"Lament for His Cock, Sore and Crucified. It Begs Your Pardon"

Like any number of men my age, I went through a Jim Morrison phase. My excuse was that I was thirteen years old. I was already into blues musicians like Willie Dixon, so the Doors cover of "Back Door Man" was fascinating to me. The rest of the band's oeuvre would soon be added to my record collection.

No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman was the first and among the greatest of the "rock n' roll fuckup" genre of literature that I cherish so deeply. Between 1983 and 1988, I read it no fewer than seventeen times. In my mid-teens, I read loads of Kerouac and Nietzsche and actually thought that I was Morrison for a time, going so far as to even write extremely bad poetry. My speaking voice is sort of the same, and being drunk most of the time certainly didn't hurt my delusions.

But, y'know, you grow. By the time I was seventeen, I decided that I was Richard Nixon instead and started breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and relentless wiretapped myself. Sadly, I never got bomb Cambodia, mostly because everything I know about that place scares the shit out of me. But, as Neil Young reminds us, "Even Richard Nixon has got soul."

If I were to retrospectively choose, I'd say that the Morrison phase was more fun, if only because the 37th president of the United States never appeared on a Miami stage drunk and inviting his audience to look at his cock. Presidential historians are unanimous in their opinion that Nixon wasn't very much fun at all.

Doors keyboardist Ray Manzerek is an even more pretentious dickhead than ol' Jim himself was, and he keeps endlessly prattling on about how Morrison was "possessed by spirits and dervishes" which is unrepentant horseshit. Jimbo was never possessed by anything more complicated by a few gallons of Wild Turkey, which is what him so much fun.

On the evening of March 1, 1969, Morrison was possessed by a few more gallons than was usual for him. Unfortunately, the Doors were scheduled to perform at the Dinner Key theatre in Miami that good eve. Jim showed up, late and dead drunk, to an auditorium that was dangerously oversold by the promoter. A drunk Morrison onstage was hardly unusual, but a Morrison this drunk was truly a sight to behold, particularly in a room this overcrowded on an especially humid Miami night.

It might be one of the few concerts in recorded human history where the band didn't get through a single song. Over and over again, Morrison would stop the show and launch into almost incomprehensible tirades. Then Morrison told his audience that they were "all a bunch of fucking assholes", whose "faces are being pressed into the shit of the world."

He went to challenge the crowd. You see, Doors concerts for the previous two years were essentially about two things: "Light My Fire" and spectacle. In New Haven in 1967, Morrison had become only the second performer to be arrested on stage in American history, after Lenny Bruce.

"You didn't come here for the music, did you?" Jim asked. "You came here to see something you've never seen before, didn't you?" He continued, " Do you want to see my cock?", he asked, as if this was the most reasonable request in the world. "Well, I'm gonna show it to you!" At that point, he pulled down the fly of his leather pants. The surviving members of the Doors and Morrison's defense layers contend that he pulled his shirt tail out of his zipper. The state of Florida asserted that it was indeed das Morrison schvantz.

Morrison wound up being indicted on five counts "a felony charge of lewd and lascivious behavior and five misdemeanors; two counts of indecent exposure, two of public profanity and one of public drunkenness."

At trial, Morrison was on the stand for about a day. When asked by the prosecution whether he had pulled his pecker out, he testified, "I don't know, I was too drunk."Amazingly, the jury acquitted on the public drunkenness charge. There were some 300 photographs of the Dinner Key performance taken that night, none of which displayed Morrison's cock, but he was convicted of indecent exposure and one count of public profanity.

The trial was a fucking mess in other ways, Judge Goodman disallowed the "contemporary community standards" defense (the musical Hair, which had public nudity played in Miami that year) in open defiance of the Supreme Court's ruling in Roth v. United States (1957). That was the reversible error by which Morrison's defense appealed the convictions. Not that it would have mattered. What people forget about Roth is that the High Court actually upheld his conviction back in the fifties. And by September, 1970, the attitudes in places like Florida had only hardened.

Anyhow, Jim Morrison died on July 3, 1971, making the entire matter moot. Until now.

If you've read Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, you pretty much already know that Florida's outgoing governor, Charlie Crist, is most duplicitous, dishonest motherfucker in all of Christendom. Crist is easily the worst person in a book filled with bad people. Even as you read accounts of shockingly scuzzy folks like John and Elizabeth Edwards, you remain thankful that they're at least not Crist.

Charlie ran for Florida's U.S Senate seat, only to get bounced out of the GOP in the primary and squashed like a goddamn bug in the general. It was a sad and horrifying thing to see, although it couldn't have happened to a worse person.

Since losing, the governor has tried to cement his reputation with the Boomer crowd, which is rapidly qualifying for Medicare. One of his plans for doing this is by advocating a pardon for one James Douglas Morrison, deceased.

Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, a Republican turned independent who lost a November bid for the United States Senate and whose term expires in January, seemed to align himself with this view in explaining why he will submit Morrison’s name to a state clemency board next month.

“The more that I’ve read about the case and the more I get briefed on it,” Mr. Crist said in an interview on Tuesday, “the more convinced I am that maybe an injustice has been done here.”

Well, not exactly. Under the laws in effect at the time, Morrison was clearly guilty of public profanity. There's a tape that was not only played in court, but was also released on a Doors box set that proves it. As much as I hate to say, given my love of public profanity, that conviction should stand. But Judge Goodman clearly fucked up on the Roth test, which means that the indecent exposure count qualifies for a pardon. More importantly, there isn't any evidence that any indecent exposure actually happened.

Was Jimbo fucked over? Sure he was. But there's another important fact to consider here. Specifically, Jim Morrison has been dead for 39 years. Is anyone really afraid that his conviction won't let him get a job at, say, Wal-Mart? His legal status in Florida likely is lower on his list of immediate concerns than being buried in Paris is.

And this isn't, like George Pataki's posthumous pardon of Lenny Bruce, a powerful statement on the importance of free speech. it's nothing more than a bid to secure the future vote of some delusional and drunken thirteen year old that has memorized An American Prayer at some unspecified future date.

Good work, Charlie!



And who can forget this popular, drunken and highly NSFW favorite ...



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STRONGER THAN DIRT!