he Strip was hopping last Wednesday for the Celebration of the Lizard King & Co., Ltd., better known as the Doors. Though the band’s first album came out in 1967, the festivities were billed as a 40th-anniversary shindig. But there was new product to push – a just-published book, The Doors by the Doors, and an imminent Rhino boxed set, Perception, which arrives this coming Tuesday.

So recovering hippies of 60-plus and young ’uns of 16 clusterfucked at the Whisky (which fired the Doors after an early gig) and the Cat Club (formerly the London Fog, where the band debuted). They paid homage in sodden sing-alongs to vocalist Jim Morrison, on hand to sign autographs, now dead lo these 36 years; gaped at keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger; and hung for the de rigueur celebrity jam. (Drummer John Densmore, who sued his bandmates a while back, was safely quarantined up the street at an overflowing Book Soup.)

There hasn’t been so much ado about the Doors since around 1980, when the convergence of Apocalypse Now (with its curtain-raising use of “The End”), the posthumous Morrison poetry album An American Prayer, and the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive sparked a revival. Is the hubbub still justified? Let’s check the music.

Perception is the fourth Doors box since 1997, and the third iteration of the quartet’s six-album studio catalog since 1999. Packaged in a replica of a door that is actually thicker than a real door (unless it’s one on a bank vault), it’s the most lavish edition yet. Each album appears on a CD (with bonus tracks, some previously unheard, many superfluous) and a DVD (containing high-resolution stereo and 5.1 surround mixes, plus video footage). The DVD mixes, supervised by the band’s longtime engineer and one-time coproducer Bruce Botnick, will likely distract or enrage some. No purist, Botnick has had his way with the original session tapes: For instance, the hi-res mix of the ’67 debut album, which I know by heart, utilizes a quite obvious alternate vocal on “Back Door Man.” The collection should keep Doors chat rooms buzzing for months.

The music plays as it did on its initial release between 1967 and 1970. The Doors and Strange Days remain seductive works fired by their lead singer’s ambitions and (yes) pretensions, and by the band’s jazzy, highly original interplay. (Look, Ma, no bass!) Waiting for the Sun and The Soft Parade still sound leaden and muddled, with the latter rendered virtually unlistenable by its grafted horns and strings. And the back-to-basics Morrison Hotel and L.A. Woman retain their bluesy earthiness and sublimity. In the end, the Doors had a better-than-major-league batting average.

That’s slightly surprising, for there are few great bands that had as many things wrong with them as the Doors. Much of the wrongness emanated from its dearly departed singer and principal lyricist: Morrison’s reach as a poet for the rock masses nearly always exceeded his grasp. (We should be grateful that “Celebration of the Lizard,” heard on Perception in rehearsal form, was never executed as an LP-side-long epic.) Plenty of the group’s work sounds strained, trivial, or just plain silly today. Thankfully, for every misstep, there’s a grand imaginative pillar; “The End,” “When the Music’s Over,” and those late-period epics “L.A. Woman” and “Riders on the Storm” make up for a multitude of sins.

In the end, beautiful friend, we continue to cherish the Doors for all they signify about this city. More about sex and death than peace and love, mirroring the town’s blinding light and infernal darkness, they managed to “penetrate the evenin’ that the city sleeps to hide.”

Their iconic status rightly holds, and inferior imitators are still legion. Next week, some kid in leather pants will work his Morrison moves at a Whisky pay-to-play night. He might as well give up now.