The story behind Jim Morrison’s posthumous pardon
The performance The Doors put on at the Dinner Key Auditorium in 1969 has long been shrouded in mystery, with soaring temperatures, alleged flashing, and hallucinations making it one of the band’s most disastrous performances. The resulting charge of incident exposure Jim Morrison was slapped with after the show was gainfully seized upon by the media and would ultimately haunt the counterculture icon until his death.
It was the media’s fascination with Morrison that seemed to drive his erratic behaviour, who seemed to almost self-sabotage by pandering to their sensationalised image of him. On the way to the infamous gig, Morrison had been drinking so heavily that he missed his flight to Miami, delaying the show by an hour. 12,000 fans were waiting for him in a 7,000-capacity space, the air-con was shot, and the crowd were annoyed. It was a sign of things to come.
Morrison seemed disdainful while performing, calling the crowd “idiots” before insisting they join him onstage – a move which forced the police to intervene. What happened next has been highly debated, with some alleging Morrison started to undress and flash his penis to the crowd. Although the crowd swore the ‘People Are Strange’ singer had exposed himself, the band rubbished the claims. Ray Manzarek offered his own alternative theory, suggesting the heat caused a “religious hallucination” in the thousands-strong crowd.
Manzarek’s likening it to the vision of Lourdes and Dionysus didn’t hold up too well, and Morrison was found guilty after a lengthy trial. Defiant, Morrison refused a plea bargain and resolved to appeal the charge as the band pressed on with L.A. Woman.
As the recording was wrapping up and Morrison was still dogged by legal worries, he left for Paris, where he was discovered dead in his bathtub in July 1971. But Morrison was granted a reprieve in death and was given a posthumous pardon in 2010 for the conviction he’d vowed to fight before his tragic passing.
Morrison’s late partner, Patricia Kennealy Morrison, was totally against the pardon, telling Uncut he did “nothing to be pardoned for”. Although the unanimous vote by the Florida Board of Executives to posthumously pardon the frontman might have been a cause for celebration for some, she said his record should have been expunged instead.
“Since the original charges and trial were a publicity stunt, to begin with, it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the pardon should follow in those footsteps,” she said. But it was the view of Florida Governor Charlie Crist (who prosed the pardon) that it was an attempt to “right a wrong”.
“We live in a civil society that understands that [the] lasting legacy of a human being, and maybe the last act for which they may be known, is something that never occurred in the first place, it’s never a bad idea to try to right a wrong,” he said.
