Passing Days

It’s odd. A lot of my life seems to have revolved around a loose association with The Doors but when Ray Manzarek passed away recently, I was wandering the Midlands of England, looking at narrowboats and unable to comment here.

Back in the 1980s, I was lucky enough to interview Ray, Robbie and John when they were in London to launch “Alive She Cried”. Several weeks later, when Ray was back promoting his solo album, “Carmina Burana”, he was kind enough to invite me back to interview him at length about his solo work and life with The Doors.

I left our meeting with five hours of taped conversation, most of which has never been broadcast or even heard publicly. The tapes were recorded on a portable Uher reel-to-reel recorder on 5 inch reels. Both the tapes and recorder are somewhere in storage and would need to be digitized before being edited into something coherent. In the past, I had never found time to sit and sift through them. Ray was always there; a fixture of life and an articulate, entertaining ambassador for The Doors music.

My feeling was always one that at some point we’d catch up again and I could fill in the blanks surrounding the history and myth of The Doors but that will never now happen.

I think I need to dig out those tapes and find out if my old Uher still works…