Ray Manzarek, the legendary keyboardist who founded "The Doors" in 1965 with Jim Morrison, died after a long fight with cancer on Monday at age 74, according to reports. Manzarek had been diagnosed with bile duct cancer.
"I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today," Doors guitarist Robby Krieger said in a statement. "I'm just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him."
Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn't talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music.
"And there it was!" Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography,Light My Fire. "It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies."
"What great company he was," Manzarek told the London Times about Morrison, who died in 1971. "Talk about going to the pub and having a couple of beers with the guy -- Morrison was perfect. He's been haunting me for some 40 years now, and I miss him every day."
The Doors went on to sell more than 100 million albums, and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. "The impact of their meteoric career has resonated far beyond their brief half-decade as a recording and performing entity," the Rock Hall's statement read upon their induction. "Their words and music captured the Sixties zeitgeist with undeniable power."
