The Miami Incident

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

[glow=red,2,300]The Doors begin to tour after Miami.....[/glow]

Saturday June 14th 1969 Chicago Auditorium Theater - Chicago

'The Doors do their first show since the Miami backlash forced the cancellation of thier 1969 tour three months previously.
Opening the first set with a breathtaking version of WTMO in which Jim allows the tension to rise before unleashing a terrifying scream the band perform an exceptional show which features a very rare performance of the complete Soft Parade and My Eyes Have Seen You which is ironic as the band is now being watched for the slightest infraction and will have the infamous 'fuck clause' hanging over it which allows promoters to stop the show at a seconds notice if The Doors step out of line.
The second set continues in that vein with Morrison showing his sense of humour which delights the audience finally concluding the performance with a rapturous version of Light My Fire.....'

Its interesting as Morrison seemed to be invigourated by the Doors lay off as he plays some incredible shows once The Doors get back onto the stage.....Chicago, Minneapolis with a guest spot from Tony Glover, the Mexico shows,the Eugene Pop Festival the night before Seattle and the Aquarius shows.
The band are still plagued with the odd cancellation as promoters seem afraid to put on a Doors show because its not in the 'public' interest.
This euphoria does not last and within a few weeks the performance at Gold Creek Park for the Seattle Pop Festival sees Jim hanging on the mike being abusive to the audience.
Doors shows after that are patchy at best....sometimes very good......sometimes passable .....sometimes awful.
It seemed that after that few weeks of optimism The Doors were dead as a touring band.
A great deal had happened since Miami the band had completed The Soft Parade album which was released on July 18th, Jim had recorded his poetry session at the end of March and had made his Rock Is Dead statement just prior to Miami, they had recorded the PBS special and seen the premiere of Feast Of Friends thier very flawed road documentary. Touch Me had been and gone as a Top 3 hit and The Doors would struggle to reach that pinacle ever again. TSP album would sell well but not as well as was expected when the project began. The Doors 'star' was on the wane....the future uncertain and the end always near........

[strangenightvstone]

The Rock is Dead Session is an example of Jim destroying his instruement/voice when he was drunk. Jac Holzman made a comment about LA Woman, he said it would be Jim's last album as a vocalist. There is a Robert Johnson song Jim sings at this session. He screams this old blues song as if he has to sing above the screams only he can hear.

"Me and the devil, was walking side by side
Me and the devil was walking side by side
We gonna take you on a long and evil ride"

As for buying the house, I belive he would have done it. I am not sure he could have planned that far ahead in his current condition. Did he even see beyond those last days?

[cobriaclord]

I love the ROCK IS DEAD session!

[strangenightvstone]

Did Bill Siddons take the trip to the Miami concert with Jim? In one of the books I read the story goes like this. The three sober Doors arrived at Miami's airport early in the day. As they got off the plane they noticed that their equiptment was being loaded into trucks. They were not alarmed. The promoter met them at the terminal and told them that the seats had been removed from the Diner Key theatre to make room for many more kids.
The Doors and who ever was managing them at that moment said that this was not in the contract and The Doors will not play.
After telling The Doors this the promotor pointed to the trucks that had The Doors equiptment on it and told them that they would never see the equiptment again. Robby was holding his guitar, so he didn't really care. Ray and John were upset, the bands brand new sound system was loaded into the trucks.
The Doors manager did not want to forfeit the brand new equiptment, he also said that if the equiptment had not been loaded on the trucks that The Doors would have left Miami at that momment. However, the manager of The Doors decided that Morrison would perform in order for them to get the equiptment back. They sold Jim out for hardware. It was not a real concert, it was merely an attempt at finding a way of getting the equiptment back from the promoters. Jim was used.
Who made this decision? Bill Siddons or Vince?
This is the turning point. He should never have been there in the first place, no one protected him.

[jym]

It wasn't so much as no one protected Morrison, you have to remember he planned on doing the show he did in Miami. It was 6 months after Ray had talked Jim into "just 6 more months", & he wanted to do a Living Theatre type thing to provoke the audience from what he saw as their apathy (?). All the other stuff, the promoter pulling the seats out, hijacking their equipment was all icing on a cake that was going to be baked anyway.

[strangenightvstone]

jym said:

It wasn't so much as no one protected Morrison, you have to remember he planned on doing the show he did in Miami. It was 6 months after Ray had talked Jim into "just 6 more months", & he wanted to do a Living Theatre type thing to provoke the audience from what he saw as their apathy (?). All the other stuff, the promoter pulling the seats out, hijacking their equipment was all icing on a cake that was going to be baked anyway.

Jim always improvised. He did not plan that. He was not provoking, he was telling them the truth. He wanted them to listen, thats all. He realized the crowd in Miami were not college students, as was the audience at USC in which Jim had bought front row tickets for for an entire week. I ask you this, if Jim had been interested in provocation of that audience wouldn't he have sat in the back row at USC so that he could view the audiencens reaction? He was into art, that is all.
The point about the promoter is, what was the value of that equiptment? Could they have made up the cost at a NY concert where the cops were a little hip? Of Course!! Would a more agressive drummer (one whos kit had been stolen) have put up with that? NO, I think of someone like Vinnie Paul Abbott of Pantera and Damageplan in these instances. He would have protected Jim, he would have raised hell. He would have lit a drum stick on fire and shoved it up the promoters ass.

[jym]

Improvisation doesn't imply an absence of inspiration, & the Living Theatre was certainly the inpsiration behind Miami whether Jim sat in the front row, the back row, or in the rafters.

[strangenightvstone]

jym said:

Improvisation doesn't imply an absence of inspiration, & the Living Theatre was certainly the inpsiration behind Miami whether Jim sat in the front row, the back row, or in the rafters.

Correct, I am talking about the difference between a Los Angeles college crowd and a teenage crowd in Florida.
There is a huge difference in these cities. If one is from Europe it might be hard to fully understand the opposition. We are talking about a 180 degree change from L.A. to Miami. Miami is in the middle of the ocean though it is attached to United States, think of it a Peninsula surrounded by the Atlantic ocean.
The crowd at the L.A. Forum show in which Jim recited Celebration of The Lizard and the crowd sat there speechless left without out a huge applause, only a small recognition of the poem. The band members walked off stage one by one, leaving Jim to say the last verse alone. That is what Jim loved, he wanted that in Miami. Do you see the difference between the cities? West Side THUG LIFE They listened to his every word in Los Angeles, not in Miami though.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jim by his own admission was interested in the psychology of crowds and had been trying to manipulate them for a long time before Miami........his mastery of the suspenseful silence just one example of the mind games he played with Doors audiences.
For me I don't think Miami was part of his experiments with crowds more a deliberate backlash against the Doors and his own self made image.......

The Living Theatre was an inspiration and maybe a catalyst but he probably would have done this somewhere else if a Florida gig had not presented the perfect opportunity to kill the Lizard King once and for all....

I don't think that this was all improv as I think Jim had a plan for that night......and it's not really fair to compare the Miami situation with todays bands as back then bands were at the mercy of halls and promoters......the equipment question today bears no relation to the situation The Doors were in back in 1969........todays bands have an army of roadies/minders to look after them The Doors went out on the road with a few mates and minor employees like the roadie Treanor.............
It was only when Zeppelins Peter Grant made the band the King not the venue operator that bands fortunes began to change......
Jim of course did his bit to bring about that change and todays artists owe him that debt ...........

[strangenightvstone]

I do not think Jim made any plans in his life, let alone Miami. He was far too drunk to plan and carry through. It was a moment by moment, life and death thing.
Maybe he was listening closely to what the others played, and reacted with his answer to the musical question.
Yes, everyone owes a debt to Morrison, he was the first ever arrested on stage. The New Haven police were very different than the Southern cops, it shows you where the power lies. Maybe Florida cops have more power in their daily activities, so when the concert came the cops were not in twisted fit. In New Haven those cops had been fucked by someone, they had no power in their position. Politicians control the cops.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Jim was not drunk everyday of his life .....thats just the myth peddled by those that use him as a meal ticket......an Oliver Stone version of his life from his mates.......Jim was not some bloke who just got up in a morning and took the day as it came..
the guy was very very intelligent and intelligent people tend to think a bit far ahead than the next five minutes....
He hated what he had become and the image he had created for himself, he was being forced into being that image by his bandmates who could not see that he was ill as too much pressure was on them to perform.......

It is not at all beyond the realms of possibility that Morrison was planning this for months......The Living Theatre simply a neat new idea to go with whatever he had planned........
to argue that someone of the intelligence of Jim Morrison just planned moment by moment forgets the amount of intelligence this guy had...........
All this Jim was always swigging from a whisky bottle bollocks that gets bandied around really shows people are forgetting the Man in favour of the Myth at an alarming rate nowadays.......
The bloke was an alcoholic we all know but he was not drunk 24 hours a day .................

When you see some of the photos from Miami it does not even seem he was that drunk that day........
We will never know the truth,unless there is something in his Miami writings that turns up but I can see a good case to argue that Miami was not quite as spontanious as some would believe........

[strangenightvstone]

Of course Jim was not drunk all the time. "I aint drunk, but I have been drinking" is the line from a blues song.
When Jim did things like he did in Miami he was very drunk, when he snorted and injected heroin he was drunk, that is why he did it.
He should not ask why, but ask how.
Drunk is a reason to do stuff, there is no though process, it just happens when you are drunk.

[cobriaclord]

It slows up your mind, its a depressant,

[strangenightvstone]

cobriaclord said:

It slows up your mind, its a depressant,

Slows what part? How does that affect someone? Is it good to do that to your mind?

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Well you will find you can't knit when you are drunk......

[jym]

I can't knit when I'm sober, so that would be quite a trick if I could knit when drunk!


Old joke I know, but I couldn't resist.

[allthingslucid]

Well, the whole Miami fiasco could have been avoided if Bill Siddons had NOT arranged for the band's next tour to begin in Miami. Bill showed his age and inexperience in deciding to schedule a concert with some very shady promoters/producers and Miami most certainly WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED if Siddons had made the smarter decision of starting the March tour in San Francisco!! What an idiot!!! Bill Graham would have easily booked some sold out shows for the Doors either at Winterland or at the Cow Palace. And the Doors would have worked their way up North, gone through the upper Midwest, heading down through New York (easily could have arranged another show at the Madison Square Garden) and maybe, eventually end up in Miami. But to have started off the tour in Miami was STUPID, plain STUPID. If Bill had an ounce of humility he would publicly state that he was STUPID and made a BIG mistake in booking the Doors at Miami to begin the ill fated March tour.

[jym]

So Morrison would have self-destructed in San Francisco then, and we'd all be talking the SanFran incident. It wasn't Miami in particular, but Jim Morrison specifically.

[allthingslucid]

No, I flat out disagree with you. We don't know if Jim would have self-destructed in San Francisco or even LA for that matter. If anything, we know that most likely there would NOT HAVE been any lawsuit filed against Morrison for his behavior on stage in front of a San Francisco crowd! The whole story of the Doors would have changed. Bill Siddons was an IDIOT! He made a major mistake booking the Doors at Miami. Some of you Doors fans just can't get away from placing blame on Jim. Get away from Jim for a moment and you will find other culprits in the making of the MIAMI INCIDENT.

jym said:

So Morrison would have self-destructed in San Francisco then, and we'd all be talking the SanFran incident. It wasn't Miami in particular, but Jim Morrison specifically.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

First off the tour was most likely booked by a tour agency The Doors employed not the manager and I think you give too much importance to Bill he was after all just a roadie they promoted to phone answerer in Rays words...........he was likely involved but the decision to start off the tour in Miami was more likely the groups and the booking agency who were sorting out the dates for them..........It just happened that this particular tour began in that part of the country and progressed up the East Coast.....It was a tour of the Eastern side of the country so why should it start in San Francisco?......there was no reason to imagine that Jim was gonna do this.....we now know there was but in 1969 we did not.........so Siddons can hardly get the rap for this....Look up the dates of the cancellations in March/April 1969 it was a major tour of the other side of the country to San Francisco ............

Also it was not the first time that Jim had done this so blaming Siddons is silly.............

newdoorstalk.proboards43.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1106403879

The Action House Long Beach, NY - June 16th 1967
Before the first Action House show. Jim Morrison reportedly instructs the
bartender to line up fifteen shots of Jack Daniel's and
then drinks them all, one after another, just prior to
taking the stage. As the show progresses, he consumes an
additional fifteen shots and clearly exhibits the
consequences. The club is exceptionally hot before the band
begins, and the stage continues to heat up as the show
wears on. Finally, as if in premonition of events to
come, Jim begins to disrobe during one song, but is
interrupted before he can achieve his ultimate goal.

The Action House, Long Beach, NY - June 17, 1967
Probably the
shortest Doors show ever. At the start of the show, Jim
Morrison places the microphone in his mouth and begins to
create "unearthly sounds" until the other band members
help him off stage. Because it is primarily a dance
club, the abbreviated show causes little
disturbance.
Doors On The Road

Morrison did what he wanted..........the manager whoever he was could do nothing to stop that..............neither could the band.........

It happened that we do know....who was to blame .......only one person....Jim Morrison........