The End

ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A year before, a teenaged me had watched the Doors play live at Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Tension at the concert was high, as Morrison was already in trouble with the law for having grabbed his own crotch during a performance in Miami a few months before. (A decade or two later, Michael Jackson’s self-crotch-grabbing would be considered a cool dance move, and enormous photos of Marky Mark grabbing his Calvin-Klein-clad crotch would cover city buses and billboards, unremarked by passing grandmothers and similarly square civilians. By then, male self-crotch-grabbing was a non-story. But back in 1970, in Nixon’s America, a long-haired boozer who sang “Back Door Man” was a threat to Southern Womanhood or whatever racist cops thought they were protecting us from when they weren’t busy beating and…