Live Philadelphia 1968 (4 August 1968) - concert history of The Doors

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Sunday night at the end of a very hot summer. The Doors, led by their scandalous lead singer Jim Morris, take the stage. But this time they are surrounded by a tight ring of police officers. Was that the plan or did something go wrong?

Let's go back

To understand the context of these events, you have to "rewind" back a few days.

The Doors had just returned to the east, and on the 1st of August the band played in Bridgeport, Connecticut. That night, the air was electrified in anticipation of a hurricane, and Jim Morrison gave a fantastic performance. With his eyes closed, almost without moving, he read the lyrics of poems and songs clearly and distinctly to the accompaniment of the approaching thunderstorm. The mood of the concert was simply surreal and the mesmerised audience remained completely silent. After the songs "Little Red Rooster" and "The unknown soldier", the audience left the venue in silence.

2 August.

The next night, 2 August, the band was already in their normal mood. They were the lead band at the Super Bowl held in Queens.

Backstage, the atmosphere was tense. The members of the British band The Who did not like the fact that they were not chosen to be the lead performers, despite the fact that they were at the height of their popularity that summer. They demanded that The Doors equipment not be on stage for the duration of their performance, which ended in explosions and smashed guitars. During The Who's performance, the revolving stage malfunctioned, leaving much of the audience unable to see the speakers and highly annoyed.

Jim arrived at that concert in a limousine with Jack Holiman and Ellen Sander, who later wrote about Jim this way:

"He was too crazy, too unreliable, intellectual and vain. But most of all he was too unreliable. He was a loner like all writers and often got drunk. But offstage he was a very nice guy."

On the way out, he flipped through the Village Voice magazine and complained that he was bored in New York, then started humming "Eleanor Rigby."

To Sander's words about him being pretty weird, Jim only replied, "I try." As they stood in traffic near the concert hall, he opened the limo window and chatted with fans, inviting them to come backstage with him. Finally reaching the stadium, he signed autographs and then disappeared backstage.

The real nightmare began when the band, after an hour's delay, took the stage. Their passage through the crowd was guarded by a group of plainclothes policemen. The cops managed to repel the first attack of fans on the stage, and then they had to form a "living wall". To appear in front of the crowd, Jim had to push through the rows of cops.

"Calm down!" he shouted. "We're here for the long haul!

He screamed, fell and ran around the edge of the stage, and twenty police officers had to push away fans who tried to grab him. He punctuated familiar songs with lines from "Celebration" and other improvised surrealist poetry that baffled the rowdy crowd of Long Island teenagers.

As the police began to roughly push back the crowd, wooden chairs flew in their direction. Jim picked one up and threw it back into the crowd. The film crew continued to record the show, but they had to dodge the pieces of furniture.

The evening ended with the song "The end". Those in the audience who couldn't see the stage shouted and got angry at those in the chairs. The whole crowd was buzzing and excited.

"Chshh," Jim told them. -Hey, seriously, be quiet! You're going to ruin everything! Shh!".

The crowd continued to scream. At the end of the performance Jim fell on stage like a shot, which excited the fans even more.

Roby Krieger ended his set with an awesome vibe, but Jim wasn't about to end his set just yet. At the very end, he gave one of the fans a hard time, and the fan threw his chair at him. Hundreds of chairs flew in the hot air of that busy evening. Jim kept dancing and laughing hysterically, and when the police tried to take him away, he lay down on the stage and refused to move. Eventually, bodyguards stepped in and led the entire group backstage. The evening ended with numerous arrests and injuries. The next day, the events were covered by the press.

Pete Townsend, the odious guitarist of The Who, watched it all from the sidelines. He was struck by the way Jim Morrison watched impassively as his bodyguards beat up teenagers who wanted to get close to him.

He thought he'd seen it all, but he was still amazed at how Jim managed to calculatingly manipulate the mood of the crowd, bringing them from elation to utter chaos. Shortly afterwards, Pete wrote a song called "Sally Simpson" as a tribute to Jim.

Backstage, while the film crew was cleaning up their equipment, Jim was comforting a teenage girl whose head had been smashed by a flying chair. Blood was running down her face from the wound, and the girl was trying to stop her tears. Jim hugged her, looked into the camera and said with a wry grin, "So much for democracy. You can't tell who hit her with the chair." He gently wiped the blood from her face and said softly: "The blood is already clotting... She was just an innocent bystander."

3 August.

That day, the song "Hello, I love you" became a hit and screamed from the speakers of literally every car in the country.

That night the band played at a concert hall in Cleveland. Again they had a film crew with them. Jim came to the concert drunk and turned the whole performance into a real chaos. Krieger tried to drown out Jim's incoherent speech with flashy guitar solos, but it annoyed Jim. "If I can't hear myself, I'm going to shoot someone in the crowd!" he shouted to his band. Then Morrison skipped all his parts on "When the music's over".

At the end of the show, Jim suddenly dived into the crowd with his microphone. A game of football began, with Jim as the ball. All the while, travelling arm in arm, he was shouting "Come on! Come on!". By the time he returned to the stage, his voice was gone. The band ended the show with the song "Light my fire" and ran off stage.

The crowd chanted Jim's name for quite a while longer, and when he never showed up, began throwing chairs and breaking doors into splinters again, and the whole evening turned into a senseless act of destruction.

4 Aug.

Now it's time for the final show. And the appearance of the band with a police escort seems no longer strange, but quite reasonable.

That hot Sunday night went great. Jim looked sober and standing on the big stage of the hockey arena even asked the rowdy crowd to go easy on the young cops who were guarding the stage.

"Backdoor man" flowed seamlessly into "Five to one". Jim stepped back into the shadows and let Robbie perform a colourful solo, which soon turned into the flamenco part of "Spanish caravan".

"What do you want to hear?" shouted Jim into the crowd. As hundreds of people began to shout their wishes Jim put in again: "One at a time, please. I can't hear you."

After a quick rendition of "Hello, I love you," the band performed "Wake up!" and "Light my fire," during which Jim danced and jumped around Mike like a man engulfed in flames.

The crowd tried to break through to the stage, but police securely guarded the perimeter until the band finished their performance and fled the stage.

The rest of the month, the band decided to take some time off. Obviously, Jim's brain was already boiling with drugs and crazy events of the past month. Anyway, their third album, "Waiting for the sun" sold well on its own. Quite unexpectedly, this album would go to number one in the United States in September.