The Night Jim Morrison Returned to Alexandria

Boundary Stones, a local history blog from WETA dedicated to sharing interesting stories and historical nuggets about Virginia, Maryland the District, recently researched an infamous night in Alexandria’s history—the 1967 evening Jim Morrison returned to the town where he spent much of his youth to perform with The Doors.

On Aug. 18, 1967, The Doors were booked twice in the region—an early evening show in Annapolis, Md., and a late show at the Alexandria Roller Rink, which was billed as the Alexandria Rock Arena for a time.

Located at 805 N. Saint Asaph St., the venue hosted some heavy hitters in the 1960s and 70s, including The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck Group (with Rod Stewart as lead singer and The Rolling Stones’ Ron Wood on bass), Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin and many others.

During the Annapolis show, Morrison got into an argument with his bandmates— Ray Manzarek (who passed away last month), John Densmore and Robby Krieger—and they refused to travel in the same vehicle with the singer on the trip to Alexandria.    

By the time Morrison took the stage in his hometown, he was inebriated and in a huff.

According to the Boundary Stones blog post:

But, despite his bottle-induced condition, Morrison apparently put on a grand performance when the band went onstage around 10pm. As long time D.C. radio personality Tom Grooms remembered, “He came out on the stage and he was in black and I’d never seen anything like that. Morrison was doing his thing, he was very theatrical, he’d fall down or lay down and I thought it was all a part of their act, but I’d never seen anyone gyrate like that before…. I remember they did a real long, incredible version of ‘Light My Fire’ and finished with ‘The End.’”

Apparently that’s when things got a little crazy. Details are sketchy, but according to several people who attended the concert, Morrison picked up a cymbal stand and threw it out into the crowd as the band played “The End,” gashing a young female fan across the forehead. Then after Jack Alix wrestled the microphone away from him to close the show, Morrison supposedly yelled, “Hey Alexandria!” and gave the crowd a one finger salute on his way off stage.

Morrison moved to Northern Virginia as a kid after his father, a rear admiral in the Navy, was assigned to the Pentagon. The family lived for a time on Woodland Terrace in Alexandria’s North Ridge neighborhood.

At last year’s Del Ray Historic Symposium, Lance Mallamo, director of the Office of Historic Alexandria, said Morrison—a voracious reader—left hundreds of books at parents' home when they parted ways after high school (by all accounts, they were not close). Morrison’s parents later donated those books to the Alexandria Library.

Morrison graduated from George Washington High School in Del Ray in 1961, eventually made his way west, enrolled at UCLA and later met Manzarek and formed The Doors in the summer of 1965.

By the time the Doors came to Alexandria in the summer of 1967, they had the No. 1 song in the country in “Light My Fire” and had appeared on “American Bandstand” just a few weeks prior (watch the clip above).   

Manzarek and Krieger most recently returned to Alexandria to perform The Doors' hits at The Birchmere in September 2012.