Week 1: JanUARY 1-7 (Los angeles)
With The Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” entering the Top Ten and ringing out all over local radio, Los Angeles opened 1967 in conflict. In the wake of the Sunset Strip “riots,’ pop stars Sonny and Cher, with a new single, “The Beat Goes On” coming out the next week, had been uninvited to ride in the New Year’s Day Rose Bowl Parade, in punishment for their participation in the November protests.
But an even more profound protest would take place further out Sunset Boulevard, east of Hollywood towards downtown L.A. Here, at the tiny Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake, a different kind of battle line was being drawn: A group of men had been celebrating New Year’s Eve just a few miles from the movie studios where many of them worked dressing and grooming and playing support for men like Sinatra and Presley. These homosexual men had found a degree of safety in Hollywood, free of the oppressive norms of ‘60s America.
But not long after midnight had passed, the celebration was cut short. A squad of Los Angeles policemen, who were no longer harassing longhairs on the Strip and who had regularly exercised their God-given right to beat up homosexuals with no fear of consequences – after all, these men were perverts, criminals – had once again descended on the small club, billy clubs flying.
That things had been like this for as long as anyone could remember was a given; that these men would continue to take this abuse forever was also assumed. But starting in the early hours of the first day of 1967, and then during the year’s first week, the crowd pushed back, first literally, as they fought with their persecutors, and then in the streets, as they protested outside the Black Cat Tavern for several days after the beatings of early Sunday morning. Though what would come to be known as “Gay Liberation” wouldn’t enter the national consciousness until the similar Stonewall Riot of June 1969 in New York’s Greenwich Village, gay men in Los Angeles had just taken a stand they’d rarely dared take before. It was a stand against business as usual, the “natural order” on which they, like so many others, always ended up getting the leftovers – or worse.
Stuart Timmons, a historian of gay culture in Los Angeles notes that, like the Sunset Strip protests, the response at the Black Cat was not actually a riot – especially in light of the Watts Riot – but was nevertheless a brave response to the violence perpetrated by the authorities. The police repression, he explains, was typical, but it was also in response to the nascent youth culture, which only began with longer hair, but didn’t stop there. The cops could feel it, and they didn’t like it.
“There was definitely a queer component to the youth culture that went unnoticed at the time,” Timmons said. “There was an androgynous factor. Several guys told me that as hippies they could dress as outrageously as they wanted. They were overtly hippies, but covertly queer. You look at the fashions of those days, and you can’t tell who was gay or straight...it is amazing to see just how quickly the gender deterioration, the blurring, started.”
A new mojo rising
Though he was straight, the most androgynous new singer in L.A. wasn’t just blurring lines; he was dancing all over them. When he made his debut on the local television show Shebang! on the evening of New Year’s Day, Jim Morrison, the haughty, feline front man of Sunset Strip regulars The Doors was undeniable proof of a new mojo rising in L.A.
The band was little-known to the mainstream, but the crowds that frequented the Strip knew it well. The band’s summer ‘66 residency at the Whisky A Go Go, playing two shows a day, six days a week, had quickly built a fan base, but it had ended spectacularly three months later, with a performance that didn’t just epitomize the band’s new approach, but made it clear that yes, something new was happening here: This would be a kind of performance very different from the eager-to-please pop shows that were the norm.
On August 21, The Doors were playing their regular show closer “The End.” It had started as a bittersweet parting love song to an old girlfriend, but in performance had gradually expanded in length and meaning as Morrison had grown in confidence and boldness as a performer. The song itself had done the same, the band improvising, Morrison’s meditations on loss deepening beyond the song’s initial subject matter.
But that August night in 1966 had been different still. Tripping on acid, that was the night that Morrison leaned into the mike and said, for the first time…
The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on...
Morrison’s subsequent monologue, which took the band as well as the audience by surprise, found him digging deeper into an Oedipal scene that climaxed, lyrically and musically, with his now-famous declaration:
“Father?” Yes, son? “I want to kill you.”
“Mother? I want to...fuck you!!”
The subsequent recorded version, which would close the band’s debut album, dropped the profanity, but Morrison’s gut-wrenching scream said everything. With the song’s crashing, writhing climax, the Doors had introduced something new and dramatic to the Los Angeles music scene: A symbolic patricide that had to that point only been implied. Morrison had, suddenly, made it explicit.
Of course, being explicit meant the Doors lost their residency when the Whisky’s manager, Phil Tanzini, fired the band – in a hail of his own profanities. But that was OK with Morrison; The Doors would never be a house band again.
Four months later, on the evening of January first, here The Doors were, their eponymous debut album about to be released on Wednesday the fourth, miming their way through their first TV appearance. Morrison had earned his reputation as a provocateur, but new year’s day 1967 he was on his best behavior, lip syncing the first single, “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” under the watchful eye of host Casey Kasem. Morrison would even agree to leave off the forbidden last word of the song’s refrain, “She get high” – just the way the record label had edited it for release as a single.
But the message of the song came across in more than just words. It was there in John Densmore’s urgent, propulsive jazz beat, there in Ray Manzarek’s surging organ and samba-like bass line – there in Robby Kreiger’s alternately fluid then thrusting guitar fills. And it was there in Morrison’s full-throated, impassioned exhortation:
Break on through to the other side!
Break on through to the other side!
This was not folk rock; this wasn’t blues, though it was steeped in them; this didn’t follow any of the rules of the established pop game. While Morrison behaved himself on TV that night, by the end of the year, he would be following no one’s dictates but his own. As he later said of “The End,” the 22-year-old singer had just said “goodbye to a kind of childhood.”
The grow-ups push back
The following Wednesday, as copies of The Doors were landing at the doors of record stores across the country, Ronald Reagan raised his right hand and laid his left on a Bible held by Chief Justice Marshall F. McComb of the California Supreme Court in Sacramento. By his side stood his second wife Nancy, who he’d married nearly 15 years earlier, when she became pregnant with their first child, Patricia. Patti, now 14, and their son Ron, 8, stood next to their mother as their father addressed the state:
“Just as we assume a responsibility to guard our young people up to a certain age from the possible harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco, so do I believe we have a right and responsibility to protect them from the even more harmful effects of exposure to smut and pornography.”
Clearly, a divide was opening up, with one side – the side that had just won the Governor’s office – seeing pornography as “even more harmful” than the “possible” effects of alcohol and tobacco. Secure in his sense of right, Governor Reagan’s parting shot referred to the state flag his political team had flown above the Capitol that morning, a flag recently brought back from Vietnam by a wounded soldier.
“It might serve to put our problems in better perspective,” Reagan suggested, of the flag. “It might remind us of the need to give our sons and daughters a cause to believe in and banners to follow.”
Young Americans may well have needed banners to follow, but they wanted their own. And in the first week of 1967, the flags they would follow were being raised not by Governor Reagan, but by Stephen Stills and Jim Morrison.