The Doors' Strange Days

When the Doors got ready to record Strange Days, they still had a wealth of material left over from their months of rehearsing and playing the Sunset Strip; songs that hadn't been used on their groundbreaking first album. Two numbers in particular, "Moonlight Drive" and "My Eyes Have Seen You", dated back to that fateful day on the Venice beach when Jim Morrison had serenaded keyboardist Ray Manzarek for the first time.

From there the collaboration between the two began. Legend maintains that Morrison "heard" most of the songs that comprised the first two Doors albums when he was high on acid in the summer of '65 and made contact with the spirit of an Indian shaman. Certainly psychedelics had an influence on both he and Manzarek, and they began to conceive of the vast potentials inherent in combining atmospheric rock'n'roll with poetic lyrics that dealt in sweeping, universal symbols. When Robbie Krieger's highly inventive and unorthodox guitar playing and John Densmore's jazz-tinged drumming were brought into the mix, the circle was complete - and the result was a sound that no band had possessed before, nor has since.

The Doors showcased this sound well on their first album, whose centerpieces included their biggest-ever hit ("Light My Fire") and their most effective dramatic extravaganza ("The End"). But the record was a like a sampler, in some ways, of all their disparate influences. It sped through jazz, blues, hard-edged rock, exotic sounds, and lighter pop sometimes without rhyme or reason.

Follow-up album Strange Days, on the other hand, was a cohesive statement both musically and lyrically. The Doors graduated from the primitive technology they'd been obliged to use the first time around when Electra records started implementing 8-tracks (!). The band utilized the extra recording space to enhance Morrison's voice and weave strange effects around his recitation of "Horse Latitudes", a poem he'd written while still in High School.

Each song adds to a collective sense of confusion, even disorientation. Nowhere seems safe; people are strange, lost, drowning, ravaging and plundering the earth. This existential vision reaches its climax with the epic "When the Music's Over", a centerpiece of the Door's club performances and one of the finest examples of rock-as-theatre that they ever committed to record. From its exhortations to all of us to "dance on fire", to Morrison's demand "we want the world and we want it now" and pleas for salvation before the final verse, the song is complex, poetic, and ultimately cathartic.

Before they were ever accused of "innate commercialism" and a "plastic approach", the Doors had won an underground following with their masterful wedding of music and poetry. With Strange Days they struck, arguably, their most perfect balance of words and music. This album exists in a world of its own, and remains quite unlike anything else in the history of rock.