You can know too much about people. Once you start sticking your nose into someone's back pages, discovering stuff never meant for public view, the same person you once held in high regard can swiftly fall from grace and end up a target for your derision and disgust.

 It's happened to The Doors, whose reputation has been sullied by barrel scrapers seemingly determined to make available every last shred of magnetic tape on which Jim Morrison and Co. recorded. These posthumous releases hit an all-time low with 1997's Box Set, featuring three CDs of unreleased live and studio music, much of it so atrocious that I haven't felt compelled to listen to another Doors disc in two years.

 That changed last week with the arrival of The Complete Studio Recordings, a lavishly packaged seven-CD box consisting of the six studio albums The Doors recorded (all remastered, presented in miniaturized versions of the original sleeves) before Morrison's final bath, a one-CD condensation of 1997's box set and an attractive colour booklet with the requisite effusive essay and full lyrics. Listen to it front to back and when the music's over -- and this time the music is actually the finished goods -- you might fall for The Doors all over again and still respect them in the morning.

 Indeed, while Morrison was alive and flashing, The Doors never made a truly bum album. Their self-titled 1967 debut remains among the most astonishing entrances in rock. Break on Through and the No. 1 single Light My Fire were its calling cards, but beyond those classics, there's an audacious meeting of blues, jazz, Kurt Weill and avant-garde drones, with Morrison, a young Adonis in black leather, crooning Beat-inspired lyrics like some psychedelic Frank Sinatra. The record was released several months before the Summer of Love, but its menacing undercurrent was already presaging what would go down at Altamont.

 When Morrison sings, "Come on, baby, take a chance with us," on the album's epic closer, The End, chances are you are already helpless to resist his Faustian temptation.

 Released just 10 months later, Strange Days was almost as good, with Ray Manzarek's swirling keyboards often conjuring a carnival atmosphere appropriate for an album with a freak-show cover and recurring themes of rootlessness and alienation, while the underrated Waiting For The Sun contained the Doors' second chart-topper, Hello I Love You, plus an array of top-notch quieter songs: The lovely and languorous Summer's Almost Gone, the flamenco-tinged Spanish Caravan and the baroque waltz Wintertime Love. Then, out of the blue, The Doors went orch-pop on The Soft Parade, a much-maligned experiment that may have lacked the primal power of its predecessors but, in retrospect, contains some exceptional songcraft and one tune in particular, Tell All The People, that sounds like the blueprint for several Nick Cave originals.

 The Doors returned to the roadhouse-blues basics on the tough, hard-rockin' Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Cafe and unwittingly delivered their epilogue with L.A. Woman, another gritty, bluesy outing that nevertheless sounded like one final spurt before the band's emotional fuel gauge hit empty.

 In July 1971, about three months after the release of L.A. Woman, Morrison broke on through to the other side, putting an end to four years of intense music making which have been followed by 28 years of vault cleaning and money-driven Morrison mythologizing. (A merchandiser in the box set allows fans to buy, among other items, an unbelievably tacky blanket with a design inserting Jimbo between God and man in Michaelanglo's Creation.)

 For Doors fans and neophytes alike, The Complete Studio Recordings is the place to start. And the place to stop.

Track Listing Disc 1
1. Break On Through (To The Other Side)
2. Soul Kitchen
3. The Crystal Ship
4. Twentieth Century Fox
5. Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar)
6. Light My Fire
7. Back Door Man
8. I Looked At You
9. End Of The Night
10. Take It As It Comes
11. The End
 
Disc 2
1. Strange Days
2. You're Lost Little Girl
3. Love Me Two Times
4. Unhappy Girl
5. Horse Latitudes
6. Moonlight Drive
7. People Are Strange
8. My Eyes Have Seen You
9. I Can't See Your Face In My Mind
10. When The Music's Over
 
Disc 3
1. Hello, I Love You
2. Love Street
3. Not To Touch The Earth
4. Summer's Almost Gone
5. Wintertime Love
6. The Unknown Soldier
7. Spanish Caravan
8. My Wild Love
9. We Could Be So Good Together
10. Yes, The River Knows
11. Five To One
 
Disc 4
1. Tell All The People
2. Touch Me
3. Shaman's Blues
4. Do It
5. Easy Ride
6. Wild Child
7. Runnin' Blue
8. Wishful Sinful
9. The Soft Parade
 
Disc 5
1. Roadhouse Blues
2. Waiting For The Sun
3. You Make Me Real
4. Peace Frog
5. Blue Sunday
6. Ship Of Fools
7. Land Ho!
8. The Spy
9. The Queen Of The Highway
10. Indian Summer
11. Maggie M'Gill
 
Disc 6
1. The Changeling
2. Love Her Madly
3. Been Down So Long
4. Cars Hiss By My Window
5. L.A. Woman
6. L'America
7. Hyacinth House
8. Crawling King Snake
9. The WASP (Texas Radio And The Big Beat)
10. Riders On The Storm
 
Disc 7
1. Hello To The Cities (Live)
2. Break On Through (Live)
3. Roadhouse Blues
4. Hyacinth House (Demo)
5. Who Sacred You
6. Whiskey, Mystics And Men
7. I Will Never Be Untrue
8. Moonlight Drive (Demo)
9. Queen Of The Highway (Alternative Version)
10. Someday Soon (Live)
11. Hello, I Love You (Demo)
12. Orange County Suite
13. The Soft Parade (Live)
14. The End (Live)
15. Woman Is A Devil