August 2nd (Friday), 1968
Flushing Meadows Park, Singer Bowl, Queens, New York
- The New York Rock Festival at The Singer Bowl -
- Introductory Instrumental (without Jim)
1. Back Door Man 3:32
2. Five To One 4:40
3. Break On Through 3:40
4. When The Music's Over > 12:33
"Vast Radiant Beach" >
"Dawn's Highway" >
"The Royal Sperm"
5. Wild Child 2:46
6. Wake Up 1:36
7. Light My Fire 8:45
8. The End* 17:04
*Taken from an alternate source
Total running time 54:36
When the Doors went back east with their film crew in early August 1968, Jim Morrison was primed. Although half drunk, ge played a riveting, focused show with his eyes closed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 1, barely moving at all as a looming summer thunderstorm echoed over the Long Island Sound. the concert had a surreal vibe as Jim bore down, enunciating lyrics and poems with hyperbolic clarity. The audience sat transfixed, and left quietly after the encores "Little Red Rooster" and "The Unknown Soldier."
The next night, August 2, the film crew finally got its riot.
It was a steamy friday night in New York City. The Doors were headlining the Super Bowl, in Flushing Meadows, Queens. There was tension backstage. The opening act, the rip-roaring English band the Who, perhaps the most hottest group in the world that summer, were angry they weren't headlining, and demanded the Doors' gear not be onstage as they played their incendiary live show that ended in explosions and splintered guitars. During the Who's set, the Singer Bowl's revolving stage malfunctioned, leaving a large part of the audinece unable to see the performance and extremely annoyed.
Jim rode to the show in a limo with Jac Holyman and Ellen Sander, who later wrote: "Morrison and 'the boys' had grown apart. He was too crazy, too unreliable, too intellectual, too conceited, but mostly he was too insecure. They shummed him socially, and he retailated by terrorizing them with the threat that he'd quit. He was lonely, as all writers must be, and he often drank himself blind and created a scene. He was also a rather pleasant guy when he wasn't acting out."
On the ride to the gig Jim flipped through the Village Voice and mumbled about how bored he was in New York. The driver got lost. "Fucking anarchy," Jim said. He started singing "Eleanor Rigby." Sander told him he was weird, and Jim said, "I tries." In a traffic jam near the Singer Bowl, Jim opened the limo's window and let a mob of excited kids grope him.
"Will some of you chicks escort me backstage?" he asked. "I might get mobbed or something."
The backstage area was cramped and sterile. Checking the film crew was with him, Jim stepped out to the crowd and was surronded bykids who seemed afraid to get too close. He signed a few autographs and then disappeared backstage.
Pandenmonium ensued when the Doors finally appeared after an hour's delay, ushered through the fifteen-thousand-strong crowd by a newly hired phalanx of black Philadelphia private detectives in stingy-brim hats. Off-duty uniformed police repelled an initial assault on the stage, then formed into a defensive perimeter. Jim had to push his way through the line of though New York street cops in order to face the crowd.
"Cool down," he told them. "We are going to be here a long time."
He preached to them, screamed, moaned, collapsed, and pussy-footed along the rim of the stage. The kids infront tried to grab at him, and twenty cops onstage had to pry them away. Jim intercut familiar songs with long stretches of "Cleberation" and other snatches of surreal, ad-libbed poetry that mystified the restive Long Island teenagers. When the cops got rough with the kids upfront, wooden seats flow onto the stage, Jim picked them up and threw them back into the convulsive crowd. The film crew kept shooting and tried to duck the lying debris.
The last song of the night was "The End." The kids, who couldn't see were fustrated, upset, and very loud. Many tried to speak to Jim onstage. Others ket shouting "Sit down" at overwrought kids standing on chairs to see better.
"Shhhh," Jim whispered. "Hey, everyone! This is serious now. Everyone - get quiet, man. You're gonna ruin this thing. Shhhhh."
He kept interrupting the familiar flow of the recorded version with poetic interjections - "Fall down now, strange gods are coming" amd other improvistaions. At one point he shrieked, as if in a nightmare: "Don't come here! Don't come in!" When he began the Oedipal verses, the audience was way ahead of him, yelling "And he walked on down the hall" before Jim spoke the line himself. When Jim got to the climactic "Mother?" hundreds of young girls screamed in terror. As the band crashed into the finale, Jim collapsed onstage like he'd been shot, and the stadium exploded. Robby Krieger finished the set in the electric storm of reverb and feedback.
Jim wasn't finished yet. As the show was ending, he went to the edge of the stage and made a negative connection with a young Hispanic couple he"d been yeing down front. He looked at this big Puerto Rican guy and said, "Who's that Mexican slut you're with tonight?" The guy picked up his seat and heaved it at Jim. The whole stage area erupted in dozens of chairs came flying through the hot, humid air. Jim kept dancng and laughing hysterically. The cops tried to get him off the stage, but he layed down and they couldn't move him.
Finally the Afro-American bodyguards hustled the band toward the dressing room. the cops fought with the kids, and a miniriot ensued with a dozen arrests and several injuries, all reported in papers the next day.
The Doors road crew had to defend the amplifiers from being torn apart. After the crowd was cleared out, the Singer Bowl looked like it had been bombed.
Pete Townshend, the Who's flamboyouant, intellectuallead gutarist, watched this wild drama from the side of the stage. He saw Jim watching impassively as his bodyguards roughed up kids who just wanted to get near him. He thought he had seen it all by then, but he was amazed by Jim Morrison's calculated escalation of the crowd's mood adulation to rapture to chaos and violence. He wrote the song "Sally Simpson" soon afterward, in a backhand tribute to Jim.
Backstage, as the film crew"s camera rolled, Jim comforted a teenage girl who had been hit in the head by a flying chair. She was bleedingfrom a scalp wound and trying to stop crying as Jim put his arm around her.
"It's demoracy," Jim said shootingly, looking into the camera with a crooked smirk. "Somebody hit her with a chair. There"s no way to tell who"s did it." Tenderly, Jim wiped blood from her face. "It's already coagulating," he cooed. "She was just an innocent bystander."
When a groupie -looking chick shasayed by in a red dress, Jim grabbed her and stuck his hand up her dress for the benefit of the camera,smiling broadly. Later he said, "Did you think it looked phony, me talking to her liked that?"
On Saturday, August 3, 1968, "Hello, I Love You" was the top single in the country, blaring mindlessly from every car in America.
The Doors played the Cleveland Public Auditorium that night, with Jim again working the crowd forthe film crew. He arrived at the hall shit-faced, and let the band play "Break On Throgh" for five minutes without him. when Jim finally appeared, he was clutching a quart of Jack Daniel's in his right hand a nd giving the sold-out, nine-thousand seat a finger with his left. He began shouting and lurching around, singing incoherently as Krieger tried to drown him out with extraloud shards of feedback and echo. This got Jim mad. "I can't hear myself! I'm gonna give you a good time, but I want it real soft." He turned to the band. "If I can't hear myself, I'm gonna get a gun and kill some people here."
During a long, horrid version of "Five To One" he started talking with the kids upfront, drawing up in laughter, derivision, and applause. Then he yelled "Listen! Llisten! I want you to feel it. I'm not kidding! I want you to feel it!"
He missed all his vocal cues during "When The Music's Over," and Krieger kept trying to mask his petulant antics with washes of electronic noise. Jim came back to the microphone. "Softer, baby, softer. Gotta feel it inside. Take it deeep inside....Hey, listen. I want to give you a history of me. All right! All right! I have a few things to say, if you don't mind...I don't know where I am or how I got here, but I did." He began to recite his poems "Vast Radiant Beach" and "The Royal Sperm." He asked for a Marlboro and dozens of cigarettes landed at his feet. The band lit into "Soul Kitchen," but Jim was getting tired and wandered awaz from the microphone. He seemed to be vomiting at the side of the stage, which drew a loud burst of the applause. By the time the band lit into "Light My Fire," Jim's mind had left the building. He kept shouting, "Come on," during Ray's solo. As Robby began his, Jim was yelling as loud as he could:
"YOU KNOW I CAN'T TAKE IT! YOU KNOW THAT! I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! COME ON! YEAH! COME ON!"
Suddenly Jim dived into the crowd with his live microphone, and it looked like a footbal scrimmage. Fights started as he was passed over the heads of the audience, chanting the yippie yell: "DO IT! DO IT!" By the time he made it back to the stage, Jim's voice was gone and the band finished "Light My Fire" and ran off.
The kids kept chanting Jim's name but there was no necore. They started throwing chairs, wrecking the concession stands, and tearing heavy wooden doors to pieces in a wanton ritual of destruction.
The final show of that wild weekend was played at the Philadelphia arena at the Forty-sixth Market on Sunday night, August 4, and it was magnificent. Strolling onto the sweaty hockey arena's stage amid wild cheering and applause at ten-thirty, Jim appeared sober and in command; he even asked the audience to stop bothering the relatively young cops who were guarding the stage. As "Backdoor Man" bled into "Five To One," Jim bummed a beer and a cigarette from the audience. He stood back and watched as Robby played a brazen, distorted solo that soon turned into a flamenco guitar clinic on "Spanish Caravan."
"What do you want to hear? Jim asked before the last section of the show. Hundreds began shouting requests. "One at atime," Jim tried. "I can't hear you." So he recited "Texas Radio" with its preaching cadences and images of Negroes in the forest and other exotica. Then "Hello, I Love You" got a quick reading, followed by "Wake Up!" and "Light My Fire," during which Jim yelled and twitched and danced around the mike like a aman on fire. The crowd surged forward, and the cops formed a defensive perimeter, as the Doors finished the song and ran off.
The Doors took the rest of August 1968 off. Jim was obviously brain fried, and anyway Waiting For The Sun was selling on its own. Unexpectedly, this cobbled-together melange of pop tunes and art songs would be the number one album in America by early September.
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