Growing up, my mom had serious cred with friends of mine for having palled around with Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and other Haight-Ashbury (less famous) standards–once, even kicking Jimi Hendrix out of her house when he’d shown up with a friend of hers extremely drunk (or extremely something).

In An American Prayer, the final album from legendary bastions of the counter-culture movement, The Doors, their enigmatic lead singer Jim Morrison is laid bare for all to see. It’s one of the most explosive and exposing albums in their canon. However, there is another set of tapes that has an even deeper insight into the singer’s character—The Lost Paris Tapes.

Very few musicians in history could be legitimately classed as poets. Patti Smith and Jim Morrison, however, are two of them in a very literal sense considering, of course, that both have seen poetry anthologies published.

THE WIDE-RANGING AND OFTEN PROPHETIC WRITINGS OF THE DOORS’ FRONTMAN ARE CELEBRATED IN A NEW ANTHOLOGY