The Doors Band

The Doors were a few months away from stardom in March 1967 when they played five sparsely attended shows at a small club in San Francisco called The Matrix. These uninhibited performances would have been fleeting if not for Peter Abram, who co-owned the pizza parlor-turned-nightclub with Jefferson Airplane founder Marty Balin. An avid recordist, Abram taped concerts at The Matrix regularly and his recordings of The Doors, made between March 7-11, 1967, spawned one of the band’s most storied bootlegs. At long last, all known Matrix recordings, sourced entirely from Abram’s original master recordings, will be released on September 8.

Japanese original release. Special box set release from The Doors contains 28 tracks total, including 17 ones available as CD format for the first time. EP covers faithfully replicate the ones released from Victor from 1967 to 1972.

Several 1970 Doors concerts were officially recorded for use on the Absolutely Live album, including both of the shows they gave in Boston on April 10 of that year. This three-CD set has the early and late sets from Boston in their entirety, adding up to about three hours of music, all but two of the tracks previously unreleased…

This essential four disc collection contains nearly four and a half hours of music, with three hours of previously unreleased material, including demos, live track and one brand new song with vocals recorded by Jim Morrison in 1970…

Of course that's Johnny Depp narrating When You're Strange, the 2010 documentary about the Doors: who else but Hollywood's biggest fan of counterculture history? The film's other prominent attraction is the treasure trove of heretofore unscreened footage from the band's heyday, including backstage material, film-school stuff, and a curious project shot by (and starring) Jim Morrison after the group had broken through. That color footage, which When You're Strange returns to throughout its running time, has a bearded, zonked Morrison driving through the Southwest desert, on the road to who knows where…

Enthusiasts who have fantasized about experiencing the Doors in a loose and unstructured environment get an hour-and-a-half dose of that reality in this two-disc set available through the band's own Bright Midnight Records. Although the music commences in a rather noncommittal fashion, there are a few moments of undiluted inspiration…

Typically, rock bio programs for radio are little more than aural versions of Teen Beat, rarely delving beyond the surface appeal of a given artist. Los Angeles-based DJ Jim Ladd's aptly titled Inner View was the first nationally syndicated music and interview program to raise the intelligence bar several notches. Ladd's No One Here Gets Out Alive – originally broadcast on North American radio stations during the late summer of 1979 – is an audio biography of the Doors as told by those who lived it…