Looking back now, all three of the Doors I later spoke to agreed that Strange Days was a watershed moment in the band’s story. That it was, arguably, their finest, purest moment. “Well, I’m surprised that you think that because very few people realize that,” said Robby, when I interviewed him for Classic Rock magazine in 2012. “But I think you’re right. I think it is one of our best albums. And we thought so too at the time. We loved it. You know, we took our time making it and really, really liked how it came out. The record company did too. Jac Holzman played it for Paul Simon. And Paul Simon, after listening to the record, said, ‘The Doors are the best band in the United States.’ Strange Days was really the four of us working together kind of on the same path. After that, things got kind of …” He trailed off into another mumble. By the time I got to speak to Robby Krieger for the first time, in 2012, he had reached a place beyond acceptance. It was far too late for regrets, his off-kilter slow-talk seemed to suggest. The past was simply a place that ran on its own fumes. Whatcha gonna do, huh? And yet he seemed genuinely disappointed still at what the relative failure of Strange Days signified in the Doors’ story. The band at their peak, with everything so right, yet already starting to be so wrong.
As if to live up to their somewhat neglected new album’s title, the Doors spent the final weeks of 1967 imprisoned on the road, living out a strange dream that was already turning into a nightmare. Their tour schedule had grown so out of control that they were often playing auditoriums on the West Coast one night, only to be sent flying across the country back to New York to play some club—a hangover from their days before they’d hit it big, which their inexperienced management team had not the foresight to renegotiate—leaving all four band members exhausted, disoriented, flat, and, in Jim Morrison’s case all too often, simply unconscious. When John Densmore’s new girlfriend, Julia Brose, asked to be introduced to Jim, the drummer merely pointed at a figure curled up under a bench at the airport, where he was sleeping off his latest drunken binge. Two garbage cans had been strategically placed in front of him to discourage the multitude of teenage fans that now routinely followed the band everywhere. “There he is,” Stephen Davis later reported John telling her with barely concealed loathing. “That’s our famous lead singer.”
Twenty-two concerts in October alone were followed by thirteen in November, shows of all sizes and variations. One night they would be playing to a thousand studious onlookers at the Bushnell arts center in Hartford, Connecticut; at the next show they would be twenty-five hundred miles across the country appearing at the Long Beach Men’s Gymnasium in California, the kind of club-plus gigs a band plays before it goes to No. 1. Not after. Then, a few days later, back to New York for a packed stand-up date at a college. Then a sit-down Playhouse Theater in New York, a psychedelic ballroom in Washington, then back to Sacramento to three thousand screaming hippie chicks and their frazzled main squeezes at the Convention Center, the sort of place the Stones or the Beach Boys would play.
“I always used to joke and say, after ‘Light My Fire’ it was all downhill from there,” Robby said when we discussed those days. “But it kind of was. Except for Strange Days. That was probably us at our best, when it was still fun.” The band certainly felt they had achieved something special, as did even the hard-nosed Paul Rothchild, who later considered it the best album he made with the Doors. “We were confident it was going to be bigger than anything the Beatles had done,” he told Jerry Hopkins. “But there was no single.” And despite Elektra taking half a million advance orders, “The record died on us.”
Though not before the band’s new supersmart lawyer, Abe Somer, had threatened Jac Holzman with the band’s going on strike if Elektra didn’t raise its royalty rate, which Jac, still fighting to hold on to the band and ward off B&D, eventually did, to 7 percent. The new album may not have lit up the charts as they had all hoped it would, but it was still a sizeable hit, and the Doors were hotter than ever. Paul Newman talked of having them write the title song for his next movie, Cool Hand Luke, which would feature a hip soundtrack based on jazz and rock. But Jim didn’t see Newman as the kind of cool number he could relate to any longer, equating him more with the old-school Ed Sullivan generation. And Jim had already laughed in the face of Sullivan when old Ed vowed the Doors would never be invited onto his show again. (Which they were not, though Sullivan relented enough, in order to boost his own ratings, to repeat the “Light My Fire” clip in the summer of 1968, when the Doors were No. 1 again.)
Ray Manzarek had a good chuckle at that one. “That line in ‘When the Music’s Over’ that Jim sings—‘Cancel my subscription to the resurrection / Send my credentials to the house of detention’—I think that was almost his way of saying, ‘OK, I already see what this whole fame trip is about, and I won’t let you make me play by those rules.’ That’s Jim using the Doors to look into the future right there …”
On tour, each night was different—either very, very good or very, very bad. Mostly they were good. The band was still riding its success, yet was refreshed by the material from the new album, which now became the focus of their shows—the swirly candy-colored organ on “Strange Days” that framed Jim’s portentous lyrics in a suitably carnivalesque way; Jim moaning like a sheep-killing dog, “Strange days / Have found us …”; the gloom offset by the joyful interplay between Robby’s wino guitar and John’s feathery percussion on “Moonlight Drive”; the sheer youthful exuberance of tracks like “Love Me Two Times,” Jim’s young voice still full of its honeyed purr, or flailing wildly on “When the Music’s Over,” exhorting audiences across the country to want the world and “want it now!”; the cloying way he softly delivered coups de grâce one moment, then yelled and swore and declaimed loudly on “Horse Latitudes,” the mystic invocation that had so startled Bill Siddons the first time he saw Jim cast its spell. There were also even newer numbers, songs that had not originally sprung from the pot-filled air of Venice Beach or rehearsals at Robby’s parents’ house—newly politicized anti-Vietnam rants like “Five to One,” or the section in “Back Door Man” where Jim began to ramble, “I want to tell you about Texas radio and the big beat …” These were exciting, if often unnerving, times for Jim and the Doors. Good times. Flaming days and deep-cut nights. All this, though they could not know it then, a far cry from the growling, out-of-control drunk that came to dominate and eventually destroy Doors shows over the coming years, the band still able to make albums that would cast their own tawdry spell, still find their poet-singer holding on grimly to whatever self-respect he had left, but evoke none of the fragile beauty of the voice on Strange Days. A long way further down the road than any of them, including Jim, had even known you could go. To where Jim would become Jimbo, as Paul Rothchild tersely nicknamed this bible-black alter ego.
The first real sign of the gathering gloom came on December 9, 1967, the day after Jim’s twenty-fourth birthday. At the gig the night before, at a college in Troy in Upstate New York, the crowd had singularly failed to be impressed by the band’s posturing, and a drunk Jim was so down he declined to take the short plane ride back into Manhattan and forced a driver to drive him the 150 or so miles.
The following day, a cold, snow-filled Saturday, the Doors had driven to New Haven, to the local hockey rink. At one of their first arena shows, the band was nevertheless depressed to discover the promoter had sold less than half the five thousand tickets allocated. Jim began drinking heavily during an early dinner and carried on in the improvised dressing room before the show. As usual there were chicks hanging around backstage, and as usual Jim began “playing” with one, as the tour manager, Vince Treanor, puts it now. Vince had been hired by B&D to try and bring a new level of professionalism to the band’s touring schedule, which was now almost constant. A slightly older former organ builder, who knew more about road equipment than anyone in the band did, Treanor was a level head among the growing madness. Between them, Vince and nineteen-year-old Bill Siddons were now doing all the donkey work and all the hand-holding.
Jim had invited the girl into the band’s dressing room, but the rest of the band had soon left them to it, after “getting tired of watching Jim play with this girl.” The next thing they knew, some kid was running down the backstage corridor to find the band and tell them, “Your lead singer’s been Maced by a cop!” Vince and Bill and the rest of the band ran to the dressing room, where they found Jim, his face a scarred red rash of pain, his eyes closed but streaming with noxious tears. It took a while to figure out what had happened. Eventually two stories emerged. The popular one, which would live down the ages, was that Jim had been making out with these two chicks in the shower stalls, man, when this uptight cop got in his face and told him to quit it. But Jim told the cop to “Go fuck yourself,” man. Right on. And that’s when the cop grabbed his can of Chemical Mace and sprayed it right into Jim’s face. Jim collapsed, man, screaming and gasping. The chicks freaked out and split.
According to Vince Treanor, though, the truth was both more prosaic and more horrible. There had only been one girl and Jim had simply been canoodling with her on a couch in the dressing room. The cop had no right to be there, and when he ordered Jim and the girl out of the room Jim understandably took offense. This was his dressing room, he explained. He was the singer of the band. It was the cop who should mind his business and leave. But the cop didn’t like being spoken back to and simply reached for his Mace and blasted Jim in the face—an outrageous thing to do under the circumstances, as the singer posed no physical threat.
“The cop had no excuse to say that Jim had attacked him. He was bigger, stronger, and taller than Jim,” Treanor later wrote. When he and Bill and the rest of the band found out what had happened, “Phone calls started to fly. The cop called his station, the Musicians Union representative called their attorney, and the promoter called the police chief, who was relaxing at home. Then he called his lawyer.”
Mayhem ensued as the dressing room began filling up with people from both sides of the freak-straight divide—the show’s organizers panicking at the prospect of having to cancel the show, the local police authorities confounded by the idea that this group of young oddballs and freaks might be able to bring a lawsuit against them, and everything compounded by the fact that two reporters from Life magazine, sent to cover the “hottest new group in America,” now on the verge of a much bigger scoop, were also in highly visible attendance, asking questions, taking pictures.
By the time Jim’s eyes had been sufficiently flushed for him to see again, and some burn cream found to tend his blistered face, the police chief had arrived flanked by more uniformed officers and several other “well-dressed men,” as Vince puts it. Speaking now from his home in Singapore, Vince Treanor says he remembers it as if it were yesterday. How the whole room turned on the now-sweating cop for causing such a scene, yelling and screaming at him. How as the scene eventually calmed down the police chief made a show to everybody of apologizing to Jim, “hoping that he understood what a terrible mistake had been made and [that] disciplinary action would follow.”
The chief made a point of getting the young cop who had fired the Mace into Jim’s face to apologize to him too, but Jim, still drunk and now bristling with righteous indignation, refused to shake the cop’s outstretched hand. “OK, man,” Jim mumbled, then turned his back on him. The rest of the room heaved a giant sigh of relief in the hoped-for assumption that that would be the end of it. That the show could now go on, and that both sides, freaks and straights, longhairs and cops, could go back to simply mistrusting each other. Like before.
The show finally began, half an hour late but with Jim and the band in surprisingly sprightly form. Ray and Robby both later recalled for me how freaked out they still felt, though, as Ray lit his ceremonial incense stick and Jim began prowling the stage like a bear with one leg in a steel trap. Nevertheless, they moved through several numbers without any further incident, save for Jim’s even more exuberant than usual screeches and cries during “When the Music’s Over” and “Break on Through (To the Other Side).” All the while, though, the extra cops and plainclothes men who had arrived with the police chief stayed and watched from the wings, their faces unmoving, their eyes never once leaving Jim.
And then it happened. During “Back Door Man,” at one of those now familiar crossroads in the music that Jim used to either extemporize on his work-in-progress poetry or simply unleash a stream-of-consciousness babble that may or may not lead one night to another “Horse Latitudes” or even, if the gods were feeling wicked enough, another “The End.” Tonight, in frozen-cold New Haven, Jim, his eyes still stinging from the chemical spray, his red face burning so hot no matter how much beer and whiskey he poured down his scorched throat he couldn’t relieve the pain, came up with a new twist on an increasingly old tale. He decided to tell the audience—his people—all about the cop who just Maced him backstage for the heinous crime of making out with a girl.
“Hey, you want to hear a story?” he called out, that playful half smile on his face that the rest of the band knew spelled trouble. “It’s a true story. It happened right here right …” He stopped and looked around, drunk, confused still, and in a voice off-mike but audible to the front rows, pleaded, “Where is this?”
“New Haven!” came several cries from the audience.
“Yeah, right here in New Haven …”
And then he spilled it, the whole deal. The sweet chick. The bad cop. “A little man in blue …” The Mace. “… and his hand came up and ssshhhttt!, right in my face, man, and I went blind.”
The crowd, primed for rebellion—revolution, man, go crazy, fuckers, yeah!—began to call out, the indignation of the congregation as the preacher begins to spout the gospel. Jim waved them down. Then told them straight: “The whole world hates me. Nobody loves me, the whole fucking world hates me!”
At which point the already agitated cops side-stage could take no more. Ordering the house lights be put back on, two of them strode across the stage and arrested Jim on the spot. Sitting at his keyboards, digging the scene something special, like one of his Marlon Brando or Jimmy Dean movies, Ray Manzarek reveled in the sheer theatricality of it. Years later, he was still cheerleading Jim on as he told the story again, for the millionth time.
“I mean, my god,” he gushed, “Jim Morrison should have been up there running for political office. Jim Morrison is the son of the admiral. He is the well-born young man, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who is heir to the throne. He should have been a well-behaved young Republican, except he’s not, he’s in the Doors and he’s totally misbehaving.
“And proof of that,” Ray went on, “is the captain—Captain Kelly, the classic Irish cop—who arrested him onstage in New Haven, he said to Jim, ‘You’ve gone too far, young man! You’ve gone too far!’ And I thought, it’s perfect. He has broken no law, other than the law of civil restraint—and he had gone too far. Into a land where no so-called rock star had gone before.” He broke into laughter. “Into an unknown place, and they were arresting him for that very reason.”
The crowd, now robbed of their show and outraged at living proof of the Man coming down hard on one of their own, could take no more. Fights broke out as people started to leave. Others refused to go quietly and tried ripping up chairs, loose floorings, anything they could pry free to hurl at the stage. Jim was dragged offstage by the two cops, one on each arm, the other three band members watching him in shocked silence for a moment before slowly following. No one knew what had just happened. Except maybe the cops, who dragged Jim along the hall, the first two propping him up while another two began beating him savagely, one punching him from behind in the back and kidneys while the other swung his meaty fists into Jim’s already messed-up face, his body bouncing back and forth between them.
Vince Treanor, who had somehow managed to barge his way through—“I have no idea where Bill was”—to see what was happening, recalls the cops then dragging Jim, “who was in pretty bad shape,” back through the dressing-room area and out through a door into the icy parking lot. In the struggle to get him inside one of the squad cars, Jim fell face-first onto the ground, “and at least two of the cops kicked him more than once.”
When the reporting team from Life arrived on the scene just in time to take shots of what was happening, the cops went into overdrive and arrested them too, for “disturbing the peace.” By now, though, more members of the Doors’ touring team had made their way through to find out what was happening, where they were taking Jim. More than eighty members of the audience had also now gathered to add to the melee. What Vince calls “a parade of cars” then made its way speedily to the local New Haven police station, where Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, was charged with “breach of peace, resisting arrest, and indecent or immoral exhibition,” becoming the first rock star in history to be arrested onstage.
“That was horrible,” Robby told me. “We didn’t know what the hell was gonna happen. They beat the hell out of him.” A rapidly sobering-up Jim was fingerprinted, his mug shots were taken (again), and he was placed on a bail bond of $1,500. It was 2 AM before the cops finally took the cuffs off him and released him into the care of Bill Siddons. The next morning it was announced that Jim would stand trial in January, and the story became national news across the United States. Thus was born Jim Morrison, rock star martyr, a role he would continue to play right up to and beyond the grave. The role, in fact, he still enjoys today.
This was something the razor-sharp Jac Holzman also seized on. Scanning the acres of newsprint generated by the story not just in Crawdaddy and the fledgling Rolling Stone but in Life and both the L.A. and the New York editions of the Times, hearing it talked about on the radio and discussed on TV news, Jac, ever the wily record man, as he recalls in his memoir, Follow the Music, quickly realized that New Haven was “a defining moment in pop history: Jim Morrison, the first rock star to be busted while performing.” It was, in fact, the very thing to “relegitimize the Doors as a counterculture group.” Having gained and then lost the immense pop audience in the wake of the enormous success of “Light My Fire” and its less spectacular follow-up, “People Are Strange,” the Doors had clearly failed to replenish their hardcore following among the freaks and hippies now buying record numbers of albums by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. The arrest in New Haven, though—played out as our hippie hero Jim, our freedom-fighting poet, duking it out toe to toe with the “little men in blue”—was just too goddamn much. Holzman quickly ordered Paul Rothchild to get ready to begin work on the next Doors album as soon as Christmas was out of the way. When advance sales for it, sight unseen, immediately “shot up to three-quarters of a million units,” he knew he was on the right path. Easy. At least, that’s how it appeared in Jac’s world.
In the world of the Doors, though, nothing they did from then on would ever be quite so easy again.
As the year wound uneasily to its close, several new things were happening at once, all of them suddenly thrown into even greater focus after the PR martyrdom of New Haven. Jim, as always, hovered between angel and devil, working feverishly when he was straight enough on completing what he intended to be his grand poetic statement, a sweeping monologue in various stages, set to whatever improvised maelstrom the Doors were able to concoct on any given night. It had been coming together in fractions over several months, dating back to their San Francisco Be-In experiences earlier in the year, Jim slipping the words into passages of “Light My Fire” or “Back Door Man” or just standing there some nights sleep-talking into the mike as the band tuned up. After one spectacularly bad show opening for Simon & Garfunkel in Queens, in the summer, Jim had gotten so wasted in an Irish bar he didn’t bother to go home, just stayed on drinking right through the next day too, treating the patrons to lines from his new Homeric epic, as he saw it. Another time he ended up on Paul Rothchild’s couch, where he began reciting a new poem he’d been working on for months, he said, called “Celebration of the Lizard.”
Now in the dying weeks of 1967 it had begun to assume a pivotal role in the Doors’ concerts, stretching some nights to nearly twenty minutes long. After the iconoclastic and confrontational “The End” and the biblical warnings of “When the Music’s Over,” this new poem was to be the ultimate piece of Doors theater. Full of all the by-now-familiar Morrison imagery of snakes and lizards and waking up in strange places, dreams and nightmares all interwoven, along with the familial death sentences, this time “the body of his mother, rotting in the summer ground,” along with snatches of lyrics that went right back to the Doors’ earliest fumblings, “the game called ‘go insane.’ ”
On those nights when it did not go well, either because Jim was too far gone to put the words together luminously enough, or in the case of one show where the Doors had been booked into a high school dance as last-minute replacements for the Four Seasons, and the audience simply didn’t get it and began wandering off, Jim really did “go insane,” stomping the mike stand so hard into the stage that it broke and a new one had to be hastily found from somewhere.
Jim’s plan, he kept explaining, though no one else in the band gave the idea much more play than an indulgent nod of their heads or a half smile—Jim was always going on about his plans for something—was that “Celebration of the Lizard” should form the entire second side of their next album. Although a rough studio draft of the piece, less than half the length of the crazed live version, would eventually surface on one of the numerous Doors compilations and YouTube links that now proliferate, only a very small section of it made it onto record in his lifetime, and then only after Paul Rothchild had forced them to refine the piece and pull it into a more recognizable song shape, retitled “Not to Touch the Earth.” Indeed, only the “Wake Up!” section survived into the band’s later live performances, with lines from the demo subsequently cut and pasted onto the posthumously released An American Prayer album.
For now, though, this was where Jim was at, even as the band’s audiences were still yelling for “Light My Fire,” and Paul Rothchild and Jac Holzman saw an opportunity for the Doors to come back with their most commercially successful album yet. Even as—especially so, in fact—Salvatore Bonafede and Asher Dann came to Jim in the dead of night with a new, decidedly reptilian plan of their own: for Jim to leave the Doors behind and start fresh as a solo artist.
Why not? On paper it made sense. The way Sal and Asher saw it, Jim was the star of the Doors, far more than, say, Mick Jagger was the star of the Stones or Lennon was the star of the Beatles. The Stones also had Brian Jones, the Beatles also had McCartney. Who did the Doors have other than Jim? Owlish Ray? Rickety Robby? Come on, man, be fucking serious. The same dark logic would be put in front of Janis Joplin just a few months later about her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Janis saw it made even darker sense and quit on the spot, going solo overnight. The late sixties were all about grabbing it while you can, no one having the faintest idea that any of this—the sex, the drugs, the bread, the fame—would last longer than the time it took to come down off your latest trip. Bands—big hit-making bands—broke up all the time. Jimi Hendrix would soon dissolve the Experience. Jeff Beck would sack his entire group, leaving Rod Stewart to become an even bigger solo star. Bob Dylan ditched his whole audience by going electric.
What was Jim waiting for? There would never be a better time, they argued. Jim was the one being interviewed by Albert Goldman in New York magazine, had been the big splash in Life following New Haven, was the one being slavishly photographed for Vogue. Crawdaddy, the thinking dude’s rock zine, loved Morrison. 16, the one the little girls understood, loved him even more. Jim had it all. What did he need the Doors for anymore? Not only were they holding him back with their nerdy looks and creepy music, but they were getting three-quarters of the dough, when Jim could have it all! In fact, under the new solo deal Sal and Asher would put together with Columbia, still hovering to pounce since foolishly letting the Doors slip through their fingers just the year before, Jim, Sal, and Asher would all be ten times richer! What wasn’t there to love? C’mon, Jim, what d’ya say? Have another drink and think about it, huh? C’mon, baby, let the good times roll …
But Jim didn’t dig that idea at all. Jim, the new antiestablishment hero who had faced down the cops in New Haven, who had told Ed Sullivan where to go when he tried to censor his song, who stood up onstage night after night telling the people the unvarnished truth, man, who wanted the whole fucking world and wanted it now, nearly shat himself when Sal and Asher got him on his own and began talking about the future. For one thing, as Vince Treanor recalls now with a chuckle, “Jim was convinced that Sal Bonafede was in with the Mafia, and that if he didn’t behave he’d have him rubbed out, you know, Mafia-style.”
Mainly, though, Jim the great shaman shrunk back into being a little lost boy needing constant reassurance at the idea of going it alone. He may have hated John, who didn’t tolerate his bullshit, may have put up with Ray, who talked the talk but never once walked the walk the way Jim did, may have been jealous of Robby, who didn’t feel the need to come down from the mountain with tablets of stone the way Jim felt obliged to but could write better songs than any of them, but he needed them in a way business guys like Sal and Asher would never understand. The other three guys in the Doors really knew who Jim was when he wasn’t wearing leather pants and giving the come-on to some overeager chick or hyped-up young head. Knew who Jim was when he was fucked up for days, the phone hidden under the bed in some cheap motel room, knew the Jim who didn’t shower for weeks, had whiskey puke all over his face and bats flying out of his hair. Knew the Jim that existed before he lost the weight and gained the acid-gravitas, and who had become superskilled at turning his midnight ramblings into coherent, chart-friendly songs that kept the whole shebang on the road.
But Jim was too scared to say no to Sal and Asher. Not to their faces. So he ran to Ray and Robby and John and told them all about the wicked men who had tried to steal him away from them, then demanded to know what they were going to do about it. Already feeling beaten down by all the crazy roadwork they were doing, all the TV shows and one-night stands squeezed between recording dates, but sensing this was just how it went when you were a successful Top 10 band, when your dreams were actually coming true, even as the nightmares began to unfold, Ray and Robby and John had not seriously considered firing their managers. Their grumbles were the same complaints of any hardworking band in America in 1967. This, though, amounted to treachery, as they saw it. Something would have to be done, and soon. But there was a contract. They knew they wouldn’t be able to just walk away from that. So they turned to their other father figure, Jac Holzman.
He recalls, “When Robby came to me one night in the studio and said, ‘Can we get an advance against $50,000?’ I said, ‘Of course you can. Do you wanna tell me what it’s for?’ He said, ‘We have to pay off Bonafede and Dann.’ And I said, ‘Come by in the morning, and I’ll have the check ready for you.’ ” As he put it in his book, “I never wrote a check with greater pleasure.” The Doors were now crucial to Elektra’s long-term prospects, “a band that could make a string of great albums.” Removing B&D would make things immeasurably simpler for Jac to make that dream a reality. It would not be straightforward, and the Doors would have to pay and pay again for the privilege of reneging on a deal they had been only too delighted to sign when they were penniless and unknown. And a suitable replacement would have to be found, one who could manage but not lead, could work with Jim but not get in his way. Could keep the other band members happy but do as he was told. The sort of manager that simply did not exist. Nevertheless, one would have to be found. Or made.
In the meantime, the last few weeks of the year were taken up by a handful of gigs, all in California, and a general celebration not of the lizard but of the astonishing success the Doors had enjoyed in their inaugural year as a professional recording group. Ray, in particular, saw this moment as an auspicious one and married Dorothy Fujikawa four days before Christmas Day at L.A.’s city hall. It was a ceremony typical of Ray’s charmingly conflicted thinking. Like Jim, Ray liked to see himself as more than just a high-profile player in a pop group. He was an artist, an outrider of the Aquarian Age. What did such petty rules as held back the lowing herd mean to one such as him? Why, nothing! At the same time, his love for Dorothy, his impending tax bills, and his burning desire to “get it made legal” made him yearn for marriage to his college sweetheart. At the same time, as he later wrote in Light My Fire, “We didn’t want to do a traditional wedding with formality and whiteness of the bride.” Nor did they feel like standing on the beach or up in the hills or indeed doing anything where many guests were invited and big words were said followed by a forced revelry.
So instead they simply booked a lunchtime slot at city hall and invited Jim and Pamela along as best man and maid of honor. Jim and Pam were “a fine couple,” wrote Ray. “And I really needed Jim’s support in this extreme moment of truth.” Afterward they all went out for lunch at a nearby Mexican joint and drank margaritas, por favor. The following night, a Friday, the Doors played the first of two shows with the Grateful Dead at the four-thousand-seat Shrine Exposition Hall in downtown L.A. Only two thousand people showed up, but the band made up for that by putting on—whisper it—something very closely resembling a true home-coming show. Even Jim was on his best-worst behavior. Halfway through the show Ray brought Dorothy onto the stage and Jim introduced them as “Mr. and Mrs. Ray Manzarek!” The couple kissed and the audience whistled and applauded. The following night, halfway through the show, the cops invaded the stage—not again!—and shut down the show. The fault this time was not Jim’s but had to do with various city ordinances the promoters had not complied with. At least, that’s what the cops said. Ray felt it was more to do with the law taking “the opportunity to hassle the hippies.”
One of the final Doors shows of 1967, however, ended on a more surreal note. Having recorded blistering performances of both “Light My Fire” and “Moonlight Drive” live for The Jonathan Winters Show on Christmas Eve, the Doors interrupted their second of three shows at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on December 28, in order to wheel a TV set onstage so they could watch themselves. They had been halfway through “Back Door Man” when the Winters show started. They simply stopped playing, downing tools, as it were, and walked over to the side of the stage the set was on and gazed at themselves on TV.
Ray Manzarek laughed when I reminded him of it years later. “Yeah, we had the audience watching us, while we watched us—onstage and on TV.” When it was finished Ray simply walked over and switched the TV off, went back to his keyboards, and counted them all in again.