PITTSBURGH — It’s gotten to where concerts are canceled, officially, for only two reasons: the undisclosed “illness” and the euphemistic “scheduling conflict,” which means they either didn’t sell enough tickets or the artist found something better to do.
Back in the day, the cards were all on the table. If the show didn’t sell, they just said “poor sales.”
Last month in 1969, everyone knew that The Doors concert was canceled because Jim Morrison may or may not have dropped his drawers.
On March 22 of that year, The Doors were set to make their Pittsburgh debut at the Civic Arena. It was long awaited because in January 1967 the LA psych-rock band released one of the greatest debut albums of all time, highlighted by the mind-blowing, chart-topping hit, “Light My Fire.”
The ’67 tour cycle seemingly took them everywhere but Pittsburgh, including Canton and Cleveland, three days before they played “The Ed Sullivan Show,” from which they were subsequently banned when Jim Morrison broke the agreement to not sing the word “higher.”
That fall ’67 East Coast swing ended with the infamous New Haven concert, where, after mocking the police about a backstage incident, Morrison was dragged from the stage and charged with inciting a riot, indecency and public obscenity.
The Doors blew by here in the summer of ’68 as well, so the first Pittsburgh show was to be in March 1969, about six months after releasing “Strange Days,” the sophomore album with the freakish cover.
On March 1, at a grossly overheated airplane hangar in Miami, Morrison showed up drunk and belligerent and verbally sparred with the crowd, uttering things like “You’re all a bunch of slaves!”
Little by little, things got a little out of control. The singer grabbed a cop’s hat and threw it into a crowd. Someone jumped on stage and doused Morrison with champagne. He ripped his shirt off and dared the crowd with “Let’s see a little skin. Let’s get naked.” Reportedly, there were takers.
Did Morrison himself “get naked”? No, his band members said. He may have unzipped and stuck his hand down there, but that was it. There were no cellphones. The police claimed that he exposed himself, shouted obscenities and also simulated oral sex on guitarist Robby Krieger. They issued a warrant for his arrest four days later.
In response, Jacksonville, Philadelphia and Toronto all canceled, and so did Pittsburgh, under pressure from Mayor Joseph Barr himself.
“I had the exclusivity on rock shows there at the arena,” promoter Pat DiCesare told the Post-Gazette on Monday, “and I didn’t want to cause any aggravation, so I was willing to forget The Doors even though I was convinced it was gonna sell out, if it was going to cause trouble.”
DiCesare canceled on March 11, 1969, explaining that it was because of the Miami incident. He got his $14,000 deposit back but lost all the money on the advertising and promotion.
Battle was on
Three weeks after the Miami concert, and one day after the canceled Pittsburgh concert, something almost unbelievable happened. Thirty thousand people packed into the Orange Bowl for a teenage Rally for Decency, some waving signs saying, “Down With Obscenity.”
The front-page AP story in the Post-Gazette noted that it consisted of “three-minute talks about God, parents, patriotism, sexuality and brotherhood” and appearances by Jackie Gleason, Anita Bryant and The Lettermen, who prided themselves as being the “squares” of popular music.
A battle was on for the hearts and minds of American youth who had gone through the Summer of Love of 1967 and were on the way to Woodstock.
The Orange Bowl rally, coordinated by 17-year-old high school football player Mike Levesque, sprung from a Catholic youth group meeting two days after the Miami concert.
“I believe this kind of movement will snowball across the country and perhaps around the world,” Gleason said, and the comedic superstar was partially right.
Levesque received a letter of appreciation from President Richard Nixon and calls from radio stations and organizers in other cities to stage their own rallies, which took place in Birmingham, Ala., Minneapolis, Minn., Austin, Texas, and other cities.
Baltimore controller Hyman A. Pressman declared this Clean Teens movement to be “the best thing that has happened in this country in a long time.”
So, Baltimore got in on the action, at Memorial Stadium in April, and … it didn’t go so well.
It did draw 45,000, but the next-day headline read, “Decency Rally Ends in Baltimore Brawl.”
At least 200 people were stabbed, beaten or pelted with rocks. The mistake was the youth organizers teasing that soul icon James Brown might be there. Instead, the crowd got a bunch of boring speakers and some second-rate local bands on a bad sound system.
“There were too many hoodlums in the stands,” a city councilman explained, adding, “There was too much emphasis on the rock ‘n’ roll music, and not enough on decency.”
A Detroit rally was another bust. They expected 15,000 at Cobo Hall and got 2,000, for a couple unnamed rock groups and The Irish Rovers.
The UPI reporter interviewed a 10th-grader, who admitted she was there to meet boys.
“Decency? Well, it’s like love your parents and love the flag,” she said. “I don’t want to be told stuff like that.”
Break on through
DiCesare was not interested in jumping on the decency rally craze.
“I didn’t give that a lot of attention,” he said.
He wanted the Doors back, and so he followed the band’s trek through the summer, during which they played Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and a couple other cities, while “Touch Me” spun on the radio.
“We waited until some of these other dates played,” DiCesare said. “I kept in touch with Bill Siddons, who was the manager of the act, and Bill convinced me that he had Jim under control and if I played him in Pittsburgh, Jim would, you know, behave himself.
“With all these shows, the managers of these theaters and arenas, they expected people to sit in their seats because they were all older and when they grew up, that’s what it was when you went to a theater. But that didn’t happen in the ’60s, especially with an act like The Doors. I mean, the kids got excited. They all rushed the stage.”
It was common after the shows then, DiCesare said, for a local TV crew to swoop in and show the arena floor in disarray, so rock concerts were an uphill battle on multiple fronts.
The Doors show booked for Saturday, Sept. 20, and briefly became a political football for Constitutional Party mayoral candidate George Shankey.
“The Democrats and Republicans are both to blame for this,” he declared in the PG. “The Democrats run the arena and the Republicans have done nothing to stop the show.”
For all the commotion, it’s surprising there were no local reviews of The Doors engagement.
