Jim Morrison’s Arrest in New Haven Catalyst for Singer’s Ultimate Demise at Hands of Authorities
55 years ago: Jim Morrison taunting Lt. Kelly of the New Haven PD as Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger look on
For the complete story of the Doors and the Death Days of the Sixties, pick up a copy of Roadhouse Blues, published by Hamilcar Publications. For the holidays, it’s discounted: Click here.
Politics and crime were the lead stories in most major American newspapers on Monday, December 11, 1967. The previous evening Jacqueline Kennedy had made her first political appearance since her husband’s assassination, arriving with much fanfare at a New York State Democratic fundraising dinner costing five hundred dollars a plate. Other noteworthy guests included future 1968 presidential candidates Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene J. McCarthy, as well as Edward M. Kennedy. RFK joked that the event might as well serve as “the Kennedy Christmas party.”
Yuletide festivities were on many people’s minds as the holiday approached. Others, though, were caught up in the hoopla surrounding Lyndon B. Johnson’s daughter Lynda Bird marrying Marine Captain Charles S. Robb in the east wing of the executive mansion in Washington DC the previous weekend. The high-profile event gave the president the opportunity to downplay the activists protesting the war in Vietnam, explaining that the young people leading demonstrations were simply a “few exhibitionists…definitely in the minority.” Yet at his daughter’s wedding and reception, police were on hand to keep a small crowd of protesters away from the event.
With the intensity of the antiwar protests, ongoing civil rights campaigns, and the growing concern about drug use among young people, few could ignore the public release of a report by the FBI that revealed “serious crime” in America had “skyrocketed” in 1967, up 16 percent over the previous year. The most chilling statistic for most readers was the fact that violent crimes in the suburbs—usually considered safer than other places—was growing at a rate faster than in the nation’s large metro cities. The national rate for murders also mirrored the overall figure at 16 percent. As a result, both the president and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover demanded that Congress provide additional funds to battle what they viewed as a crime wave sweeping the nation.
Many Americans conflated rising violent crime rates with drug use by hippies. An investigation into the “drug scene” in Boston published that same day by journalist Robert L. Levey claimed: “There is one generalization that applies to all the types in the hippie underground of Boston and Cambridge. They have experimented with drugs.” The story included tales of college students selling marijuana and LSD imported from San Francisco and New York and young teen runaways who were caught up in the scene.
For Captain Joseph Jordan of the Boston narcotics squad, the hippie influence was not about love and peace, but its detrimental effect on younger teens. He likened hippies to “wolves masquerading as sheep. They throw out a lot of propaganda that just isn’t true.” Representing the thinking of much of the establishment, Jordan complained, “The hippies live in a complete drug atmosphere. Their whole environment deals with drugs.” Although law enforcement agents pinpointed marijuana for its widespread use, what they really feared was a growing epidemic of amphetamines (“speed”), particularly the form injected by needle directly into the user’s vein.
According to Levey, though, LSD reigned as the kingpin of hippie drugs: “The official initiation to the hippie underground.” One of the young people he interviewed described his first acid trip as an “incredible state of harmony and love.” Another claimed the drug “just opens your head to such huge vistas.” Yet Levey relayed that the hippies knew that some people had life-threatening reactions to LSD, explaining that one young woman’s sister had been hospitalized for two months after a bad dose. The reporter summed up the drug scene like many in the “straight” world might, saying, “Some can handle it—for others it is a seductive and destructive course.”
A thread tying together these disparate events and stories was another piece of news reported that day and over the next week: the arrest of Jim Morrison late Saturday night while on stage in New Haven, Connecticut. Perhaps not compelling enough to make it to the front page of the conservative mainstream media, the singer’s arrest and the resulting fallout held different meanings depending on where one stood on the current-event spectrum.
Speaking with a woman who was seventeen years old when Morrison was arrested on stage by the New Haven police force, I asked if she were a Doors fan back then. Her answer, with hesitancy in her voice as if she were instantly reliving the era: “Oh no! That was druggy music.” For her, the music scene at the time centered on the Beatles—the wholesome, Ed Sullivan Show “I Want to Hold Your Hand” version, not the mind-altered, questioning-authority band of the late Sixties.
The one-word label—“druggy”—for the Doors is significant in how it becomes both a moniker and a definition. Remember, December 1967 is five months after the band had hit the top of the charts with “Light My Fire” and three months after their national appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The idea that Doors fans were either hardcore rock-psychedelic enthusiasts or teenyboppers who had Morrison pinups on their walls is more nuanced. Some longtime fans were in many respects turned off by the band’s mainstream success. Newer listeners probably looked past the bad-boy image and the drug overtones.
What we know for sure is that the parents of these Doors fans and others in the older generations who were in authority positions resented the threat the band and others like them epitomized. It seems over-the-top to look back and consider a rock group a danger, but, since Elvis Presley’s explosion into the national consciousness in the 1950s, popular figures in music were seen as potentially threatening. The Doors challenged the ideals such people held dear. In this specific case, then, the band becomes a critical lens in examining how society and those in power come to grips with detractors or other critics outside what they consider the norm.
Newspaper report of Morrison’s arrest
The nation was on edge that fall because of the late October antiwar protest held at the Lincoln Memorial where some seventy thousand activists, hippies, war vets, Black Power members, and others gathered to show Lyndon Johnson how they felt about the war in Southeast Asia. After several speakers addressed the masses, including writer Norman Mailer and child psychologist Benjamin Spock, the crowd crossed the Potomac River toward the Pentagon. Johnson railed against the “irresponsible acts of violence and lawlessness by many of the demonstrators,” but there were just one thousand arrests and no felonies. If anything, the crowds were tame and reacted primarily against the aggression of the police and military that arrested them. The eyewitness accounts of the brutality—particularly on women protestors—were shocking.
The march pointed to a sea change in thinking, but also put the nation even more into us-versus-them camps. “For the first time in history,” explained historian Thomas Heinrich, “Americans from all walks of life rose up in mass protest against U.S. military intervention.”
The viciousness of the police response to the march on the Pentagon, according to Mailer, was essential to his concept that “the center of American might be insane.” Similar to the old adage that insanity meant doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome, Mailer determined people were “caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul.” In his aggressive, resolute fashion, the novelist connected the “schizophrenia” of capitalism, technology, and religion to the war. “America needed the war,” Mailer explained in The Armies of the Night. “It would need a war so long as technology expanded…and the cities and corporations spread like cancer; the good Christian Americans needed the war or they would lose their Christ.”
“New Haven alerted authorities at every level of law enforcement that Jim Morrison had to be stopped!”
So while Baby Boomers and others looking back from the twenty-first century might layer much of the 1960s with feelings of nostalgia or longing for the ideals they may have believed in at the time, we must never forget that the “Summer of Love” was only joyous for some of the people, some of the time. For others, the 1960s would be an era of repression, inequality, exclusion, and heartbreak. Dread and fear served as the undercurrent pulsing through the age. The challenge was that Mailer’s description of national psychosis was largely undetected by those it afflicted. Yet it was at the heart of why the state would react so definitively to repress an artist like Morrison.
Jim’s arrest in December 1967 while on stage at the New Haven Arena is important in understanding the decade. The incident represents how myriad people and institutions in a position of power were willing to use their authority to stamp out or thwart those who symbolized something they didn’t understand or even attempt to comprehend. For those wielding a hammer, as is said, everything looks like a nail. The establishment’s reaction to Morrison and the Doors was to look at them as something evil that had to be stopped.
Is the New Haven incident and Morrison’s onstage arrest part of the singer’s mythology? Certainly, but it’s more than simply iconography or yet another aspect of his life blown out of proportion. For every person who believed in the potential of the Sixties as the dawn of a better age, there were many more who saw the era as threatening, immoral, and—perhaps most important—antithetical to what the United States epitomized.
New Haven alerted authorities at every level of law enforcement that Jim Morrison had to be stopped!
One of the many headlines about the New Haven arrest
Splash page, chapter 8 of Roadhouse Blues: Morrison, the Doors, and the Death Days of the Sixties by cultural historian Bob Batchelor
For the complete story of the Doors and the Death Days of the Sixties, pick up a copy of Roadhouse Blues, published by Hamilcar Publications. For the holidays, it’s discounted: Click here.