No. 21: ‘Strange Days’

It was mid-1967, and for the Doors the psychedelic music was almost over.

The red-hot combo out of L.A. recorded its sophomore effort during the Summer of Love, aka the summer of “Sgt. Pepper.”

As with “The Doors,” Jim Morrison and company looked to their well-honed stage act for material. Most of the songs were dark and druggy works, composed about the same time as those on the debut album.

There was no massive hit to rival “Light My Fire,” but key tracks on “Strange Days” include “Love Me Two Times,” “People Are Strange” and “When the Music’s Over,” all immediately popular and all destined to become rock classics.

Fans continue to rediscover the less obvious charms of the album’s title track, “Moonlight Drive,” “Horse Latitudes” and “You’re Lost Little Girl.”

A long way from leftovers, as some critics sometimes found the work. (“Many of the chord progressions and figures are easily recognizable from their first album,” Rolling Stone said in its positive review of the time.)

As an underdog effort, “Strange Days” has aged remarkably well, however. It’s a lean and muscular work of underground rock, subtle and spooky, with arguably only one weak track. The sonics and studio covfefe are far more interesting than on the first album, by design.

“The fans have found this record. … We went after the truth and finally it’s being heard,” producer Paul Rothchild marveled in the early 1980s.

It doesn’t take a great leap of the imagination to draw a line from “Strange Days” to the early works of X, another combo finding material in the underbelly of Los Angeles. The producer of those 1980s works by X? Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek. “They’re talking about exactly the same thing that … Morrison was talking about,” he said at the time.

You could argue that “Strange Days,” in fact, provided a high water mark not only for ’60s underground rock, but for the Doors. The buzz wouldn’t last:

“By the time we hit (the third album) ‘Waiting For the Sun,’ things were getting a little thin,” Rothchild recalled. Morrison would “come in too drunk to sing decently” doing “a spoiled brat thing.”

But for “Strange Days” the band remained on fire, excited about the direction of music in 1967 — particularly “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” — and the possibilities of eight-track recording (double what was available for “The Doors”). The team worked off and on at Sunset Sound for that summer.

Engineer Bruce Botnick recalled, “It wasn’t (Rothchild) producing them or me recording them; it was the six of us, and we worked as a unit. It was really nice.  it was just a wonderful, symbiotic working relationship. It was what it should be in the studio, where people feed off one another creatively. … We all just moved in the same way.”

Let’s check the lysergic levels. As with “The Doors,” the psychedelic vein runs throughout, yet congeals in a handful of songs:

Side 1 kicks off with “Strange Days,” an effects-heavy number featuring the Moog synthesizer, among the first uses of the instrument on a rock record. The track also features backward piano and drums. The party’s almost over, Morrison warns: “Strange days have found us … We run from the day / To a strange night of stone.” … “Horse Latitudes” features the poet Morrison, unleashing a tale about a ship forced to dump its cargo (horses) into the sea. The nightmarish song, a mere minute and a half, gets its sonic surrealism from a variety of studio effects such as dropped Coke bottles and white noise from tortured tapes. “Mute nostril agony” comes to life via moaning band members. … “People Are Strange” picks up the European cabaret vibe from the first album’s improbable cover of Brecht-Weill’s “Alabama Song.” The barroom vibe remains unsettling, the narrator issuing both a cry for help and a warning to those who would come near. It’s a study in alienation and paranoia, internal phenomena quite familiar to denizens of the ‘ 60s underground.

And then comes “When the Music’s Over.” The 11-minute piece draws inevitable comparisons with the first LP’s “The End,” but without the literary pretensions and the Oedipus freak-out. It dated back to the band’s early days, workshopped at the Whisky a Go Go. (Manzarek cops to borrowing the simple main riff from the jazz standard “Watermelon Man.”) It’s a scratch-and-nod special, with Morrison working up a lather via an early version of his shaman-preacher bit. Yet, he howls, “Cancel my subscription to the resurrection.” Instead of Oedipus, we get Dionysus: “Well, the music is your special friend / Dance on fire as it intends.” “When the Music’s Over” remains among the Doors’ strangest and most psychedelic songs, an epic of lyrical substance and deep groove.

The Doors wouldn’t abandon psychedelia entirely after “Strange Days” — the marvelous “Not to Touch the Earth” from the third album would have been right at home on the first two LPs. But starting with the relatively weak “Waiting for the Sun” album, the band sought new directions that included horns & strings, gospel, roadhouse blues and cocktail jazz. Times had changed, and the Doors changed with them, for better or worse.