Doors

The dizzying organ intro, the bass thundering like cannon fire, and that absurd, lunar Moog wrapping around the spectral voice of a Jim Morrison more shamanic than ever, refracted through echo. As the euphoria of the Summer of Love fades into an autumn heavy with melancholy and second thoughts, the Doors definitively spoil the flower children's party. Strange days have found us. Strange days of bewilderment and desolation, for a present draped in mourning – the Vietnam War, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan – and for a future thick with anguished uncertainty. Farewell California dreaming, the music is over, nothing left to do but turn out the light ("When The Music's Over").

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

"Strange Days" was released on September 25, 1967, nine months after the debut LP, the epoch-making bestseller that announced Jim Morrison and co.'s gospel to the world. Strike while the iron's hot – that was the label's thinking, as they aimed to make the Doors America's answer to the British Invasion of the Beatles. And at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, Los Angeles, no expense was spared: the producer's chair was still occupied by Paul A. Rothchild, who had also helmed the debut, but everything here is more polished and sophisticated. The record was cut with the most modern equipment available, the recording jumped from four to eight tracks, and there was even the appearance of a futuristic Moog synthesizer.

The evolution is tangible musically too: the Californian band's signature sound grows even darker and more morbid, oscillating between blues roots and psychedelic hues, jazz veins and rock adrenaline. If "The Doors" had thrown open the doors of perception, in that Huxleyan sense, through a series of lysergic rites and collective bacchanals, "Strange Days" is more intimately psychedelic: like an introspective journey probing the darkest recesses of the mind. Robby Krieger's guitar builds tension riff after riff, John Densmore's drumming is tribal and martial, while Manzarek's keyboard runs sound even more hypnotic. There's also the addition of a guest bassist, Doug Lubahn, at the time a member of another Elektra act, Clear Light. Morrison's lyrics also grow more personal and decadent, narrating tales of everyday alienation and loneliness, skillfully dramatized by the shades of his baritone: funereal in the most apocalyptic episodes, subdued and contrite, almost a whisper, in the more intimate moments.

Strangeness is the watchword, right from the cover art, which – at the explicit wish of the frontman, already wary of his own overexposed image – doesn't depict the band at all, but rather a group of jugglers and street performers, captured by photographer Joel Brodsky in Sniffen Court, a historic alley off 36th Street in Manhattan, in front of a poster for the band, complete with a label recalling the album's title. But "strange" is a multivalent word, one that can also mean "foreign," "different," "hostile" and "hallucinated," depending on the narrative twists of a record that is, as a whole, a hymn to nonconformity, to the uncompromising refusal to ever fall into line.

Days of alienation

Ten tracks in just 35 minutes of music: it's a concise, perfectly focused set, this second effort from the Californian band. Starting right from that memorable opener. It's hard to say what's most epic about the title track: Manzarek's swirling Vox Continental at the start, the Moog's roar (played by Morrison with help from Paul Beaver), the singer's desolate prophecy, Krieger's overdriven guitar, or Lubahn's forceful bass weaving through the gorgeous chord changes that anchor the track. Whatever the case, "Strange Days" remains one of the Doors' definitive masterpieces, as well as one of their most modern and prescient songs. Legend has it that it was inspired by the band's visit to Andy Warhol's feverish New York, and it's easy to believe: the comparison with their contemporaries the Velvet Underground is far from out of place.

Feeling lost, estranged, unhappy is the condition shared by the record's two "girl" songs as well. The soft, ballad-like cadences of "You're Lost Little Girl," cradled by Morrison's warm voice and the embroidery of Krieger's Gibson (here also delivering the album's first solo, in an almost flamenco vein), break against that sinister, mechanical, cabaret-noir gait that reveals the song's ambiguous, scabrous nature. "Unhappy Girl" too – melancholy and lively at once, with psychedelic keyboard shadings, Krieger's slide riffs and Manzarek's piano bass – moves from mischievous premises toward an exhortation to break free from the prison of one's own body and swim in the river of mystery ("Don't miss your chance/ To swim in mystery/ You are dying in a prison/ Of your own device"). A woman is also the addressee of the invocation in "Love Me Two Times," one of their irresistible blues-rock numbers, driven by Densmore's frenzied drumming and Manzarek's harpsichord, backing a wildly sensual Morrison as he cries "Love me two times, I'm goin' away" (lyrics by Krieger, inspired by American soldiers wanting to be "loved twice" before shipping out to Vietnam). It was meant to be the new "Light My Fire" – complete with a central keyboard solo recalling it – but its risqué lyrics kept it off the radio, to Rothchild's despair.

But the record's manifesto song, alongside the title track, is "People Are Strange," with its wonderful refrain, an eternal anthem to urban alienation and marginalization: "People are strange when you're a stranger, faces look ugly when you're alone." Written by Morrison in a matter of minutes after a drive with Krieger through the hills of Santa Monica that culminated in a sunset atop Laurel Canyon, it's lysergic and poignant, theatrical – with that vaudeville cadence – and steeped in blues melancholy, with the guitarist's gorgeous arpeggio and Manzarek's honky-tonk saloon piano underscoring the Lizard King's dejected vocal. Just over two minutes of pure sonic magic, faintly streaked with psychedelia thanks to the organ's flourishes.

Venice Beach by moonlight

Jim Morrison and Ray Manzarek had met at UCLA film school in Los Angeles. They quickly became friends, fired up by art and lysergic nights. In the summer of 1965, they ran into each other on Venice Beach. Morrison told his friend that he hadn't left for New York after all, but had decided to stay and write songs. One of them was "Moonlight Drive." Jim sang it to him with his eyes closed, sitting on the sand. And Ray realized the two of them could form a band. Two years later, that song ended up on "Strange Days," with all its load of bewitching desolation. A waking dream, by moonlight, concealing yet another invitation to set sail, to escape the suffocating urban jungle: "Let's swim to the moon/ Let's climb through the tide/ Penetrate the evening that the city sleeps." Water as a metaphor for liberation, then, but also – perhaps – for the desire to end it all, with those macabre references to "fish like friends" and "pearls instead of eyes." Krieger's bluesy bottleneck-guitar inlays, with their constant rising and falling riffs, combined with the lopsided rhythm, conjure an irresistible sense of estrangement.

But it's also the seemingly minor tracks that shape the shifting kaleidoscope of "Strange Days." Take the psychedelic hallucination of "Horse Latitudes," with its manic little organ chasing after the singer's raving spoken-word, grappling with the tale of a ship forced to jettison its cargo, horses included, into the sea; or the rocking build of "My Eyes Have Seen You," with another of Morrison's abrupt mood swings underlined by Krieger's blazing solo and Lubahn's bassline; or again "I Can't See Your Face In My Mind," with its languid lounge atmosphere, barely disturbed by the leader's seductively menacing vocal, the bass giving way to Manzarek's marimba, with delicate touches of slide guitar and keyboards.

The music is over

The grand finale deserves a chapter of its own. Eleven minutes for a new psychotic soliloquy from the Lizard King, announced by an anthology-worthy intro: the jazzy languor of the organ, Morrison's scream, the distorted whiplash of the guitar, foreshadowing a long journey strewn with mysterious imagery and biblical metaphors ("cancel my subscription to the Resurrection"; "before I sink into the big sleep, I want to hear the scream of the butterfly," "the Persian night") that gathers momentum over the long Krieger-Manzarek improvisation, before dying down as Morrison begins declaiming his verses and culminating in the chilling unison chant of "We want the world and we want it now!" that unleashes the final frenzy and another Morrisonian climax ("When the music's over/ Turn out the lights/ The music is your special friend, dance on fire as it intends, music is your only friend, until the end"). A melodramatic crescendo modeled – as Krieger himself has admitted – on the structure of "The End," but with a different outcome: where the debut's Oedipal ritual spilled over into a tribal, liberating orgasm, here everything implodes into an oneiric swoon offering no escape. Music is the only reason for living, and when it ends, all that's left is to "turn out the light": the most unsettling premonition of what would happen to Jim Morrison on that terrible day, July 3, 1971.

Although it reached number three on the American charts, "Strange Days" would disappoint Rothchild's sky-high expectations. It was all down, in his view, to the lack of an ice-breaking single along the lines of "Light My Fire," which kept the album from matching or surpassing the success of the debut (No. 2 on Billboard). And yet, as the years go by, the conviction grows – at least in this writer's mind – that this is actually an even more mature and profound record than the debut. Its ten songs capture the truest essence of the Doors' musical mission: an experimental psychedelic-rock band nonetheless capable of scratching with an extraordinarily impactful pop appeal. And in its lyrics, in Mr. Morrison's own autumn of discontent, one can glimpse the other, darker and sicker side of California's great acid era, of the Age of Aquarius and youthful rebellion. A concentrate of hallucinations, paranoia and anguished confessions that remains one of the most powerful and evocative musical portraits of America in the Sixties. Its visionary spirit would not escape the notice of a perceptive director like Kathryn Bigelow, who, nearly thirty years later, would borrow its title for her own sci-fi blockbuster of the same name.

Strange days have found us. As if we thought we could get away with it, somehow escape our fate. It was the snapshot of an era; it has become a dark prophecy for all the years to come.

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10/11/2019