What, after all these years, most readily springs to Don “D.A.” Pennebaker’s mind about filming Bob Dylan? The Judas moment? The scores of loaf-haired shop girls tapping on dressing room windows? The seemingly endless stand-offs between singer and uncomprehending broadsheet toffs? Random things, as it happens. A dawn encounter on the docks of New York with a naval fighting ship and the captain striding out to tell a shock-haired, Ray-Banned Dylan that he had written a book which he named One Too Many Mornings after the Dylan song. A backstage exchange in which Dylan mentions The Animals to his friend Alan Price – clearly a sore point for Price, who has just left the band in acrimonious circumstances. Dylan backs off and plays a blues phrase on guitar; Price responds on the piano. “Two people bypassing words to speak with each other. Just beautiful.”

That said, there are moments whose significance were immediately apparent. In 1966, with Don’t Look Back finished, Pennebaker found himself in London once again, filming Dylan for his first electric tour. At the Mayfair, the singer paid host to the visiting Beatles, who joined him for an impromptu 3am premiere of the film. It may have turned out to be the most influential rock documentary of all time, but sitting in the New York office where he and his wife Chris Hedegus run their film company, an amused Pennebaker remembers no one in the room being especially impressed: “Dylan and Lennon, they really didn’t know what to make of it. And Paul wasn’t interested. Back then, most people saw the lack of what’s known in Hollywood as ‘production value’. The only person that got it was George Harrison. He came up to me and said, ‘That’s a real film.’”

As “Bobsessives” the world over ready themselves for tonight’s simultaneous premiere of Martin Scorcese’s Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Dylan ingénues could do a lot worse than set the video and head out to the Barbican where Don’t Look Back gets a rare public airing. Lest we forget, it was Pennebaker’s state-of-the-art 16mm camera in 1965 and 1966 that caught almost every gripping piece of archive footage on Scorcese’s film – the years when his subject ascended from the status of cult to spokesman of a generation. Hence when a 64 year-old Dylan tries to deconstruct the adulation afforded to him at his creative peak, we cut to the reluctant messiah at yet another press conference wearily fielding a variety of baffling questions: the one from the writer who asks if he really cares about what he is saying (“How can I answer that if you’ve got the nerve to ask me?”); the one from the writer who wants to know how many protest singers there are in America (“136. Maybe 142”). In the context of the relentless attention; the factions – folk fans; teenagers; beatniks; communists – all seeking to claim him as his own, it isn’t hard to see why Dylan felt the need to travel with an entourage, and later, a band.

With the possible exception of A Hard Day’s Night, Don’t Look Back was the first film to realize that the fascination comes not just from filming the talent but also the behaviour around it: “It intrigues me,” says Pennebaker, now 80, “to see how people deport themselves in the presence of some kind of major talent or knowledge. It’s what that person – in this case Dylan – knows that determines who they want to spend time with.” Momentarily deploying the kind of snappy Dylanese logic so abundant in Don’t Look Back, he continues, “I mean you don’t want to spend a lot of time with someone who knows nothing, right? You just want to get to the feel of someone who has trodden higher up the ladder of life than you ever will. And this was the first time someone had presented the idea that pop music could have the same completely heavy effect as a major work of art.”

Has Pennebaker seen Some Kind Of Monster – one of countless rock docs which have used Don’t Look Back as their template? In Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary, we get to see Metallica enlisting the help of group therapist Phil Towle to iron out their differences. There’s a telling moment when the supposedly impartial Towle hands a piece of paper to singer James Hetfield. It’s an idea for a lyric. “Heh-heh! That’s exactly what I mean. I haven’t seen Some Kind Of Monster, but I can imagine the scenario. You can understand why people yield to those impulses. At the same time, I was pretty clear about my role in doing Don’t Look Back. The idea was simply to find somebody who is willing to let me into his life and, you know, just watch them.”

“Just watch” – those two words, as much as any, sum up the Pennebaker method. In contrast to the modern practice of breaking up concert footage with “revealing” interview footage, his legendary films of David Bowie’s final Ziggy Stardust show at Hammersmith and Jimi Hendrix at Monterey eschewed interviews and fast editing, bringing you closer to the moment as a result. And what moments. “Well, I can’t claim that I had heard of Jimi Hendrix prior to then,” concedes Pennebaker, “A friend of mine had told me about this new guy who sets his guitar on fire as he plays. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s a kind of blues I’ve never seen before. I was knocked out by it.”

Pennebaker’s warts-and-all approach to his subjects has, paradoxically, warmed them to him. After all these years, he still counts Dylan as a friend. He filmed Janis Joplin in several locations for a film he never got around to completing (“There are several films in my life that I never worked out how to finish, so I leave them the way they are”). Pennebaker remembers a smart but intensely insecure singer. “She was managed by Albert Grossman [Bob Dylan’s fiercely protective manager] and he set out to surround her with the very best musicians he could get. But that served to make her very competitive. She would sort of yell and it didn’t really help her. I would play her Billie Holliday records and maybe show her that there was maybe another way. Just as an act of friendship. Both on a professional and personal level, the problem was the drugs. I didn’t know how to deal with her drug use on film. It was part of her life, so you couldn’t ignore [it].”

Recent years have seen Pennebaker scale down his involvement with musicians. Depeche Mode sought him in 1989 for their 101 film. “I think they were after something like a real-life Spinal Tap, but Spinal Tap is actually a very sophisticated movie. Nevertheless, they were wonderful to work with. They were working-class kids with this wonderful idea that you didn’t have to have a big band. You just got a tape recorded and winsomely played along with it.” He’s possibly the world’s only octogenarian Radiohead fan. Judging by the band’s comically bleak 1998 verité documentary Meeting People Is Easy, the feeling is mutual: “That’s why I don’t feel the need to seek out musicians. People have learned that you can take a little camera that cost you under a thousand dollars and make a film for TV. And that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be me that does it.”

For many people, tonight’s broadcast of No Direction Home next week will offer a first chance to see footage from Eat The Document – the much bootlegged 1966 documentary whose release Dylan has never consented to sanction. Having handed over all his footage to Scorcese, Pennebaker says he’s unsure what the director has used. “I’m dying to see No Direction Home,” he says, “I just haven’t had a chance yet.” Thus your correspondent – having seen the film – finds himself in the peculiar position of having to describe Pennebaker’s footage back to him, in particular the freshly-excavated moment that has long since assumed mythical significance in the story of Bob Dylan’s life – the fan at Manchester Free Trade Hall, shouting “Judas!” in response to the singer’s supposed betrayal of his folk beginnings. “I’ve been told about it,” says Pennebaker blithely. “So, how does it look?” It’s extraordinary, I tell him. You hear everything clear as day: the heckle; a rattled Dylan saying, “I don’t believe you”; then bellowing the most incendiary Like A Rolling Stone imaginable. “Well, I’m dying to see it,” says the man who filmed it.

It seems incredible, I tell Pennebaker, that he has abolutely no memory of such a historic moment. “Well, that’s thing about making history,” he smiles, “You have no real awareness that it’s happening. You’re far too busy recording the present.”

When is a Door not a Door? When it’s subject to a lawsuit prohibiting it from calling itself a Door. What would Jim Morrison, now in his 37^th year of being dead, have made of the row that has broken out between his three bandmates? That it all seems a little sad is one thing on which Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek and John Densmore are all agreed. The absence of Morrison can’t be the only sticking point here. In 1972 and 1973, the three Doors who didn’t die in a Parisian bathtub made a pair of albums – Full Circle and Other Voices – which are being readied for their first ever CD release this autumn. These days, however, Densmore no longer wants to be a Door. And if he can’t be a Door, then he doesn’t feel that any band with Krieger and Manzarek in it has enough Doors in it to be The Doors. Over a phone line from his home in Los Angeles, he does however offer the news that he will be touring with his own band Tribal Jazz, featuring a keyboard player who he deems to be as good as his idol Herbie Hancock. At no point does he say anything nearly as nice about Ray Manzarek. Not that Manzarek will lose any sleep over that. “Hey man, I made The Golden Scarab with [revered jazz drummer] Tony Williams. It’s a brilliant record, even if I say so myself.”

Though at times a little gauche when attempting to justify the umpteenth remastering of what must be the most re-remastered back catalogue of all time, Ray Manzarek is also an astute talker, so he’ll almost certainly be aware of the irony that unfolds on the fifth floor at London’s swish Sanderson Hotel as he holds forth. Though ost here to talk about yet another batch of Doors reissues, he spends much of that time ruefully pondering the lack of attention accorded to his post-Doors works such as his treatment of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, a recently published novel (Snake Moon) and, of course, The Golden Scarab.

But while he bemoans his own post-Doors profile, Manzarek is fiercely protective of Morrison’s reputation. And with the self-styled Lizard King not around to do his own PR, the keyboard player feels that someone has to stick up for Morrison as he really was – not the caricature depicted in Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic. Manzarek remembers going to see the film in a Los Angeles cinema, turning to his wife Dorothy halfway through and declaring, “Man, I’m leaving this band! If this is what this guy is really like, I’m walking out!” Perhaps he should have walked out. That way, he wouldn’t have got to see the bit at the end of the film where the Manzareks give birth to a daughter called Princess (they don’t have a daughter, Princess or otherwise).

“What Oliver Stone made,” continues Manzarek, “was as much a movie about Oliver Stone as Jim Morrison. He made a white powder-tequila movie about a psychedelic band, in the process missing the entire spirituality of The Doors – not to mention the humour of Jim Morrison. Jim was a regular guy and a poet. Oliver Stone’s treatment of a poet is like some overheated Victorian women’s novel of what a poet is. So you see Jim walking around spouting this poetry in a wibbly-wobby walk which he supposedly had because he was always stoned. Insane, man! Jim Morrison could put one foot in front of the other and walk normally, and he never spouted this poetry. He wrote stuff down.”

Manzarek’s attempts at damage limitation at what surely ranks as the corniest biopic committed to celluloid – how those myriad cosy chats between Morrison and his Red Indian apparition chum linger in the memory! – are admirable. At the same time, it’s unclear how much damage limitation is possible when it comes to preserving the creative legacy of a man who, at least some of the time, appeared to think he was part lizard, who mendaciously claimed that his mother and father were dead and once recorded a long, rambling poem about the death of his penis (“Lament for my cock/Sore and crucified/I seek to know you”).

Perhaps the truth about Morrison was best summed up by another leather-trousered extrovert. Writing about The Doors singer, Julian Cope suggested that the job of any great rock star was like that of a modern day Dionysis – to walk the tightrope “between untouchable sex god and total asshole.” Robby Krieger is tickled by Cope’s portrayal of Morrison. “That describes Jim to a tee,” says the guitarist, who wrote Doors hits such as Light My Fire, Love Me Two Times, You’re Lost Little Girl, Touch Me and Love Her Madly. “He could be both of those things – often within the same minute.”

By way of illustration, Krieger remembers a story dating back to the day that The Doors recorded The End, the Oedipal epic that concludes the group’s eponymous first album. “Jim had taken a good dose of acid, and we recorded the song in two takes – so, as you can imagine, afterwards, we were elated. We went our separate ways at the end of the night, but Jim wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to do more. So he snuck back into the studio, but of couse, no-one was there. So what did he decide to do? He decided to spray the whole place down with fire retardant. He ruined the whole damn studio.”

A few months ago, Krieger and Manzarek arrived in Britain to play a series of Doors-based shows. What they couldn’t do, of course, was call themselves The Doors. Nonetheless, with The Cult’s Ian Astbury on hand as a surprisingly convincing Morrison, Riders On The Storm offered a truly authentic spectacle for short-sighted baby boomers. Did they ever have the occasional moment when they gazed on at the leonine, leather trousered Astbury and forget that they weren’t in 1967? Not for a moment, says Krieger. “Jim tended to command attention by standing still a lot of the time, whereas with Ian, it’s a different dynamic.”

Now that Astbury has left to make another Cult album, Riders On The Storm have appointed a replacement – former Fuel singer Brett Scallions, who, apparently, “wears leather like it’s liquorice”. If Morrison had made it back from Paris and The Doors were still a going concern, what kind of music would they be making? Manzarek lets it be known that he hates these hypothetical questions – “People always ask that question. How the f*** do I know, man?” – before elaborately speculating on the kind of music a 21^st century Lizard King might make. “What we’d be doing is making music like An American Prayer. It’d be a combination of jazz, rock’n’roll, spoken poetry and atmospheric sounds. We would have expanded our stage show to a more theatrical prepared theatre. We would go into a city and stay there for maybe a week at a time and rig sounds under the seats.” Manzarek proceeds to quote his favourite poem at length, Angels And Sailors – a sadistic Catholic fantasy, which ends, “Lying on stained, wretched sheets with a bleeding virgin We could plan a murder Or start a religion.”

If Manzarek is, at least initially, wary of speculating on the music Morrison might have made with The Doors in 2007, he seems less uncertain about the singer’s position on the use of his songs in advertisements. Offered a rumoured $15,000,000 for the use of Break On Through in a Cadillac ad, Krieger and Manzarek gave their assent. But without a yes from Densmore, the deal fell through.  Interviewed for the L.A. Times in 2005, the drummer explained, “People lost their virginity to this music, got high for the first time to this music. I’ve had people say kids died in Vietnam listening to this music, other people say they know someone who didn’t commit suicide because of this music…. On stage, when we played these songs, they felt mysterious and magic. That’s not for rent.” Densmore’s words are relayed to Krieger and Manzarek, although judging from their reactions, you suspect they have a pretty good recall of them. “That’s not for rent?” smiles Krieger, “Every time someone buys those records, we still collect royalties, so I guess it is for rent.”

I suggest to Krieger that the main bone of contention might be those songs being used to sell a product that isn’t a Doors album. “You know, back in the day, we were gonna use light my fire for a Buick ad. We couldn’t get a hold of Jim to ask him if we should do it or not and so the rest of us we signed off on it. In the end though,  Jim went crazy when he found out, so we ended up pulling the ad.” Manzarek says he can’t see what the fuss is about. “The word ‘sell out’ is ridiculous. If you’re using something and you like it, and they come to you and say we’d like to use one of your songs in an ad for, say, Apple – well, we all use Apple, don’t we? Then, what’s the harm in that?” According to Krieger, Densmore has even said that “he would do an ad if it was the right one.”

Densmore, however, flatly denies having said any such thing. “I’m actually writing about this at the moment, for a book that’s due next year. I’ve been going through documents that Jim had drawn up to prevent people from doing this very thing. This has all just come to light, so there’s a little coup for you. I was surprised by just how adamant Jim was [on this matter].”

Is there something to be said for the view, favoured by Krieger and Manzarek, that time may have moderated Morrison’s stance? “What?” scoffs Densmore, “That Jim’s dead and that’s the precise reason why we should do it?”

Such is the gulf that appears to have opened up between Densmore and Manzarek in particular that it’s hard to imagine them ever having been in the same band. Whilst both are talking to me for ostensibly promotional reasons, their appetites for the hard sell couldn’t be more different. “I’m telling you that the state of the art fidelity on these CDs is just amazing,” says Manzarek, referring to the 40^th aniversary remasters of the Doors’ six albums. “And we’ve added little cookies, little bits of candy and fluff and things that were on the original multitracks. [At the time] we didn’t use them, [but now] we thought let’s stick them in.”

By contrast Densmore offers up a recollection dating back to 1966, less than a year after The Doors’ inception. “I remember how shocked we all were when the Rolling Stones released their first hits album High Tide & Green Grass. And now here we are and there have been 400 Doors greatest hits albums.” He’s exaggerating, but not by much. Coming in the wake of 13, Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine, Classics, Greatest Hits, Best Of The Doors, The Very Best Of The Doors Legacy – The Absolute Best, and The Doors (Original Soundtrack), a brand new expanded Very Best Of The Doors (it now comes with a DVD) means that Doors compilations now comfortably outnumber studio albums.

Does it matter? Not to Manzarek, who sees the endless stream of reissues as a way of ensuring that new generations get turned on to Doors music. In their different ways, all three surviving members feel they are staying true to their singer’s spirit. But 37 years is a long time to go without seeing someone. Who exactly are you remembering after all these years? Just like the famous quote from Aldous Huxley’s Doors Of Perception, from which the group took their name, there are things that are known and things that are unknown. Suspended on the threshold between them is what Jim Morrison would have really wanted.

It’s been a decade since the royalties from A Girl Like You filtered through to Edwyn Collins. The song that propelled the former Orange Juice frontman into top tens all around the world earned him enough to move from a one bedroom flat to a terraced house in Kilburn. On the front door of that house, where the window should be, is a piece of corrugated iron. As his wife Grace explains, “There are some kids around here who just about remember A Girl Like You, and think Edwyn’s a rock star. There’s really nothing to steal, but this is our fourth break-in over a period of two years.”

If there’s an unspoken message imparted by Grace’s sing-songy Glaswegian tones, it’s that you’re not expected to feel sorry for her. Over the course of a relationship that dates back to Collins’ days in Orange Juice, she has often been his metaphorical right hand. Aged 17, when I turned up to a Birmingham venue hoping to interview Collins for my fanzine, it was the glamorous, blonde-bobbed Grace – then, as now, his manager – who decided on Collins’ behalf that he would make the time to talk.

Twenty years on, she now frequently has to do the job of his actual right hand. Since the stroke and the subsequent bout of MRSA that almost took his life two years ago, Collins has learned to talk, walk and read a little, but his own fist is permanently clenched. If he needs to work out a new song, his 18 year-old son Will might strum while Collins’ left hand shapes the chords.

But to say that life goes on is an understatement. Last month, Home Again – the album Collins recorded just before his stroke – finally appeared to career-best reviews. Recent weeks have been taken up with rehearsals for his upcoming live shows. And whatever other faculties Collins’ illness may have taken away from him, his laugh still sounds like a drain struggling to cope with the barrelful of porridge being emptied into it.

In the front room, sometime Aztec Camera frontman and guitarist in Collins’ band Roddy Frame can be heard gently teasing him over Grace’s revelation that, during this morning’s trip to the barber, Collins had to have his ear hair trimmed for the first time. “What did they use?” says Frame, “A strimmer?”

Clearly, kid gloves are not needed for a friendship which stretches back to 1980, when the 16 year-old Frame and 20 year-old Collins both fronted groups on Glasgow’s influential Postcard imprint. Back then, Collins was a surrogate older brother – not just to Frame, but to every indie kid who heard the fey art-school clatter of singles such as Poor Old Soul and Falling And Laughing. As Frame puts it – no doubt echoing the sentiments of acolytes like Franz Ferdinand and Belle & Sebastian – Orange Juice were emblematic of a time when “indie actually meant something. They were an affront to the music industry – these effete young men with their Penguin Classics sticking out of their tweed jackets.”

That Collins was arguably the most articulate musician of his peer group makes one effect of his stroke seem doubly cruel. His dysphasia – a condition affecting his use of words – is something he constantly struggles with. Occasionally, neighbouring words in his internal dictionary get mixed up. Talking about acclaimed early Aztec Camera singles such as Oblivious, Collins says, “Roddy was pretentious, really.” He means precocious – although Frame adds, “thinking back to my old interviews, he might have a point.”

And yet for all the unimaginable setbacks, Collins radiates a strange inner peace. The contrast from the restive soul of latter-day solo cuts couldn’t be more pronounced. Looking back at Collins’ albums in the wake of A Girl Like You, songs like I’m Not Following You and the Britpop-baiting Adidas World depict an artist increasingly irritable at the changing world around him. Home Again, though, portends a transition. Songs like Leviathan portray a man breaking free of his earthly container – bored of his own boredom, yet unsure of what will replace it.

Looking back now, Collins says, “I had a prescient energy… a sadness looming forwards.” His words are eerily borne out by new single One Is A Lonely Number. “And if life breaks your heart,” he sings, “You needn’t fall apart/Cos you’ve still got your mind/Which will serve you in kind.”

Like anyone keeping tabs of Collins’ progress thoughout the spring of 2005, Frame began thinking in terms of if rather than when he might see his friend again. “When Edwyn got sick,” he begins – before turning to address Collins directly. “I couldn’t get to see you for the first three months. It was just close family.”

Collins suddenly looks saddened. “Did they not let you see me?” Oh God, Sorry to hear that, Roddy.”

“Don’t be silly, man! They have to do that! You had newspapers ringing you up. But it really got me thinking that you were like a trailblazer to me. You went down to play in London before I did. You were on the NME cover before I was. I realised how much of an influence you had, even to this day, in my humour and the way I view music.”

For these reasons, when Frame got the call about helping Collins with these upcoming live shows, the answer was always going to be yes. Nevertheless, being a sideman for the first time in his life has been a humbling experience. “The other day we were playing something, and I said, ‘How about doing it like this? And Edwyn goes, ‘No, I want it to be [ital] correct [ital].” But, you know, that’s the brilliant thing. No-one’s tip-toeing around anyone. Edwyn is sounding great.”

Parachuted into circumstances that would have gotten the better of almost anyone, it’s as though he has found a challenge he can really get stuck into. The sketches of lapwings and snake eagles in the booklet of Home Again hint at his appetite for the fight. To draw them, the right-handed Collins had to re-learn with the left.

“Certain doctors made predictions about likely outcomes,” says Grace, “on the basis of three minutes with him every two days.” Had she listened closely to them, she might never have dared to imagine an Edwyn Collins well enough to accomplish the remaining duties of this Thursday afternoon.

At a studio two miles away, Collins and Frame are to play two songs for this week’s Times Sounds podcast. As Collins’ first recording session since his stroke, there’s no telling how it will go. “When people ask him if it’s easier to sing,” says Grace, on the other side of the glass, “he usually says yes – but that’s slightly misleading. Memorizing and getting the flow of the words has been a painstaking slog.”

Her words tail off as, through the speakers, Roddy Frame picks out the opening notes of Home Again. When Collins opens his mouth to sing, his words are inescapably pregnant with the travails of the last two years. Grace stares downwards and grins the grin of someone who may start crying at any minute. “Outside on the street,” sings her husand, “Well, I heard somebody singing/And I heard the music ringing/From some clapped out pirate station/It was my unholy salvation.” The note is high, sustained, and seems to break loose from his body like one of those lapwings in flight. No second take needed.