Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger are your Connector of the Day.

They're one of the most legendary bands on the planet and nearly fifty years after they formed, The Doors are still entertaining audiences in one way or another.

Comprised of Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, Robby Krieger and the late Jim Morrison, The Doors were one of the most controversial bands during the so-called Woodstock era in the late 1960s.

The group's most well-known member, Jim Morrison was the lead singer of the group and many of his songs are still played on radio waves.

Their first album released in 1967 and was titled "The Doors." The album features one of the band's most famous songs—the 12 minute epic, "The End."

The band's second single, "Light my Fire," was another big hit for the group and it sold over eight million copies.

Between 1967 and 1971, the band released a total of seven albums.

On July 3 1971, the lead singer of the group, Jim Morrison, was discovered dead at a Paris hotel room.

Although the remaining three members of the band continued to perform and release albums, their allure was slighty diminished with the absence of Morrison.

A new documentary called "When you're Strange," chronicles the life and adventures of the group with archive footage and exclusive interviews.

The documentary was filmed by Tom DiCillo and features John Densmore, Robby Krieger and Ray Manzarek. 

Source: CNN (blog)

“There are no rules at a rock concert,” declared Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, 60s counter culture icon and the subject of Tom DiCillo’s admiring film documentary When You’re Strange.

Unfortunately, the US authorities didn’t agree with Morrison. In 1969, the same year as his cocky pronouncement, the Dade County Sheriff’s Office charged him with “lewd and lascivious conduct” for reportedly exposing himself on stage in Miami.

There’s footage from the concert in DiCillo’s fascinating film. The clip doesn’t reveal whether or not Morrison actually flashed his fans but it does show that the singer was so drunk that he probably wouldn’t have known what he was doing.

By then, Morrison’s decline from charismatic rock god to bloated drunk was well under way. A little more than two years later he’d be found dead in his bathtub in Paris, aged 27 – the age reached by fellow rock casualties Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who both predeceased him by less than a year.

Morrison succumbed, you could say, to the dangerous Romantic myth of the self-destructive artist. It’s a myth that remains potent (just ask Pete Doherty) and sustains the pilgrimage of mourning fans to Morrison’s grave in Père Lachaise cemetery.

DiCillo, maker of the indie comedies Living in Oblivion and The Real Blonde, is clearly something of a Morrison pilgrim himself and his film, narrated reverentially by Johnny Depp, at times veers perilously close to hagiography.

To those not under the singer’s spell, however, the leather-trouser wearing frontman always tottered precariously between the charismatic and the ludicrous. Can you keep a straight face before his strutting poses: Mescaline Messiah, Byronic rebel with a cause, Dionysian master of the revels, Lizard King, Mr Mojo Risin’?

At its best, though, The Doors’ music made up for the pretension. With band mates Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger and John Densmore behind him, fusing rock, blues, jazz and even Spanish guitar, Morrison’s dark baritone still mesmerises.

Listening to The Doors today, it is impossible to disentangle their cultural references from our own. Film school drop-outs Manzarek and Morrison unwittingly wrote the soundtrack to an era. Take ‘The End’. As soon as the song begins, with Krieger’s guitar veering between sitar and bluegrass, East and West, you can’t help adding Apocalypse Now’s images of helicopter gunships and napalm sunsets.

As for The Doors’ own story, if you’ve seen Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic then you’ll probably get a feeling of déjà vu watching When You’re Strange.

There is, though, lots of archive footage to admire in DiCillo’s film, some of it previously unseen. Most striking of all are scenes from HWY: An American Pastoral, the experimental film Morrison made in 1969, which show him driving through the desert and – thanks to some crafty aural editing by DiCillo – hearing the news of his own death on the radio.

Off now to lay a wreath at Père Lachaise.

When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors is on general release.

Uploaded by RhinoEntertainment on Feb 28, 2010

Source: What's On TV

Cancel my subscription to the resurrection: Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Much of this film about America's most "dark and dangerous" rock band consists of previously unseen footage. You wouldn't know that, though, unless you read the press notes. Somehow, it all seems rather familiar anyway, probably thanks to Oliver Stone's 1991 feature film about them, which starred Val Kilmer and some very fine wigs.

Although this is his first documentary, Tom DiCillo's previous features such as Living in Oblivion and The Real Blonde have been heavy with irony about film and fashion. It's strange, then, that this film is so reverential. Narrated by Johnny Depp—Mr Vanessa Paradis, of course—there isn't a hint of a smirk at Jim Morrison's leather-panted posturing. Somehow, Depp makes being in a rock band seem really boring.

While the band's music is always worth hearing, the one impressive stroke is to intersperse the film with an experimental short Morrison made of himself driving out in the desert. The effect looks like Morrison contemplating his own death, one which came at 27 (same age as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin) in Paris and led to a grave in Père Lachaise, not, as the American radio announcer at this film's beginning calls it, "Pierre Lachaise". 

Source: The Guardian

A photograph of the band taken for album The Doors

To compliment the cinema release of Tom DiCillo’s documentary about the The Doors ‘When You’re Strange,’ the Idea Generation Gallery is hosting an exhibition of previously unseen and lesser known photographs from the controversial band’s history.

Iconic singer Jim Morrison, keyboard-player Ray Manzarek, drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger stare moodily out of a series of black and white and sepia portraits shot throughout the band’s six year career prior to Morrison’s death in 1971.

Photographers including Joel Brodsky, Bobby Klein and Henry Diltz captured the troubled American band’s success, Morrison’s increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol and their irreverent performance-style between 1966 and 1971. The collection provides another glimpse of the enduringly popular group’s approach. 

Source: Independent