The Officer Who Used Mace on Jim Morrison Backstage Had No Idea Who He Was — What Jim Did With That D
The police officer did not recognize him. This is the fact that everything else rests on, the fact that the evening of December 9th, 1967 returns to whenever it is examined carefully. The officer who found Jim Morrison in the backstage shower area of the New Haven Arena had no idea who he was. He saw a young man in a space where young men were not supposed to be, and he told him to leave, and the young man did not leave, and the officer responded to that non-compliance the way that officers to non-compliance in December of 1967, which was with the particular authority of someone who has been told that their judgment in the field is final. Jim Morrison was 23 years old. The Doors were one of the most discussed bands in America. Light My Fire had spent 3 weeks at number one over the summer. Strange Days, the second album, had been released. Two months earlier to reviews that treated the band not as a novelty, but
as something genuinely serious, a presence in American music that was doing things that American music had not previously done in quite this form. Jim Morrison’s face was on magazine covers. His name was on radio stations in cities he had never visited. His voice was coming out of speakers in apartments across the country, delivering words that made people feel things they could not entirely account for.
The officer in the shower area of the New Haven Arena knew none of this. He knew a young man in a restricted space, and he told him to leave, and the young man said something back, something that was by every account neither threatening nor aggressive, but that was also not compliance. And the officer used mace.
He sprayed mace into Jim Morrison’s eyes in the backstage corridor of the New Haven Arena, and Jim Morrison stood there in the corridor with his eyes burning and his face wet, and then he went to get ready for the show. The show was sold out. The audience had been filling the arena since before the doors opened.
The kind of crowd that had been forming around the doors all year as the fame had accelerated. Young people who had heard the music and felt it do something specific to them. Who had come to see whether the thing they felt listening to the records was something that existed live.
Whether the voice and the words and the strangeness of the songs were connected to an actual person who would be present in the room with them. They did not know filing into their seats that the actual person was in the backstage corridor with mace in his eyes. Ray Manzarek found out what had happened.
He was told by a road manager who had been in the vicinity who had witnessed the confrontation without fully understanding it, who conveyed the information in the abbreviated way that people convey information when the situation is complicated and the show is about to start. Ray understood the information. He understood it through the lens of seven months of playing alongside Jim Morrison in venues large and small.
Of watching Jim’s interior states translate directly into what happened on the stage. Of knowing that what Jim carried with him when he walked out to the microphone was not separable from what the audience received when he got there. He went to Jim. He found him in the dressing room not in distress exactly, not performing anger, but in the particular state that followed things that happened to him before shows.
Slightly interior, slightly removed from the ordinary dimensions of the room in the process of metabolizing something that had not been planned and that the evening now required him to carry alongside everything else. His eyes were red from the mace. He was drinking water. He did not say much to Ray.
Ray did not say much to him. They had been in enough difficult pre-show situations by December of 1967 to understand that the situation did not require extensive discussion. It required the show. But to understand what Jim Morrison did with what had happened to him when he walked out onto the New Haven Arena stage that night, you have to understand what he had been doing with things all year.
What the performances had become in the 12 months since the first album and Light My Fire and the particular velocity of fame that had arrived faster than anyone had anticipated and had required Jim Morrison to develop on the fly and in public a relationship to his own celebrity that the celebrity itself kept destabilizing. The performances of 1967 had been getting longer and stranger and more genuinely unpredictable.
Not in the way that performances become unpredictable when a performer is losing control. The band was tighter than it had ever been, the music more precisely realized, the relationship between the four musicians more deeply understood. What was becoming unpredictable was Jim Morrison’s relationship to the stage itself, to the space between the microphone and the audience, to the question of what a performance was and what it could legitimately contain.
He had been pressing against the edges of that question all year and the edges had been giving way and the New Haven show was going to be the clearest demonstration yet of exactly where the edges were and what happened when they broke. He walked out onto the stage and the crowd responded the way crowds responded to Jim Morrison in December 1967 with the particular intensity of people who have been waiting for something and are now in the presence of it.
The roar that contained both recognition and anticipation. The show began normally. The band was tight. The songs moved through their established shapes. Jim Morrison sang with the particular quality of focused intensity that had characterized the best shows of the year, fully present, fully committed, the distance between his interior state and what was coming through the microphone as small as it ever got.
And then midway through the set, he stopped singing. He stopped in the way that he would stop sometimes in the long middle sections of songs, the pause that the audience had learned to read as the gathering of something, the held breath before the next extension of wherever the song was going.
But this time the pause did not lead into more music. It led into words. Jim Morrison began to describe into the microphone what had happened to him in the backstage corridor, not performing the description, not using it as theater, not working it into the mythological framework of the Lizard King persona, just describing it, a police officer, a shower area, mace, the burning in his eyes.
The fact that the officer had not known who he was, which was the most interesting part of the story, and the part that Jim returned to with the particular attention of someone who has found an unexpected truth in an unpleasant experience. Because what the officer’s non-recognition meant, what Jim was working through in real time into a microphone in front of a sold-out arena in New Haven, was something about the relationship between fame and identity, between the image that the world had constructed around him and the actual person who could be maced in a corridor by someone who had no access to that image. The image was famous. The person was not protected by the image’s fame. The image traveled without the person, and the person remained vulnerable to the specific, ordinary vulnerabilities of a person in a space where they were not supposed to be. He spoke about this for a while. The audience listened. They were not entirely sure what was happening, whether this was part of the show, whether the show had ended and something else had begun, whether the
person at the microphone was performing or simply speaking. The ambiguity was genuine because Jim Morrison did not know the answer to it, either. He was at the boundary between the performance and the event, the boundary that he had been pressing against all year. And for a few minutes he was standing exactly on it, speaking into a microphone, making the audience into witnesses to something that had happened to him in a corridor.
A New Haven police officer came onto the stage, then more of them. The lights in the arena came up, the harsh, neutral house lights that revealed the space for what it actually was rather than what the show lighting made it. Jim Morrison was still at the microphone when they reached him. He did not run, he did not resist in any physical sense.
He looked at the officers and the officers looked at him, and he was arrested on stage in front of the sold-out audience in the full light of a house-lit arena for breach of peace and for whatever other categories the situation required. John Densmore, watching from behind the drums as the officers moved onto the stage, saw something in Jim’s face at the moment of the arrest that he would return to in interviews for decades afterward.
He said it was not fear and not defiance and not the performed confrontation of someone who wanted to be seen being arrested. It was something quieter. The expression of someone who has, in some sense, arrived at the place they were heading without having planned to arrive there. The stage had become, for one evening, the corridor, the space where the image offered no protection, where the person was simply a person subject to the authority of people who did not know what the image was and would not have cared if they had. Ray Manzarek, also watching from the stage, understood it differently in musical terms, as he understood most things. He said later that what Jim had done, from the moment he stopped singing, and began speaking, was extend the performance into territory that performances had not previously claimed. The description of the corridor was not outside the show. It was the show, continuing by different means, pressing further into the question of what the space between a performer and an
audience could legitimately contain. By that standard, the arrest was not the end of the performance, it was its conclusion. The charges against Jim Morrison arising from the New Haven arrest were eventually dropped. The evening generated significant press coverage, which covered it primarily as a confrontation between rock and roll and authority, the counterculture and the establishment, the familiar narrative categories of 1967 that were available to make sense of it.
These categories were not wrong. They were simply insufficient in the way that available categories are always insufficient when someone is actually standing at an edge rather than performing proximity to one. Jim Morrison had been standing at an edge all year. New Haven was where he found it, not because he had planned to find it there.
The officer in the shower area had not been planned. The mace had not been planned. The description into the microphone had not been scripted. But the finding was not accidental. The edge was where the year had been going. And when it arrived, Jim Morrison was at the microphone in a sold-out arena in New Haven, Connecticut, doing the only thing he knew how to do with the edge when he found it, stepping onto it and speaking clearly in his own voice about what was on the other side.
Bill Siddons drove him to the police station. The paperwork was processed. Jim Morrison was released. They drove back to the hotel. The tour continued. The following night in another city, there was another show. The performance Jim Morrison gave at New Haven Arena on December 9, 1967 was never recorded in any officially sanctioned form.
What exists is accounts from John Densmore, from Ray Manzarek, from journalists who were present, from audience members who were there and understood in real time that they were witnessing something that would not be repeated in quite the same form. The accounts agree on the facts and disagree on the meaning, which is the expected condition for events that happen at genuine edges.
What they agree on without exception is the moment when the house lights came up, the sudden harsh, neutral brightness that replaced the show lighting and revealed the arena as it actually was, not a charged darkened space of performance and electricity, but a large building with seats and a floor and officers moving onto the stage and a young man at a microphone who had been sprayed in the eyes with mace in a corridor earlier that evening and who was now in the full light still at the microphone, still in the position of someone who has something to say. That was Jim Morrison at 23, still at the microphone in the full light with something to say. What the arrest at New Haven Arena did in the weeks and months that followed was clarify something that Jim Morrison had been circling since the first album was released and the fame had arrived in the particular form that fame took in 1967. The clarification was not comfortable. It was not the kind of thing that could be processed quickly or converted into a useful lesson that would guide future
decisions. It was a confrontation with the specific limits of what the image could do and could not do, and those limits were sharper and more absolute than the preceding year of accumulating celebrity had made them seem. The image traveled. That was what images did.
They traveled independently of the person who generated them, found audiences the person had never met, accumulated meanings the person had not intended, created expectations the person was then required to meet or disappoint. Jim Morrison’s image had been traveling for 12 months by December 1967, and it had traveled a very long way.
It was in magazine covers and in record stores and in the minds of the young people who had filled the New Haven Arena that evening, who had constructed from the image a version of Jim Morrison that they were expecting to encounter in the room. That version of Jim Morrison was protected by its fame. Was not touchable, not subject to the ordinary mechanisms of authority that operated in corridors and shower areas in police precincts.
The person was not that version. The person could be maced in a corridor. The person could be arrested on a stage. The person was subject to everything the image was not subject to, and the person was also the one who had to get up in the morning and continue regardless of what the image was doing or what the audience expected the image to do.
This was the thing that the New Haven evening had made concrete and unavoidable, the gap between what the image was and what the person was, rendered visible by the specific unglamorous mechanism of a police officer with mace in a backstage corridor who had no idea who he was talking to. Robby Krieger processed the evening quietly as Robby processed most things.
He watched it happen. From the stage, the description into the microphone, the officers arriving, the house lights, the arrest. He did not speak extensively about it in the immediate aftermath. He was 21 years old, still in the process of understanding what the band he had joined was, what its front man was, what the nights like this one meant for the project they were all engaged in.
He understood it as a musician, something had happened at New Haven that extended the show into territory shows had not previously claimed, and the extension had consequences, and the consequences were going to be part of what came next. What came next in the immediate sense was a night in a police precinct and charges that were eventually dropped, and a press account that described the evening in the terms available to December 1967 for describing such evenings.
What came next in the larger sense was the continuation of the year, the continuation of the performances, the continuation of Jim Morrison’s pressing against the edges of what the form could contain. Miami, 2 years later, would be the next most significant instance of that pressing, and it would have legal consequences that were not eventually dropped, but Miami was Miami.
New Haven was New Haven. They were different moments in the same direction of travel. What remained when the year turned and 1968 began and the tour continued and the records kept selling and the image kept traveling was the memory of the house lights coming up. Every person in the New Haven Arena that night carried that memory.
The sudden brightness, the officers on the stage, the young man at the microphone who had not run and had not resisted and had remained in the position of someone with something to say. In the full light with the audience watching, in the specific unglamorous truth of a person who had been maced in a corridor and was standing in the consequences of it in public without the protective darkness of the show lighting.
This was Jim Morrison in December 1967 at the edge that the year had been leading toward. Not a myth, not a persona, not the Lizard King or the Shaman or the dangerous frontman who pressed buttons for theatrical effect. A 23-year-old with red eyes and a microphone and something specific and true to say about what had happened to him.
In front of people who had come expecting the performance and received something that was not the performance and was not not the performance either. Something that existed in the space where the two collapsed into each other and it was no longer possible to say with confidence which side of the line you were on, that space was where Jim Morrison lived.
The New Haven Arena in December 1967 was simply the night it became most visible, most clear, most undeniable. The night the house lights came up and everyone in the building saw it at the same time.
