Part of the education of The Doors in the City by the Bay took place at The Human Be-In, a festival featuring music, activists, and spirituality in Golden Gate Park. Twenty thousand or more people had gathered to protest a California law banning LSD that had passed the previous fall. The Doors played elsewhere throughout the weekend but weren’t established enough to play the festival. The experienced the hippie vibe, firsthand, though as part of the throngs of people that descended on San Francisco, ultimately launching the “Summer of Love.”
Read moreMorrison Arrested Onstage in New Haven -- Beginning of the End
Jim Morrison’s arrest in December 1967 while on stage at the New Haven Arena is important in understanding the Sixties. The incident represents how myriad people and institutions in a position of power were willing to use their authority to stamp out or thwart those who symbolized something they didn’t understand or even attempt to comprehend. For those wielding a hammer, as is said, everything looks like a nail. The establishment’s reaction to Morrison and the Doors was to look at them as something evil that had to be stopped.
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