*The superb new The Doors documentary, When You’re Strange, narrated by Johnny Depp and featuring LOTS of new archive footage, is out to own on DVD and Blu-ray from 30 August*
I once read the David Bowie saw Satan at the bottom of his swimming pool in the ‘70s. Have you ever had any really cool supernatural experiences?
MANZAREK: Well England is a country of ghosts isn’t it! Paranormal experiences in England, my God! That’s all you have here, this supernatural world surrounding our daily existence. We’re a lot cleaner and fresher in California. It’s all new and clean and pure.
KRIEGER: But you want to hell!
MANZAREK: Oh yeah, that’s true. I was locked out of all the flow of existence. I went to heaven and hell.
How were they?
MANZAREK: Heaven is great. Hell is hellish. Hell is individual. You’re stuck in ‘you’. You cannot enter into the flow and energy of existence, you’re all ego, and the ego will not dissolve. And that’s hell. Heaven is ‘one with all things’. But on the other side is the hellish experience where you’re totally locked out of the energy. And hell isn’t a burning place of fire, it’s a place like Dante’s inferno, where the ninth circle of hell is a devil encased, frozen…the worst thing that you can be is frozen...
KRIEGER: I’d rather be that than burning.
MANZAREK: Well…
KRIEGER: I once saw angels coming out of the ceiling. Do you know what a cottage cheese ceiling is?
I know what cottage cheese is…
KRIEGER: It’s this stuff that’s sprayed onto the ceiling for acoustics. It looks like cottage cheese. I was on acid, when all of a sudden these angels flew out of the cottage cheese. It was pretty cool. There was a whole bunch of them.
MANZAREK: We had Indian bedspreads on the ceiling and all these little figures started moving around them. LOOK AT THEM GOOOOOO!!! Robbie saw angels, but I went to heaven and hell, then I had these little Indian figures running around on the bedspreads up on the ceiling.
Did you write any songs in heaven?
MANZAREK: Oh no, you don’t bother with music. You’re totally transported. All you are is alive. Then you bring all that experience back, that’s what you do. You bring the feeling of infinity back and try to put that in your music.
When You’re Strange begins with Jim Morrison alive and listening to news of his own death. Do you think he’s really still alive?
MANZAREK: Well he was buried in a sealed coffin in Paris so there are thousands of conspiracy theories. Our manager back then, just a kid who was way out of his depth, went to see if Jim was actually dead, and only saw the sealed coffin in Jim’s apartment. He never asked to see Jim’s body! And that coffin was then buried in Pere Lachaise Cemetery. So who knows, man! Who knows!
Where do you think his body is?
MANZAREK: Either in Pere Lachaise Cemetery or in the Seychelles. I wrote a book 10 years ago called ‘The Poet In Exile’. It’s about a rockstar who fakes his own death in Paris. If you want to read a conspiracy theory about Jim’s death, read this. It may or may not be fiction…
If Jim hadn’t died, and you’d carried on, what would your ‘80s phase have been like?
MANZAREK: Why the ‘80s?
Everyone went funny in the ‘80s.
KRIEGER: I think we would’ve gone into visual arts and videos.
MANZAREK: We could’ve been a punk rock band.
KRIEGER: We already were punk rock.
MANZAREK: That’s true.
Are you best mates with Johnny Depp since he narrated When You're Strange?
MANZAREK: No
KRIEGER: We’ve never met him.
Well he bases his characters on rockstars. Reckon he might emulate you guys next?
MANZAREK: Well I’ve heard that he listens to ‘The End’ as he’s preparing to find his character in various roles.
KRIEGER: He reads Jim’s poetry on the soundtrack. He said ‘I’d love to do that’, so he went out on his boat and spent all night recording. It’s just him reading between the songs, no musical accompaniment.
MANZAREK: We did musical backing to Jim’s poetry on an album called ‘American Prayer’. I highly recommend it as The Doors seventh studio album. There are six studio albums and the ‘lost’ seventh studio name is called an ‘American Prayer’.
KRIEGER: It’s one of my favourites.
I’ll check it out. I haven’t got that one.
MANZAREK: And check out my book. It’s called ‘The Poet In Exile’. Hang on, we’ve done that one. Robbie, tell them about your new album.
KRIEGER: It’s called ‘Singularity’. It’s an instrumental album of jazz, rock and flamenco. It’ll be out here soon.
MANZAREK: And my book’s called ‘The Poet In Exile’.
What’s The Poet doing?
MANZAREK: Writing poetry. Hang on, I’m not going to tell you. You’ve got to read my book.
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