RAY MANZAREK

keyboardist with rock group the Doors

“I think that’s a more important question for thirty- and forty-something people than it is for fifty-somethings, who were in the transition from radio to records. I can’t really remember buying hardly anything in the ‘50s. I was mostly listening to the radio, not purchasing albums.

“Albums didn’t really matter until you had a good stereo system, you know? Why buy the damn things unless you’ve got a good rig to play them on? So I finally got enough money to buy a decent component stereo system, and then the first records that I bought were probably jazz....jazz records by Miles and Coltrane.

“But one of the first LPs that I ever really listened to was an album called ‘Giants of Boogie Woogie,’ and boy, did that influence me. It was Albert Ammons, Pinetop Smith and Meade Lux Lewis playing boogie woogie, and holy cow, did this white boy ever click into that stuff. Wow. That was one of the great influences of my life, that record. That’s the one that did it for me.”