The counterculture era was perhaps the most significant period in modern musical history. For its movers and shakers, every minute was gold dust: history etched into the cultural fabric, with icons born from the most unassuming situations.
It wasn’t only an era of excitement, innovation, and community. It had its unsavoury side too, where the unchecked egos of its stars ran rampant, and the untold dangers of drug abuse, alcoholism and undiagnosed psychological issues compounded to create some of music’s darkest moments.
Yet life is rarely so binary, and there are plenty of more nuanced moments that blend the historic, the comedic, and the slightly unsavoury. One of the more surreal occurred during a late-night jam at the New York hotspot The Scene, between 6 and 7 March 1968. As told in The Doors Interactive Chronological History, it saw two of the counterculture’s brightest lights, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, come to blows, with a little help from another icon of the era and fellow ’27 Club’ member, Janis Joplin.
According to legend, an excitable audience had gathered at The Scene that night on whispers of a planned jam featuring Hendrix and The McCoys’ Randy Hobbs, Bobby Peterson and Randy Zehringer. Unaware, they were about to witness another star take the stage, in one of his most humiliating public appearances.
Enter Jim Morrison. Partway through the bluesy jam, The Doors frontman climbed on stage. According to onlooker Michael J Weber, “Mr. Mojo Risin'” was “slurring, very stoned”, shouting uncomfortable noises down the mic such as “oh-wow-wooooh” while clinging to the stand.
Things were about to get worse. Morrison, seemingly desperate to be the centre of attention, then slumped to his knees, whether by design or by drunkenly losing his balance no one could say. He proceeded to perform mock oral sex on Hendrix, described by Weber as “very lewd and crude”, wrapping his arms around the ‘Purple Haze’ star’s legs and screaming “I wanna suck your cock!” Hendrix, unfazed, kept playing.
Joplin, until then just another onlooker, was about to raise the stakes. On record as despising the “asshole” Morrison, she’d had enough after the stunt, and stepped on stage with a drink in one hand and a bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.
Elektra publicist Danny Fields, watching aghast from the crowd, offered his own account. Speaking to Louder Sound in 2020, he recalled: “Janis stepped in and hit Jim over the head with the bottle, then she poured her drink over him. The three of them started grabbing and rolling all over the floor in a writhing heap of hysteria. I swear there was, like, fur flying, like a cloud of dust around them, as if they were in a dry river bed. They were in a tangle of broken glass, dust and guitars. A lot of dust and feathers and leathers and satins went flying around.”
For all of Hendrix’s stoicism and Joplin’s fury, the night didn’t end how any of the three would have liked. It remains one of the most bizarre moments of the period, by some distance.
Fields concluded: “Naturally, it ended up in all three of them being carried out. Morrison was the most seriously hurt. They all had minders and roadies, and there were guys from the club whose job was to help keep order.”
