Just Say "Yo" to Drugs

Aftermath: According to Baggott, Donald continued the quacky-tonkin' (only geese "honky"-tonk) until he was carted off the stage in a straitjacket. This was far from the last meltdown for the Possum, but it just goes to show you: It may walk like a duck and it may talk like a duck, but it might not be a duck after all -- it just might be George Jones.

Star: Jim Morrison/the Doors

Specifics: March 1, 1969, the Dinner Key Auditorium, Miami

Meltdown: Drunk beyond even his own impressive norms, Doors frontman Jim Morrison staggered onstage and berated the people of his native state for being too dumb to leave Florida and move to California. He moved on to encouraging the audience to strip naked. And then he started asking questions. "You didn't come here for music, did you? You came for something more, didn't you? You didn't come to rock & roll, you came for something else, didn't you?" A long pause followed, as the audience wondered what he was on about. Morrison had the answer. "You want to see my cock, don't you? That's what you came for, isn't it?" And then Morrison unleashed his love scud, or maybe he didn't. To this day, no one is sure.

Aftermath: Everybody went home. Nothing happened until the papers picked up the story the next day. The media pressured City Hall and the police to do something about Morrison's corruption of Florida's youth, and eventually even President Nixon and the FBI got involved. Finally, four days after the show, six warrants were filed for Morrison's arrest, ranging from misdemeanors such as public drunkenness to a felony charge of lewd and lascivious behavior. As word spread of Morrison's conduct, promoter after promoter canceled. Doors songs were dropped off radio playlists from coast to coast. Though his trial resulted in only two misdemeanor convictions, the Miami incident effectively ended Morrison's career.

Star: Grace Slick/Jefferson Starship

Specifics: June 1978, Lorelei Festival and Hamburg, West Germany

Meltdown: Jefferson Starship's European tour was not going well. At the Lorelei Festival, their first show in Germany, thousands of fans rioted when it was announced that Grace Slick was too sick to perform. The next night the band probably wished Slick was still ailing. As a child of the post-World War II era, Slick later admitted that she always had it in for Germans, and she told them so in no uncertain terms at this Hamburg show. She took the stage in a Nazi uniform and goose-stepped around the stage taunting the Germans about losing the war, pausing occasionally to insert a finger or two up the nostrils of puzzled German men, whom she called a bunch of Nazis. "I'm in Germany and I'm gonna get back at them for Dachau or some dumb drunken decision," Slick said years later. "That's what that night was about: dumb, drunken decisions. So they started walking out, but they kept coming back, like, 'Maybe she'll do something really hideous and we will have missed it.' A freak show."

Aftermath: Slick quit the band immediately after the show. The band staggered on without her through the rest of the tour. "I think she created punk rock that night," recalled Jefferson Starship drummer John Barbata. If only that had been her swan song. Sadly for Slick, this gig proved to be just a midpoint on her transformation from hippie ice princess to corporate rock schlockateer. In 1981 she would rejoin the band, which dropped the "Jefferson" from its moniker and unleashed some of the worst rock of all time in the mid-'80s. From "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" to "We Built this City"? That fairly defines the concept of creative descent. -- John Nova Lomax