27: Jim Morrison by Salewicz Chris

Author:Salewicz, Chris [Salewicz, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

But does ‘When the Music’s Over’ possess the majesty of the impossible-to-emulate ‘The End’? Perhaps not.

On Sunday 27 August 1967, The Doors had played at the Cheetah, a venue on Santa Monica Pier. Before an audience of 2,000, Jim Morrison had deliberately fallen off the stage, to be caught by the audience. Towards the end of 1967 in live shows he was moving much more spontaneously on stage as he performed his visionary, shamanic act. At the beginning of December, however, a far darker force moved into his life.

On Saturday 9 December 1967 The Doors played in New Haven, Connecticut. While making out with an 18-year-old local girl in a backstage shower stall prior to the show, Jim was interrupted by a cop who opened the door. Seeming to believe the singer was a member of the audience who had somehow snuck backstage, the officer ordered him to leave the room. As he would, Jim told the cop to fuck off. For this response, the policeman sprayed mace into the singer’s eyes. In pain, Jim Morrison ran screaming to the group’s dressing room. Bill Siddons then emerged to inform the cop of his error. The officer apologized, although such regret begs the question as to why he would have felt entitled to mace a member of the audience? As a metaphor for a jagged schism in an egregiously conflicted nation, in which lines were distinctly being drawn between ‘straight’ and ‘non-straight’ society, it is compelling. (Might one also not muse on Jim Morrison’s awkward relationships with uniformed authority? Did such figures in any way trigger nerves that reminded him of his naval officer father?)?

As though in some absurdist cartoon of precisely how not to behave at such events, local police hovered on the edge of the New Haven stage. During The Doors’ last number, ‘Back Door Man’, Jim Morrison – who had performed the concert with stinging red eyes – told the audience the tale of what had happened backstage prior to the show. Now he taunted the police. Thrusting his mike under the nose of one of them, he commanded: ‘Say your thing, man!’ Almost immediately, the house lights were switched on. Police stepped forward, arresting the singer and dragging him offstage – the first time this had ever happened to an artist in the United States. The hall erupted with fury. In the ensuing riot by the audience, many fans were also arrested.

Taken to a local police station, Jim Morrison was charged with ‘breach of the peace, resisting arrest and indecent or immoral exhibition’. Further arrests were made as angry protesters gathered outside the police station. At two in the morning, The Doors singer was released from the station on a bail bond of $1,500. A trial was set for the next month.

They had started the year on the high of the release of their first album, The Doors. By the end of 1967, The Doors’ singer seemed briefly to have become Public Enemy Number One.

After the New

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