Soundtrack of the Week

I was 13. Napster just came out. I had one friend with an internet connection fast enough to download a Whitesnake song faster than one drumfill per 4 hours. Me and few others went over and started to pirate what we knew. For me and my friend Eric, it was Ozzy and Metallica. For the other guys, it was rap. Then one of the more adept drug takers of the group saw a band that caught his eye.

"Hey, get that one. I think my dad listens to that."

After about 15 minutes or so, the amazing World Wide Web delivered the tune. Rain. Fucking rain? Dude, did we just wait this whole time to listen to the fucking rain?

Riders on the storm....

This shit is weird, man.

Into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown....

Pissed, my group of friends went on downloading Warren G and Bone Thugs and whatever it is that suburban white kids in the late 90s wanted to listen to to sound cool (Limp Bizkit records, amazingly, were not getting us laid).

But that song stirred something inside of me. I wanted to hear it again. I had grown up on Aerosmith, Megadeth and GWAR. My sixth grade teacher once remarked how she never ran into many students wearing ripped camo pants and Metallica/GnR tour shirts. Music wasn't new to me. But this music? This was new.

I spent the next few weeks talking my friend with that magical music downloading machine into finding more of it. Those searches introduced me to "Norwegian Wood", "All Along The Watchtower" and "Won't Get Fooled Again". I also started to get high just about every single day. I was floored. All the different sounds and approaches and the energy and the optimism. It was the strangest world I've ever known.

One day, I walked into my school's library and picked up a book. "Oh shit, I know what this is." I started reading. I was hooked. It had shamans and drugs and acts of random violence and sex and excitement. It was about freedom. It was about being alive. It was No One Here Gets Out Alive. It was about The Doors.

His brain is squirming like a toad....

From that moment on, I was Jim Morrison. I grew my hair out just like his (something I've tried to recreate about a half a dozen times since then, but could never get it as perfect as 15 year old me could), started to care more about poetry than sports, about freedom more than safety. I started to care about things that, for once, seemed like something worth caring about. I felt alive for the first time in my life. I broke on through in the best possible way. I've spent most days since absorbing music of all kinds, feeding from the energy it gave and the reveling in the wisdom it provided. I wanted to be The Doors. I wanted to let loose inside of The Whiskey and stroll down Sunset Strip without a purpose. I needed to walk Venice Beach with wide eyes and take in everything that came across me. I sought out their music, starting where they started, with 1967's The Doors. That record is still the first thing I think of when I think of the 60s. I know every fill and lick and beat and solo of every song. That record changed my life.

I always wanted to be the next Jim Morrison, but as I got older, I found myself becoming more like their keyboardist, Ray Manzarek. In the background, letting the artists be artists, but still having my hands on things. I became a thinker, not a poet. I believed in men like Morrison and John Lennon. I believed in rock and roll being a high form of art that could rip down a government just as easily as revved up an engine. I wanted to learn and breathe the art of music and champion those who mastered it like Hendrix or Page. In 1999, not a lot of people still believed in the power of rock music. Woodstock had just been destroyed.

But one man still talked about the 60s and Jim Morrison with the same rush of excitement and amusement as I did. That man was Ray Manzarek. He was a devout priest to the altar of rock and roll. He had faith, man. And as I stand now, the same age as Morrison when he was found dead in a bathtub, I'm glad I never turned out like the ill-fated singer. All I can do know is hope to be more like their unappreciated keyboardist.

Riders on the storm....