in 1979 and now finally released as a four-CD set.

The three Bright Midnight releases, available through the Doors' Web site (thedoors.com), and Stoned Immaculate, a tribute album with an all-star cast including Creed, Stone Temple Pilots and Aerosmith, continue the long-running expansion of the Doors franchise. For a group that managed only six studio albums while Morrison was alive, the Doors never seem to run out of product. Nor does the public's fascination with Morrison show any signs of abating nearly thirty years after the singer's death. These latest releases, flawed though they are, tell us why.

In the summer of 1969 and on into 1970, when the concerts collected on The Bright Midnight Sampler were recorded, Morrison had become an international punch line because he supposedly dropped his pants during a show in Miami. The stunt got the Doors blacklisted in some cities and turned the quartet into a circus act for a new mob of "rock & roll voyeurs," as Ray Manzarek calls them in the Alive documentary, who came not to commune with Morrison but to watch him implode.

"We're all in the cosmic movie. . . . You better have some good incidents happening and a fitting climax," Morrison announces at a Philadelphia performance. There are moments when he strains to provide that climax. Track nine, "Bellowing," is exactly what its title says: Morrison as blustering blooze parody. Caught up in one of his sub-Rimbaud moments, the singer blathers on in "Been Down So Long" about how "love hides in molecular structures" and pleads with a sweet young thing to "dump your load on me."

Yet it was Morrison's willingness to appear ridiculous that also made him great. If the other Doors -- Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, drummer John Densmore -- reinterpreted rock as the moodiest of blues, Morrison saw it as a theater of chaos, an opportunity to be pursued with reckless, sometimes self-destructive zeal. He enjoyed making audiences squirm in confusion with his "Hello to the Cities" rant, and he thought nothing of interrupting his band to make speeches, browbeat fans or improvise nonsense ("Dead Cats, Dead Rats"). On a seventeen-minute "When the Music's Over" from Live in Detroit, the quartet journeys from spine-chilling climax to jaw-dropping absurdity and back again: Krieger's swooping guitar kicks the trapdoor from under Morrison's feet as he howls like a wounded an