Third Season of SPAC Ends With Performance of Doors

by Marilyn Nason, The Post-Star, September 3, 1968

Saratoga Performing Arts Center had “a happening” to close the third season Sunday night that will never be forgotten by the 12,000 youngsters attending, the 21-man police force attempting to keep order or the properly worried management slightly shook by what had befalled the beautiful $4.5 million amphitheatre.

The Doors and the Earth Opera were the cause and the effect can only be likened to something in a movie. In fact,
it actually did become a movie, with upteen bearded, barefooted photographers, kleig lights, sound equipment everywhere recording all the hysterical, noisy moments for posterity by a camera crew hired by the Doors themselves to produce such a film.

As for the show itself, the noise of 13 huge amplifiers onstage, augmenting the already perfect sound system of SPAC itself, made it nearly impossible to distinguish anything of the vocal and instrumental efforts of the Doors and the Earth Opera — unless you were fortunate enough to be in the next county. But kids loved it. They were ecstatic, listened quietly and applauded and stomped their feet.

Their dress was the outlandish garb expected of such groups, their hair in every size shape and color, and their stage gyrations bordering on the obscene on several occasions. But the strangest part of all is that, once offstage, “the great put on” shuts off and they become perfectly normal, nice young men “just making a living providing the garbage these kids want,” as one of the Earth Opera volunteered to several of the press backstage.

The performer who seems to act and react the same on/offstage is Jimmy Morrison, singer with the Doors, whose comments quoted throughout the country, include “I’ve always been attracted to ideas that were about revolt against authority. I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that has no meaning.”

The latter pretty well described his performance, too. Once offstage, his three personal bodyguards lead him to his dressing room for safety’s sake.

But Sunday night, he broke away at one point, leaped onstage, down into the theatre itself and was nearly mobbed to death before the bodyguards literally threw him back onstage and rushed him, crying and kicking, back to his dressing room.

Finale to his onstage performance found him falling prone, thrashing and wriggling around as if in pain, while the drummer threw part of his equipment at him, midst thunderous applause and shrieks from the audience.

It took Saratoga Police one and a half hours to clear the theatre to the shouts of “we want more,” after the stage
lights had gone off and the house lights came up.

While they grappled with the audience in the theatre, a member of the troupe, at the mike, kept urging them to “go home and be good. The show is over, kids, and they won’t let us come back unless you cool it now.”

As the last of the electronic equipment was placed on a rental truck, a backstage hand observed, “What’s SPAC coming to? Too bad George Balanchine and Eugene Ormandy couldn’t see this. Or Mrs. Nelson Rockefeller, SPAC’s chairman, for that matter.