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The Doors timed the arrival of their second album, Strange Days, with almost
spooky prescience. Its pervasive air of unease — the more powerful because
so many of the songs are so quiet — coupled with its doom-laden sense that,
as the album’s long finale put it, “the music’s over”, proved unusually
prophetic.
The month when Strange Days appeared, September 1967, marked the end of the
so-called Summer of Love. This had been the high point of the madly
optimistic hippie conviction that rock’s emerging counter-culture could make
dreams come true; that all it took to reverse everything from American
foreign policy in Southeast Asia to the dominance of western consumerism was
for a large congregation of young “heads” with flowers in their hair to, in
the words of the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, “turn on, tune in and drop
out”.
This message had blasted out of San Francisco’s hippie enclave,
Haight-Ashbury, often carried in musically ragged, acid-flecked code by the
city’s most celebrated hippie bands, notably Jefferson Airplane and the
Grateful Dead. It played well in most places where longhairs and dope hung
out together, but didn’t cut much ice in the other music capital of
California, Los Angeles. The LA rock scene didn’t have a community nerve
centre like Haight. It functioned in a more fragmented, atomised way, around
hip music venues such as the Whisky A Go Go, and big private houses up in
Hollywood, like the one where, in 1967, the leader of LA’s biggest band,
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, was repurposing pop music, or losing his
mind, or both.
As Wilson beavered away indoors, down in the clubs on Sunset Boulevard a new
band, led by a charismatic and priapic young poet in leather trousers, was
making huge waves. The Doors, the latest signing to America’s hottest
“underground” label, Elektra, were capturing the imagination of the city’s
alternative types with music that, for all its psychedelic veneer, had
nothing to say about love or peace. Rather, it seemed to nail LA’s unique
proclivity for experimental arty endeavour and deviant sexuality in an
atmosphere of drug-borne paranoia. Taking their name from a title that
Aldous Huxley borrowed from William Blake for his book exploring the effects
of mescaline, The Doors of Perception, the band wore their sophomoric
intellectual interests with pride.
Unlike their peers in San Francisco, the Doors didn’t try for the “West Coast”
sound. They didn’t do folky harmonies or sloganeering choruses. They had
clearly been listening to John Coltrane and jazz fusion, and their lack of
respect for rock protocol meant they didn’t even carry a bass guitarist,
preferring to use a bass keyboard instead. Formed in 1965 by two UCLA film
graduates, Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek, they released their self-titled
debut album in January 1967, and deliberately chose not to blow with the
prevailing wind.
Though its bluesy stylings were broadly of the moment, its dark lyrical
preoccupations — conveyed with dramatic elan by Morrison’s fierce baritone
vocal and Manzarek’s spectral organ sound — rained a thunderstorm down on
the hippie parade of 1967. Even their breakthrough hit, the erotically
charged Light My Fire, which topped the American charts in April,possessed a
brooding quality. Its mysterious references to “our love [becoming] a
funeral pyre” foreshadowed one of Morrison’s most outrageous,
self-mythologising statements: “Death and my cock are the world.”
The End, the 11-minute epic that closed out The Doors, had a similar thrust,
culturally, to a song by an East Coast band who likewise declined to sign up
for the smiley hippie utopia. Heroin, by the Velvet Undergound, flagged one
unheeded toxic destination awaiting the blithe counter-cultural crowd. The
homicidal fury of The End eerily evoked another.
One great musical event separated The Doors from its successor, Strange Days.
The Beatles’ magnum opus, Sgt Pepper, lit up the Summer of Love. Among other
things, its bold refusal to stick with the guitar, bass and drums format
that had pretty much defined pop music since the dawn of Elvis served as a
clarion call to any band who fancied they could do things differently.
For Strange Days, the Doors and their trusted producer, Paul Rothchild, set
about creating a very different sound to the one they achieved with The
Doors. For their debut, the band had done what most bands usually did in the
studio: unpacked their gear, played the songs the same way they did them
live, then moved swiftly on. This time, they spent much longer over the
recordings, using the electronic resources of the studio — the way the
Beatles and George Martin had — to create sound fields and atmospheres that
wouldn’t have survived the hurly-burly of a Doors concert.
The shimmering, woozy organ motif that kicked off the first track on the
album, Strange Days, had little in common with the shrill, brassy keyboard
intro to Light My Fire. With Robby Krieger’s guitar mixed well down and
Morrison’s vocal closer most of the time to a sonorous murmur than the
declamatory roar he regularly unleashed on The Doors, the new record crept
up on the listener. Strange Days seemed more at home with the noirish, cool
cabaret feel of songs such as You’re Lost Little Girl, I Can’t See Your Face
in My Mind and People Are Strange than it did with more raucous items such
as Love Me Two Times and the freaked-out, shouty poem Horse Latitudes. Only
on the album’s long valedictory coup de grâce, When the Music’s Over, did
the Doors really let rip in a song that was, to all intents and purposes,
The End without the body count.
To highlight the distance between their first and second LPs, Morrison decreed
that he and the band would not, on this occasion, feature in person on the
album cover. Instead, the New York photographer Joel Brodsky was
commissioned to create an image that somehow reflected the music. His
decision to go with a circus theme was an inspired choice, resulting in one
of the iconic album sleeves of the 1960s. The problems that Brodsky
encountered hiring actual circus performers at a time in the summer when
most of them were working out of town meant that most of the characters seen
on the cover of Strange Days were friends, locals or, in the case of the two
dwarves, actors. That scarcely mattered: the surreal, blue-stained oddness
of Brodsky’s cover photo made them marvellously apt companions for the
disturbed meditations they enclosed.
That the record’s cover failed to reveal anything at all about the group who
had made it — and didn’t even feature the album’s title — contributed to the
relative lack of success Strange Days enjoyed on its release. “We thought it
was the best album, and we were confident that it was going to be bigger
than anything the Beatles had done,” Rothchild said. “But the record died on
us.”
To be fair, Strange Days did make No 3 on the Billboard album chart, and
spawned a couple of minor hit singles in People Are Strange and Love Me Two
Times. It is true, however, that it failed to match the sales and chart
placing of the Doors’ debut. This was, however, a small price to pay for an
album that was well ahead of its time in its moody evocation of where the
hippie trip was headed. It remains, for many Doors fans, the most complete
and original collection of their career. Its afterlife, which has included a
video of the song Strange Days, made in the 1980s with the same cast of
circus freaks that featured on the cover, has outshone that of an album such
as Waiting for the Sun, which rode the anti-Vietnam wave of 1968 with more
success, but less musical subtlety and distinctiveness, than its
predecessor.
In truth, Strange Days was Morrison’s finest hour. After it, as the heavy
drinking took hold, his voice lost the dreamy quality it had once possessed
and turned by degrees into a gruff, stentorian bark. This in no way
diminished his stature as one of the Dionysian gods of rock, a reputation
that has preserved him in aspic for generations of leather-clad, wannabe
wild-man vocalists since his death in 1971, but it progressively robbed the
Doors’ music of its strangeness and its charm. When it comes to both of
those, Strange Days is, 41 years later, still king.
