BIOGRAPHY: KEVIN COURTNEYreviews The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean YearsBy Greil Marcus Faber Faber, 210pp. £14.99

IT'S DIFFICULT to approach The Doors without crashing headlong into the myth of Jim Morrison, but if anyone can find a way through the web of lore and legend surrounding the band's doomed shaman, it's Greil Marcus. After all, he once negotiated the labyrinthine connections between punk, avant-garde and western culture in his classic critique Lipstick Traces. Worming his way into the essence of The Doors should be a doddle.

Jim Morrison was the anti-hippie: a poet-popstar who turned his audience's gaze away from the sun and into the darker recesses of the soul, where the view was far more interesting. The Doors eschewed the innocent, flowers-in-our-hair side of Haight-Ashbury in favour of the chaos, paranoia and uncertainty of a generation at war with authority, with old values, and with itself. There was no place at Woodstock for The Doors, nor at Monterey; their music stalked the badlands of California, and sounded a funeral march for the hippie dream. It's no wonder Francis Ford Coppola used the band's oedipal epic The Endas the climactic soundtrack for Apocalypse Now.

GREIL MARCUS has been a fan of The Doors since the early days of the band, and regularly went to see them at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom, so he’s well placed to bring us back to a time when The Doors were fresh, new and shocking, their impact not yet worn out by endless rotation on classic radio. The Doors’ entire career lasted only five years – and for most of that time, recalls Marcus, they were “at war” with their audience, who, behind the freaked-out, free-love facade, were often as deeply conservative in their own way as a supper-dance crowd.

Using old bootlegs of The Doors in concert, Marcus highlights the visceral tension between Morrison and the crowd, as each taunted and antagonised the other. “Wake up!” screams Morrison at the 18,000-strong audience at the LA Forum in 1968, during what Marcus describes as a “sometimes excruciating performance, sometimes confusing and alive, the band bashing atonally, refusing any rhythm, Morrison singing and reciting and roaring and whispering . . .”. For The Doors, that polarity between singer and audience was what created the live spark.

So consider this a report from the frontlines, with Marcus as your battle-scarred war correspondent, bringing you a blow-by-blow account of a conflict that left one rock god dead, and an entire generation wondering if the hippie dream had been one huge advertising scam.

“No one reads a song like Greil Marcus,” reads the cover quote from Salman Rushdie, and he’s right; as Marcus leads the reader through his personal selection of key Doors songs, he brings each one to life, conjuring up its spirit with a few well-chosen words and tossing in some weird metaphors just to jolt the reader into a different headspace.

In Mystery Train,he pictures Morrison "throwing bits of blues songs out the window", as if they're "just used tickets, and worth as much". In LA Woman, Morrison is "in the back of the sound, as if trailing the band on the street, shouting that he's got this song for them, a new-type song for a dime", which, if you listen, is exactly how Morrison does come across on the song. Marcus is quick to note that, at the time of LA Woman, the Lizard King was battling both alcoholism and drug addiction, and looked every bit the wild, bearded hobo.

Each chapter sees him deconstructing a Doors song, examining each fragment, guitar line, keyboard run, drumbeat and lyric, then putting it back together in different permutation, holding it up to the light, but also feeling around in the dark to discern different shadows and shapes.

Some of the songs, such as Light My Fire, Break On Throughand People Are Strange, have become so familiar to us after 40 years of airplay, you can't imagine Marcus uncovering any new layers – but he manages to find fresh perspectives where others would see only well-trodden dust.

In trying to avoid dealing directly with the elephant in the studio, the towering, tottering figure of Jim Morrison, tilting at the world’s windmills, Marcus takes some confusing detours and side-roads.

There may be little about Morrison himself, but there's plenty about Morrison as played by Val Kilmer in Oliver Stone's 1991 film, The Doors. There's also a lengthy digression into the 1990 film, Pump Up the Volume, starring Christian Slater as a pirate radio DJ. Oh, don't worry, Marcus has a point to make about American teen rebellion – and a strong one too – just be aware of these detours before you sign up for the excursion.

This is an alternative trip through the “so-called 60s”, with little room for nostalgia, but plenty of wide open space to see where The Doors’ music might fit in the wider landscape of American popular culture. After reading this, the next time you listen to a Doors song, I guarantee you you’ll hear it as if for the first time.

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Timesjournalist