“You’re fired!”: The California venue The Doors were too dangerous for
Anyone who saw The Doors once needed to know what they were getting whenever they stormed into their town.
They were always the dark side of what the Summer of Love was supposed to be, and while they weren’t calling for riots in the streets or anything, you could tell that Jim Morrison was doing everything he could to get a reaction out of the more straight-laced members of his audience whenever he recited his poetry. But despite having the most magnetic stage presence of all time, ‘The Lizard King’ did have a few establishments that he wasn’t welcome at over the years.
But when Morrison first got up onstage, he didn’t even consider himself a proper singer. The biggest names in the world at the time were people like Mick Jagger, and while Morrison had a great hold over the audience, he wasn’t exactly the greatest vocalist. He was more about putting on a show whenever he sang his songs, and when the room came alive whenever the band played ‘Break on Through’ or ‘Light My Fire’, no one could deny that he had the entire world in his hands for those few seconds.
Then again, not everyone was going to be in love with what Morrison was doing. Even when the band were first trying to get a record deal, Jac Holzman of Elektra Records wasn’t that impressed by what they were doing until he saw them for the fourth time. He knew that there was some magic in there, and if they could direct it in the right place, then they would have something that could make them famous.
That’s all well and good, but playing the media game means playing by the rules, and that was always Morrison’s biggest problem. Whenever he got onstage, he had no idea what he was going to do, and while that did bring out some of the greatest performances that he ever gave, there were more than a few times where the stage could turn into an outright warzone when he pushed the wrong buttons.
He would eventually get arrested in New Haven when he talked about being assaulted by cops before the show, but things weren’t even that cordial back home. The Whisky-A-Go-Go had been their home away from home for the longest time, but when the band debuted the song ‘The End’ for the first time, Morrison’s improvisation that recreated Oedipus Rex wasn’t going to go down well with the staff.
When Ray Manzarak talked about watching the song unfold, he remembered the manager of the club being furious after the show, saying, “Sure enough, Jim says, ‘Mother I want to…’ and then he shouts the f-word with all the gusto he possibly can. John [Densmore], Robby [Krieger] and I assault our instruments and the [club] comes back to life. We finish our set, we get off the stage, and the audience is just mesmerised, except for [owner] Phil Tanzini, who rushes upstairs and tells Jim, ‘You are the filthiest guy on this planet. You can’t say that onstage. You’re fired.’”
Then again, it probably wasn’t the best move for Tanzini to fire him during a Thursday night slot, considering that the band had more shows booked through the rest of the weekend. They managed to hold onto their jobs at the club for a few more days, but even if they weren’t approving of the language, the crowd absolutely loved it, to the point where every single pair of eyes were transfixed on what Morrison was doing.
The staff could have been confused, mesmerised, and disgusted all at the same time, but that was never a big problem for The Doors. They lived to cause a bit of a stir everywhere they played, and if the rest of their contemporaries weren’t that comfortable with it, they were going to lean into the darker side of their performances even more.
