Riot at The Singer Bowl

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Aug 2, 1968 - Singer Bowl, New York.


Over the years there were numerous accounts of
the Doors provoking riots at their performances. Some
of these reports were elaborate embellishments
perpetrated by the venues for the purpose of interfering with
performances by the rock groups they wished to ban. Other
bands, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, found
themselves engaged in the same controversy. One serious
consideration raised by these conflicts was how to provide
adequate security without inhibiting the performers or
interfering with the audience's enjoyment. Jim Morrison,
however, does not share these concerns. In fact, he is
intrigued by the mob mentality he has observed at the
Doors' and other bands' performances. Despite the
exaggerated portraits of violence surrounding some concerts,
accounts of this performance are undeniably valid. From
the outset, the show on this dreadfully hot and humid
New York summer night is plagued with difficulties.
The Kangaroo open the show, and are poorly received
by an impatient, unruly crowd. They are followed by
the Who. It is a year before the Who's rock opera
Tommy is released, and the band has yet to achieve
legendary status in the States. Nevertheless, they are
determined that the stage set-up specifically accommodate
their presentation and are adamant that none of the
Doors' equipment obstruct the stage. During the Who's
performance, the rotating stage breaks down, leaving a section
of the audience unable to see the band adequately.
The Who put on a good, but not exceptional, show.
They leave the stage visibly annoyed. After their set,
there is an hour-long interim before the Doors take the
stage, and the delay further aggravates the impatient
audience. As soon as the Doors appear, they are greeted with a
thunderous assault of screaming fans, and segments of the crowd begin rushing the stage. A column of policemen are stationed at the front of the platform to curtail this onrush of people, while Morrison fiercely jostles his way through them to face the crowd. The chaos escalates continuously during the performance, with fights erupting throughout the Singer Bowl. Morrison sings with a
very precise and articulate emphasis on the lyrics,
and actually appears to be substantially more sober
than the crowd he is facing.
Ellen Sander (Jac Holzman's girlfriend and rock critic) comments on the show's build-up in Trips:
"A good portion of
the audience still couldn't see and they were
furious. Crowds stormed the front of the stage and were turned back by the police. Some were trying to scale the stage and others cheered them on. Morrison spun around and ground the songs out half-heartedly, ad libbing, improvising, doing an ominous dance. Hysteria was building.
Morrison shrieked, moaned, gyrated, and minced to the edge of the stage, hovering. Hands reached out and
grabbed him and the cops had to pry them away. The camera crew ducked a piece of broken chair which came flying onto the stage. Morrison caught it and heaved it back into the crowd. The Doors were hardly visible from any angle because there were about twenty cops
onstage."

By the time the Doors begin to perform "The End,"
the crowd is an incredible uproar. Morrison vainly
attempts to "sssshhhh" the audience, but there is no
response and he begins appealing to them. "Hey, this is
serious, everyone! Get quiet, man! You're going to ruin
the whole thing."
Following the opening stanzas of the song,
Morrison drifts into an expansive passage of poetry,
beginning with
"Fall down now; strange Gods are coming."
With decidedly steady pacing, he advances through a
series of poems until he unexpectedly screams,
"Don't come here! Don't come in!" Proceeding from this
flare-up into "Ensenada," Morrison is continually assailed with clamorous screams of "Morrison is King!" from the crowd. He calmly begins to recite the Oedipal section with "Mother, I want to..." and the Singer Bowl bursts into pandemonium with the audience finishing the lyrics. The band accelerates into the musical passage and
Morrison hits the stage, writhing in agony like the death
knell of a hideous serpent while the crowd goes wild.
The instrumental passage climaxes with a horrendous
blood-curdling scream from Morrison, followed by Krieger's guitar set on some wildly unrestrained echo. By now no one remains seated in the crowd and the police are forming a barricade in front of the stage. The audience is defiantly screaming "Sit down, cop!" as Krieger finishes the song with a long trail of feedback. Just before midnight, as the Doors conclude their
performance, a horde of people begin demolishing the wooden seating section in front and hurling portions of the splintered benches at the stage. The debacle turns into a complete riot when the crowd charges the police barricade, forcing the Doors to abandon the stage amid a torrent of plummeting debris. As the police struggle to regain control of the crowd, Vince Treanor and the equipment crew desperately try to defend their gear. Pete Townshend, lead
guitar player for the Who, observes the entire
disturbance from the side of the stage and is both fascinated and appalled by Morrison's apparent indifference to
the situation. According to Who biographer Dave
Marsh, it is Morrison's aloof and mystifying demeanor in
the face of intensifying chaos that prompts Townshend
to write the Who's composition "Sally Simpson."
The Doors On The Road

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

from Break On Through by Prochnicky and Riordan

On August 2, The Doors played the Singer Bowl in
Flushing Meadows Park, in Queens, New York. The arena was
left over from the old New York World's Fair and the
double bill with The Who was a total sellout that was to
be filmed for possible inclusion in The Doors
documentary. It was a humid, tense, end-of-summer Friday night, and Morrison, Doors film crew members Babe Hill and Paul Ferrara, and Ellen Sander, a writer for Hit Parader, climbed into a limo at the motel and rode out to the Bowl. Right off things started going wrong. The driver got lost and Morrison began accusing him of "anarchy." Then they got caught in the traffic of the crowd arriving at the show. Eventually they found a road that led to the stage entrance, but as the limo rounded a corner a host of fans rushed toward it. They had been waiting for just this car.
The kids surrounded the
limo forcing it to stop halfway to the entrance. Then
they moved in pressing their hands and faces against
every available window. Some even jumped on the back of
the car, laughing and squealing. Several reached for
the door handles. Sander reached across Morrison to
snap down the lock on his door, but he got there
before her and opened it. The kids went nuts, reaching
in, grabbing at Morrison, pulling at his clothing.
Jim made no resistance and even climbed out of the
car and stood in the midst of them. They converged on
him, pressing beads and photos and drawings into his
hands. Morrison smiled. "Will some of you girls escort
me backstage?" Sander reported him saying. He
laughed huskily, almost embarrassedly. "I might get
mobbed or something."
Backstage was crawling with
photographers and fans who had managed to get past the guards
into the steamy cement locker room. There had never
been any trouble at the Bowl, so security was lax. To
make matters worse, Morrison decided to take a walk
inside the arena. He got about twenty feet before
hundreds of people swarmed around him and he had to return
backstage. Babe Hill came running up. "There's already been
some trouble." He grinned.

"The Who don't want The
Doors' equipment onstage when they play. I think they're
sore because they didn't get top billing. They
threatened to wreck it if it's there when they close the
set."
By the time this was all sorted out, the program
started late. A surprise third act, The Kangaroo, was
announced, angering the crowd, but their set was over soon
and The Who came out. Then, just when everyone
thought things would settle down, it got worse. The Who
were not performing up to par and the revolving stage
stalled during their set, resulting in several hefty
repairmen hustling onstage to bang away in an attempt to
fix it. Nothing doing. It was stuck and stuck good.
When operative, the revolving stage made it possible
for the act to be seen from all angles. When it
stuck, a fourth of the crowd was left with a view of
nothing but amplifiers and these people were starting to
get mad. In an effort to calm things down, Pete
Townshend did a bump and grind on stage and joked that he
"had to get one in before Jim Morrison comes on." At
the close of The Who's set, Ray, Robby, and John came
outside to watch the band's famous equipment destruction
finale. Townshend had to slam his guitar to the floor
several times before it shattered. Then he threw the
pieces out into the audience and the crowd fought among
themselves for the fragments. Keith Moon kicked in his drums
and rolled them off the platform. One of The Who's
road crew lit up a smoke bomb, but it was all sort of
anticlimactical. The Who had played a bad set. The equipment
smashing came off too easy, too planned, as though it was
the only way off the stage. Nonetheless, the crowd
roared.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

They were ten thousand strong, whipped into a
frenzy from sheer frustration if nothing else. When The
Who came offstage Townshend told Elektra publicist
Danny Fields that the audience was "real tense and
ready to explode." Fields hurried to tell The Doors.
Morrison just looked at him as though he was an idiot and
said, "How can you tell?" The crowd was anxious but The
Doors decided to take their time about coming on. A
full half hour passed and still no Doors. By this time
the audience was stomping and shouting, demanding The
Doors. Finally, Manzarek, Krieger, and Densmore were
introduced and they began a musical vamp while waiting for
Morrison. Jim deliberately took his time, already getting
off on manipulating the crowd to relieve his
boredom. When he did come, he came with an entourage of
security cops forming a wedge in front and behind him,
completely hemming him in. People leaped at him and tried to
touch him, but the cops got him safely to the stage.
Morrison grabbed the mike and began to sing, but a good
portion of the audience still couldn't see. They began
storming the stage hoping for a better view, but the cops
turned them back. As if to further infuriate the angry
crowd The Doors stalled onstage, messing around between
songs. Every now and then a few people would try and
climb on the stage and the rest of the crowd would
cheer them on. Morrison played it to the hilt, growling
songs at them rather than singing, ad-libbing,
improvising, doing some kind of ominous dance. And everywhere
he went The Doors film crew followed, all over the
stage, trying to capture his every move. In the crowd
there was a mounting sense of hysteria.
Adding to
the volitile atmosphere the houselights had been left
on for The Who's set as planned, but they were
turned off for The Doors. This was a New York crowd and
the concert was punctuated with hostile shouts as
people screamed at each other to sit down or more often
"get the hell out of the way." Morrison made an
offhanded effort to control it. "Cool down," he urged
almost seductively. "We're going to be here a long
time." The audience responded by shouting for "Light My
Fire." Jim threw himself into the show, playing off the
mood. He shrieked, moaned, and slithered right to the
edge of the stage, hovering over the ringside crowd
who desperately tried to reach out and grab him as
the cops pried them away.

In the middle of "When
The Music's Over," Morrison launched into poetic raps
touching on several pieces including "Indians scattered on
dawn's highway bleeding, ghosts crowd the young child's
fragile eggshell mind." After a while he became lewd,
stirring up the crowd with a rap about a "Mexican whore
sucking my prick" and some bit about "the keeper of the
royal sperm." With each obscene remark there was a
noticeable wave of response from the crowd. Next, The Doors
performed "Wild Child," a full four months before its
release. Then they did the "Wake Up" section to "The
Celebration of the Lizard" and "Light My Fire." With each
song the tension seemed to build. Morrison continued
to milk it, lying on the stage, writhing snakelike,
and singing as police formed a bulky barrier against
the fans repeatedly charging the stage. That night,
with his hair shorter and the beginnings of paunch,
Jim seemed not possessed, but plastered. He
continually threw himself down on the stage and crawled
around on his belly, making it even more difficult for
the obstructed audience to see.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The feeling of impending violence was there the
whole set and then Morrison decided to finish with "The
End," the most radical, emotional-stirring song in The
Doors repertoire. Now he was letting it all go. At one
point in the song he made eye contact with a girl in
front of the stage, flirting with her. Her boyfriend
glared at him and he glared back. Then he looked at the
girl again, grabbed his crotch with both hands, and
thrust toward her, shouting the most vulgar remark he
could come up with. Some say that her boyfriend then
went for a chair and that started the riot. Others say
he was just one of many who later went crazy. All we
know is that it was just past midnight when the number
ended. At the last notes, Morrison fell back on the
stage and screamed. As if on cue, over two hundred
youths suddenly rushed the stage. The outburst was
thundering and spontaneous, like an earthquake or a sudden
violent storm. Fifteen private policemen held back
part of the audience, but others outflanked them and
stormed the stage. The people in the blocked seats began
tearing up their wooden chairs and flinging them around
the stadium. Some of the audience threw chair legs at
the stage. And then people started throwing whole
chairs. Paul Ferrara and Babe Hill, still trying to film,
ducked as a piece of wood came flying toward them.
Without hesitation Morrison leaped up and grabbed the
piece of wood, heaving it back into the crowd. A moment
later it came sailing through the air again. There were
so many cops around them now that The Doors were
hardly visible. People started fighting everywhere and
several more made it on to the stage. As the crowd took
over, The Doors were forced to flee. They had to be
dragged through the mob of screaming kids. Backstage,
the area was cleared of everyone but The Doors and
their crew. Like wounded animals, the kids kept
slamming against the backstage doors, banging and
shouting, shaking the walls. Onstage, armed with pieces of
the broken chairs, they began smashing The Doors'
equipment, systematically destroying it as police tried to
intervene. For an hour the riot raged on. Inside the
backstage area, Morrison and the other Doors passed beer
around while Jim talked to a girl who was bleeding from
a head wound. When it was finally over, twenty
people were hospitalized, three with serious injuries,
and two were arrested. The concert grossed
seventy-five-thousand dollars.
Break On Through by Prochnicky and Riordan

[darkstar]

Irate Teens Break Up New York Concert
Newark, New Jersey Evening News 1968



There persons were injured and two were arrested early today when a teenage audience at a folk-rock concert suddenly charged the stage.

The violence said about 200 teenagers in a capacity audience of 10,000 listening to a group called “The Doors” began breaking up the wooden chairs at the Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens.

As the group was completing its last two numbers, the teenagers ran for the stage, forcing the musicians to retreat, leaving their equipment behind. A witness said student’s armed with pieces of chairs began smashing the equipment on the stage before guards could stop them.



One teenager was arrested when he punched and kicked patrolman, police said. The youth was treated at a hospital for a cut on his head.

Two girls were treated at the hospital for minor injuries and another person was arrested.



cities.com/SunsetStrip/Disco/4753/irate_teens.htm

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

August 2nd 1968. Singer Bowl
Flushing Meadows Park, New York.


The Singer Bowl was basically an arena built from the remains of New York’s World Fair that was in existence during the 1930’s. The concert was a double bill and a crowd of 17,500 people had come to see both The Who and The Doors which had it’s problems right even before The Doors had started to play. The limousine driver had lost his way and got stuck in traffic and when The Doors finally made it to the venue, there were fans thumping the limousine.
As seen on the video "Soft Parade - A Retrospective", Jim had wandered through the arena and teenage kids were hanging around him while Jim tried to ignore them as he flicked through some magazines - even the photographers backstage clung to Morrison like parasites.
There may have been some tension between both bands as The Who had apparently refused to use the same equipment as The Doors.
The concert was running late as it was and to make things worse, a third act called Kangaroo was placed on the bill at the last minute and opened up the show. The disasters didn’t stop here as the revolving stage had stalled during The Who’s performance. The repair men couldn’t get the stalled stage fixed and the stage was stuck for good. This meant that 1/4 of the audience couldn’t see the remaining concert.

After The Who had played a fairly bad set and smashed up their equipment at the end of a their performance, The Doors had come on stage about half an hour later and started to play but without Jim. Finally after five minutes, Jim made it to the mike as he purposefully took his time to go on stage and was escorted by an entourage of security personnel.

The Doors started off with their medley, "Back Door Man/Five To One" but things were not settling down as the audience had difficulty seeing The Doors perform. As heard on the audience recording of this show, the crowd yelled out:

"Sit down ! Sit down ! Sit down !"

"Sit down you whore!", some one else offensively remarked.

"Sit down before I knock you down !", as one guy screamed to some one else.

"Yeah, anything you want" replied the other person.

"Come on you cunt !" the first guy took up his challenge and a scuffle broke out between the two.


The Doors played "Break On Through" and "When The Music’s Over". Jim recited some of his poems during "When The Music’s Over":

"Vast radiant beach
and a cool jewelled moon
couples naked
race down by its quiet side
and we laughed
like soft mad children
smug in the woolly cotton brains of infancy.

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind

We leap the wall, dog and I
to hang choking on fence collar chain
Dogs lick shit
Mexican girl whore sucks my prick.

Open windows on the town
Open pores on foreign air.

The car rasps quiet.
Motor destroys itself on rotten fuel
The pump is ill.
The hose has a steel nozzle.

We . . . we want

Oh keeper of the royal sperm
Please feed the king
or the king will die"


After completing "When The Music’s Over", Jim then spoke.

"You got it ?"; whilst Robbie tuned in his guitar for the next song.

Jim then announced to the crowd:

"Never.. Never, performed before on public stage."

"Yeah", Jim added as he reasserted his statement to the crowd. The group then played "Wild Child" for the first time in front of a live audience.

Jim made it real difficult for the audience to see him perform on stage as he purposefully threw himself on the stage as he writhed and jerked around the floor like a man possessed - as seen on the video "A Feast Of Friends" and "Soft Parade - A Retrospective".

According to Elektra’s publicist, Danny Fields; "This was when he started to self-destruct. And he did it in public, turning the audience against him".

Reviews for this concert certainly did not receive any appraisals to say the least, particularly Robert Somms of the New York Free Press;

"I would characterize their current act as wearisome, exaggerated, repitious and puerile. To some that would indicate a lack of effort on my part. But Morrison (and he is the reason the Doors can walk off the stage of the singer Bowl after a casual set $25,000 richer) is basically bad theater and worse theatrics.

Beyond the grade-school prurience, the nauseating politicizing, the grotesque strut, the absurd ponts, the deliberate gestures, the unimaginative offering of himself, Morrison and the Doors aren’t just playing some songs or constructing a sound exciting or innovative in itself. They are victimized by the success of a pose they assumed."

The last song was "The End".
The riot really erupted when supposedly Jim had grabbed his crotch with both hands as he thrusted his body towards a girl in the front row and then made an obscene comment to her. It just so happened that the girl’s boyfriend was sitting next to her and he threw a chair at Jim and the crowd went berserk. Just after midnight when the Doors had finished playing "The End", Jim gave his final scream and fell onto the stage when 200 teenagers rushed onto the stage, throwing chair legs & chairs around and smashed up the equipment. Fifteen private police men couldn’t hold back the crowd and some even made it backstage and started bashing on the dressing room door. Jim was in the dressing room and trying to comfort a girl who had a cut on her face as a chair had been thrown at her.
The riot lasted for about an hour and by the end of it all 3 people were hospitalised for minor injuries and 2 arrests were made.
A Dionysian Experience.

The Doors headline with opening act The Who. Jim's limo driver gets lost before the show in the traffic of the crowd and the limo is mobbed by fans. Jim gets out and the fans go crazy grabbing his clothes and hair forcing items, necklaces, etc. into his hands. He finally makes it backstage and decides to take a walk around the arena. He gets 10 yards down the hallway and is swarmed by hundreds of fans and is forced to go backstage. The Who refuses to play with The Doors equipment on stage during their set. They get there way and go on but the rotating stage gets stuck and a quarter of the restless crowd cannot see the band furiating many of the audience. They finish the set smashing their equipment and the crowd is roaring. Pete Townsend walks off telling The Doors people that the crowd is ready to explode!
The Doors wait 30 minutes and finally take the stage with Jim waiting even longer as the others jam. Jim comes out swarmed by security and his film crew. The fans who cannot see begin to storm the stage and are thwarted back by security. Jim is animated and growls songs while dancing and gyrating, hopping and twirling in a shamanic tide often rapping obscenities during breaks and between songs. The crowd is hot and Jim is in rare form. The tension builds with each song, each chant, each movement. Jim and the audience are one. He feels there emotions boiling and slowly turns up the heat. Jim throws himself down on the stage and crawls around on his belly driven by the music, the crowd, and his demons. The Doors finish with "The End" and as Jim sings the last note, falling back on the stage, the crowd as if being pulled back like an arrow, as if on cue, suddenly erupt and thunderously rush the stage. The crowd overtakes the stage and begins smashing the bands equipment. The riot rages on for over an hour with the band backstage drinking. Many fans are injured, hospitalized or arrested.
Doors Interactive History


See also When You’re Strange Film thread for the way the concert was interpreted by Tom DiCillo
When You’re Strange: Critique?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"City streets are not the only place where there is unrest and mobs get out of hand. On Friday night at the Singer Bowl, which is located on the grounds of the old New York World's Fair, a melee broke out involving several young patrons of a concert headlining The Doors, and The Who, both top rock combos.
The youngsters charged the stage area and threw
chairs on stage, damaging some of The Doors' equipment. The Doors were just wrapping up their slot shortly past midnight. Three persons were hurt; one of them was arrested. The kids were restless due to the
concert's late start, a long intermission, and the addition
of a third act, The Kangaroo. Perhaps topping off
these events were The Doors' lyrics, many of which
refer to death, power, violence, and comment on
society's bizarre aspects, and the wild theatrics of the
group's lead singer and new contemporaneous sex symbol, Jim Morrison.
Adding to the climatic moment, was that, per plan, The Who had performed with the house lights on, but these were turned off for The Doors. And the tension was further spurred by breakdown of the revolving stage which, when operative, made it possible for
the act to be seen from all angles. The Doors
have been gaining a reputation for exciting audiences
beyond the norm. They have had several such incidents;
the most recent of which was a larger-scaled riot the
previous weekend in Cleveland. Rushing the performers is, of course, not new to pop music in general, let
alone r & r specifically. But it seems to be only of
late that destructiveness has become a key
threat
Singer Bowl August 2nd 1968.
Variety Magazine August 7 1968

[casandra]

The Doors at The Singer Bowl

Audience concert footage. Silent. Low quality.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBQZeYmlL_g

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

The bootleg contradicts a lot of what was said in the DiCillo film about Jim goading the audience.
Obviously it's not complete but would be a useful exhibit to use in his defence.

[casandra]

I agree with you. I don’t think Jim goaded the audience and started a riot. I don’t think it happened for the reasons Dicillo stated in the film.

The audience was angry before the beginning The Doors concert because to the problems of the stage.

In the bootleg you can hear the audience yelling because some people got up and they didn’t allow seeing the concert to the people that they were behind. I think this was the reason why some people began throwing the seats.

Anyway, if there would be a real riot, there would be hundreds of injured people, not just two people.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Apr 19, 2011 15:55:07 GMT casandra said:

Anyway, if there would be a real riot, there would be hundreds of injured people, not just two people.

The people who owned the concert halls used this type of thing to gain control over bands and therefore rake in more profit.
Doors gigs were elevated to riot status by media people who were in collusion with hall owners.

I think it was the legendary Peter Grant who finally nailed that coffin shut in favour of the artists when he began to bring Zeppelin to the US.

Sadly bands like the Doors were always at the mercy of these people which is why so many of the musicians from the time ended up broke and unremembered.

[casandra]

The media likes to exaggerate and manipulate the news.

The first time the Rolling Stones came to Spain (Barcelona, 1976), some conservative newspapers said that there had been serious incidents and even several injured people because scuffles between the fans. Actually, the people were injured by the police because they fired rubber balls and tear gas. Many people who went to that concert remembered it as a great experience and they have said many times that neither riots nor did scuffles happened there. There were some complains because there were many people outside who were without a ticket. They only complained a bit because they wanted that the promoters would open the doors and they would allow coming in to those who were left out. But the complains were peaceful.

Here, in that time, the most conservative people thought rock music was a synonymous for violence and degeneration. I suppose in America, too. The excessive reactions about Miami incident were a example of this: press, promoters, cancellation concerts, rallies for decency, the trial,… it’s very sad.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Apr 20, 2011 15:21:53 GMT casandra said:

Here, in that time, the most conservative people thought rock music was a synonymous for violence and degeneration. I suppose in America, too. The excessive reactions about Miami incident were a example of this: press, promoters, cancellation concerts, rallies for decency, the trial,… it’s very sad.

That attitude was here in the UK as well during the 60s and 70s.
But we were a lot more enlightened than America which suffers a more extreme mainstream than we have here.
Our own Prime Minister Harold Wilson made a point of being seen with the Beatles in the 60s so I think we here were more in tune with the music as a nation than the US.
We had plenty of bad boys and they made the news but there was never a backlash like we saw in America with The Doors.

[casandra]

The Beatles and The Animals came here in 1965, but The Rolling Stones came after Franco death. I guess that they should seem so disrespectful, rebellious and outrageous to the authorities of that time.

I think the most popular British and American music were known here. My father liked Elvis and I had an uncle who loved The Beatles. I remember my earliest musical memory is Yellow Submarine. When my brothers and I went his home, we always wanted to hear this song. This would be the late 60's. We were childs then.

However, I think at that time, few people knew The Doors here, although I think some singles were released in Spain, for example, Roadhouse blues and Love her madly. I saw these some times at old records markets.

I read that a Spanish journalist saw them live in New York (I don’t know if at the Madison Square Garden or at the Felt Forum). Another journalist said when he was young he wrote a letter to The Doors asking if it was true that the group was being expanded, incorporating Lonnie Mack. I guess he would have read this in a magazine at that time. And Jim wrote him a letter saying it was not true and sent him a signed copy of American Prayer. The guy didn’t believe that Jim himself had written him, he seemed impossible that a rock star could write himself to his fans. Years later he did an interview to Frank and Kathy Lisciandro and he asked them if the sign was true. They almost were upset because the guy mistrusted. I guess Morrison would call attention himself that a teenager from a country far away from America had heard about The Doors and so he decided to answer and sent him the book as a gift. It's a nice story and speaks volumes about the real Jim Morrison.

www.elpais.com/articulo/cultura/MORRISON/_JIM_/THE_DOORS/vientre/bestia/elpepicul/19960703elpepicul_3/Tes

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Morrison was well known for phoning fans who had written to The Doors from The Doors Office.
I also reada story of a Japanese pen friend who he shared poetry with. He told this young girl he would come and see her when the band toured japan and Australia.
Sadly it never happened.
But as you say this speaks volumes for someone with such celebrity.
He was not always the drunken oaf idiots like Manzarek seem to glory in when they peddle their tripe to journalists.

Excperts from Stephen Davis' recent book on the Doors:
------------------------------------------------------
...
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 ******* 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.


Background information regarding the two previous nights'
happenings also taken from Stephen Davis' book on the Doors

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 interjenctions - "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 bleeding from 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 for the 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 away 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.