The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
THE STORY BEHIND...
To begin our new series about pop culture’s most mythologised moments, Ian Winwood revisits the Doors gig that ended in scandal
Concert Halls Management Association duly blacklisted the band, and their hits were dropped from radio playlists.
Morrison’s trial, which began at the Metro Dade Justice Building in Miami on August 17 1970, was a circus. On the first day, the six-person jury learned that the prosecution witness who had signed the original complaint against Morrison also happened to be an employee of the prosecutor’s office. Depending who you listened to, presiding judge Murray Goodman was either an idiot or a crook; this latter charge was borne out by Morrison’s attorney, Max Fink, who claimed that Goodman had already told him that the case could be made to disappear for the price of $5,000 (Fink declined the offer). And, when not working to prove the defendant’s guilt, hipster prosecutor Terrance McWilliams could be overheard asking Morrison to sign his Doors albums.
The notion that justice in Dade County was not so much blind as dumb was further reinforced when the court declined to accept as evidence more than 100 professional photographs from the front row at the Dinner Key Auditorium, covering the duration of the Doors show, none of which showed evidence of indecent exposure. Despite this, towards the end of the trial the judge took the irregular step of instructing the jury to find the defendant guilty; while the jurors were deliberating, he then said in open court that there was no real evidence.
On September 20 1970, Jim Morrison was found guilty of misdemeanour counts of indecent exposure and “open profanity”. Described by Judge Goodman as “a person graced with talent”, he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $500. Freed on a $50,000 bond, the singer died of heart failure the following year before the appeal could come to court. On December 8 2010, Florida governor Charlie Crist and the state clemency board unanimously signed a complete posthumous pardon.
Irealised recently that I had, to the best of my memory, read every Shakespeare play except one: Coriolanus. So I decided to rectify the matter. The play is classified as a tragedy, but on my first reading I can see why the critic A C Bradley didn’t consider it on a par with the quartet of great tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. The character of Coriolanus – or Caius Marcius, as he is when the play opens – is a pretty black-and-white sort of chap in the way that Hamlet and his peers are not. He is not given to internal monologue or soliloquy, so we learn very little about him. The play is more about action than introspection; there is, it feels, one fight after another, and much tomato ketchup would be required in the average production.
The plot is this: Caius Marcius helps lead Rome (in the era after the Tarquins, in the early 5th century BC) in a stunning victory over the Volscians. Marcius is a ruthless soldier who manifestly likes fighting; and his part in the victory was to besiege the city of Coroli and overrun it. For this, his general accords him the name of Coriolanus; but worse – from his point of view – his mother, the splendidly named Volumnia, urges him to translate his military fame into a political career and stand for the post of consul. His head turns and he does; but this man of action has even less political talent than some of our present rulers, and things rapidly turn ugly.
Coriolanus’s main problem is his unconcealed contempt for the plebs and their tribunes, or representatives, whom he berates for their inadequacies in not having fought for Rome. Inevitably, the tribunes take against him and oppose him – something his arrogant nature will not tolerate. He denounces them in terms that go too far, and he is expelled from Rome.
Desiring vengeance, he allies with his former enemies to fight Rome; but his mother, horrified by his behaviour, prevails upon him to remain loyal to Rome, and he reverts to type. This persuades the Volscians that he is a traitor, and they kill him in a remarkably brutal way – effectively carving him to pieces with their swords. Given the
‘I knew Jim never did it. What happened in Miami was a mass hallucination’
apparent ease with which he has changed sides, his end becomes inevitable. Precisely because he lacks the psychological depths of other tragic figures, life is simple for him: those men who are not soldiers are fundamentally pointless; those who are not for him are against him; and the idea that anyone who has not prevailed by force of arms should have a say in the running of Rome is inimical to him.
The story, thus, is straightforward, but Coriolanus never seizes our imagination or provokes our interest in the way of some of his fellow tragic heroes. Indeed, one could have a debate on whether Coriolanus is a tragic figure at all, or simply another brave, but arrogant, twerp who gets what was coming to him.
Shakespeare pillaged Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch for the story, as he did for Antony and Cleopatra shortly afterwards. The play, according to Shakespeare scholars, was probably written and first performed in either 1608 or 1609. It is not just soliloquies that are lacking; at times it is hard to believe that this play is by the same hand as the other tragedies. The sparkling imagery that characterises so much of the language of the rest of the canon is largely absent from this play, and little of the verse is memorable. It lacks the bite of the 1590s plays, when there was a political, propagandistic element to emphasise the legitimacy of the Tudors and their appointed successors. After the effortless transition of rule from Tudors to Stuarts in 1603, the motivation behind the Shakespeare brand changed. By the time of Coriolanus, his serious plays had become mainly about storytelling.
However, there are many lessons to be found in the play, which perhaps may be more relevant today than they were more than 400 years ago. It is a warning to military men that their skills do not always translate to politics; and that those who seek to thwart the will of the people, or to rule in contempt of them, seldom have happy endings. And there are also lessons about the dangers of betrayal, and how the betrayed can respond.
Even in the less glittering works, Shakespeare, by his concern with the fundamentals of human nature, always has something important to tell us.