Robby Krieger sets the record straight on Jim Morrison’s indecent exposure arrest
In 1967, The Doors emerged as one of the leading forces in America’s blooming psychedelic rock wave with their seminal debut album. The band comprised keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore, who created a characteristic blues and jazz-infused sound frontman Jim Morrison could adorn with his eccentric Beat-inspired poetry.
As a countercultural presence, The Doors energised the baby boomer generation and its fervent disdain for the establishment and the ongoing war in Vietnam. Following his tragically premature death in July 1971, Morrison became an immortal icon of this transitional moment in American history. This was partly thanks to the frontman’s wild stage presence of excess and anarchy, which, to his detriment, followed into his personal life.
A certain level of inebriation can be a tremendous boon to a young performer, but Morrison found moderation difficult. Infamously, the singer would frequently turn up to concerts drunk and/or stoned out of his mind, provoking the audience and floundering in performance.
Morrison’s unhinged and aggressive onstage demeanour greatly inspired Iggy Pop, who fronted The Stooges in the late 1960s and early ’70s. “I attended two concerts by the Doors. The first one I attended was early on, and they had not gotten their shit together yet,” Iggy revealed in a past interview. “That show was a big, big, big influence on me. They had just had their big hit, ‘Light My Fire’ and the album had taken off. So, here’s this guy, out of his head on acid, dressed in leather with his hair all oiled and curled. The stage was tiny, and it was really low. It got confrontational. I found it really interesting.”
“I loved the performance,” Iggy continued. “Part of me was like, ‘Wow, this is great. He’s really pissing people off, and he’s lurching around, making these guys angry.’ People were rushing the stage, and Morrison’s going, ‘Fuck you. You blank, blank, blank.’ You can fill in your sexual comments yourself. The other half of it was that I thought, ‘If they’ve got a hit record out and they can get away with this, then I have no fucking excuse not to get out on stage with my band.’ It was sort of the case of, ‘Hey, I can do that.’ There really was some of that in there.”
As two of the most provocative performers in rock history, Iggy and Morrison are both associated with controversial antics – Iggy enjoyed his fair share of self-mutilation and once even knocked out a fan with a watermelon. One thing the two frontmen had in common, however, was a penchant for indecent exposure.
As the legend goes, in March 1969, Morrison exposed himself while performing at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami. At the time, Morrison was in a downward spiral as his issues with addiction and fame worsened. The infamous concert is widely considered the beginning of the end for The Doors.
Morrison had been drinking heavily during the day and missed a connecting flight to Miami. When he finally turned up an hour late, the poorly ventilated venue was packed out with frustrated fans. During the particularly shoddy performance, the crowd appeared disinterested, prompting a response from Morrison.
“You’re all a bunch of fuckin’ idiots,” he yelled. The temperature began to rise in the room, both literally and figuratively, as fans stormed the stage. It is alleged that Morrison exposed himself to the madding crowd in his dazed state.
Accounts of the indecent vary, but The Doors’ guitarist, Robert Krieger, claims the story has been bent out of shape through years of Chinese whispers. “It wasn’t what they said it was,” Krieger told Forbes in 2021. “He didn’t whip it out. In fact, after the show, we were upstairs drinking beer with the cops. Nobody was getting arrested or anything like that.”
Continuing, the guitarist and ‘Light My Fire’ songwriter suggested that Morrison’s subsequent arrest was a result of political posturing. “What happened was there were people running for office at the time, and they started making a big deal about it,” he added. “Finally, he got busted for it. That threw a kink in our whole deal because we couldn’t play live. They have this thing called the Hall Managers Association, and they voted to ban the Doors from any of the halls.”
Following the events in Miami, Morrison was sentenced to six months imprisonment. While appealing the court ruling in 1970, he moved to Paris, where he tragically died under strange circumstances a year later.
Watch The Doors perform ‘Light My Fire’ at Isle of Wight Festival 1970 below.
