Rej Manzarek je do svoje smrti 2013. godine tvrdio da je publika doživela religioznu halucinaciju u Majamiju Ray Manzarek claimed until his dying day in 2013 that the audience had collectively
experienced a “religious hallucination” in Miami
The Doors were poisoning the youth. A group of high school pupils even held a protest, and even Hoover didn’t remain qui- et. His FBI played its role, warning of the pos- sibility of racial violence and claiming that Morrison had tried to cause chaos among the huge crowd of young people. The following Wednesday, 5 th March, the City of Miami issued a warrant for the ar- rest of James Douglas Morrison. The charge was signed by an o cial who had attend- ed the concert and worked for the state prosecutor. The e ect on the future of The Doors came astonishingly quickly. Miami was due to mark the start of a major tour of the United States, but as the news spread far and wide, concert halls cancelled agree- ments one by one. Even Morrison’s ador- ing fans from rock magazines turned their back on him. Rolling Stone led the circus by publishing a lead photo entitled“Want- ed in Dade County”. Radio stations stopped playing their songs, and during those tough 18 months before Jim had even stood in front of a judge and jury, the public has al- ready carried out their collective cruci xion. While the national media mocked Mor- rison ruthlessly, the nal chapter was be- ing prepared in Dade County. Morrison vs the. Establishment. The trial began on 12 th August 1970 and lasted for 40 days. The
“It’s hot and sweaty... It’s a swamp and it’s a yuck – a horrible kind of place, a seaplane hangar – and 14,000 people are packed in there, and they’re sweaty... Jim has seen The Living Theatre (a theatre troupe that experimented with confront- ing the public) and he’s going to do his ver- sion of The Living Theatre... He’s going to show these Florida people what psychedelic West Coast shamanism and confrontation is all about,”said Manzarek speaking about that evening. He claimed until his dying day in 2013 that the audience had collective- ly experienced a “religious hallucination”. “Morrison waved his shirt in front of the crowd and asked them if they wanted to see more. And the audience wanted that, but I swear that Jim never did it. That was one of those mass hallucinations,” wrote The Doors keyboardist in his autobiography. Before the end of the concert, the band had played a little Light My Fire, Jim was thrown into the crowd, the madness reached fever-pitch, and then the Miami masses went home, and Jim ew to the Car- ibbean for a break. And nobody suspected that the press would blow the events of the concert up to unprecedented proportions, and that there would be no end of media spin. It was written in the Miami Herald that Morrison, who doesn’t shy away from ob- scenity, indecently exposed himself, incit- ed a riot and becoming violent... All that was left was for him to blamed for sever- al murders for the picture to be complete. And politicians also didn’t fail to react (it’s worth remembering that war was under- way in Vietnam and Richard Nixon was in power, and The Doors represented a great target for settling accounts) and do some- thing against the denigration with which
youngest jury member was aged 42. Jim was convicted of open vulgarity and inde- cent exposure. The verdict was under the appeal process when he completed his sev- enth album, and many say one of his best albums, with a massive return to the blues - LA Woman. It wasn’t long after the Miami scandal that Jim decided to quit the band, and in March 1970 he moved to Paris. He intend- ed to take a break from concerts and con- centrate only on writing. “The trouble with all these busts is that people I know, friends of mine, think it’s funny and they like to believe it’s true and they accept it; people that don’t like me like to believe it because I’m the reincar- nation of everything they consider evil. I get hung both ways,”said Jim in a 1971 in- terview. That year, in April, he also released his last, seventh album, just three months prior to his death. James Douglas Morrison died in Paris on 3 rd July 1971. In the space of just a year, the world had also been left without Jimi Hendrix and Janice Joplin. All three of them were aged 27 when they died, and they all became legends. Morrison perhaps didn’t belong in the present of that time, but it was more than clear that he belonged to the future. That’s because he’s never been more alive and in uential in the minds of millions of people around the world. The generations that Jim tried to reach emerged from their long-held silence to correct a few old mis- takes and relay the memory of a guy who only spent ve years actively creating, and whose poetry endeavoured to free us from a limited life.
The Miami incident and its rami cations set Morrison on a road that culminated in death, but the legend lives on Incident u Majamiju i njegove posledice poslali su Morisona na put koji se završio smrću, ali legenda je i dalje živa
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