''We had no money, but it was a lot of fun'' said Ray

-Is that how you met Jim?

 

Ray Manzarek: At the film school, yep. We met probably, I don’t know, somewhere late ‘63, early 1964 at the UCLA film school. He got his bachelor’s degree in ‘65, and I got my master’s degree in ‘65, and we formed the Doors. Yeah, I met Jim at UCLA and met my wife Dorothy at UCLA in art class. 

I wasn’t gonna take it, but I did. I took an art class on how to draw storyboards and draw pictures and pretended I knew what to do, but I was terrible. I had no talent that way at all, but she was in the class. That one class. I took one class that I didn’t have to take, and met my wife, and we’re still together! I had no business being in that class. I was in the film school. I didn’t have to take it. I just took it as an elective. Boy, did that work out. Talk about knock on your lucky wood. And met Jim Morrison at UCLA, too.

We started working on the songs like that, and Dorothy supported us. So Jim had the bedroom and then Dorothy and I took the living room, with the mattress, because it had a heater and we could stay warm at night. Jim had an electric blanket so he didn’t need a heater. Then he got the bed that didn’t have the heater. And the three of us lived together. Dorothy worked and we would take her from – we lived in Venice – and we would take her to work, drop her off, and go to the UCLA music school where they had pianos. We would go down into the little practice rooms and practice. Jim would work on his singing. We worked on his song structure, and I would play the piano, figuring out chord changes. Boy, that was fun. We had no money, but it was a lot of fun....

From an interview