The Doors’ disastrous 1968 tour that hospitalised Jim Morrison and sparked Britain’s hippie age
Raised in the sun-soaked psychedelia of the West Coast, America’s hippie age quickly spread across the States and, with the aid of a particularly anarchic Jim Morrison and a rather disastrous tour that saw The Doors frontman hospitalised, inebriated, and generally out of it, it didn’t take long for psychedelia to reach Europe, either.
By the time that 1968 rolled around, in the post-Summer of Love landscape, The Doors had carved out a name for themselves as the defining band of the counterculture era; nobody represented this bold new age of youthful rebellion, mind-expanding drugs, and expansive sonic odysseys quite as well as Jim Morrison and his band of acid-dripped, jazz-fueled musicians.
At that time, though, word was slow to traverse the Atlantic Ocean, and the received pronunciation of BBC radio presenters never dared to utter the name of Jim Morrison or The Doors.
Nevertheless, enough of London’s small but growing hippie fraternity had heard of The Doors that the band chose to organise a tour of the UK and mainland Europe in 1968. Together with the equally anarchic San Francisco outfit Jefferson Airplane, the two bands left a trail of rock and roll destruction across the continent, in doing so infecting those ancient nations with the newfound inspiration of the psychedelic age.
Inevitably, though, their arrival in the UK didn’t go off without a hitch. In fact, the band were greeted at the airport by protestors, with conservative activist Mary Whitehouse leading the charge, calling the band “a political extremist organisation”. It seems as though their reputation preceded them.
After things had cooled down somewhat, though, The Doors made their way to London’s Roundhouse, along with the Airplane who were hot from their appearance at the first-ever Isle of Wight Festival, for a series of shows witnessed by the likes of Steve Winwood, Arthur Brown, and even a young David Bowie; the movers and shakers of London’s uber-cool music scene.
As if that wasn’t enough, Granada TV – presumably under the direction of Tony Wilson – filmed the shows for the documentary film The Doors Are Open, contrasting their counterculture rock with footage of the student riots in Paris, the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and shots from the Vietnam War.
If a little on-the-nose, the documentary film perfectly summed up the time period and the context in which The Doors arrived in England.
All of that contextual importance, though, didn’t seem to get through to Jim Morrison, who spent the majority of his time in London out of his tree. It was during this tour, specifically, that the frontman started to go noticeably downhill, in terms of his abuse of drink and drugs. In fact, during an appearance in Amsterdam during the very same tour, he had consumed so much hashish that he had to be hospitalised, forcing Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger to take on vocal duties for the night.
Set upon by the architects of moral panic, and hospitalised by the cheap abundance of booze and drugs in Europe, by the standards of most rock and roll tours, The Doors’ European jaunt in 1968 was pretty disastrous. It did, however, firmly establish that bold new age of psychedelic rock in Europe, and spurred on the entirety of Britain’s own countercultural experiments. In that sense, the tour went about as well as could be expected.
