by James Riordan and Jerry Prochnicky544 pages, $20 hardcover. Published by William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.

Riders on the Storm: My Life with Jim Morrison and The Doors by John Densmore

319 pages, $19.95 hardcover. Published by Delacorte Press, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10103.

With at least six books on Jim Morrison and The Doors now on the shelves, five published within the last year to take advantage of tie-in sales on the flowing, copious coattails of Oliver Stone's powerful film, The Doors, you'd think one of them, at least, might approach "very good," "excellent," even "definitive."

Not so. There have been no good books written about Jim Morrison and the band he fronted, and I'm beginning to wonder if there ever will be. It seems that those writers most attracted to such a task in the first place are just those writers least equippedemotionally, historically, musicallyto do their subject justice. Could it be that there's a place in rock writing for Albert Goldman after all?

Ultimately, after all the tales of Morrison's boozing, drugs, degradation, womanizing, and swift slide down into sodden alcoholism and desperate artistic flailing, there seems to be not a great deal to say about the entire Doors phenomenonat least by those who have written about it so far. For these tales are as old as rock'n'roll itself: vague but blinding visions of an ecstatic state transcending poverty and middle-class stuffiness alike, with hopes that the liberating power whipping around a roadhouse stagethe power that tells musicians and audience alike that we're on the edge, that anything can happen, and it just might happen tonightwill somehow change things forever.

For the lucky (or unlucky) few, that power degrades into the powers of fame and money, in which what was once transcended nightly by music is now transcended more permanently by sales, marketing, investments, even as the door to the original fading vision, a door never actually passed through, is kept ajar by drugs and alcohol. Jerry Lee Lewis has lived on this edge for nearly 40 years. Bob Dylan continues to warp in and (mostly) out of it. For a brief time, Elvis embodied it all, even if he never thought about it in such terms. And for a slightly longer time, Jim Morrisonwho certainly thought about it a great dealwas an avatar of a far darker version of the same dream.

Funny thing is, Jim Morrison's tragedy is revealed in these two books, almost despite the authors' intentions. There's much loose talk of "shamanism," by Riordan, Densmore, and Morrison himself, but very little understanding of the shaman's role in the society of which he is an integral part. Morrison seems to have latched on early to a carefully selected, tiny handful of quotationsfrom Blake, Nietzsche, and Castanedaby which he then proceeded to systematically destroy first his body, then his mind, and finally his soul. He was hardly the first. His models were such early burn-outs as Verlaines, Rimbaud, and Dylan Thomasthe cheapest romantic clichés of the self-destructive poet, used as an excuse for getting drunk instead of writing for 150 years now.

In his early 20s, Jim Morrison had a dim, embryonic vision of alternate realities to be shared through religious, ritualistic proto-theater, with music the key ingredient. He wanted to, in Blake's words, "cleanse the doors of perception"hence the group's nameso that "every thing would appear as it is, infinite." Of course, this is half of what life is about; Morrison forgot the rest, which is that, while we pursue the infinite, we are rooted in the finite, the limited, the body, duality; the awareness of the tension between life and death, the finite and the infinite, is what it is to be human. Morrison's furious drive to break on through whatever boundaries he saw with alcohol, music, and outrageous behavior eventually erected new boundaries built of these very tools. As far as anyone knows, these last boundaries remained invisible to him until the end, when death was the only door left open.

It's difficult to come down too hard on Doors drummer John Densmore's Riders on the Storm. The book is an extremely personal, if superficial, account of one simple, decent, frightened man's ride on the rock'n'roller-coaster of the American '60s. With Morrison's long-time lover, Pamela Courson, dead just three years after Morrison himself, guitarist Robby Krieger's taciturnity, and keyboardist Ray Manzarek's almost desperate (and quite successful) Doors boosterism, this is likely as close as we'll ever come to a clear vision of what it was like to live and work with Morrison.

Written in the form of diary entries, letters to Morrison after his death, and page after page of brave if embarrassing gushing, Riders has "Writing Workshop" written all over it. Doing TM, reading Joseph Campbell, attending men's workshops with Robert Bly, Densmore worked on the book for years, for better or worse without a ghostwriter or an "as told to." But Riders remains little more than a good sit-down for a couple afternoon beers with a sincere, earnest, not very articulate musician attempting to come to terms with a long-past period of his life that tortures him still. Densmore's remorse at his own cowardice in never confronting Morrison on the singer's self-destructiveness is painful to read, and very real; to judge the man's writing seems churlish. But, as with so many books about rock, after I finished it, I felt like reading a book.

Break On Through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison, by James Riordan and researcher Jerry Prochnicky, was the wrong choice. This fat, seemingly well-researched study has all the wit, wisdom, perspective, and grace of a five-pound block of Velveeta. Riordan's third book, it's monochromatic in style, insufferably righteous in its increasingly defensive posture toward Morrison, snarled in hopelessly tangled non-sentences, full of errors of grammar and punctuation, and rife with malapropisms. Morrison goes through "rights" of passage, has a "pension" for self-destruction, is "wailed" on the head by a bottle-swinging Janis Joplin, and is finally laid to rest in a Paris burial "sight."

The sentences are filled with empty, dead words: "Their relationship...fluctuated dramatically on an almost moment-to-moment basis." Who needs those last seven words? Open the book at any page to find more examples than you ever wanted to read of how not to write well. William Morrow is a large, prestigious publishing firm; don't they employ copy editors any more?

But the story is there, the facts copious, and the mystery of Morrison's death finally revealed (he OD'd on Pam Courson's heroin). This is, without a doubt, the most thoroughly researched book on Morrison and the Doors yet to be published (though no one seems to have yet uncovered a photo of Morrison's mother), and reveals Danny Sugerman's No One Here Gets Out Alive for the puerile, fawning mess it is. (Densmore reveals that Sugerman and Ray Manzarek deleted large chunks of negative information about Morrison from No One Here; that's the only way Sugerman's book could be published.) All Break On Through seems to lack is writing.

But not even Prochnicky's ample legwork can be trusted. The one set of public-domain facts I was able to check proved infinitely malleable in an axe-grinder's hands. Riordan has nothing good to say about The Soft Parade, The Doors' fourth album; I happen to like it quite a bit, and was surprised that he offers not a single favorable opinion from anyone else. More to the point, he states (p.337), "Incredibly short for a Doors album at only thirty-four minutes, The Soft Parade is undefined and, like the title says, soft." Besides the fact that Riordan should have written "as" instead of "like," The Soft Parade is actually longer, by a minute, than its predecessor, Waiting for the Sun, and within seconds of the playing time of Strange Days, which Riordan praises as The Doors' best album with no complaints about its brevity. A small thing, an album's exact length, but if the man is so careless as to fudge data on such a trivial issue, I'd hesitate to take his word in larger matters.

Jim Morrison did not accept limits, and they eventually claimed him. No genius, he was a failed visionary, a boy who refused to become a man, a stranger to responsibility, and ultimately, a victim to his own unbridled appetites; he died little more than a pathetic, burned-out creep. But before that happened, he had a few good years of dark, ominous words and melodies that spun out with cold clarity, a musical immediacy that sounds as fresh today as it did a quarter century ago when it sent thrills of sex and death up the spines of a young audience who'd never heard the like. Yes, he was the Lizard King; what Densmore, Riordan, and Prochnicky make more than clear, while shedding remarkably little new light, is something we all knew anyway: that "I can do anything" was the shallow, desperate boast of a man already fallen off the edge on which he so loved to live. The tragedy of Jim Morrisonwho, like all sacrificial media gods, will always be young; that's why we love to kill them, love to help them kill themselvesis that he destroyed himself in full view of millions, and no one did a thing to stop him. He never broke on through to the other sidehe merely broke.

In the end, all that matters in a book is the writing, what Ezra Pound called "the quality of the affection." John Densmore's Riders on the Storm contains much affection and little writing; Riordan's and Prochnicky's several pounds of publishing product has neither.

Meanwhile, the Doors mill of original albums, new videos, and recompilations grinds onthe Doors sell more records now than they ever did, and still to the same segment of the population: 15-to-21-year-olds. Perhaps the saddest thing is that Morrison's appeal might remain merely the bulge in his leather pants, the dry-humped mike stand, the lolling tonguehe who would be shaman-king relegated to being David Cassidy's dark precursor. A sad and cautionary tale, and one that remains ill-told. Perhaps it's better soeven after all this bad writing about a failed life, I still love The Doors.Richard Lehnert