An Excerpt from Roadhouse Blues: Morrison, the Doors, and the Death Days of the Sixties by award-winning cultural historian Bob Batchelor
In the aftermath of the horrific debacle that took place at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami on March 1, 1969, Jim Morrison and the Doors would never fully recover. 55 years later, we look back at the night and its oversized impact on music and cultural history. The band and its singer became public enemy #1. Below is an excerpt from Roadhouse Blues, winner of the IPA Book Award in Music by cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor —
“I’m angry at the Doors management team for letting him go onstage. He was drunk and they shouldn’t have let him out there…they wanted to make the money.”
— Robert Josefsberg, Co-counsel, Miami Defense Team
If the preceding few minutes could have been called chaotic, the next were a gates-of-hell rage. The singer pretended to expose himself several times, but it was all playacting. Ray, who had the closest view, explained: “That son of a bitch Jim Morrison had teased and taunted and cajoled that crowd into believing he had shown them his cock. Hell, he had hypnotized them…The lying dog Jim Morrison had conned them.”
With the sound of “Light My Fire” in the background, Jim didn’t stop. Now he wanted a riot and urged the crowd to rush the stage. The police and University of Miami football players guarding the stage were quickly confronted with wild-eyed teens who wanted to get to their hero. “Bodies kept hurtling and charging and flailing about,” Ray said. Jim was thrown from the stage and danced with the crowd like a shaman. The house lights came up and Manzarek stopped playing. John had already left the stage, and Robby wrapped his arms around his guitar as a way to protect it from the onrush.
Jim had lit the night on fire. You might suspect that Miami was a deliberate attempt by a very smart, very drunk man to sabotage or excise the part of himself he could no longer stand. He later told Circus magazine, “I think I was just fed up with the image that had been created around me.” Although he cooperated with its creation and—it can be argued—orchestrated its design, he complained, “It just got too much for me to really stomach…I just put an end to it in one glorious evening.” This retrospection, though, happened after he’d sat through a lengthy trial and had a year and a half to think about why he did it.
“It just got too much for me to really stomach…I just put an end to it in one glorious evening.”
While the events leading up to Miami put him on a downward trajectory, it is hard to imagine that Jim realized he’d just lit the fuse that would ultimately destroy him.
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Larry Mahoney, a Miami Herald journalist, reviewed the show on March 3, reporting that Jim had not incited a riot and afterward, backstage, “nobody tried to arrest Morrison.” He interviewed Charles Crocker, a Miami police officer, who said nothing of the alleged indecent exposure and instead remarked, “That guy did his damnedest to start a riot and the kids didn’t move.” Mahoney did claim, however, that “Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of his audience, screamed obscenities, and exposed himself.” Yet none of the thirty-one police officers moved to arrest the singer.
Three days later, on March 6, Mahoney reported that six warrants had been issued, including one for a felony—lewd and lascivious behavior in public by “exposing his genitals and by simulating masturbation and oral copulation.” If given the maximum sentence for the charges, Morrison would serve three and a half years in jail. State Attorney Richard E. Gerstein announced that Florida would pursue “the maximum sentence on each count to run consecutively.”
The public outcry was huge. For the Doors, the national tour that would finally deliver them to the masses in style—and bring in huge box-office receipts—was cancelled when venue owners and operators caved to the pressure from local politicians, parents’ groups, and decency activists. In effect, they were banned. Or as one rock historian explained: “The Doors were show business poison.”
On April 3, Morrison turned himself into the FBI at its LA office. He was released after posting a five-thousand-dollar bond. With Jim’s freedom at stake, the media took a curious stance: They reported on the reaction against him but also painted the rock star alternately as a caricature of the gluttonous, idiot celebrity and the scourge of 1960s America. As the negativity spread, radio stations pulled Doors songs from the air and parents’ groups spurred teens to hold “burn the Doors” album events to show their disgust.
While the Doors became public enemy number one after Morrison’s arrest, it must be remembered that at the same time, nearly twelve thousand American military personnel had been killed in Vietnam. From a contemporary vantage point, the Miami incident seems like an overt case of pinning an era on an incident that really didn’t have very large stakes. For example, in the months after Miami, sex, drugs, and nudity were given a starring role in the film Midnight Cowboy. Later in 1969, Easy Rider contained many counterculture ideas, including the use of psychedelics. In light of Morrison’s arrest and the ban on the Doors, it seemed to be that America had divided itself into two factions: pro- and anti-hippie. The two couldn’t be reconciled. Conservative forces in Miami realized they could use the fact that there were young teens in the Dinner Key Auditorium audience to strike out against the counterculture by delivering justice against the Lizard King.
“In light of Morrison’s arrest and the ban on the Doors, it seemed to be that America had divided itself into two factions: pro- and anti-hippie. The two couldn’t be reconciled.”
After Miami, neither Jim nor his bandmates would ever be the same again. The fissures in their relationship and in Jim’s booze-fueled explorations of his own psyche were brought to the surface. The specter of jail time became ever-present, which choked the air from Morrison’s life and upended his relationships.
Robby said, “Jim’s drinking had ramped up gradually since the beginning of the band, but in the wake of the Miami incident it was isolating him from the rest of us and making it hard to be his bandmate, let alone his friend.” Although they had a difficult time expressing it to Jim in that moment, given that his actions got them banned and had cut off their income, the three bandmates were sympathetic. “We felt bad for him. We weren’t happy about being pulled off the radio or having our shows canceled, but after the initial wave of bad press, the whole thing actually made us look cool, and it was easy enough to bounce back,” the guitarist explained. There was life after Miami—as long as Jim didn’t end up in jail.
Still, a band is a business—kind of like a mini-corporation—and there were many bills to pay and people to support. The Soft Parade reportedly cost about eighty-six thousand dollars to produce (about seven-hundred thousand dollars today). After the fact, the series of cancelled gigs later cost the band at least a million dollars and possibly much more. The Doors organization also faced lawsuits as promoters attempted to recoup the money they had spent publicizing upcoming shows. Fighting those legal battles cost the band in attorney fees, in addition to the fees for Jim’s impending defense.
Attorney Robert Josefsberg, who would serve as co-counsel in Jim’s defense, offered a different perspective, “I’m angry at the Doors management team for letting him go onstage. He was drunk and they shouldn’t have let him out there.” They could have kept Morrison from performing, but, as the lawyer contended, “they wanted to make the money.” From this perspective, the need to keep the Doors machine running almost destroyed everything they had created. And it ultimately played a role in Jim’s death.
Read Roadhouse Blues for the story of Jim Morrison and the Doors! Published by Hamilcar Publications