What did you do in the psychedelic wars, daddy? ask these two grizzled '60s veterans – Jefferson Airplane singer and guitarist Paul Kantner and Ray Manzarek, the keyboard player for the Doors – and be prepared to, in the words of "Roadhouse Blues," "Let it roll/All night long." Producer Harvey Kubernik – who specializes in spoken-word recordings – has done just that, jogging hours of memoryspeak out of Kantner and Manzarek, and, in the process, adding some worthy, agreeably rambling discourse to the West Coast rock archives. There aren't many mind-blowing revelations on these two-CD sets, but hearing everything from the horse's mouth is peculiarly charming and fascinating.

Kantner, a San Francisco native, has a lot to say on the genesis of the hippie Zeitgeist in the Bay Area. "Drugs were not a huge part of what was going on," he notes at one point. "Drugs were just like dessert at a good meal." Kantner also has the wisdom not to take himself too seriously. With candor, he deflates the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Airplane's agitprop period ("I had ... only hippie optimism and a sweetly naive idealism") and praises the gentle genius of Jerry Garcia, who shepherded the Airplane's landmark Surrealistic Pillow album to completion in spite of the band's lack of studio discipline. Kantner also offers good-humored anecdotes about Woodstock, Altamont and Paul McCartney's visit with the Airplane in San Francisco during April 1967.

Manzarek plays more to the microphone. In a booming baritone, he adds his own theatrical relish to the Jim Morrison mythology when he notes that Morrison's funeral was a closed-coffin affair ("Jim Morrison was never seen dead"). Manzarek conjures quite vivid images of Morrison, beginning with their friendship as UCLA film students. And when Manzarek describes his fateful sighting of Morrison on a Southern California beach – a meeting that led to the forming of the Doors – he romanticizes almost shamelessly:

"The sun is setting into the Pacific Ocean.... The water is glistening, and I see this figure walking along in the shallows.... As he's kicking up the water, he's making diamonds because of the way the light is hitting the water from behind, the sun coming in low and hard, and these diamonds are coming out of his feet...."

The real pearls on Myth and Reality relate more to Manzarek's memories of his hip childhood on Chicago's South Side, where he got an early introduction to the blues and learned the boogie-woogie piano style that was part of the Doors' eclectic bedrock. He even claims that as a young man, he co-authored a blues tune, "Now Look What You've Done," which wound up being recorded by and attributed to Muddy Waters. Now there's a contentious notion: a black man stealing a white guy's music.

Manzarek's own lifts from blues and jazz were applied to a shamanistic style of rock & roll that made him more money than Waters ever saw. And if Manzarek is something of a gee-whiz oral historian, rhapsodizing about his first glimpse of Elvis Presley as if it were a thunderbolt unique to Manzarek's sensibility, he is also a survivor whose passion for the past is utterly infectious. (RS 747)

MATT DAMSKER