The Doors

The end of the 1960s found The Doors – one of the dark-star American groups who had exemplified the freewheeling spirit of that ground-breaking yet troubled decade – teetering on the abyss. With Jim Morrison increasingly becoming the victim of his own hype – drunk and out of control most of the time, a danger to himself and others – the rest of the band feared for their own futures.

“The boys did not hate Jim,” insists former Doors tour manager Vince Treanor. “The boys did not dislike Jim. The boys wanted Jim to be part of the group, but they couldn’t take the trouble that Jim was causing. They couldn’t take the loss of [so many] performances as a result of his behaviour. They couldn’t take the loss of all the record sales. They couldn’t deal with the loss of radio time. The censure that went down, the newspaper articles, the pastors and the righteous ministers with their boyfriends in the closet that got up and were saying how terrible The Doors was and how perverted Morrison was. The whole thing. They didn’t want to deal with that kind of bad, negative, horrible publicity.”

And yet, in the drawn-out aftermath of the arrest of Doors frontman Morrison after he allegedly pulled out his penis on stage at a concert in Miami in April 1969, ‘bad, negative, horrible publicity’ followed The Doors around like a cloud of flies.

The release later that year of The Doors album The Soft Parade, an overindulgent confection of lyrical navel gazing and musical self-importance, had not helped the band’s sagging reputation. Jim Morrison was now a bearded and bloated parody of the lit-up boho poet he still saw himself as, while keyboard player Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore were way past long-suffering, and now deep into despair about their rapidly shrinking career prospects. Suddenly everything about The Doors was a drag, man.

‘In the drawn-out aftermath of the arrest of Jim Morrison, ‘bad, negative, horrible publicity’ followed The Doors around like a cloud of flies.’

“As Jim got more out of control – the roomful of gunpowder waiting for somebody to light a match – Ray became more alienated and isolated from him,” Treanor says. “Now Ray never disowned Jim, but he never did what we all should have done, which was to say: ‘Look, asshole, smarten up, you’re wrecking everything!’”

Treanor recalls how Morrison once told him: “People wanna see me drunk on stage”. “I said: