These are strange days for Robby Krieger -- or at least busy ones.

"It is a little weird," the Doors guitarist agrees down the line from the band's Hollywood offices. "There are a lot of things going on at once."

First and foremost: Tuesday's DVD release of the new Doors documentary When You're Strange, which chronicles the meteoric career and tragic end of the psychedelic '60s rockers fronted by self-destructive Lizard King Jim Morrison. On the same day, the 64-year-old Krieger also unveiled the instrumental jazz-rock album Singularity, his first new solo release in a decade.

And on a sadder note, Saturday marks the 39th anniversary of Morrison's untimely death in a Paris bathtub at age 27. "They never let me forget about that one," Krieger says, sighing.

Before heading off to Europe for gigs with Manzarek-Krieger -- the Doors-based band he leads with keyboardist Ray Manzarek -- Krieger took the time to discuss the documentary, the Morrison behind the myth and his strained relations with ex-bandmate John Densmore.

What do we get from When You're Strange that we haven't seen or heard before in all the other documentaries and movies and books?

This is the first time we've had a full-length, serious documentary made by a professional organization. And it's done pretty well. I'm pretty happy with it.

But there's also no contemporary footage or interviews with any of you.

No, and I'm glad we didn't do that. We were going to, but then I saw the old footage and there was so much good stuff ... Nobody wants to see us talking about us. Well, maybe some people do, but that's been done before.

When you watch that old footage, what do you think and feel? Is it enjoyable or sad?

Well, when I see the footage of us playing, I'm always amazed at how good we were ... It just floors me. But of course, when you see how Jim messed himself up and how we couldn't do anything about it, that's always a bummer. Today, we would have stuck him in rehab. And maybe it still wouldn't have mattered, but at least we would have done something, you know.

Did you or do you feel any guilt over that?

Not really. We actually did try to do an intervention on him at one point. It didn't work. He was just not the kind of guy that it would have worked on, anyway. His whole thing was rebellion, you know -- "I'm gonna do what I wanna do"

Going back to your live performances: When was the band at its peak, in your opinion?

There were different peaks. But for me, the best we ever played was right after the first album. In the studio, we had honed those songs to perfection, playing them over and over. The thing about The Doors is, we never practised. In my whole memory, we only had four or five rehearsals. All the rest of it was gigs. So recording was like practice for us. And we were really good.

What's your relationship with John? Between refusing to play and taking you to court to stop you and Ray from playing as The Doors, he clearly seems to have a different view of the band's legacy.

He sure does. He doesn't want to play, for whatever reason. Whether he feels it's not right to play without Jim, I don't know. But we played without Jim for two albums in the '70s. The truth is we haven't talked much since the lawsuit, but we're trying to get him back into the fold. John has an open invitation to play with us. And I'm sure it will happen at some point.

There's been so much mythologizing about Jim. What was he really like?

He was just another human being -- a good friend and all. But he was different than anybody I'd ever met. And I've never met anybody like him again. I didn't realize it at the time because there were so many weird people around that you took it as a matter of course. But he had the combination of being a genius songwriter and having that weird self-destructive personality, along with being the best-looking guy you'd ever seen. There's never going to be anybody like him again.

darryl.sterdan@sunmedia.ca