Jim Morrison: Trial by ‘Fire’

Jim Morrison of the Doors got into trouble with Ed Sullivan by singing “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” after promising Sullivan’s producers that he’d change that line from “Light My Fire.” That was on September 17, 1967. In March of 1969, he got into much hotter water in Miami, where, in the midst of a chaotic concert, he was arrested and later charged with “lascivious behavior,” including indecent exposure, along with profanity and public drunkenness. After a highly publicized trial, he was found guilty of two misdemeanor indecency charges on September 20, 1970.

I met Morrison, accidentally, in early 1971, when he popped into an apartment in West Hollywood, downstairs from where his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, lived. We wound up chatting for more than an hour, and the session is known as the last Jim Morrison interview ever. Weeks after our visit, he left for Paris, never to return.

The conversation, which I recorded on a funky cassette recorder, has been released on a CD, is on exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, and an excerpt, with video of Morrison, me and others, is online (try http://blip.tv/file/308184).

The general consensus is that Morrison was railroaded; that a particularly hard-ass judge with a political agenda didn’t give him anything remotely close to a fair trial. Sentenced to six months in jail, along with a $500 fine, he was out on appeal when we spoke.

“There was no possible way I could have received a fair trial,” he told me, “because of the climate of public opinion that had been stirred up for a year and a half… But one thing I was interested to observe: Every day we would rush home to watch ourselves on TV; they couldn’t film in the courtroom. But going and leaving, they’d film it, and we’d hear the reporters’ views of what happened. The first few days it was kinda the old-line policy, what people had been thinking for a year and a half. But as the trial wore on, the reporters themselves, from just talking to me and the people involved in the case—the tone of the articles, and even the papers, became a little more objective as each day wore on.”

In my book, The Doors By the Doors, I quote Jac Holzman, who signed the Doors to his Elektra record label: “Had Jim lived, he would have rejoiced that the statute on which he was arrested was later found to be unconstitutional. On appeal, his specific case would have been thrown out. And Jim would have savored with a special joy this bit of irony: The judge who tried him was himself disgraced just a few years later for taking a bribe.”

Here’s Jim Morrison.