Reopening The Doors

First with the Beatles, and now with The Doors, 2000 is a big year for celebrating history's top acts. Legendary for their acid rock pioneering in the late 1960s, The Doors have a new tribute CD out and the surviving members of the group are pairing with some of music's best vocalists for a tribute album.

As VH-1's Rebecca Rankin reports for CBS News, it had been almost eight years since the surviving members of The Doors — drummer John Densmore, keyboard player Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Kreiger — had played on one stage together, and that had been in celebration of their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

This time, for a taping of VH-1's The Doors Storytellers Experience, they joined with some of rock's best.

Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction was more than ecstatic to be on stage with some of his idols for this once-in-a-lifetime musical opportunity.

"If you can jump in a movie of your favorite movie, that's what it's like singing a Jim Morrison song," Farrell says.

Other singers doing their best rendition of Jim Morrison: Creed's Scott Stapp, Ian Astubury of The Cult, and Train's Pat Monahan. The Stone Temple Pilot's Scott Weiland was also on hand to do his best Lizard King impression.

"To look back at the drums and see The Doors logo on the drums and me singing those songs....what an honor. It was a pretty electrifying and elating experience," says Weiland.

Densmore was thrilled to see so many people vie for that position on stage.

"We've been without a singer for 20 years — now we have five or six. Jim would've loved it," Densmore said.

It's not as if, however, The Doors lapsed into inactivity after Morrison's death of a heart attack resulting from a drug overdose in 1971. While Densmore has been semi-reclusive, Manzarek performed with and produced The New York Dolls, a band that never quite achieved star status but did get a wide cult following in the mid- and late-1970s, and he did several jazz and classical piano albums.

Kreiger, who wrote the band's first big hit, Light My Fire, has also been busy with several solo recording efforts, and is widely respected as an innovative and influential guitar player.

The group has also active in keeping The Doors themselves alive. All have written books about their experiences in the 1960s and early 70s, when The Doors made pop music history with songs like Hello, I Love You, L.A. Woman, Touch Me, and what is arguably considered their signature song, Riders of The Storm.

The Doors are among the first musicians to fuse "acid rock" — music that approximated the aural experience of psychedelic drugs, with long, repetitive, occasionally exquisite songs with surreal lyrics — with mainstream success.

No one typified the promise and excesses of that particular music more than Morrison himself. His good looks, heavy drinking and drug use, occasionally brilliant poetr and early death at age 27 could have stopped the musical movement cold.

But with several mega-bands — most notably Led Zeppelin — citing them as influences, and the emergence of FM radio in the late 1970s and early 80s, The Doors had the unlikeliest of comebacks. Rolling Stone magazine captured the irony of it all by putting Morrison on its cover with a caption declaring him "Hot, Sexy and Dead."

Now with the tribute album Stoned Immaculate — A Tribute To The Doors coming out, and Storytellers Experience playing this Sunday at 10 p.m. EST, The Doors look like they'll be lighting a fire under yet another generation of fans.

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