The year 1969 was supposed to be when the Doors became more than just the “American Rolling Stones.” This was to be the year they finally caught up with the Beatles. Instead, 1969 would become the Doors’ annus horribilis. The year the whole shithouse went up in flames, as Jim would memorably put it. The start of a really bad trip …
Despite the ragged end to 1968, with recording on The Soft Parade still groaning fitfully on, and relations between Jim and the other three Doors similarly stalled, the first single from the album, “Touch Me,” raced into the US Top 10, peaking at No. 3. It would be the last time any Doors single went Top 10 in the United States, but nobody knew that yet, of course. Instead, despite the tangles and confusions, the resentments and short fuses, the band seemed set for another all-conquering year, at least in terms of chart success and ticket sales.
The New Year got off to a flying start with their first headline appearance at New York’s Madison Square Garden on January 24. All twenty thousand tickets had sold out in advance. It was hard to imagine a more auspicious start to the coming year. As they had at a pre-Christmas show at the L.A. Forum, the band also featured a bass guitarist onstage with them, Harvey Brooks, twenty-four years old and a tasteful player schooled in jazz but lately the bassist of choice for everyone from Bob Dylan—whose Highway 61 Revisited album and consequent single, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Brooks had played on—to Mama Cass Elliot and the Electric Flag. Brooks had been brought in by Paul Rothchild to add oomph to the sessions for The Soft Parade and had been hired to give the Doors’ big showcase concert at the Garden added luster. There was also a mini-orchestra onstage for the night.
The Forum show, though, had been a downer, the crowd bored by the selections the band chose to play from The Soft Parade—a soporific “Tell All the People,” a righteous “Wild Child,” which somehow failed to ignite, a rousing “Touch Me,” their latest hit—the teenagers who made up the majority of the eighteen-thousand-strong crowd calling out repeatedly for “Light My Fire,” until the band finally gave in and did it for them, then had to endure the crowd shouting for them to play it again. An exasperated but defiant Jim finally called the band to a premature halt, then crouched down and asked the kids in the front rows what it was they really wanted. When they came back with “Light My Fire”—again!—he stood and yelled, “Is everybody in?”—the rest of the band exchanged glances, fearing the worst—followed by, even louder into the mike, “Let the ceremony begin!” He then, rather magnificently, if wincingly painfully for the band, brought the show to a close by reciting the whole twenty-minute “Celebration of the Lizard” set piece without any musical support from the band, changing the words as he went along to whatever came to his angry, fevered mind. Ray, Robby, and John left the stage before he ended, the crowd eventually no longer heckling or even laughing but simply stunned into silence. There was no encore. Watching from the side was Pam, with Jim’s younger brother, Andy. For once not even know-it-all Pam knew how to describe what had just happened.
The Garden in New York, however, would be an event of an entirely different character. Even Jim couldn’t fail to be impressed by the grandeur of his surroundings, and the band heaved a collective sigh of relief as he appeared focused and completely into the whole thing, throwing his leather jacket into the crowd, then laughing and joking with them. Jiving on a whole new set of lyrics over the intro to “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Fat cats! Dead rats! Suckin’ on a soldier’s sperm … Crap, that’s crap!” Only he wasn’t being mean and twisted, he was being playful. “You are life!” he announced grandly at one point, addressing one half of the arena. “You are death!” he told the other side with a devilish grin. Then without skipping a beat, he told them all as one, “I straddle the fence—and my balls hurt!”
The only dicey moment occurred during the “execution” in “The Unknown Soldier,” when Jim hurled himself to the ground so hard and with such a loud bang that John Densmore thought he’d actually knocked himself out. “I stood up from my seat and looked down at him over the drums. He didn’t move,” John recalled in his memoir. “The audience was so stunned it didn’t know whether to keep quiet or applaud …”
There was a party after the show over at the swish Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, where Jim had his own suite, having arrived a few days earlier with yet another old UCLA chum, Alain Ronay. Word came back in the early hours that gate receipts for the Garden show had topped $125,000, almost $1 million in today’s terms, with the Doors walking away with a profit of more than $50,000 (around $350,000), making them one of the highest-paid acts in the business. Jim toasted the band’s success with vintage champagne and high-grade coke, followed by the more serious business of some exquisitely ancient single-malt whiskey, which made him overtalkative for once and friends suddenly with the whole world, chain-smoking and getting down with the heavy Big Apple scenesters.
The following afternoon, after he came to, Jim played host in his suite to an attractive red-haired young woman named Patricia Kennealy, then the twenty-two-year-old editor-in-chief of Jazz & Pop magazine. Jim had agreed to be interviewed by the striking young woman from Brooklyn while the rest of the band took off for a photo session. Jim was growing a beard and had had enough of simpering for music magazine photographers. Besides, this chick from Jazz & Pop, whom he had been introduced to briefly the night before, after the Garden show, there was something about her …
Recalling the meeting in her enthralling 1992 memoir, Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison, Kennealy writes, “He is bigger than I had thought, taller too, dressed in last night’s concert clothes of unbleached white linen peasant shirt, black jeans and black leather boots. His brown hair is a little lighter than it looks onstage or in photographs, a deep rich brown with no red in it, shoulder-length and shaggy. The eyes are blue, and there is a depth in them, none of that shallow empty washed look blue eyes can so often have. The voice is soft, the smile frequent and charming, the grin devastating.”
Jim, normally so bored giving interviews now, became drawn into the conversation, which eventually went on for more than two hours. But then this was no normal Q&A with some chick from a pop zine. Jim found himself discussing mysticism, shamanism, mythology, music, literature, ancient Celtic arts. … As Patricia got up to leave, Jim touched her arm and asked, “Who are you?” Patricia told Jim who she was. And he immediately suggested they stay in touch, meet up again soon, very soon. It would be the start of the last meaningful relationship with a woman Jim Morrison would ever have. And it was as if they both knew it.
Back in L.A. in February, it was another frustrating month in the studio. As an antidote to the suffocating atmosphere engendered by Rothchild’s preoccupation with his intricately layered production of strings and horns, the band got drunk in a Mexican restaurant one evening, went back into the studio that night, and began jamming on easy-to-remember numbers like “Love Me Tender” and “Mystery Train” by Elvis, and a long, rambling, improvised jam that quickly evolved into a Jim rant about “the death of rock ’n’ roll.” This had become a recurring theme for Jim over the preceding weeks; he told one interviewer that he felt the band might soon “retire to an island … to get back its vitality.” Now, with the band also letting off steam, jamming away on an endless boogie, Jim growling and scatting over the top, their feelings were laid bare. “I got a few things on my chest, I gotta get them off. Now listen, listen … I don’t wanna hear no talk about no revolution … the only thing I’m interested in, I wanna have a good time … let’s roll!”
It was meant to be a fun track, a laugh for all concerned; in fact it was one of the most depressing tracks the band would ever record. Like being forced to spend the night on a park bench with a talkative drunk. When Paul Rothchild sat through the forty-five-minute tape the next morning he “accidentally” erased all but the first fifteen minutes or so. Suitably discouraged, the band never mentioned it again, though Jim would occasionally tell reporters about it, qualifying his words by adding how he doubted anyone would ever hear it. (The truncated tape eventually resurfaced on one of the many Doors reissues and box sets in the 1990s, titled “Rock Is Dead.”)
Jim now seemed to carry that fatalism with him wherever he went. In his book, Jac Holzman recalls the stories that would come back to him. Jim now had his own corner booth at the Whisky, so there would be no one at his back, and the girls would come and fawn over him. Elmer Valentine, the Whisky’s manager, would make a fuss, all that business of three years before about firing the Doors conveniently forgotten. Then once Jim was drunk enough he’d be standing up again, yelling about “fucking niggers.” The chicks would coo into his ear, try and stroke him down, but he would stand up and pour beer over the girls’ heads. Then come on all sad and sorry afterward.
At the Whisky Jim once again crossed paths with Pamela Des Barres—now making it herself as one of Frank Zappa’s all-girl group, the GTOs, originally known self-mockingly as the Laurel Canyon Ballet Company until the night they turned up at Zappa’s hill cabin naked except for bibs and giant diapers, their hair up in pigtails and all sucking lollipops. A delighted Frank insisted they dance onstage with the Mothers of Invention that night—and that they change their name to the GTOs. GTO stood for many things: Girls Together Outrageously, Girls Together Only, Girls Together Occasionally, Girls Together Often, and any number of similar phrases. “The GTOs would get dressed up every night to go dancing, ’cause there was safety in numbers,” says Gail Zappa. “They wore these wild outfits [and] they would also get in the Whisky free so they could dance. ’Cause for a while, they were the entertainment …” There were Miss Pamela, Miss Christine, Miss Cinderella, Miss Mercy, and Miss Lucy (plus, at different intervals, Miss Sandra and/or Sparky). Having proved themselves by appearing onstage at several Mothers of Invention shows as dancers and/or backing vocalists, in November 1968 Zappa put them on a weekly retainer of thirty-five dollars each. As Alice Cooper recalls, “People just got off on them. They were a trip …” Not Jim, as Pamela now recalls. “One night we were all at the Whisky—me and the GTOs—and Jim wandered in.” He’d recently let his beard grow, seemed less bothered by how cool his clothes were—or weren’t—and appeared far from the chiseled rock god he’d appeared to be on TV some weeks before, promoting “Touch Me.” By now, says Pamela, Jim “basically lived there [at the Whisky]. And by this point he’d become a terrible alcoholic. It was not so much drugs with him, it was alcohol. Jim just came and sat with us. He would sit with whoever was there whom he’d recognize. He was blotto, you know? Just drunk. He sat there with us, and we were all there hanging out, and all of a sudden he just hauled off and threw a drink in Miss Lucy’s face. He just picked it up and threw it right in her face. She went, ‘Rude!’ She was very upset and outspoken, and then he hauled off and slapped me across the face. Really hard, for no reason!”
Pamela goes out of her way, though, to try and explain the context of Morrison’s appalling behavior. “But at the same time, his mystique was growing, and […] I almost enjoyed it, because it was such an anomaly and such a weird thing, and such a trip. I was offended at the time, but later I went, ‘Wow, that was amazing. That was a really interesting moment.’ ” Or as Danny Fields puts it, “You’d be surprised at how many rock ’n’ roll husbands have punched their wives in the face.” Pamela Des Barres was not Jim’s wife, though, merely a supportive friend. Maybe so, says Danny, but “one of his weapons was to turn on people. To bring you in, then push you out over the cliff.”
Jim’s bad behavior became such a feature of nights at the Whisky, suggests Des Barres, that it was almost expected. “At first, when the Doors were coming up, and Jim was a gorgeous god, he was treated with deference and love and respect, and then the local people who got used to him being around, he was just like all of us, hanging around. Then he got more and more drunk and destructive.”
The crowd became inured to his spoiling things. “He would climb up onstage with whoever was up there and interrupt their set and grab their microphones and pull his pants down and all those things that he did.” She says Mario, the owner, would “get on the mike and say, ‘Jim, get off the stage.’ ” When Jim ignored him, Mario would repeat the command. “ ‘Jim, if you don’t get off the stage, we’re going to have to shut down the sound.’ But he wouldn’t get off. So he said, ‘Jim, you better get off. We’re gonna turn off the lights.’ And he [would] finally turn off the lights in the club to get him offstage and then carry and drag him off.”
Would he fully expose himself? I asked.
“Yeah,” said Pamela.
At the Whisky?
“Yeah. He would do that. And he shoved the microphone down in his trousers, and expected the poor guy to sing through it.” She burst out laughing. Then quieted down again as she recalled the guy she first knew, compared to the drunken loser he became.
“He was funny and he was deep, and things had meaning for him. He cared. But then I watched the dissolution of this person. I watched him fall apart through the years. It was very gradual, but I remember one night coming out of the Whisky and he was trying to sleep in the gutter in front of the Whisky. He was curled up and he was trying to sleep in the gutter. He didn’t even know where he was. People were stepping over him. That’s what had happened to his mystique …”
Another blast from Jim’s past, Mary Werbelow, also recalled seeing Jim around this time. Speaking with her hometown newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, in 2005, she claimed that she and Jim had maintained contact, albeit in limited form, since their breakup. “I’d see him when he really needed to talk to someone,” she said. The last time had been during the making of The Soft Parade, when Mary recalls Jim telling her, “The first three albums are about you. Didn’t you know that?” To spare his feelings, clearly raw, she didn’t explain that she’d never really listened to any of his records. She had heard the Doors on the radio, but she had never been to one of their shows, nor actually bought an album. She said he once even asked her to marry him, but she had refused. “It was heartbreaking. I knew I wanted to be with him, but I couldn’t.” Wise Mary always did know better than any of Jim’s other girls. By early 1969, Mary had left L.A. for India, where she planned to study meditation. Jim never saw her again.
As this was all happening, a new Doors single was released. The second track to be lifted from the Soft Parade session, “Wishful Sinful,” became their first not to make the US Top 40 since “Break on Through (To the Other Side)” two years before. A whimsical, pretty pop ditty, it sounds like it was recorded in 1964, compared to the new hard rock that was sweeping the country; on heavy radio rotation at the time were “Crosstown Traffic” by Jimi Hendrix, “Rock Me/Jupiter Child” by Steppenwolf, “Pinball Wizard” by the Who, and, newest and most scintillating of all to young rock fans, any track you liked—they were playing them all—from the just-released Led Zeppelin album. Zeppelin had played a week of shows at the Whisky in January, and Jim had been there for at least one of them. Friends say he was put off by what he saw as the unnecessarily histrionic vocals of Robert Plant and was unimpressed by Jimmy Page as a guitarist, but this sounds suspiciously like sour grapes. Zeppelin was on its way to replacing the Doors as the coolest band in America. Jim especially hated it when chicks like his old friend Pamela Des Barres began raving about them. Even more so when it became clear she was now Page’s numero uno girlfriend whenever Zep was in town.
Jim didn’t care, he said. Instead he and his ever-faithful entourage were now more in thrall to a new show that had recently opened at the Bovard Auditorium at USC—the latest work from the New York–based Living Theatre, a renowned experimental theater company founded in 1947 by the then-twenty-one-year-old German-born actress, writer, and director Judith Malina with her partner, Julian Beck, an American poet and painter, aged twenty-three. The abiding philosophy of the company was based, it claimed, on the work of the French playwright Antonin Artaud, in particular on what he called “the Theatre of Cruelty”—specializing in staging what these days would be termed multimedia productions, which work to dismantle the “fourth wall” between the actors and the audience. Jim had read about and become entranced by them when he learned of their pioneering productions throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, in which they adapted works by favorite writers of his: Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and William Carlos Williams.
Having been arrested several times for “indecent exposure,” the outlaw troupe had spent the past few years mainly touring Europe, where they became the darlings of such equally self-absorbed countercultural “icons” as Keith Richards, Lindsay Kemp, and Salvador Dalí. Eventually, though, the novelty wore off, and in 1968 the Living Theatre returned to the United States and began staging what was to become its most famous production, simply titled Paradise. A semi-improvisational show, as always built around full audience participation, it included a centerpiece in which several actors of both sexes recited a long list of current social taboos, most especially public nudity, at the same time taking off their clothes and moving among the audience, who may or may not have felt like doing the same. Because of this, the show had attracted equal measures of critical acclaim and public notoriety in Europe. None of which deterred either Malina or Beck from continuing to tour the show now they had arrived back in the States. The purpose of the play, Beck had explained in an informal address at Yale University some weeks before, was to uphold the idea of, as he put it, “that madman who inspires us all, Artaud,” and of “the non-civilized man.” He added, “Our work had always striven to stress the sacredness of life.”
Jim certainly thought so, and became so enchanted by the play he bought tickets for himself and all his friends—including Tom Baker and Michael McClure, who he felt would be most impressed by the experience—to go several nights in a row, throughout February, making sure he was in the front row for every performance he could get to. Jim came away each night determined to bring some of this “reality” into his own performances with the Doors. As Jac Holzman puts it, “When he went to the Living Theatre he was seeking.” Now he wanted to “try it out onstage.” The idea seemed a little far out but, hey, man, this was the Doors, right? They were supposed to be far out … right?
But as Ray Manzarek would describe it to me, almost poetically, more than forty years later, “What played in L.A. just didn’t fly in Florida.” And without any of them knowing, least of all Jim, who was so blind drunk he could barely remember the next day what had happened the day before, when the singer tried to apply some of his recently acquired ideas to the Doors’ own “more challenging” performances, this time it really would be the end …
The band’s biggest, most lucrative tour yet was scheduled to begin on March 1, in Coconut Grove, Miami, at the Dinner Key Auditorium, a converted seaplane hangar with low wooden rafters and a wobbly wooden stage. The band had originally been booked to play the Convention Hall, but the local promoters—two brothers named Ken and Jim Collier, of Three Image Productions, who also owned a karate club—had made the band a better offer to play the Auditorium: a guarantee, on the basis that it held more people, of $25,000, against a maximum possible turnover of $42,000.
“The place had not been used for years for anything much,” recalls Vince Treanor. “It was old, dirty, and hot.” What nobody knew until they had arrived and begun setting up the equipment was that Three Image had taken out all the seats, thereby swelling the seven thousand capacity to a crowd almost twice that size, with hundreds more finding ways of sneaking into the rickety old building undetected. It was a ferociously hot, swelteringly humid afternoon, and tempers ran high as Siddons argued with the Collier brothers over the arrangements.
Calculating that the Three Image cut for the show would now amount to more than $75,000, Bill insisted on renegotiating the band’s own percentage. But, according to Vince, “the brothers laughed at him.” In the end, Bill told them the band would not play at all, that he was canceling the show for breach of contract. “However, this did not seem to bother the brothers too much,” says Treanor. They asked Bill where the equipment was. “Bill replied, ‘At the Auditorium, I assume.’ The reply was frightening. ‘No, it is in our truck. If you ever want to see it again, you will play.’ ”
Jim, meanwhile, was having his own problems just getting to the gig. He had intended to fly from L.A. to Miami with Pam, but they had had another huge bust-up on the way to the airport and Jim had ordered her to get the fuck away from him, telling the driver to take a now screaming, hysterical Pam home. By the time he got to the check-in desk he had missed his flight, so he went to the bar and began drinking, waiting for the next flight. Sweet-talking the pretty flight attendant into keeping the drinks coming on the plane, when it stopped at New Orleans he went into the bar there and promptly got even more drunk, causing him to miss his second plane of the day.
By the time Jim finally staggered into the venue, Siddons had, on the one hand, what Vince describes as a band “angry that Bill had been so foolish as to make a deal with a proven cheat,” and, on the other, a now heavily bearded, slovenly Jim Morrison, sporting a leather hat with a skull and crossbones on it, so clearly out of his gourd on whiskey and beer he could barely stand up straight. But it was too late to do anything about it now. The only option was to do the show and get the hell out of Dodge as fast as they could, they decided.
The moment they hit the stage, though, it was clear this was going to be one of those shows. The band stepped up into “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” but in a weird reprise of his improvised ranting on the then-unknown “Rock Is Dead,” Jim decided to treat everybody with his own unique way of saying hello. “Yeah!” he roared. “Now looky here! I ain’t talkin’ about no revolution. And I’m not talking about no demonstration. I’m talkin’ about having a good time. I’m talkin’ about having a good time this summer. Now, you all come out to L.A. You all get out there. We’re gonna lie down there in the sand and rub our toes in the ocean, and we’re gonna have a good time.”
The band, still vamping the intro behind him, was not yet alarmed, maybe this was Jim just revving up for one of those rare nights when he actually entertained the audience. Then Jim leaned into the mike and began jigging around. “Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you … ah, ah, ah … whew, whew, whew, whew …”
Finally he began to sing a recognizable verse and the band finished the song with a flourish. The audience, now over thirteen thousand strong, went crazy, or tried to, but most could barely move, they were squeezed in so tight; many just hollered and screamed. The band kicked into “Back Door Man” and Jim yelled, “Fuck! Louder! Come on, band, get it louder, come on! Yeah, baby! Louder! Yeah! Yeah!”
This time, though, the rambling broke the song in half, as Jim went into a verbal tailspin. “Yeah, hey! Yeah, hey! Suck me, baby. You gotta …” He began to howl like a wolf. “Hey softer, baby. Get it way down. Softer, sweetheart. Get it way down low. Soft, soft, soft, soft, soft. Sock it to me. Come on, softer. Hey, listen, I’m lonely! I need some love, you all. Come on. I need some good time lovin’, sweetheart. Love me! Come on. I can’t … I can’t take it without no good love. Love, I want some lova, lova, lova, lova, love me sweet. Come on. Ain’t nobody gonna love my ass! Come on!” At which point sections of the audience started to laugh.
The band tried to reestablish some gravitas by plowing into “Five to One,” but again Jim got so carried away he took things way too far, at the end of the second verse stopping to tell the audience, “You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ idiots! Lettin’ people tell you what you’re gonna do! Lettin’ people push you around!” There was some more laughter, but the mood quickly changed as it became clear the singer was not joking around. “How long do you think it’s gonna last?” Jim demanded. “How long are you gonna let it go on? How long are you gonna let ’em push you around? How long? Maybe you like it. Maybe you like being pushed around! Maybe you love it! Maybe you love gettin’ your face stuck in the shit! Come on! You love it, don’t ya! You love it! You’re all a bunch of slaves. Letting everybody push you around!” Now he was yelling at the top of his voice, taunting them. “What are you gonna do about it! What are you gonna do about it! What are you gonna do about it! What are you gonna do about it! What are you gonna do about it! What are you gonna do?”
The mood lifted slightly when in a prearranged stunt Jim’s pal Lewis Beech Marvin, heir to the Topanga supermarket family fortune, came onstage holding a live lamb, passing it gently to Jim while he made his speech about respecting animal rights and not killing and eating animals—the irony lost on the majority of the crowd, who were unaware of Jim’s predilection for eating meat of any variety. As Jim handed the lamb back to Lewis, he slurred into the mike, “I’d fuck her but she’s too young!”
The rest of the show continued in similarly chaotic fashion. When Jim asked for a cigarette hundreds arrived on the stage, thrown by the audience. When he refused to sing the hits the band tried improvising around him, on something that appeared to be called “Away in India”—though the band didn’t get it, a pained reference to Mary Werbelow’s recent departure. Other times he simply stood and rapped with the people in the crowd, as far as he could see them above the harsh stage lights, which bathed the whole arena in stark black and white hues. Then he gave them “Celebration of the Lizard,” the band struggling to bring any feeling to the occasion, angry and freaked out as they were by the whole fucked-up trip at this point.
After Jim finally acquiesced and counted the band in to “Light My Fire,” it looked like they might get away with this one after all, and Ray and Robby and John all exchanged relieved looks that seemed to say, “Only five more minutes, then we’re out of here.”
Then Jim got an even better idea. Recalling his recent drunken visits to the Living Theatre show, he invited the whole audience up onto the stage, yelling, “No limits! No laws! Come on, come on! Let’s do it!” Then he began to take his clothes off. “Take off your clothes,” Vince Treanor recalls Jim announcing. “Let’s see a little skin around here! Let’s get naked!” Standing out of range of the mike, he joked to kids in the front, asking if they wanted to see his cock.
“Vince, don’t let him take his pants off!” Ray yelled at Vince, who now ran up behind Jim. “When I got behind him I slipped my fingers through his belt loops and twisted them down,” Vince says now. “Now even if Jim tried to pull away, we were hooked together. I put my elbows on my hips and lifted. This pulled his pants up higher on his waist. So high that I think his voice went up a couple of octaves. I stayed that way for a long time.”
Meanwhile, however, large sections of the audience, now in a complete frenzy, began stripping off their clothes and hurling them around the auditorium. “How they got the clothes off I don’t know, because there was no room to move,” says Vince. “My guess is that of the thirteen thousand people in that room, probably eight thousand had absolutely nothing on at all. Many of the others, mostly boys, removed their shirts. Most of those retaining their clothing were girls.”
At which point the first policeman walked onstage, followed by the two Collier brothers, both of whom were now starting to panic too. “For some ridiculous reason, [Jim] grabbed the officer’s hat. The audience loved that. The cop was startled and began to put his hand up to ward off the gesture, but he was too slow. In one sweeping motion, Jim threw the hat into the crowd. The kids cheered even louder with that.”
Ken Collier, the older of the bothers, told Jim, “Someone’s going to get hurt!” Jim sneered, “We’re not leaving until everyone gets their rocks off!” But by now hundreds of kids had mounted a platform to the rear of the stage, which was starting to collapse, taking John and his kit with it. According to Vince, “It was at this point that one of the brothers walked up to Jim, who was standing at the mike stage center, and violently shoved him offstage into the crowd.”
The front of the stage began to falter too, from all the people trying to climb up on it. In desperation Vince and some of the crew tried holding the huge stage amplifiers in place, to prevent them from falling on the people below. “We wanted to lay them down on their back, but fortunately things didn’t get that far. I could see Jim heading for stairs and then go up. I didn’t see more as things were getting frantic with kids still trying to climb on the stage from both front and back.”
He yelled at the others, “Get off, the stage is collapsing!” They wasted no time doing what they were told, scrambling through the now-crowded stage, and got to the stairs as pandemonium broke out, followed by the policeman who had been foolish enough to join them on the stage. Out of breath and still roaring drunk in the dressing room afterward, a smiling Jim apologized profusely to the cop for throwing his hat, and the cop seemed happy to accept the apology. Out in the arena, Vince helped heap the discarded clothes into a pile he reckoned to be five feet high and at least eight feet wide. With Jim still burbling about the Living Theatre, and what a great art performance the show had been, the rest of the Doors were able to finally shrug it off. Soon they would all be on vacation in Jamaica for a few days, until the tour proper started a week later in Jacksonville.
Three days later Jim was sitting around on the beach smoking a joint the size of a banana when Bill Siddons called him with the news. The Dade County Sheriff’s Office had just issued a warrant for his arrest on four counts: lewd and lascivious behavior (a felony), indecent exposure (a misdemeanor), open profanity (misdemeanor), and public drunkenness (misdemeanor). Jim was dazed, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Was it the fucking joint, man? What did he say? Bill spelled it out. If guilty, Jim could be sentenced to five years’ hard labor. Meanwhile, all public performance permits for the Doors had been revoked. The rest of the tour was canceled.
The party was over.
All these years later, Ray insisted he was unrepentant about the Miami show, even though the fallout would eventually serve to crush the Doors. I asked how he had felt that night, seeing the energy Jim and the Doors were creating together get so completely out of control …
Ray said, “Yes, it did seem that way. It was never like that for us. We knew where it was going. We knew what was happening. There was no place it could go that we couldn’t control it. I mean, it’s not as if our music was out of control, or Jim was out of control. If Jim was out of control at all it was only because he was drunk. But the ideas he presented to the audience were terrifying. I think that’s what it was all about. And the intensity with which the musicians developed his ideas was terrifying! Because it wasn’t a good time. It wasn’t the happy Beatles. It just wasn’t. It wasn’t the Stones playing the blues and that sexy, magic Mick just prancing around the stage. It just wasn’t that. It was something else, something that we’d never experienced before. And it was like, what the fuck are these guys doing? And as you say, where is it going? Am I in the presence of insane people? Is everyone in this auditorium going to go insane? Well, yes! For an hour and a half to two hours, allow us to take you into a place of madness, a place of insanity, a place where Dionysus, that goddamn Greek god of passion, of madness and drunkenness, will preside over the evening’s presentation—and we will no longer be in control, none of us in this room. That was a Doors concert …”
Nevertheless, I said, this surely was something else. In Britain, members of the Beatles and the Stones had been arrested for possession of drugs. But the Doors were now getting arrested for what they did onstage. By police with guns, who would beat you with clubs, lock you up for years. “I get nervous,” I said, “just reading about that stuff, let alone experiencing it firsthand in 1969 …”
He laughed. “Well, thank you for your concern. We weren’t worried about that, though. The object of a Doors concert was, in essence, as Jim once said, ‘We perform a musical séance. Not to raise the dead, but to palliate the dead, to ease the pain and the suffering of the dead and the living.’ And in doing that, we dove into areas that were deeply, deeply Freudian, and psychologically deeply Jungian at the same time. So we were merging both Freud and Jung, which might seem impossible, but it happened onstage, and really upset the establishment. There was just something about the power in the music, and that insane sexuality of Jim Morrison, that drove the establishment right over the edge.”
Processed by years of selling the myth of Jim Morrison and the legend of the Doors to generations of younger media folk, Ray was on automatic pilot now, I could tell. Speaking to others who were there at the time, though, and were forced to suffer the long-drawn-out fallout from Miami, one gets a very different picture.
“Bedlam, just total craziness” is how Robby Krieger remembered it in an interview with Guitar World. “I remember Jim just rolling around in the midst of all those people and I was wondering if we would ever get out of there.” Even so, he says, none of them had any idea just how badly the whole thing would blow up over subsequent weeks and months. “No, hell no! OK, the concert was fucked up, and we didn’t finish, but nobody was angry, nobody asked for their money back. And the cops were friendly—they sat around drinking beers with us after the show. Nothing happened until a week later, when somebody decided to make a stink about it. Some politician decided to make their career at our expense. Then it fucked everything up. We couldn’t play anywhere for a year. The Hall Managers’ Association basically banned us.” As Bruce Botnick observed wryly, “The people weren’t coming for his poetry or anything like that [anymore]. They were coming for the event, and Jim in some respects was giving it to them. They came for chaos—we give you chaos!”
Overnight, the bookings stopped, with concert promoters across the country scared off by the threat of arrests and lawsuits and the destruction of venues and equipment. Of people’s lives. AM radio also stopped playing Doors records. In the more conservative Southern states, including Florida, Doors albums were even removed from shelves. Not everyone took it that seriously, of course. Rolling Stone had a lot of fun with the whole shebang, publishing a specially made-up WANTED poster of Jim and headlining their review of the Miami show as JIM’S ORGAN RECITAL.
It was left to Bill Siddons to try and make sense of the situation. At least, at ground level. He admits to being shocked, not really knowing what to do, except watch the ground quake under Jim’s feet.
“Yes, watching how Jim suffered because of the Miami incident and because, you know, his mission in life was to make you question your own values and standards and get to a higher place because of it. He was dragged down into the dirt because he was trying to provoke an audience to think beyond putting one foot in front of the other, and he was just dead drunk when he did it, and he fucked up. And the Deep South of our American culture crucified him for it. And it was very disheartening to Jim. It broke his spirit, because he was facing going to jail for years and years over an artistic expression.”
He sighs and continues. “Miami was the breaking point. I think Jim really reevaluated what the hell he was doing. Although they did continue working together for a couple more years, at least another year, that’s really what made him decide he was moving to Paris and focusing on screenwriting and being a writer and a poet, and the rock ’n’ roll madness was something he’d … he had … You know, for the first few years he was the master. He was the ringmaster. Then all of a sudden it was taken out of his hands and he was fighting for his life. And he just kind of went, ‘I can’t do that anymore. I don’t wanna do that anymore.’ ”
Or as Jac Holzman puts it, “Jim was now in another world, he had separated from the rest of us because he had to …”