If you’ve ever seen Oliver Stone’s bananas retelling of Jim Morrison’s life in The Doors, you probably have an idea of what Jim Morrison’s brief foray into professional filmmaking was like. A listless young man of indeterminate origin obsessed with the darker side of culture and spirituality makes lascivious films that earn the scorn of his classmates before he dramatically quits to embrace life as a poet.

When Jim Morrison approached the microphone on December 12th, 1970, there was already a commotion. For years, Morrison enthralled crowds with some of the most powerful and wild antics that rock audiences had ever seen. As the self-appointed Lizard King, Morrison cavorted and careened across the stage, leaving audiences in fits of hysterics.

The story of Jim Morrison remains coated in both tragedy and mystery. On the one hand, the sweet music he made with The Doors was lightyears ahead of its time and would play a crucial role in shaping music’s future. While there are no question marks over his talent, his personal life, on the other hand, is soaked in irregularity and question marks remain over who Jim Morrison really was.

While the 1960s may have been the age of superstar collaborations, it was by no means the era of friendly camaraderie. The golden age of rock is riddled with stories of bitter rivalry, backstabbing, and the occasional drunken brawl.

As two of the biggest rock bands on the planet, Led Zeppelin and The Doors were bound to develop a rivalry. During their respective reigns, they cultivated a sort of cross-Atlantic version of The Beatles vs The Rolling Stones feud, with Led Zeppelin being characterised as the soft English boys and The Doors as the hard and fast American muscle band.

For every idealistic dream of the summer of love and hippie counterculture, there is usually a far darker and uglier side. For every flower power moment, there is dirt under your fingernails and, for every enlightening and ground shaking anthem, there is a singer who absolutely hated it. All that and more is compounded within The Doors euphoric song ‘Light My Fire’.

More than 50 years after that fateful day in 1971, the death of Jim Morrison is still the source of speculation. Even today, those closest to him remain unconvinced that the singer died of an overdose, and with no autopsy to back up these reports, you can’t blame them.