I’ve read that the band preferred that version but I find hard to believe. Strange Days is being reissued in November in a deluxe edition that includes the original mono mix. It also has another great Krieger solo of repeated riffs and screaming sustain. The song “My Eyes Have Seen You” is an underrated Doors’ tune a song that builds from a syncopated almost military 4/4 that evolves into a headlong charge as Morrison relates his ascension from lust into a quatrain of spiritual ecstasy, each beginning with the title. It’s startling how fresh songs like “Strange Days”, “People Are Strange” and “Moonlight Drive” sound today. And his double-tracked feedback guitar solo on “When The Music’s Over” is one of the best acid-rock guitar solos ever. Robbie Krieger is the instrumental star of the album with brilliant slide guitar on “Unhappy Girl”, another song of alienation, while he plays a similar fete on “Moonlight Drive,” his ascending and descending slide giving an eerie air atop drummer John Densmore’s slow tango groove, before heading into the acid blues slide solo. It’s a lighter tune, a song of farewell, written by guitarist Robby Krieger and played out over Ray Manzarek’s baroque boogie-woogie harpsichord. “Love Me Two Times” is the song that always stuck out the wrong way for me on this album. Even songs like “Moonlight Drive,” which were actually composed before The Doors formed and were demoed for the first album, have an ominous feel as Morrison sings in a darkly hued voice, relating a tale of suicide of at least, oblivion. Likewise, “I Can’t See Your Face in My Mind” is a song of cultural overload as “carnival dogs consume the lines,” a line that Morrison sings in what he reputedly called his “psychedelic Sinatra” voice. And that may have been more psychological than pharmaceutical although it’s hard to tell. Both “Strange Days” and “People Are Strange” suggest a Jim Morrison who was out of sync with his surroundings. The album is darker than the debut with songs like “Strange Days” questioning the efficacy of the counter-culture and the epic 11-minute track, “When the Music’s Over.” If “The End” was high acid drama, “When the Music’s Over” was apocalyptic. It didn’t have any big hits on it, and it “only” got to number 3 on the Billboard charts which is a bit ironic, given that their debut was still in the Top Ten 9 months after its release.īut Strange Days was a brilliant album with a more polished and spacious sound courtesy of producer Paul Rothschild, engineer Bruce Botnick and a new 8-Track tape recorder, state-of-the art for the day. Their self-titled debut in January of ‘67 with songs like “Light My Fire” and “The End,” and it’s follow-up, Strange Days, released on September 25, 1967. In 1967, The Doors released not one, but two albums. A Flashback 50 with The Doors "Strange Days"
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