Any encounter with a co-founder of The Doors is always in danger of turning into a long conversation about Jim Morrison. A real live Door is, after all, as close as anyone might get to the shade of the singer himself, and the temptations to dwell are huge.
In circumstances like these, the death of a lead singer back in 1971 might not be the easiest subject to broach - the keyboard player perhaps a little weary of endless speculation about the dead handsome frontman. But not so with Ray Manzarek. Being the sort of person who says things like "Man, it's good to be alive!" and having written a book called Light My Fire My Life with the Doors, he is quite happy to talk about anything. He is, it would seem, is on some kind of mission of explanation. He wants, he says, to be a bridge to the 21st century.
"I'm one of the older acidheads left over from the 1960s and by God I'm going to tell you what LSD and psychedelics and spirituality and rock 'n' roll and good deep sex is all about. And hopefully you can begin to lose some of the cynicism. What I'm trying to do with the book is help today's young people understand what the 1960s were all about - the idea, the underlying philosophy and principles of the 1960s. Wearing flowers in your hair, going to San Francisco, smoking a lot of dope and getting laid wasn't really the point of the 1960s, that was the point of being young.
"The 1960s was a battle between the lovers and the profit-mongers and the profit-mongers won. I want to get the lovers back in there! The war is not over! The war will be concluded in the 21st century and the lovers always win!"
While quite certain that every interviewer gets a similar spiel, there is nevertheless some relief that Manzarek himself is not another slow-witted victim of 1960s excess. Energy levels are high - he is cheery, warm, talkative and he certainly hasn't been idle. Since the Doors finally closed at the start of the 1970s, he has worked as a record and video producer, making no fewer than three videos about his old band. He regularly performs at music and poetry events with the poet Michael McClure and his recorded output includes an adaptation of Carmina Burana (with Philip Glass). The rest of his time, however, has probably been spent answering questions about Jim Morrison.
"I assume that Jim Morrison is gone. But everyone else is so excited and concerned about how he died. And of course it's not how a poet dies, it's a poet's words that are the important thing. But the words require reading and understanding and a bit of quiet on your part. You have to look into a deeper place in yourself. Put your cocaine down, put your crack down, sit down and shut up. The death of Jim Morrison is a kind of hysteria and what I was trying to do was dispel the hysteria. There used to be a saying in the 1960s: "May the boy Jesus shut your mouth and open your eyes."
Manzarek is nevertheless well aware of why Jim Morrison became such an icon of his times. The tragedy of death certainly sealed it, but even in life, he was playing to a gallery of very serious devotees. Image was always central to the Morrison myth and while Manzarek might well deny it, the famous Jesus picture may well have been a calculated act. Whatever the intention, to the adoring fan, Morrison always seemed rather more than just a talented frontman.
"That's in a way what killed him - carrying the weight of those projections became very, very difficult for Jim," he says.
"Jim is a great lead singer. I can play the piano. But don't project anything else onto me because I have all the failings - I'm afraid, I'm a loser, I'm a liar, I'm snivelling and conniving and I cheat and lie. I do everything. I'm really a bad human being. We're all bad human beings and that's why we're here on planet Earth. We are all sinners and now we have to rise above that and conquer that within ourselves."
The book is certainly enlightening on the music itself. The influences on the Doors are acknowledged with some clarity as Manzarek explains how they created their sound. And they had very definite ideas too about what they were trying to achieve. Morrison saw himself as a poet, John Densmore was a jazz drummer, Robby Krieger played flamenco and bottleneck blues guitar while Manzarek himself could turn his hand to just about anything. The trick was to combine it all at a period when the Beatles reigned supreme - a time when there was no great room for a Californian band with big ideas.
"The Beatles were basically the cute Fab Four - cute lads - very, very good but still the Fab Four. The Stones were on the other side doing blues and they were cool and we always dug the Stones - but we thought quite frankly that we could play better. We were going to do poetry and rock just the way the beatniks did poetry and jazz. We wanted to set up a foundation for a very good poet to do his poetry. This psychedelic, southern American, Tennessee Williams, beatnik poet to sing his poetic words over the top of that all-encompassing musical foundation. That's what we set out to do. I don't want to blow my own horn, but we invented the genre."
Manzarek, perhaps surprisingly, remembers quite a bit about 1960s. He describes Doors's gigs as being "like communion - a spiritual act of oneness with the tribe. We were like tribal animals dancing and pulsating." He also recalls those famous nights in the Whisky-A-Go-Go where the Doors from California hooked up with Them from Belfast and the two Morrisons got to sing together on stage. For Manzarek, the jam between Jim and Van ("those two wild Irishmen") was one those occasions where they actually achieved "that Muddy Waters shamanistic thing on stage".
Ray Manzarek is inevitably tied to the myth of Morrison and the Doors. But there is a reality here too. Manzarek and Morrison were best friends from their days at UCLA and together, in the summer of 1965, they excitedly formed one of rock's most significant groups. And behind all talk of shamans, drugs, lizards, love and poets, Ray Manzarek knows, like the rest of us, that the Doors were an extraordinary and innovative band who blew the roof off American rock.
"Well, it's got to be very entertaining! I think one of the obligations of any artist is to make something that's going to make the audience say `Wow! Hey what's that?' It can be hideous, it can be gorgeous, it doesn't matter. Rock 'n' roll is an art form and I think it's extremely serious. But you can also take it to the other extreme in which it's nothing but entertainment. A lot of the rock 'n' roll today, the big touring shows and the boy bands and the girl bands, that's not much different than the circus. What you got from the Doors was real - no kidding. We tried to make it entertaining but it was real. Like Jim said: "You never know when you're giving your last concert - so you've got to let it all hang out."
Light My Fire My Life with the Doors by Ray Manzarek is published by Arrow at £7.99 in the UK