When The Doors brutally snubbed Simon and Garfunkel: “I have to apologise”
Folk revivalism lasted longer than is remembered.
While Bob Dylan’s early 1960s burnishing in Greenwich Village’s clubs and coffee houses has become musical lore, American folk’s continued trajectory is eclipsed by the West Coast’s countercultural explosion that scored the summer of love and the Woodstock generation.
Yet, many of the decade’s big names found further fame despite the acid rock and psychedelia trends of the day. Dylan would immortalise himself with a string of lauded ‘gone electric’ albums, Crosby, Stills, and Nash would define Los Angeles’ folk rock, and a whole slew of singer-songwriters from Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell would push folk’s relevance to the era’s radicalism.
Right at the forefront of folk’s evolution was Simon and Garfunkel. Scoring some of the day’s biggest hits and selling record levels of albums, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s partnership curiously eschewed much of the era’s vanguard trends in favour of a songwriting style indebted to the Americana of old, as well as a little of British traditional balladry.
Melding a purer, gospel style of songcraft with lyrical examinations of the nation’s political turmoil in keeping with the values of their hippy peers, S&G found themselves in a fraught proximity with other bands who shared their sentiments while owing nothing to their orthodox folk styles.
Such a clash took place in August 1967. Riding high with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme’s success, Simon and Garfunkel headlined New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium to an audience of tens of thousands. Whether down to the promoter Leonard Ruskin is unclear, but the big event pulled LA psych-rockers The Doors as a last-minute support band who were similarly enjoying commercial success from their debut album, a dark garage conjuring that couldn’t have been further removed from the evening’s top billing. Reportedly losing equipment on the flight there, The Doors’ frontman Jim Morrison was in a narked mood backstage.
“You could feel our nervousness backstage when Paul came in to wish us luck,” Doors drummer John Densmore recollects in 1990’s Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and the Doors. “He was very friendly. I don’t know whether it was nervousness, or just that Jim hated folk music, but he gave Simon the worst vibes, in short of saying, ‘Get the fuck out of our dressing room’”.
“Then we went out onstage, and Jim didn’t give an inch,” Densmore added. “He didn’t try to connect to the audience in any way. At the end of our set, during the ‘Father, I want to kill you’ section [of ‘The End’], Jim put all the bottled-up hatred and rage and whatever was bothering him into slamming the mic down and screaming. It lasted about one minute. The audience woke up a bit and started thinking about what they were seeing. After intermission, Paul and Artie walked out onstage to thunderous applause”.
Such surly and pent-up aggression no doubt charged The Doors’ volatile set, adding to the mystique Morrison was weaving for himself, and leaving a troubled mood for Simon and Garfunkel to enter into for their gentle folk set. Never having quite buried the hatchet, Densmore would tell the It’s Only Rock And Roll Podcast years later that, catching Simon play Memphis in 2016, resulted in a long-awaited amends backstage: “’I gotta apologise fifty years later at how rude Jim was to you’. Paul says, ‘I remember that!’”
No hard feelings were had; the pair put Morrison’s foul mood down to anxiety or insecurity, but crucially, Simon accepted the apology with grace. It’s not the first time Simon’s shown such magnanimity, following a tense relationship with Dylan after the latter’s snickering during a 1966 Simon and Garfunkel set, to the two co-headlining a tour together in 1999.
