One of the biggest concerts of 1967 took place at Hi Corbett Field in early May.
The audience of mostly teens and young 20-somethings filled the infield and the bleachers of Hi Corbett long before Jim Morrison and The Doors took the stage. Among the audience was Bill Buckmaster, then a 19-year-old University of Arizona broadcast student on a first date with classmate Ann Burch.
Illinois native Buckmaster was “the long haired, free-spirit type who loved rock music and still do,” he said. His date, Ann, was a sorority girl from Tennessee who grew up in Phoenix. For 24 hours before the concert, Tucson radio station KTKT played The Doors’ breakthrough single “Light My Fire” over and over again, so everyone was pumped up for the show, Buckmaster recalled.
Buckmaster, who went on to become a Hall of Fame Tucson broadcaster, said The Doors played every song off their eponymous debut album, released in early 1967. And for the most part, the concert was relatively uneventful — a far cry from what happened the following summer when The Doors returned to Hi Corbett.
The Tucson Citizen reported that the stadium fuses blew out the lights on that late June night in 1968, likely a casualty of the 16 giant speakers plugged into Hi Corbett’s electrical outlets. For the rest of the night, Morrison performed in the dark, although they restored the power to the instruments and speakers. According to the Tucson Citizen report, Morrison, in a seductive voice, urged the mostly female crowd to break through the fence separating the stage from the audience, and acting on his advice, the then 15- or 16-year-old Linda Valdez found herself pushed from her place behind the fence barrier onto the stage.
She was terrified.
“It was scary. It was really scary to be up front,” said Valdez, a UA grad who still lives in Tucson and is a political columnist for The Arizona Republic.
“I never liked Jim Morrison after that. He did that on purpose,” the former Arizona Daily Star reporter said, recounting the bedlam that followed. “He manipulated that crowd and made people go crazy and rush the stage without any (regard) at all to the implications.”
As for Buckmaster and Ann, their first date led to several more including “a lovely dinner at the Iron Mask Restaurant, which is now Kingfisher” on East Grant Road, he said. The couple dated for five years before getting married on May 5, 1972 – nearly five years to the day of their first date — in Phoenix.
Last week, the Buckmasters, who have traveled to more than 100 countries and all 50 United States, returned to Tahiti in the French Polynesia to celebrate their 45th anniversary. The trip was an encore to their fifth anniversary visit to the South Pacific paradise.
