The Doors are as respect-worthy as MC5

There's some footage of Jim Morrison that makes me chuckle every time I even think of it. In it, Mr Mojo Risin' himself is waxing lyrical, clearly under the impression that words of pure poetry and enlightenment are dripping from his Dionysian tongue. To the rest of us, however, he is just another rock star completely off his gourd on the type of drugs that simply aren't available to us mortals.

But when he wasn't riding the snake or getting "Little Jim" out in public, the Lizard King and his pals in The Doors made some pretty challenging music, as we're reminded in the new documentary When You're Strange. Now, I've liked the Doors unashamedly for years now - not an easy thing to admit when you're over the age of, say, 16, and especially when you work in a profession full of iconoclastic purists.

I think I like them for the same reason most others hate them: Morrison's pretentious poetry, his messiah complex and the underlying belief that rock music could actually change society. And because it annoys people. Even Oliver Stone's accidentally comical biopic or the fact that loads of backpacking Eurotrash students seem to like them, too, is not enough to put me off. It's their music I keep returning to. It's just so baroque and velvety. So dramatic. You can keep the later drunken bluesy stuff, but I'll never tire of the swaggering call-to-arms of Five to One or the anxiety-inducing Not to Touch to the Earth.

They were grafters, too: six albums in five years, all of them worthy, all as good as anything the (deservedly) critically acclaimed likes of 13th Floor Elevators or MC5 released. As far as preening, provocative, self-important, misguided and annoyingly good-looking frontmen go, Jim Morrison was the best of his era. Jim Osterberg agreed: it was seeing the Doors that made him step out from behind a drumkit, change his name to Iggy Pop and form the Stooges. And everyone from Echo & the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes to Jane's Addiction, Marilyn Manson and Queens of the Stone Age surely owe some degree of debt.

Mind you, if you see me weeping in tie-dye and lighting a candle at Père Lachaise, you have permission to suckerpunch me. Or if you see me in leather trousers anywhere. Some things are inexcusable. You have to draw the line somewhere.