Set the Night on Fire

Jim loved to get into fights, but he would always lose. Most guys who pick fights are doing it to look tough or prove something. Jim didn’t care about dominating people physically. He never threw the first punch; instead, he provoked people with words or acts of destruction until they finally took a swing.

He wasn’t a weakling—he could’ve defended himself if he wanted to—but then again, he was usually so wasted that a stiff breeze could have knocked him off his feet.

Was it masochism? Manipulation? Pushing emotional limits? Symbolically striking back at his authoritarian father? I used to chalk it up to drunken stupidity—which it was—but now I recognize it as calculated drunken stupidity. Liquor was always the catalyst. Jim wouldn’t even think of saying or doing something to start a fight when he was sober. He was always a perfect gentleman, even to cops. Underneath it all he never wanted to actually hurt anybody.

There was the time he challenged the cops with my brother. There were a couple of public wrestling matches with Janis Joplin. I don’t want to defend or glorify his behavior. The fights he got himself into were usually avoidable and always obnoxious. But the nature of how each battle started and ended seemed to reveal something about his personality.

Once Jim and I were eating at a diner when some navy boys came in and started picking on us about our long hair. The standard taunts: calling us girls and so forth. I muttered something back under my breath, probably a smart-ass remark about their sailor suits. Whatever I said, Jim repeated it loudly for their benefit and then took the insults to the next level.

They grumbled back at us, but things died down and we finished our meal in peace.

As we were leaving, Jim went to make a call from the phone booth outside. The sailors followed us out. They tried to grab me but I shook them off and ran.

I turned to see Jim pinned inside the phone booth, with one of the sailors strangling him and bashing his face against the glass. Jim shouted, “Call the cops!”

The sailors got in a few more licks and left Jim in a bloody pile on the ground. I ran back to help him and offered to take him to the hospital. He shrugged it off and said he was okay. The incident was hardly his fault, but it was yet another example of Jim being a magnet for violence, and reveling in it.

I’ll never fully understand the psychology of what drove him to fight, but I’ll also never forget the look on Jim’s face when it was being flattened against the glass of that phone booth. He was smiling. Ear to ear.

Friends Gathered Together

Lisciandro, Frank. Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together:

Frank Lisciandro: Was he capable of physical violence?

Rich Linnel: Well, I think we’re all capable of it, but I wouldn’t use “violent” as a word to describe Jim. He was not a violent person. Would much rather use “the calm calculus of reason,” you know, in situations where somebody else was very upset, and Jim would endeavor to calm him down and to use reason to calm him down, and a little bit of humor, too.

Vince Treanor: To me, Jim was a very sensitive person. I think that Jim was a hurting person. There was something there that was hurting him. Jim was a very eloquent, a very creative person. Jim could be a very understanding, a very curious person. He was able to provoke thought, and he was able to respond to almost any topical question with reasonable intelligence, reasonable rationale. I think that Jim was a gentle person. He was not physically violent. He abhorred violence and war and destruction and injury to other people in a fighting fashion.

Frank Lisciandro: You hung out with Jim for years, sometimes twenty-four hours per day, and you never saw him do anything violent?

Babe Hill: I never saw him choose anybody off or anything like that or swing at anybody.

Frank Lisciandro: Or yell at anybody?

Babe Hill: No. Oh, well, he’d yell and call somebody a n***** from time to time, for provocation; not in violence or anger or anything. Violence was just totally not part of his personality, of any kind, as you yourself can testify.