This is the third installment of a multi-part series about anti-rock ‘n’ roll crusaders from years gone by and the damage they do in the name of “protecting the children.” These pieces feature a parade of villainous villains of the rock censorship world, some that you’ll recognize, some that you’ve hardly even heard of. If you missed the previous articles check the Flaming Spuds Rhapsodies home page.
Not even three years after The Beatles’ “Bigger than Jesus” crisis, moral panics over rock ‘n’ roll and the people who played it were becoming fairly regular occurrences in these United States.
After the rise of psychedelia and hippiedom circa 1967, lots of conservatives blamed rock ‘n’ roll for promoting drugs to the nation’s youth. After his daughter Diane committed suicide by jumping out of her West Hollywood apartment window in 1969, TV host Art Linkletter blamed it on an LSD flashback and claimed that the drug culture in general and rockers were partly responsible for Diane’s death. Linkletter actually proposed a debate over drugs between The Beatles and President Richard Nixon.
That would have been cool!
Speaking of Nixon, his vice president, Spiro Agnew — assumedly between meetings to accept bribes from government contractors from Maryland — declared in September 1970 that songs such like The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends” and “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane were “messages of drug use.” The Beatles song, Agnew said, is “a catchy tune, but until it was pointed out to me, I never realized that the ‘friends’ were assorted drugs.”
But these were peanuts compared with the reaction to a concert by The Doors in Miami on March 1, 1969. The reaction by authorities was downright scary.
Here’s the story: Doors singer Jim Morrison was arrested, convicted and faced three years in prison for his drunken antics at the Miami show at a place called the Dinner Key Auditorium — which sounds more like a fancy joint you’d go to see Al Martino or Jack Jones than it does a rock venue.
Before we get going, here’s a pretty cool video of one of my favorite early Doors songs:
So what happened that night in 1969? According to a 2023 story in American Songwriter:
On stage, Jim Morrison, along with guitarist Robby Krieger, drummer John Densmore, and keyboardist Ray Manzarek, performed their typical, hypnotic set, despite their frontman’s intoxication.
Opening on “Break on Through (to the Other Side),” the band also performed their cover of the Willie Dixon-penned Howlin’ Wolf song “Back Door Man,” filled with Morrison’s drunken diatribes in between. …
… An hour into the Miami set, the show began to shift after the band began playing “Light My Fire.” Prior to that, Morrison was ignoring the crowd’s screaming requests to hear the song. They barely got through it before all chaos ensued. Because of the disorder of events that unraveled, there are many conflicting accounts of what exactly happened that night at the Dinner Key Auditorium.
A 56-minute audio post on YouTube (embedded below, though the audio is shitty) features the sounds of the show up to about a minute after the band finished “Light My Fire.” Morrisons starts shouting “I wanna see some action out there!” He repeats that four times then invites the audience to come to the stage. “I want to see you people come up here and have some fun. Come on! Come on! No limits! No laws! This is your show. Anything you want goes. Now come on! Anything you want. Let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it!”
A few seconds later there’s some kind of a thud. A man’s voice can be heard saying “Someone’s going to get hurt.” From there you only hear muffled crowd noises, some quick sounds from Manzarek’s organ and Morrison saying something about “…`til we all get our rocks off.”
In Rolling Stone’s original coverage in 1969, includes an account by one of the concert’s promoter, Ken Collier:
… Morrison whipped off his shirt and began to pull out all the stops. At one point, according to Collier, Morrison was asking, “Do you wanna touch me?” Then it became a command: “Come up and touch me.” At another point Morrison was pouring champagne over his own head. “He was really drunk; he’s a big drinker,” Collier says.
Then, just before the stage filled up with about 60 people, Morrison asked, “Do you wanna see my cock?” according to Collier; and this was when Collier went into action, grabbing the microphone away from the singer, flashing the two-finger peace and victory sign at the audience and saying: “Keep calm, sit down, keep quiet, peace, this can’t happen in Miami, we’re not going to have this in Miami, sit down …”
While Collier was rapping, Morrison was in action, pushing people around the stage, bellowing, and acting as if he were masturbating, Collier recounts; but Collier did not see Morrison liberate his penis, he stresses. Other observers told Collier that Morrison had exposed himself, but Collier himself missed it.
The article quotes The Doors’ manager Bill Siddons, who dismissed that allegation, saying it was, “just another dirty Doors show. It didn’t seem to be too big a deal.” Siddons added, “until the police chief took it on as his crusade.”
But while the cops indeed instigated the charges against the Lizard King, most say it was a Miami Herald reporter named Larry Mahoney, who stirred things up, starting with an account of the show under the headline “Band Fails to Stir a Riot.”
As a retired newspaper man myself, I’m constantly defending journalists from attacks by the right and the left that blame reporters for all kinds of crap.
I won’t be doing that here for Larry Mahoney.
In that first article, Mahoney wrote:
The hypnotically erotic Morrison, flaunting the laws of obscenity, indecent exposure and incitement to riot, could only stir a minor mob scene toward the end of his Saturday night performance… Many of the nearly twelve thousand youths said they found the bearded singer’s exhibition disgusting. Included in the audience were hundreds of unescorted junior and senior high school girls… It was not meant to be pretty. Morrison appeared to masturbate in full view of his audience, screamed obscenities and exposed himself. He also got violent, slugged several of [the security workers] and threw one of them off stage before he himself was hurled into the crowd.
Hundreds of “unescorted” junior and senior high school girls! I think you can see where this was going
Writer Bob Norman, in a 2010 story in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, noted, as did many other sources that police at the show didn’t arrest Morrison. That’s “likely because he never committed the act that anchored the case and got all the moralists in a tizzy,” Norman wrote.
But in following days, the article said:
Mahoney and other reporters then called authorities and basically asked them if they were going to let this obscene and unlawful behavior stand. Within two days of the article, the Miami State Attorney’s Office, in part based on the testimony of an office boy, filed obscenity, drunkenness, and indecent-exposure charges against Morrison.
Good work Mahoney!
MildEquator.com, a website “designed to bring collectors and fans of The Doors, the highest quality, authorized materials available for reference online” says the band left the arena and went to Jamaica for a vacation. But …
In the subsequent days while on vacation, Miami officials begin to issue warrants for Jim’s arrest, and the media begins reporting on the event nationwide. Jim Morrison returns to the U.S. only to learn that he is being charged with a felony and is now a wanted man in Florida.
On April 3rd, Jim turns himself in to authorities at the Los Angeles Federal Building after a second felony charge is laid against him for fleeing Miami. He waives extradition charges, and is eventually arrested on November 9th in Miami where he is released 20 minutes later on bond. All official documents pertaining to the trial and arrest indicate that Jim had a total of 4 charges laid against him - Lewd and Lascivious Behavior (a felony), Indecent Exposure, Open Profanity and Public Drunkeness.
Meanwhile, just days after the concert, 17-year old Mike Levesque, a senior at Miami Springs High School, began organizing what would become known as the Rally for Decency. According to an Associated Press article on the front page of the March 24, 1969 New York Times, Levesque, said “the idea grew out of a Catholic youth group discussion two days after the controversial Doors concert.”
The rally, which took place at the Miami Orange Bowl, drew a crowd estimated at 30,000, which is more than twice the audience at the Doors show.
That’s probably because the rally featured such teen favorites as Steppenwolf, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Ike & Tina Turner and a new group called Led Zeppelin!
I’m lying, of course.
The actual Decency lineup included fabled homo-hater Anita Bryant, The Lettermen and The Great One himself, Jackie Gleason.
A UPI story quoted Gary Pike of The Lettermen saying, “You see, we knew that some time soon a movement like this had to start. We believe in goodwill among mankind, and so on, but this ‘love everybody’ kick of the hippies is too much.”
Gleason also was gleeful. As reported by several news outlets, he predicted that similar rallies would “snowball across the United States and perhaps around the world.”
The lede of this article is hilarious in an unintentional way: “It was almost like the Newport Jazz Festival, a Fourth of July rally and a Billy Graham crusade rolled into one big protest demonstration.”
Newport Jazz … starring Anita Bryant and The Lettermen.
Though it was touted as a rally by for and of decent teens, that earlier-cited Associated Press story noted that about half the audience was adults. The above-mentioned UPI story said “Clergymen of all faiths helped the youngsters organize the rally.”
Another enthusiastic adult supporter was the ever-so-decent Richard Milhous Nixon. Tricky Dick wrote to Levesque saying:
This very positive approach which focused attention on a number of critical problems confronting society strengthens my belief that the younger generation is our greatest natural resource and therefore of tremendous hope for the future.
And Gleason and the guy from the Lettermen were right. Rallies for Decency popped up in other cities. But if Miami was the Woodstock for the counter-counter culture, Baltimore was its Altamont.
The Baltimore Police Museum has one account of this Decency rally, which took place in April, 1969:
It was anything but decent. They held a big rally at Memorial Stadium in the spring of 1969, a rally for local youth to come together and show that not all of America’s children were drug-crazed hippies intent on dismantling the establishment of the United States. Said one participant: “It was supposed to show that everything wasn’t going to hell in a hand-basket.”
This gig was trouble from the word go …
Although it was promoted in every high school throughout the metro area, very few kids knew exactly what it was they were attending. Many youngsters arrived on the rampant rumor that James Brown and his Famous Flames were going to give a free concert. Others believed it would be an arena to protest the war in Vietnam or a forum to push for the right of 18-year-olds to vote. And thousands of naive youngsters from churches and community centers in the suburbs arrived on buses for an afternoon of wholesome music and good clean fun.
Altogether, more than 40,000 people showed up at the stadium on April 20 to attend the “Maryland Youth Rally for Decency.” By the time police shut the rally down not long after it started, rioting and mugging left 138 people hurt, 142 arrested and seven stabbed. Seven police officers were injured, including one whose kneecap was crushed when someone threw a trash can down a ramp.
Maybe they rioted because The Lettermen weren’t there. Whatever the case, this was the end of the Teens for Decency movement.
But another Decency rally deserves mention also, the one in Cincinnati.
I have to praise writer Jay Gilbert for his lede in this 2020 article in Cincinatti Magazine: “This is the story of two penises, separated by 20 years and 1,000 miles. One was in Miami in 1969, and belonged to Jim Morrison of The Doors. The other was in Ohio in 1989, and caused the downfall of a popular politician.”
That politician was a Republican Congressman named Donald Edgar “Buz” Lukens, who represented his Ohio district from 1967 to 1971. After losing a race for governor in 1970, he served several years in the state Senate before returning to Congress in 1987.
And in April 1969, Gilbert writes:
He was among several politicians and celebrities who attended Cincinnati’s Teens for Decency rally … About 10,000 people packed the Cincinnati Gardens, where Ohio’s and Kentucky’s governors and Cincinnati’s mayor welcomed them. There was also an appearance by America’s poster child for teenage innocence, Dick Clark …
What fun! At least there were no riots.
As for our pal Buz, his political career crashed in 1989 after he was convicted with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” and “contributing to the unruliness of a minor” for paying $40 to the girl for sex in his apartment on November 6, 1988.
Gilbert wrote “Lukens arranged to meet with the girl’s mother at a McDonald’s to negotiate a cover-up, but sadly for him that conversation was videotaped.
Lukens initially refused to resign from Congress. But he lost the 1990 GOP primary to future House Speaker John Boehner. And a few months later, in October 1990, he finally called it quits after the House Ethics Committee voted to investigate charges that he’d fondled and propositioned a Capitol elevator operator.
And in 1996 he was convicted of bribery during his years in Congress and sentenced to 30 months in prison.
These guys …
Speaking of convictions, in September 1970, a Miami jury found Jim Morrison guilty of indecent exposure and profanity. Judge Murray Goodman sentenced him to six months in jail and a $500 fine. He was released on a $50,000 bond while his verdict was being appealed.
Morrison was dead about nine months later. He died in Paris on July 3, 1971.
But he got a birthday gift on December 8, 2010. Just weeks before leaving office, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and his state clemency board unanimously signed a posthumous pardon for his wicked crimes.
The New York Times wrote:
Mr. Crist – who took the unusual step of speaking on Morrison’s behalf during the hearing – said there remained doubts as to whether the singer exposed himself. Another member of the clemency board, Alex Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, said it was not the job of the clemency board to “retry” his case. She said the decision to grant a pardon was recognition of Morrison’s artistic legacy and that his accomplishments had endured since his death. “We don’t know what did or did not happen,” she said.
One last shot at my brother in journalism who led the frenzy to prosecute Jim Morrison, the late Larry Mahoney.
Howard, in his New Times piece quotes “a rather shameless piece [by Mahoney] for the Sun-Sentinel about Morrison in 1986.”
There, Larry wrote:
Did the Lizard King, all dressed up in leather, really expose himself in Miami? Even to this day there is doubt in my mind. For one thing, hundreds of photos were taken of the concert — and in not one is there clear evidence of his most offending act.
I do remember the girls around me in Dinner Key saying, “Oh gross!” and “Take me home” when the act supposedly occurred. I think that I saw it also, but Morrison was doing a lot of monkeying around on the stage — completely out of control. So I tell the callers, yeah, he did it all right.
Yup. there was “doubt in my mind” about this terrible event that sparked a national moral outrage. And he had no evidence except a few teenage girls saying “Oh gross!” But nearly 20 years later Mahoney was still telling people “he did it alright.”
What a journalistic inspiration!
Howard also mentioned that Mahoney’s “flowery obituary” in 2003 didn’t mention the biggest story of his career, Jim Morrison’s Miami concert.
“I can see why,” Howard wrote.
I’ll leave this on happier note. One thing I have in common with Jim Morrison is that both of us are former Albuquerque residents. He lived there for a while as a kid. And like most New Mexico kids in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Morrison apparently was familiar with TV kiddy show host Dick Bills (who was Glen Campbell’s uncle, but that’s another story) and his afternoon show, The K Circle B Ranch. A few years ago, this ditty, apparently taken from The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” session, surfaced on YouTube:
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