When the music’s over, turn up the fight

The story so far: Robbie and Ray want to be Doors again, but John doesn’t want to play, even if the Man offers him megabucks for his old songs. Meanwhile, Jim is still dead

When is a Door not a Door? When it’s subject to a lawsuit prohibiting it from calling itself a Door. What would Jim Morrison, now in his 36th year of being dead, have made of the row that has broken out between his three former bandmates? That it all seems a little sad is one thing on which Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore are all agreed.

The absence of Morrison can’t be the only sticking point here. In 1972 and 1973 the three Doors who didn’t die in a Parisian bathtub made a pair of albums — Full Circle and Other Voices — that are now being readied for CD release in the autumn. These days, however, Densmore no longer wants to be a Door. And if he can’t be one then he doesn’t feel that any band with Krieger and Manzarek in it has enough Doors in it to be The Doors.

Such is the gulf that has opened up between Densmore on one side and Manzarek and Krieger on the other that it’s hard to imagine them ever having been in the same band. While all have agreed to talk for ostensibly promotional reasons, their appetites for the hard sell couldn’t be more different.

Referring to the freshly minted 40th-anniversary remasters of the Doors’ six albums, Manzarek leans forward in his sunlit London hotel suite and declaims: “I’m telling you, man — the state-of-the-art fidelity on these CDs is just amazing .”

By contrast, here’s Densmore two days later, on the phone from Los Angeles. “I remember how shocked we [in the Doors] were about the Rolling Stones releasing their first hits album High Tide & Green Grass when it was still only 1966. And now here we are and there have been 400 Doors greatest hits albums.”

He’s barely exaggerating. Alongside those remasters, another new compilation has just arrived. Coming in the wake of 13, Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine, Classics, Star Collection 1, Star Collection 2, Greatest Hits, The Best of the Doors, The Very Best of the Doors, Legacy — The Absolute Best and The Doors (Original Soundtrack), an expanded Very Best of the Doors (it now comes with a DVD) means that Doors anthologies now outnumber studio albums.

Though he may, at times, bemoan his own postDoors profile (sales of his 1983 adaptation of Carmina Burana and a recent novel, Snake Moon , remain sluggish), the passing of time has merely intensified the pride that 68-year-old Manzarek takes in having known Jim Morrison. With the self-styled Lizard King not around to do his own PR, the keyboard player feels that someone has to stick up for Morrison as he really was, not the caricature depicted in Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic.

Manzarek remembers going to see the film in a Los Angeles cinema, turning to his wife Dorothy halfway through and declaring: “Man, I’m leaving this band! If this is what this guy is really like, I’m walking out!”

“Oliver Stone’s treatment of a poet is like some over heated Victorian women’s novel of what a poet is,” continues Manzarek. “So you see Jim walking around spouting this poetry in a wibbly-wobby walk which he supposedly had because he was always stoned. Insane, man! Jim could put one foot in front of the other and walk normally, and he never spouted this poetry. He wrote stuff down.”

Manzarek’s attempts at damage limitation over what ranks as the corniest rock biopic of all time — how those myriad cosy chats between Morrison and his Native American apparition chum crunch in the mental gearbox! — are admirable. At the same time, it’s unclear how much damage limitation is possible when preserving the legacy of a man who, at least some of the time, appeared to think he was part reptile, who mendaciously claimed that his parents were dead, and once recorded a long, rambling poem about the death of his penis (“Lament for my c***/ Sore and crucified/ I seek to know you”).

Perhaps the truth about Morrison was best summed up by another leather-trousered extrovert. Writing about the Doors singer, Julian Cope suggested that the job of any great rock star was like that of a “bozo Dionysus”, to walk the tightrope “between prince of the underworld and total a******”.

Sitting in Manzarek’s chair some 24 hours later, Krieger is tickled by Cope’s portrayal of Morrison. “That describes Jim to a tee,” says the 61-year-old guitarist, who penned Doors perennials such as Light My Fire, Touch Me and Love Her Madly . “He could be both things — often within the same minute.”

By way of illustration, Krieger tells a story dating back to the day that the Doors recorded The End , the oedipal epic that concludes the group’s eponymous debut. “Jim had taken acid, and we recorded the song in two takes — so, as you can imagine, afterwards we were elated. But Jim wanted to go back and do more. Later he snuck back into the studio, but no one was there. So he decided to spray the whole place down with fire retardant. He ruined the whole damn studio.”

A few months ago Krieger and Manzarek arrived in Britain to play a series of Doors-based shows. What they couldn’t do, of course, was call themselves the Doors. Nonetheless, with the Cult’s Ian Astbury on hand as Morrison, Riders on the Storm offered an authentic spectacle for shortsighted baby boomers. Did they ever have the occasional moment when they gazed at the dark, leonine Astbury and forgot that they were not in 1967? Not for a moment, says Krieger. “Jim tended to command attention by standing still, whereas with Ian, it’s a different dynamic.”

Now that Astbury has left to make another Cult album, Riders on the Storm have appointed a replacement — the former Fuel singer Brett Scallions, who apparently “wears leather like it’s liquorice”.

If Morrison had made it back from Paris and the Doors were still a going concern, what kind of music would they be making? “What we’d be doing is a combination of jazz, rock’n’roll, spoken poetry and atmospheric sounds,” Manzarek says. “We would have expanded our stage show to encompass theatre. We would go into a city and stay there for maybe a week at a time and rig sounds under the seats.”

Manzarek is no less uncertain about Jim’s position on the use of his songs in advertisements. Offered a rumoured $15 million (£7.6 million) for the use of Break on Through in a Cadillac ad, Krieger and Manzarek assented, but without Densmore’s say-so the deal fell through. Interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 2005, the drummer explained: “People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music. That’s not for rent.”

Densmore’s words are relayed to Krieger and Manzarek, although judging from their reactions, you suspect they have a pretty good recall of them. “That’s not for rent?” smiles Krieger. “But we still collect royalties, so I guess it is for rent.”

I suggest to the others that the bone of contention might be those songs being used to sell a product that isn’t a Doors album. “The word ‘sell out’ is ridiculous,” protests Manzarek, “If you’re using something and you like it, and they come to you and say we’d like to use one of your songs in an ad for, say, Apple computers — well, what’s the harm in that?”

According to Krieger, Densmore has even said that “he would do an ad if it was the right one”. Densmore, however, flatly denies having said any such thing. “I’ve been going through documents that Jim had drawn up to prevent people from doing this very thing. This has all just come to light, so there’s a little coup for you.”

In their different ways, all three surviving members feel they are staying true to their singer’s spirit. But 36 years is a long time to go without seeing someone. Who exactly are you remembering after all these years? To echo the famous quote from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception , from which the group took their name, there are things that are known and things that are unknown. Suspended on the threshold between them is what Jim Morrison would have really wanted.