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Perhaps more than any other band, the Doors pretty much nailed their mission with the very first song on their first album, which was "Break on Through (to the Other Side)." As you listen to the albums in sequence, what do you hear growing and evolving over time?

I don't know that there's linear progress, I don't actually think there is. It's an exploration of the other side. We broke on through and invited listeners to join us. We stuck our heads into the blue canopy beyond. And a lot came from ingesting certain hallucinogenic substances.

We explored music from blues to musique concrete -- the sounds we put behind "Horse Latitudes" were total chaos, pure sounds like Stockhausen and Boulez. There were love songs, ballads, happy ditties -- like "Hello, I Love You" came from a day on the beach when Jim and I saw this young Nubian princess with a café au lait color, and Morrison wanted to run up and talk to her and I said, "Don't do it, that's jailbait, that's trouble waiting to happen." And a couple of days later he came in with this sun-kissed ditty, saying, "Remember that girl? This is what I wanted to say to her -- hello, I love you, won't you tell me your name?"

Out of the Doors catalogue, I admit that I have the most trouble with the "Soft Parade" album and its "jazzy" arrangements, which it seems a lot of people would agree with.

If you don't like it, it's completely my fault. I said, "Let's put horns and strings on." The Beatles had done it; this is like two albums after "Sgt. Pepper." "Let's get some lush strings, some jazz horns." And Paul Rothchild said, "How about a fiddle player and a banjo picker?" We tried to expand beyond that four-unit sound to bring in other players. But it violated the preconceived notion of what the band was -- "Well, how dare you? It's always the four, the dark, moody, mysterious Doors." Well, I don't think so. We are alive on planet Earth and we can do whatever we damn well want to.

I think it also depends when you come into the Doors. I just talked to a guy in Europe and he said it was the first Doors album he ever heard and that he loves it.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about the Doors?

Probably the Oliver Stone movie, the idea that Jim Morrison was a crazy drunk, totally out of his mind, drunk and insane. Halfway through the movie I turned to my wife and I said, if it was really like this, I wouldn't have made it, I would have quit.

That idea went over really well in the '90s, but the real Jim Morrison was much more literate and spiritual without that crazy bravado and insanity. Being in the band was fun -- it was the '60s, people smoked pot and they laughed, they got hungry. Marijuana releases your hunger and your risibility. And I didn't see any of that fun in the movie; it was all Sturm und Drang.

Do you think the movie version of the Doors helped keep the mythology growing?

That Anna Nicole Smith version is an easy thing to digest in this day and age; it makes it intriguing. The handsome, young, dark poet who dies early. And he's in a rock band, so you don't even have to read his poetry!

But the Doors were always more complex than that. When I met Jim on the beach and we decided to start the band, the most important thing for us was the words. We wanted to put the words and rock music together the way the beat poets married poetry and jazz. People still talk about the beat poets, and they still talk about Jim Morrison.

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Alan Light is the former editor-in-chief of Spin, Vibe and Tracks magazines and a former senior writer at Rolling Stone. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, GQ and Entertainment Weekly. His book "The Skills to Pay the Bills: The Story of the Beastie Boys" was published in 2006. Alan is a two-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music writing.