him.

Of course, if Morrison is still alive, he'd be spending his time hanging round that Parisian graveyard, the Pere Lachaise, giggling at the people visiting his empty grave. Or maybe he just spends his days trying to figure out how to access his money, somehow.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Not quite the Doors use Scallions to replace Astbury

With Ian Astbury off the scene - you'll recall he's gone of to work on his own musical legacy - Riders on The Storm were desperate to get a singer to fulfil their previously-booked tributes-to-themselves Doors dates.

So desperate, in fact, they've signed Brett Scallions from Fuel.

So long, I'm off to rejoin a Cult

Ian Astbury, who, lest we forget, has been spending the last four years pretending to be Jim Morrison in The Doors, has had enough. He's heading back off to restart The Cult. There's a statement:

"I have decided to move on and focus on my own music and legacy. I have learned a great deal from the both of them, and it certainly has expanded my abilities as a performer.

"This has been a difficult decision to make but I feel I would be holding them back as well as myself if I did not depart at this time."

I'm sorry, Ian, did you just say you were going to focus on your legacy, like you're Billie Holiday or Malcolm X?

And you've got to love the idea that the continued presence of Ian Astbury might "hold back" Riders On The Storm (they can't actually call themselves The Doors) more than, say, the fact that the whole point of the band existing vanished when a guy ODed in the bath back when Elsie Tanner was a lass.

Is everybody in? The rise in sea levels is about to begin

Naturally, only a complete curmudgeon would object to any attempt to persuade us to cut our use of greenhouse gases, so the launch of Global Cool is probably a good thing - and, hey, if takes Josh Hartnett flying in from Hollywood on a jet to persuade people to remember to switch off their bedside light before falling asleep, who are we to argue with their priorities?

Indeed, by our calculations, the extra carbon dioxide emitted during the glittering launch for the campaign could be offset simply by all of us in the UK switching off our kettles for the next seven weeks - and that's got to be worth it, right?

What does puzzle us, though, is that the campaign is being built around a poem - written by Jim Morrison and set to music by Perry Farrell. If I were looking for someone to be at the centre of a campaign asking people to avoid excess and waste, and take care of themselves and all they hold dear for the future, a dead junkie wouldn't have been my first choice.

KT Tunstall is also going to be at the London launch - and, certainly, by not playing her music at all, we've helped to save enormously on our emission levels. Perhaps we should encourage KT to help by stopping releasing records altogether? Imagine... just not putting out three albums, with the attendant manufacture, and promotional tours, and trips down to Woolworths - how much otherwise wasted carbon dioxide could be left untouched by such a small sacrifice?