Brothers in the Basement
Ray knew Dick Bock. It’s all six degrees of separation. When we went to make our little demo at World Pacific, before Robby was in the band, Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha were packing up their gear while we were coming in.
Ray and I both came from struggling lower-class families. Once we got the brass ring, he wanted to hang on so freakin’ tight it was a bit over the top for me. I will always miss his left hand and my drums. The bass player and the drummer: they are brothers in the basement, cooking the groove. We talked to each other: “Someday maybe we can have some jazz sax on this song.” This was before The Doors ever started. He saw all the great jazz guys, like Curtis Amy. We were totally in sync. That’s really what I miss so much: Groove Holmes in the
left hand and Glen Gould in the right. Ray split his brain in half. He would say, “My left hand isn’t really smart.” He just played this repetitive line “do, de de do, do de de do,” which he kind of got from Boogie Woogie. Then his right hand would solo. That was actually a challenge for me; because when he would take a solo he’d get excited, and the left hand would speed up in tempo. Then I’d have to say, “Whooooaaa, hold it back now, Ray.”
The reason we had bass players was because the Fender Rhodes bass lines didn’t have the punch we needed. We always got bass players to overdub Ray’s bass lines, because the string on a Fender bass had that thump. I had such a good time playing with Harvey Brooks on The Soft Parade.
The studio scene is pretty much locked. There are 50 guys who they always hire, and they’re great. They’re incredible readers. It’s staggering. We came along without charts. We might scribble down some chord changes, and that was it. Sometimes I was envious of those studio guys, but once in a while we’d hire one of them to help us out. For the first session Paul Rothschild got Larry Knechtel to play bass and then Ray Neopolitan. One day Lonnie Mack was walking down the studio hallway, and we were playing “Roadhouse Blues.”
“Hey, Lonnie.”
“Wha’?”
“Would you play bass on this?” Talk about a pocket.
Smiling at Me
The Beatles started the whole concept of writing your own material. Elvis didn’t so that so much. Once that got going, I think the execs felt “Oh, this stuff is selling. Let’s just let them do their thing.”
Jack Holzman, president of Elektra, owned a pretty boutique label. We were excited because Paul Butterfield was on there and Joni Mitchell. It was kind of a family. We could talk to them on the phone.
I would go to the Manne-Hole and see the Paul Horn Quintet, of which Miles Davis said, “Paul plays ‘the horn’ the way it should be played.”
And Emil Richards was there, of course. I was just a kid drooling over this music. Years later I got to jam with Emil and Paul. and I knew exactly how to play those fast 3/4s that they did in that group. They were turning around and smiling at me. And that was it for me. That was the ultimate. That’s the beautiful thing about music: it transcends language.
Finding the Feel
I love what Ringo said when drum machines were invented: “I’m the drum machine!” Keltner and I have talked about Ringo. He gets criticized because of his technique, but it’s the feel. For drummers the space between one beat and the next is the whole deal. If you push it, you’re playing military marching band stuff. If you wait till the last second to play the next beat, you’re playing the
blues. That’s a huge thing to us. When The Doors started, we jammed on the blues.
But when we got into our originals, Ray and I were finding the feel. Jim’s words gave it to me. It was appropriate for those songs. Thank God we felt the thing the same.
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