Notes

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Flushing Meadows Park
Queens, New York

- The New York Rock Festival at The Singer Bowl -


1st gen Very good audience recording 7/10


Excerpt taken from Stephen Davis' book on Jim Morrison p. 272-276:
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When the Doors went back east with their film crew in early August 1968, Jim Morrison was primed. Although half drunk, ge played a riveting, focused show with his eyes closed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on August 1, barely moving at all as a looming summer thunderstorm echoed over the Long Island Sound. the concert had a surreal vibe as Jim bore down, enunciating lyrics and poems with hyperbolic clarity. The audience sat transfixed, and left quietly after the encores "Little Red Rooster" and "The Unknown Soldier."

The next night, August 2, the film crew finally got its riot.

It was a steamy friday night in New York City. The Doors were headlining the Super Bowl, in Flushing Meadows, Queens. There was tension backstage. The opening act, the rip-roaring English band the Who, perhaps the most hottest group in the world that summer, were angry they weren't headlining, and demanded the Doors' gear not be onstage as they played their incendiary live show that ended in explosions and splintered guitars. During the Who's set, the Singer Bowl's revolving stage malfunctioned, leaving a large part of the audinece unable to see the performance and extremely annoyed.
Jim rode to the show in a limo with Jac Holyman and Ellen Sander, who later wrote: "Morrison and 'the boys' had grown apart. He was too crazy, too unreliable, too intellectual, too conceited, but mostly he was too insecure. They shummed him socially, and he retailated by terrorizing them with the threat that he'd quit. He was lonely, as all writers must be, and he often drank himself blind and created a scene. He was also a rather pleasant guy when he wasn't acting out."

On the ride to the gig Jim flipped through the Village Voice and mumbled about how bored he was in New York. The driver got lost. "Fucking anarchy," Jim said. He started singing "Eleanor Rigby." Sander told him he was weird, and Jim said, "I tries." In a traffic jam near the Singer Bowl, Jim opened the limo's window and let a mob of excited kids grope him.

"Will some of you chicks escort me backstage?" he asked. "I might get mobbed or something."
The backstage area was cramped and sterile. Checking the film crew was with him, Jim stepped out to the crowd and was surronded bykids who seemed afraid to get too close. He signed a few autographs and then disappeared backstage.

Pandenmonium ensued when the Doors finally appeared after an hour's delay, ushered through the fifteen-thousand-strong crowd by a newly hired phalanx of black Philadelphia private detectives in stingy-brim hats. Off-duty uniformed police repelled an initial assault on the stage, then formed into a defensive perimeter. Jim had to push his way through the line of though New York street cops in order to face the crowd.
"Cool down," he told them. "We are going to be here a long time."

He preached to them, screamed, moaned, collapsed, and pussy-footed along the rim of the stage. The kids infront tried to grab at him, and twenty cops onstage had to pry them away. Jim intercut familiar songs with long stretches of "Cleberation" and other snatches of surreal, ad-libbed poetry that mystified the restive Long Island teenagers. When the cops got rough with the kids upfront, wooden seats flow onto the stage, Jim picked them up and threw them back into the convulsive crowd. The film crew kept shooting and tried to duck the lying debris.

The last song of the night was "The End." The kids, who couldn't see were fustrated, upset, and very loud. Many tried to speak to Jim onstage. Others ket shouting "Sit down" at overwrought kids standing on chairs to see better.

"Shhhh," Jim whispered. "Hey, everyone! This is serious now. Everyone - get quiet, man. You're gonna ruin this thing. Shhhhh."

He kept interrupting the familiar flow of the recorded version with poetic interjenctions - "Fall down now, strange gods are coming" amd other improvistaions. At one point he shrieked, as if in a nightmare: "Don't come here! Don't come in!" When he began the Oedipal verses, the audience was way ahead of him, yelling "And he walked on down the hall" before Jim spoke the line himself. When Jim got to the climactic "Mother?" hundreds of young girls screamed in terror. As the band crashed into the finale, Jim collapsed onstage like he'd been shot, and the stadium exploded. Robby Krieger finished the set in the electric storm of reverb and feedback.

Jim wasn't finished yet. As the show was ending, he went to the edge of the stage and made a negative connection with a young Hispanic couple he"d been yeing down front. He looked at this big Puerto Rican guy and said, "Who's that Mexican slut you're with tonight?" The guy picked up his seat and heaved it at Jim. The whole stage area erupted in dozens of chairs came flying through the hot, humid air. Jim kept dancng and laughing hysterically. The cops tried to get him off the stage, but he layed down and they couldn't move him.

Finally the Afro-American bodyguards hustled the band toward the dressing room. the cops fought with the kids, and a miniriot ensued with a dozen arrests and several injuries, all reported in papers the next day.
The Doors road crew had to defend the amplifiers from being torn apart. After the crowd was cleared out, the Singer Bowl looked like it had been bombed.

Pete Townshend, the Who's flamboyouant, intellectuallead gutarist, watched this wild drama from the side of the stage. He saw Jim watching impassively as his bodyguards roughed up kids who just wanted to get near him. He thought he had seen it all by then, but he was amazed by Jim Morrison's calculated escalation of the crowd's mood adulation to rapture to chaos and violence. He wrote the song "Sally Simpson" soon afterward, in a backhand tribute to Jim.

Backstage, as the film crew"s camera rolled, Jim comforted a teenage girl who had been hit in the head by a flying chair. She was bleedingfrom a scalp wound and trying to stop crying as Jim put his arm around her.
"It's demoracy," Jim said shootingly, looking into the camera with a crooked smirk. "Somebody hit her with a chair. There"s no way to tell who"s did it." Tenderly, Jim wiped blood from her face. "It's already coagulating," he cooed. "She was just an innocent bystander."

When a groupie -looking chick shasayed by in a red dress, Jim grabbed her and stuck his hand up her dress for the benefit of the camera,smiling broadly. Later he said, "Did you think it looked phony, me talking to her liked that?"

On Saturday, August 3, 1968, "Hello, I Love You" was the top single in the country, blaring mindlessly from every car in America.

The Doors played the Cleveland Public Auditorium that night, with Jim again working the crowd forthe film crew. He arrived at the hall shit-faced, and let the band play "Break On Throgh" for five minutes without him. when Jim finally appeared, he was clutching a quart of Jack Daniel's in his right hand a nd giving the sold-out, nine-thousand seat a finger with his left. He began shouting and lurching around, singing incoherently as Krieger tried to drown him out with extraloud shards of feedback and echo. This got Jim mad. "I can't hear myself! I'm gonna give you a good time, but I want it real soft." He turned to the band. "If I can't hear myself, I'm gonna get a gun and kill some people here."

During a long, horrid version of "Five To One" he started talking with the kids upfront, drawing up in laughter, derivision, and applause. Then he yelled "Listen! Llisten! I want you to feel it. I'm not kidding! I want you to feel it!"

He missed all his vocal cues during "When The Music's Over," and Krieger kept trying to mask his petulant antics with washes of electronic noise. Jim came back to the microphone. "Softer, baby, softer. Gotta feel it inside. Take it deeep inside....Hey, listen. I want to give you a history of me. All right! All right! I have a few things to say, if you don't mind...I don't know where I am or how I got here, but I did." He began to recite his poems "Vast Radiant Beach" and "The Royal Sperm." He asked for a Marlboro and dozens of cigarettes landed at his feet. The band lit into "Soul Kitchen," but Jim was getting tired and wandered awaz from the microphone. He seemed to be vomiting at the side of the stage, which drew a loud burst of the applause. By the time the band lit into "Light My Fire," Jim's mind had left the building. He kept shouting, "Come on," during Ray's solo. As Robby began his, Jim was yelling as loud as he could:
"YOU KNOW I CAN'T TAKE IT! YOU KNOW THAT! I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! COME ON! YEAH! COME ON!"

Suddenly Jim dived into the crowd with his live microphone, and it looked like a footbal scrimmage. Fights started as he was passed over the heads of the audience, chanting the yippie yell: "DO IT! DO IT!" By the time he made it back to the stage, Jim's voice was gone and the band finished "Light My Fire" and ran off.
The kids kept chanting Jim's name but there was no necore. They started throwing chairs, wrecking the concession stands, and tearing heavy wooden doors to pieces in a wanton ritual of destruction.

The final show of that wild weekend was played at the Philadelphia arena at the Forty-sixth Market on Sunday night, August 4, and it was magnificent. Strolling onto the sweaty hockey arena's stage amid wild cheering and applause at ten-thirty, Jim appeared sober and in command; he even asked the audience to stop bothering the relatively young cops who were guarding the stage. As "Backdoor Man" bled into "Five To One," Jim bummed a beer and a cigarette from the audience. He stood back and watched as Robby played a brazen, distorted solo that soon turned into a flamenco guitar clinic on "Spanish Caravan."
"What do you want to hear? Jim asked before the last section of the show. Hundreds began shouting requests. "One at atime," Jim tried. "I can't hear you." So he recited "Texas Radio" with its preaching cadences and images of Negroes in the forest and other exotica. Then "Hello, I Love You" got a quick reading, followed by "Wake Up!" and "Light My Fire," during which Jim yelled and twitched and danced around the mike like a aman on fire. The crowd surged forward, and the cops formed a defensive perimeter, as the Doors finished the song and ran off.

The Doors took the rest of August 1968 off. Jim was obviously brain fried, and anyway Waiting For The Sun was selling on its own. Unexpectedly, this cobbled-together melange of pop tunes and art songs would be the number one album in America by early September.

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Also performing: The Who; The Kangaroo
Filmed for Feast Of Friends
Promotion: Gary Kurfist & Shelley Finkel
Capacity: 17,500

Over the years there were numerous accounts of The Doors provoking riots at their performances. Some of these reports were clearly elaborate embellishments perpetrated for the express purpose of interfering with prospective performances at the venues. Other bands, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, found themselves engaged in the same controversy which was designed to obstruct the flourishing enterprise of live concert appearances. Wherever the truth resided, this issue raised a serious consideration: how to provide adequate security for maintaining a congenial atmosphere for all involved without arousing indignation from the audience or the performers.
At this time, however, Jim Morrison did not share the concerns surrounding their public appearances. In fact, he was intrigued by the mob mentality he had observed at their and other bands' performances. Aside from the exaggerated portraits of violence surrounding other concerts, accounts of this performance were undeniably valid. From the outset, the concert on this dreadfully hot and humid New York summer night had been plagued with difficulties. The opening band was poorly received by an unruly crowd impatient for the two main acts. It was a year before The Who's rock opera "Tommy" was released, and the band had yet to achieve legendary status in the States. Nevertheless, they were determined that the stage set-up specifically accommodate their presentation and were adamant that none of The Doors' equipment obstruct the stage. During The Who's performance, the rotating stage had broken down, leaving a section of the audience unable to adequately see the band. The Who put on a good, but not exceptional show, and exited the stage visibly annoyed. After their set, there was an hour-long interim before The Doors took the stage, and the delay further aggravated the already impatient audience.

As soon as The Doors appeared, they were greeted with a thunderous assault of screaming fans and segments of the crowd began rushing the stage. A column of policemen were stationed at the front of the platform to curtail this onrush of people, while Morrison fiercely jostled his way through them to face the crowd. The chaos escalated continuously during the performance, with fights erupting throughout the Singer Bowl. Morrison sang with a very precise and articulate emphasis on the lyrics, and actually appeared to be substantially more sober than the crowd he was facing.

Ellen Sander commented on the show's build-up in Trips: "A good portion of the audience still couldn't see and they were furious. Crowds stormed the front of the stage and were turned back by the police. Some were trying to scale the stage and others cheered them on. Morrison spun around and ground the songs out halfheartedly, ad libbing, improvising, doing an ominous dance. Hysteria was building. Morrison shrieked, moaned, gyrated, and minced to the edge of the stage, hovering. Hands reached out and grabbed him and the cops had to pry them away. The camera crew ducked a piece of broken chair which came flying onto the stage. Morrison caught it and heaved it back into the crowd. The Doors were hardly visible from any angle because there were about twenty cops onstage." (Ellen Sander, Trips, New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1973)

By the time The Doors began to perform "The End," the crowd was in an incredible uproar. Morrison vainly attempted to "sssshhhh" the audience, but there was no response and he began appealing to them. "Hey, this is serious everyone! Get quiet man! You're going to ruin the whole thing."

Following the opening stanzas of the song, Morrison drifted into a expansive passage of poetry, beginning with "Fall down now; strange Gods are coming." With decidedly steady pacing, he advanced through a series of poems until he unexpectedly burst in a scream of "Don't come here! Don't come in!" Proceeding from this flare-up into "Ensenada," Morrison was continually assailed with clamorous screams of "Morrison is King!" from the crowd. He calmly began to recite the Oedipal section of the song, but when he paused at one significant part, the audience impatiently roared the delayed lyrics "he walked on down the hallway, baby!" The crowd momentarily became quiet again, until Jim reached the conclusion of the Oedipal section with "Mother, I want to..." and the Singer Bowl burst into pandemonium with the audience finishing the lyrics. The band accelerated into the musical passage and Morrison hit the stage, writhing in agony like the death knell of a hideous serpent while the crowd went wild. The instrumental passage climaxed with a horrendous blood-curdling scream from Morrison, followed by Krieger's guitar set on some wildly unrestrained echo. By now no one remained seated in the crowd and the police were forming a barricade in front of the stage. The audience was defiantly screaming "Sit down, cop!" as Krieger finished the song with a long trail of feedback.

Just before midnight, as The Doors concluded their performance, a horde of people began demolishing the wooden seating section in front and hurling portions of the the splintered benches at the stage. The debacle turned into a complete riot when the crowd charged the police barricade, forcing The Doors to abandon the stage amidst a torrent of plummeting debris. As the police struggled to regain control of the crowd, Vince Treanor and the equipment crew desperately tried to guard and defend their gear.

Peter Townshend, lead guitar player for The Who, observed the entire disturbance from the side of the stage and was both fascinated and appalled by Morrison's apparent indifference to the situation. According to Who biographer Dave Marsh, it was Morrison's aloof and mystifying demeanor in the face of intensifying chaos that prompted Townsend to write The Who's composition "Sally Simpson."

by Greg Shaw


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Review by Bill Tikellis

The Singer Bowl was basically an arena built from the remains of New York’s World Fair that was in existence during the 1930’s. The concert was a double bill and a crowd of 17,500 people had come to see both The Who and The Doors which had it’s problems right even before The Doors had started to play. The limousine driver had lost his way and got stuck in traffic and when The Doors finally made it to the venue, there were fans thumping the limousine. As seen on the video "Soft Parade - A Retrospective", Jim had wandered through the arena and teenage kids were hanging around him while Jim tried to ignore them as he flicked through some magazines - even the photographers backstage clung to Morrison like parasites.
There may have been some tension between both bands as The Who had apparently refused to use the same equipment as The Doors. The concert was running late as it was and to make things worse, a third act called Kangaroo was placed on the bill at the last minute and opened up the show. The disasters didn’t stop here as the revolving stage had stalled during The Who’s performance. The repair men couldn’t get the stalled stage fixed and the stage was stuck for good. This meant that 1/4 of the audience couldn’t see the remaining concert.

After The Who had played a fairly bad set and smashed up their equipment at the end of a their performance, The Doors had come on stage about half an hour later and started to play but without Jim. Finally after five minutes, Jim made it to the mike as he purposefully took his time to go on stage and was escorted by an entourage of security personnel.

The Doors started off with their medley, "Back Door Man/Five To One" but things were not settling down as the audience had difficulty seeing The Doors perform. As heard on the audience recording of this show, the crowd yelled out:

"Sit down ! Sit down ! Sit down !"

"Sit down you whore!", some one else offensively remarked.

"Sit down before I knock you down !", as one guy screamed to some one else.

"Yeah, anything you want" replied the other person.

"Come on you cunt !" the first guy took up his challenge and a scuffle broke out between the two.

The Doors played "Break On Through" and "When The Music’s Over". Jim recited some of his poems during "When The Music’s Over":

"Vast radiant beach
and a cool jewelled moon
couples naked
race down by its quiet side
and we laughed
like soft mad children
smug in the woolly cotton brains of infancy.

Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding
Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind

We leap the wall, dog and I
to hang choking on fence collar chain
Dogs lick shit
Mexican girl whore sucks my prick.

Open windows on the town
Open pores on foreign air.

The car rasps quiet.
Motor destroys itself on rotten fuel
The pump is ill.
The hose has a steel nozzle.

We . . . we want

Oh keeper of the royal sperm
Please feed the king
or the king will die"

After completing "When The Music’s Over", Jim then spoke.

"You got it ?"; whilst Robbie tuned in his guitar for the next song.

Jim then announced to the crowd:

"Never.. Never, performed before on public stage."

"Yeah", Jim added as he reasserted his statement to the crowd. The group then played "Wild Child" for the first time in front of a live audience.

Jim made it real difficult for the audience to see him perform on stage as he purposefully threw himself on the stage as he writhed and jerked around the floor like a man possessed - as seen on the video "A Feast Of Friends" and "Soft Parade - A Retrospective".

According to Elektra’s publicist, Danny Fields; "This was when he started to self-destruct. And he did it in public, turning the audience against him".

Reviews for this concert certainly did not receive any appraisals to say the least, particularly Robert Somms of the New York Free Press;

"I would characterize their current act as wearisome, exaggerated, repitious and puerile. To some that would indicate a lack of effort on my part. But Morrison (and he is the reason the Doors can walk off the stage of the singer Bowl after a casual set $25,000 richer) is basically bad theater and worse theatrics.

Beyond the grade-school prurience, the nauseating politicizing, the grotesque strut, the absurd ponts, the deliberate gestures, the unimaginative offering of himself, Morrison and the Doors aren’t just playing some songs or constructing a sound exciting or innovative in itself. They are victimized by the success of a pose they assumed."

The last song on the audience recording is "Wake Up/Light My Fire" - however according to Riordan & Prochnicky (1991), The Doors had finished off the concert with their last song, "The End". Obviously "The End" did not make it’s way on to the audience recording and would’ve been interesting to hear what exactly had taken place. The riot really erupted when supposedly Jim had grabbed his crotch with both hands as he thrusted his body towards a girl in the front row and then made an obscene comment to her. It just so happened that the girl’s boyfriend was sitting next to her and he threw a chair at Jim and the crowd went berserk. Just after midnight when the Doors had finished playing "The End", Jim gave his final scream and fell onto the stage when 200 teenagers rushed onto the stage, throwing chair legs & chairs around and smashed up the equipment. Fifteen private police men couldn’t hold back the crowd and some even made it backstage and started bashing on the dressing room door. Jim was in the dressing room and trying to comfort a girl who had a cut on her face as a chair had been thrown at her.
The riot lasted for about an hour and by the end of it all 3 people were hospitalised for minor injuries and 2 arrests were made.
Unfortunately, the recording of this concert starts to flutter during the last song, but none the less we are fairly lucky that this recording of this concert survived the chaos that occurred there that night.
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Review by Billy Hadley

The Doors headline with opening act The Who. Jim's limo driver gets lost before the show in the traffic of the crowd and the limo is mobbed by fans. Jim gets out and the fans go crazy grabbing his clothes and hair forcing items, necklaces, etc. into his hands. He finally makes it backstage and decides to take a walk around the arena. He gets 10 yards down the hallway and is swarmed by hundreds of fans and is forced to go backstage. The Who refuses to play with The Doors equipment on stage during their set. They get there way and go on but the rotating stage gets stuck and a quarter of the restless crowd cannot see the band furiating many of the audience. They finish the set smashing their equipment and the crowd is roaring. Pete Townsend walks off telling The Doors people that the crowd is ready to explode!
The Doors wait 30 minutes and finally take the stage with Jim waiting even longer as the others jam. Jim comes out swarmed by security and his film crew. The fans who cannot see begin to storm the stage and are thwarted back by security. Jim is animated and growls songs while dancing and gyrating, hopping and twirling in a shamanic tide often rapping obscenities during breaks and between songs. The crowd is hot and Jim is in rare form. The tension builds with each song, each chant, each movement. Jim and the audience are one. He feels there emotions boiling and slowly turns up the heat. Jim throws himself down on the stage and crawls around on his belly driven by the music, the crowd, and his demons. The Doors finish with "The End" and as Jim sings the last note, falling back on the stage, the crowd as if being pulled back like an arrow, as if on cue, suddenly erupt and thunderously rush the stage. The crowd overtakes the stage and begins smashing the bands equipment. The riot rages on for over an hour with the band backstage drinking. Many fans are injured, hospitalized or arrested.