It was on their first album... (I believe 1967.)
And I was pretty young. In fact, my childhood memories of that first album are limited to "Break on Through," "Twentieth Century Fox," and "Light My Fire." "The Crystal Ship" didn't even register on my consciousness until I was an adult and was going out with a woman who was a little bit of a female version of Jim Morrison...
(As to my youth back then, I had an interesting path through the 60s. My brother was born in 1950. He is one of those musical genius types who can play anything. By 1967, he was in a couple of bands -- he played trumpet in a working polka band (!) and he played rock guitar in a working club band... I was born in 1960, so by 1967 I was still too young to actually be part of the 60s revolution, but I was old enough to see everything that was going on, and I was able to hang out around my brother, his friends, and the various groupies who got off being with the neighborhood band...)
I always thank God for this sort of schizo view of the 60s I got -- I was too young to participate in the drug scene when people actually thought it was cool. And, by the time I got old enough, 99.9% of my brothers friends had already paid the price for the life style and I was able to see, first hand, the dangers and tribulations such stuff inflicts on a person (some flat out dead, some in foreign prisons, some in insane asylums, some walking veggies, some just disappeared...). Though I was too young to take part in the drug scene, I was just old enough to appreciate the great music, to sit around at parties and stuff, to meet the former beats who had survived, to talk to the freaks who were around, and to see the emptiness of the "hippies" when the mass media tried to _market_ the left overs of the beat generation with some kind of marketable version of the freak generation...
Mark W.
I was born in 1953 so I was right in the middle of all that. I must admit to a little experimentation, the only thing I came away liking was pot. I don't smoke anymore, but I think it should be legal. Luckily no one I knew ended up dead or in prison, one guy I met in the 1970s ended up in an insane asylm, I'm not sure it was do to drugs though. I spent a couple of years as a bartender and came away with the impression that hard liquor is much worse than pot. I'm glad I don't do that anymore, but it was fun for awhile.