Ray Manzarek

The original Laguna the Puma demos were done at Ray Manzarek’s house with his son Pablo Manzarek on drums. I was renting a weekly apartment down the street and when Geoff Travis wanted to reimburse me $900 for plane tickets I used when I had come to London to show him the songs. I thought it would be better to FedEx the check to Manzarek’s house, but then Ray told Pablo and the other guys that I was ‘’secretly being paid by Geoff Travis and keeping the money for myself’’ and refused to believe that it was simply a reimbursement for a plane ticket that I had paid for myself earlier. So I had to replace Pablo Manzarek on drums with the drummer of my friend’s band The O who were also signed to Polydor.

Ray would mock me and say ’’So, it’s Michael the rockstar’’ and yell at us when we working in the home studio on sunday ‘’Today is the lord’s day and on the lord’s day we don't work in the studio’’ meaning Ray wanted it perfectly quiet so he could watch with the most focused attention the La lakers on TV. Danny Sugarman, author of ‘No One Here Gets Out Alive’, the famous doors bio, would also frequently come by as Ray would bore him to death talking about sports. Funnily enough, MTV came over to the house one day and Ray went straight over to me, got me in front of the camera and said “I like hanging out with people like Mike, because Mike is from the streets, and he knows what's going on.” As soon as the MTV crew left, Ray was back to giving me a hard time. The footage of Ray and I never made it onto MTV, except for quick edits of Ray saying things like, “If anyone could fake their own death, it would be Jim.”

The one thing I remember is although he was criticizing me, he told me I remind him of Jim as I had the same thought processes and ‘out of it persona’. He then hit me on the back rather violently and said ‘Can you please join a gym or something?’ I spent a lot of time with Ray between the ages of 16-20 years old. The organ sound used on Children of The Garden Unicorn is a MIDI sample taken from Ray’s original Doors keyboard before it was donated to the Rock n roll hall of fame.