“Jim was locked into that body where he had his problems,” Robby seemed to look up at us for the first time, “But when we got together to play, that was the good part. He always loved that part. That’s when he was at his best.”

“And ninety percent of the time he would come through. There were only a few gigs that went really bad. Those happened in Seattle, I feel sorry for Seattle,” Ray shook his head.

“Michigan,” Robby sheepishly added.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Ray began to recall the embarrassing memory, “Fucking Michigan! The University of Michigan homecoming, with the football players. Jimbo took over and Jim was simply not able to perform. It was so bad that John and Robby left the stage, I picked up a guitar and played some John Lee Hooker kind of stuff hoping we could get through at least something, and Jim was just drunk as a skunk, berating tuxedoed guys, gowned girls, and they came to hear the band with the hit song Light My Fire and instead they get the Dirty Doors and it was like a tragedy, man! We got banned from the Big Ten. The letter went out: ‘Never hire this filthy, dirty, disgusting band ever again!’ So yeah we had a tough time, but that’s what you had to go through.”

Courtesy of Elektra Records

“What band doesn’t, ya know?” Robby justified.

“The art is the only thing that matters,” Ray emphasized, “Whatever it takes, whatever you have to go through to get to the art. That’s the only thing that matters. We had a tough time with Jim the latter half of his short life on the planet. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything, man. I wouldn’t fire the guy, not do it, because every time he had to deliver something, he delivered great poetry, he delivered a great song, he delivered a great lyric. If that had suffered, that would have been a different story. Your poetry is not any good, your verses aren’t any good, what you’re doing isn’t any good because of your drinking. Then we would have to tie him up. But he came through. But what’re you gonna do? You live with his eccentricities.”

Tom DiCillo’s radiant documentary “When You’re Strange” is a rare and fleeting glimpse through the key-hole of The Doors, and through this key-hole we see how four young guys in six short years changed the way we hear music forever. Through this key-hole we can also briefly peer into the mysticism of Jim Morrison. How boldly he strode from total amateur (who was once technically homeless) to multi-million dollar poster child of the Zeitgeist. It’s as if he knew exactly what he was doing every step of the way. Morrison wore foresight like his skin-tight leathers, and one has to wonder if he had his date of departure etched in stone long before it ever happened. As the spotlight grew hot, as the fans turned to crowds, as the crowds turned to mobs, he barely flinched. It was all going according to plan in an era where serious ideas could actually take flight, if just for a short while.

Photo Credit: Paul Ferrara

From concert to concert, girl to girl, poem to poem, and of course, bottle to bottle, Morrison used these events as stepping stones around the world to spread his messages: freedom in the face of epic oppression, courage to be strange in a herd of normalcy, but perhaps above all else, a desire for each star-crossed generation to hop on a merry caravan into the Unknown — no matter how dark, no matter how scary – with the devout conviction, that on the Other Side was simply… love. He was the poet as pervert, the rock star as madman, the lover as animal. But macho arrogance catches up with the artist (just ask Hemingway) and in the end Morrison was all too human for anyone — including himself — to fully fathom. The metaphorical trigger was finally pulled in a bathtub in Paris, France… under circumstances that he and only he will ever understand. One can only assume, but in his last breaths it is comforting to consider that his final thought was that of victory. Victory over the friends that tried to own him, the courts that tried to shackle him, the era that tried to define him. The end was only his true beginning, a transition from popular meat to eternal icon. In the end his victory was immortality, the stuff of legend. It was what he was scribbling in his UCLA notebooks all along.

Netflix or buy the DVD on June 29th.

***Special thanks to Staci Wilson for this article***