Did he or didn’t he?
Fifty years later, nobody can really say whether Jim Morrison exposed himself
On March 1, 1969, in Miami, Fla., Jim Morrison could be seen performing any number of acts that sensible citizens of a Southern-state city would have found distasteful.
Onstage, while clutching a live lamb to his chest, the Doors frontman announced: “I’d f--- her, but she’s too young.” He also called the audience of 10,000 “a bunch of f--ing idiots.” Then, during the song Love Me Two Times, he performed a mock sex act on guitarist Robby Krieger’s Gibson SG.
But did Morrison really then expose himself indecently, the offence of which he was accused in the next morning ’s Miami Herald, and for which he was convicted the following year? In the decades following the singer’s death in Paris in 1971, this supposed transgression has played no small part in burnishing Morrison’s popular mythology, yet chances are it never happened.
The Doors’ engagement that evening at the Dinner Key Auditorium, Miami — a rather grand name for what was in fact a glorified airplane hangar that reeked of damp and filth — was their first concert in Florida, the state where Morrison was born in 1943. But in the hours before show time, the band was given cause for hesitation.
Despite the promise of a $25,000 fee, the four members of the Doors — Morrison, Krieger, keyboardist Ray Manzarek and drummer John Densmore — took one look at the decrepit venue, later described by their booking agent as the worst he had ever seen, and threatened to cancel their performance. In turn, the event’s local promoter promised to impound the band’s equipment should they do so. Good ol’ boy heavies reeking of violence made sure the musicians understood that this threat was far from idle.
By the time Morrison took the stage, he was in a state of advanced inebriation and, during Light My Fire, he appeared to be about to drop his trousers. Directing his voice to the wings, Manzarek shouted to the Doors’ tour manager, Vince Treanor, “Vince! Vince! Don’t let him do it!” Rushing onstage, Treanor — partman, part-chastity belt — placed his thumbs in the belt loops of Morrison’s leather trousers. He was joined by the promoter, Ken Collier, who warned the singer: “Someone’s gonna get hurt.” Morrison was unfazed. “We’re not leaving until everyone gets their rocks off,” he replied.
By now, members of the audience had started to mob the performers and the stage began to creak beneath the strain. Krieger dashed for the dressing room, while Densmore stumbled into the band’s lighting board, causing it to explode in a fury of sparks.
“The stage was collapsing,” Manzarek said in a 1994 radio interview. “Part of me was saying, ‘we’re in serious trouble here.’”
As for the indecent act, he added: “I knew Jim never did it. What happened in Miami was a mass hallucination.”
Not everyone agreed. Although the Doors had been allowed to leave Miami unmolested — after their nine-song set, they were even seen laughing and joking with off-duty police officers — an article in the March 2 edition of the Miami Herald by Larry Mahoney claimed that Morrison had “appeared to masturbate in full view of the audience, screamed obscenities and exposed himself.”
The reporter then placed a call to the Dade County District Attorney’s Office asking if they were aware that a rock star had committed these public acts on their patch.
Many believe that Morrison’s subsequent trial bore the fingerprints of a paranoid White House, a claim substantiated by a letter from then-president Richard Nixon, in support of the singer’s prosecution, read out later that month at the not-at-all sinisterly named Rally for Decency at the Orange Bowl stadium. Lucrative tours were cancelled after the 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 Aug. 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, toward 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 Sept. 20, 1970, Morrison was found guilty of misdemeanour counts of indecent exposure and “open profanity.”
Described by Goodman as “a person graced with talent,” Morrison 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 Dec. 8, 2010, Florida governor Charlie Crist and the state clemency board unanimously signed a complete posthumous pardon.