Fans Not Ready to Close the Doors : Some Were Hoping for--but Didn’t Get--a Musical Trip Back to the ‘60s at Manzarek Show

They wanted to see Jim Morrison. The legendary leader of the Doors being unavailable, they were willing to settle for the band’s former keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. And if that meant having to deal with the other guy, well, they were ready to do that too.

“I saw Jim Morrison live four times,” Jonathan Davis, 45, said immediately upon being asked why he came to the Coach House Sunday night to see Manzarek with San Francisco poet Michael McClure. “First time was at the Cheetah in Santa Monica, back in ’67. It was mesmerizing.”

“I’ve always loved Morrison,” explained Kirsten Sketch, 24. “I think Jim Morrison is really interesting,” said Nathan Rudd, 13, illustrating the late singer’s cross-generational appeal.

But what fans who paid $16.50 to see Manzarek and McClure got was a far cry from the collection of oldies and insider reminscences many had hoped for.

Trading the organ he used in the 1960s for a grand piano, Manzarek played a jazz-influenced underscore as McClure, the Beat Generation poet who later befriended Morrison, Janis Joplin and other Woodstock-era rockers, read from his collections.

“Look Mama!” went McClure’s “Foreman and Ali (Orange Flowers).” “A huge pearl! A pound of Plastique to poke/IN MY EARS!/FEARS DIE IN THE BLOWUP./HE’S DISSOLVING TIME AND SPACE/to hold her forever/in an agony she never agreed to.”

For nearly 1 1/2 hours, the two continued in an interplay of impressionistic words and music that had less to do with 1960s classic rock than 1950s existentialism.

As McClure opaquely invoked topics from environmentalism to politics to sexuality, the audience of about 180 listened carefully and applauded enthusiastically at the conclusion of each piece.

But despite McClure’s vaguely Morrisonian delivery--though not a singer, the poet didn’t shy from shouting an odd verse--the affair unfolded to the puzzlement of much of the Coach House crowd.

It was the occasional anecdote that Manzarek had to offer that elicited the greatest attention. To his mild annoyance, this enthusiasm was sometimes misplaced.

“You guys might know what happened at Kent State,” Manzarek said, introducing a poem McClure had composed at the Ohio campus, “The Eagle and the Whirlpool.” When this reference was greeted with scattered applause, as if it had been the site of one of Morrison’s many outrageous adventures, Manzarek quickly silenced the audience: “College students were shot at Kent State (University in Ohio), by the National Guard” in 1970.

“They were protesting a war in Vietnam,” interjected McClure.

“And they were actually shot down ,” Manzarek said. “The American National Guard shot down American students. That was the end of the ‘60s, man. That was it. We realized that they will kill you if they have to. If they have to, they will kill you,” he said, emphasizing his words like a professor trying to make a particularly important point. “And they’ll kill you guys, too.”

After the performance, Manzarek said the reference to Kent State “gives me the opportunity to say what we used to say in the ‘60s, ‘Make love, not war.’ It was a beautiful sentiment.” As a whole, Manzarek said, the show he and McClure have been touring for the past three years allows him to continue the essence of the Doors in a different aesthetic setting.

“The Doors were saying exactly the same kind of thing we’re talking about,” he said. “It’s an entirely different kind of thing, but if you like the Doors on an intellectual, spiritual, emotional level, then what Michael McClure and Ray Manzarek are doing is in exactly the same place.”

The effort, he said, is to get the audience “into another state of consciousness, as opposed to an hysterical hyper-state. We try to approach the inward man.”

Added McClure: “We let the pedestaling effect of the stage wash away so the audience is a participant with us. If you go back to the ‘60s, you could find a point where the audience quit being part of the whole event and the people on stage quit being a part of the whole event and the audience started worshipping the people on stage, who were then freed of the responsibility of being artists and became entertainers.”

As far as the evening’s events went, McClure concluded, “I think it was a rather deep performance, in the sense of us going inside of ourselves and the audience going inside of themselves and meeting us at the place in between.”

This sentiment did not extend, however, to actually meeting the fans outside of the Coach House. Misled by a tour manager into believing the stars would leave by the front door, nearly a dozen fans vainly waited for two hours for a chance to meet the two friends of Morrison. A report that Manzarek and McClure had escaped in a BMW from a backstage exit did little to quell the fans’ affection for the Doors.

Like most of those in the audience, Barbara Lestrange, 45, of Reseda, had not heard of McClure before the performance. But she and several friends had been fans of the Doors in college and said they rarely missed opportunities to see surviving members of the group, especially if a possibility existed to get an autograph.

“I admire the man’s music,” Lestrange said of Manzarek, before changing the subject to Morrison.

Now a junior-high-school teacher, Lestrange said she uses Morrison and his music in her classes.

“The ‘60s were a time of an in-depth emotional coming-out, and his music speaks to that,” she said, explaining the significance of the Doors. “We were the college intellectuals, you know, not the teeny-boppers looking at Morrison’s tight pants--although, that was very interesting too.”

For another fan whose exposure to the Doors led him across the Atlantic, the evening was a bit of a letdown as well.

“I’ve been trying to stake down an autograph from Ray Manzarek for four years,” said Alex McCarthy, 24, an Englishman now living in El Toro. “But he’s been rather recalcitrant.”

McCarthy, a drummer, said that listening to “The Doors Greatest Hits” album in 1985 was among the most moving experiences in his life and partly inspired him to immigrate to America, where Morrison memorabilia was more common. Having collected more than 100 records and tapes of Doors performances, as well as most books published on the band, having visited Morrison’s grave in Paris and seen Manzarek in at least 12 appearances, McCarthy said his disappointment would not cause him to give up his enthusiasm for his quest.

“This is not a grudge match, but a signature would be nice after all this.”