"The End – I hate that song" mutters the girlfriend the other month. "But it's a work of staggering genius!" I cry. "It's The Doors" she says. "When I was 17, everyone I knew had that bloody poster on their door. Or that plinky-plonky sixth-form poetry on their turntable." During the 1980s, especially, The Doors' legacy could pretty much be boiled down to that bloody poster of that bloody awful man, and a workaday cover of People Are Strange in The Lost Boys.
So I tell her about The End. Why it matters; why it's important. I boozily tell her about the Apollonic and the Dionysiac, the Oedipus myth, the ritual murder of priest-kings, the Golden Bough, Nietzsche, Heart of Darkness and Jung's dark night of the soul. I namecheck Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, TS Eliot and his Hollow Men. I use the word 'existentialism.' I explain how all the above feeds into the lyrics for The End. And when it's all over, she says "Well, I suppose it's okay then." Two weeks later, while watching the new Doors documentary When You're Strange, I discover it's a song Jim Morrison had written about breaking up with his high-school sweetheart.
Few groups occupy a territory between the arcane and the mundane as conspicuously as The Doors. You know the party line: Morrison was an "electric shaman", leading his tribe into an elevated state of consciousness during communal gatherings (had Morrison been born in Wakefield, his opening incantation might have been "Is ev'rybody in? Let the bingo begin!").
For many others, The Doors' sound is akin to that of a grizzled barfly barking obscenities over music resembling the theme tune to ITV's Tales of the Unexpected. The hideous 'Touch Me', in particular, sounds like something a cheesy 1960s comedian might sing over his sketch show credits. Don't get me wrong, I like some of their songs. But very often, it's mute nostril agony.
Still, there are enough 'Boomers around to keep stoking the myth. When You're Strange is the first feature-length documentary about the group, and comprised exclusively of archive footage (no talking heads) and outtakes – flotsam to be reemployed and placed in service. Essentially, it's an unimaginative VH1-style profile with pretensions.
The narration, coolly uttered by Johnny Depp – an actor who clearly wishes he'd been born in 1950, and whose voice-over has belatedly replaced the director's own in what you'd have to conclude is a pretty astute marketing move – is sheer Colemanballs: banal and often factually incorrect. Morrison, we're told, "is both innocent and profane, dangerous and highly innocent. No-one has had this exact combination before." Seriously? Elsewhere, "The youth movement catches fire, making everyone over the age of 30 a cultural enemy." So, that's counter-culture heroes Leary, Burroughs, Warhol and Bucky Fuller immediately show-trialled out of the picture then. Almost despite itself, it'll occasionally throw up a grimly arresting image: Nehru jackets with Peter Sellers specs; Ed Sullivan lurching around like something from an Ed Wood picture; ghoulish audiences paying to watch a car-crash, repeatedly chanting 'Light My Fire' at a snarling drunk who can't stand up.
A delighted Ray Manzarek calls this the "anti-Oliver Stone"; he's very much not a fan of The Doors, the movie. Yet, laughable as that film is, it does at least have some lunatic life to it. Ironically, there is nothing here as purely exhilarating as Stone's 10-minute recreation of the infamous 1969 Miami concert, in which Val Kilmer alternately alienates and galvanises the crowd. The best rockumentaries – Dig, Oil City Confidential – have charismatic live-wires at their centres. When You're Strange has a dead lizard.
So I tell her about The End. Why it matters; why it's important. I boozily tell her about the Apollonic and the Dionysiac, the Oedipus myth, the ritual murder of priest-kings, the Golden Bough, Nietzsche, Heart of Darkness and Jung's dark night of the soul. I namecheck Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, TS Eliot and his Hollow Men. I use the word 'existentialism.' I explain how all the above feeds into the lyrics for The End. And when it's all over, she says "Well, I suppose it's okay then." Two weeks later, while watching the new Doors documentary When You're Strange, I discover it's a song Jim Morrison had written about breaking up with his high-school sweetheart.
Few groups occupy a territory between the arcane and the mundane as conspicuously as The Doors. You know the party line: Morrison was an "electric shaman", leading his tribe into an elevated state of consciousness during communal gatherings (had Morrison been born in Wakefield, his opening incantation might have been "Is ev'rybody in? Let the bingo begin!").
For many others, The Doors' sound is akin to that of a grizzled barfly barking obscenities over music resembling the theme tune to ITV's Tales of the Unexpected. The hideous 'Touch Me', in particular, sounds like something a cheesy 1960s comedian might sing over his sketch show credits. Don't get me wrong, I like some of their songs. But very often, it's mute nostril agony.
Still, there are enough 'Boomers around to keep stoking the myth. When You're Strange is the first feature-length documentary about the group, and comprised exclusively of archive footage (no talking heads) and outtakes – flotsam to be reemployed and placed in service. Essentially, it's an unimaginative VH1-style profile with pretensions.
The narration, coolly uttered by Johnny Depp – an actor who clearly wishes he'd been born in 1950, and whose voice-over has belatedly replaced the director's own in what you'd have to conclude is a pretty astute marketing move – is sheer Colemanballs: banal and often factually incorrect. Morrison, we're told, "is both innocent and profane, dangerous and highly innocent. No-one has had this exact combination before." Seriously? Elsewhere, "The youth movement catches fire, making everyone over the age of 30 a cultural enemy." So, that's counter-culture heroes Leary, Burroughs, Warhol and Bucky Fuller immediately show-trialled out of the picture then. Almost despite itself, it'll occasionally throw up a grimly arresting image: Nehru jackets with Peter Sellers specs; Ed Sullivan lurching around like something from an Ed Wood picture; ghoulish audiences paying to watch a car-crash, repeatedly chanting 'Light My Fire' at a snarling drunk who can't stand up.
A delighted Ray Manzarek calls this the "anti-Oliver Stone"; he's very much not a fan of The Doors, the movie. Yet, laughable as that film is, it does at least have some lunatic life to it. Ironically, there is nothing here as purely exhilarating as Stone's 10-minute recreation of the infamous 1969 Miami concert, in which Val Kilmer alternately alienates and galvanises the crowd. The best rockumentaries – Dig, Oil City Confidential – have charismatic live-wires at their centres. When You're Strange has a dead lizard.