Light My Fire
Enough has been written about The Doors already. But the history of Jim Morrison is always fodder for rock scribes. We both got our starts in a dinky mildewed coffee house in Pinellas Park Florida; a suburb of St. Petersburg on the gulf coast of Tampa Bay. The Beaux Arts Coffee House was run by a veteran dancer from Balanchin’e troupe in New York. Tommy’s mother would sit at the front screen door of the antibellum Tennessee Williams style run-down southern mansion and take a dollar and seventy five cents from every Jr. College student trying to grow a beard and a poetry reputation.They would lounge about the musty old furniture, amongst six toed cats, bad poetry, even worse paintings of local young men who occasionally lived above the coffee house on three floors of boarding house rooms. Our bass player and some times paper hanger rented a room on the third floor and papered the walls with red flocked fleur-de-li resembling a mix of French Quarter and New York’s Chelsea Hotel only much damper from all the tropical humidity.
Bethlehem Asylum played on the screened in back porch trying out new songs and falling back on jazz tunes that we could get through. Mine was the first drumset to be played there. It was mostly acoustical guitars and flutes. Folkies from New York would stop there on their way down to Miami. The back yard was a jungle riot of local floral set off nicely by strings of tiki lights hiding teens sipping wine, smoking weak pot and making out. Morrison read his poetry to the small crowd until he announced that he was going to California.
Robbie Krieger wrote the song but Jim and the rest of the guys in the Doors made the song come alive. History in the making. Upon meeting Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player, I revealed that I was a veteran of the Beaux Arts coffee House in Pinellas Park, Florida. He was intrigued. Jim had mentioned it. “Is that place for real?”
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