So why is The Doors’ Strange Days on this best 1,000 albums ever thing?
As with many albums that zoom me back to my high school years, let’s kick things off with an embarrassing story.
If one were to dig up my senior yearbook – and I must take a moment to plead with you here: please don’t – you’d see the following as your humble narrator’s quote:
When the music’s over, turn out the lights
Now, mildly cringey enough on its own, I think we can all agree, yes? But then I feel the need to confess the part where I in no way had any kind of profound philosophy or Deep Thoughts to convey with said quote.
Sadly, it’s akin to Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules dropping his menacing and iconic Ezekiel 25:17 speech on dudes: we learn later in Pulp Fiction that “it was just a coldblooded thing to say” before he capped their asses.
In my case, it was simply something that sounded profound but was just me trying to seem way cooler or interesting than I was at the time.
I share this mini-episode of Nerd Alert: Eric Berlin’s High School Non-Adventures to make one thing clear: I already loved The Doors deeply by then.
The hooks sunk in early, and they sunk deep.
There’s still something about this album that makes me feel things. And I’ve come to understand over the course of five years of working on this here best 1,000 albums ever project that that is the most important thing to me when it comes to music. And there’s something transportive about Strange Days that starts with its title track: it’s “textbook” psychedelic in the sense that it makes me feel dislocated, altered in the most pleasant and yet strange ways.
“Under the hood” of this song, there’s ingenious stuff at work here: a loungey/mystical vibe drapes over the opening section, with Morrison mysteriously intoning that strange days have found us.
Whether it’s 1967 or 2025 or somewhere in between, that’s always going to hit, right?
But then around a minute, we get that badass, nearly proto-punk section, with kind of a jazz-punk flex from John Densmore on drums and Ray Manzarek turning psychedelic blues madman on the keys. And then as bonus, while The Doors don’t have a bass player as such, session player Doug Lubahn’s work here takes the track next level.
It’s cliché as hell to call something “a trip,” but “Strange Days” is a goddamned trip, and one that I happily take the ride on again and again.
Another theme I return to in this project is sharing how I’ll imagine having a time machine to check out bands before they were famous at dive bars and tiny venues. I’m obsessed with the creative process (see: my near-scary devotion to The Beatles Get Back documentary), and getting insight into how the raw materials start to refine into their finish form is just about the most exciting thing I can think of when it comes to art. In many cases, the output of that process is more interesting, a “better” creation than what comes later as the polished, final form.
So when I discover a rare recording of “Strange Days,” Live at the London Fog in Los Angeles from 1966 – a year before they’d become the house band at the Whisky A Go-Go – it melts my brain in the way that the best music, the best art, is supposed to.
Also, I just find this performance endlessly cool and vibey.
In revisiting the epic-length 11 minutes of “When the Music’s Over,” I really tried to pretend what someone would think of it if they had absolutely no idea who Jim Morrison and The Doors are, or what their music is about.
We get a mysterious and unusually spare-sounding intro, followed by a howling guitar and Morrison both, and it’s like a wild meshing of dark psychedelic rock meets lounge music played in the most badass neighborhood of purgatory.
Oh, but that’s not nearly it, my friends. Just as the band’s self-titled debut album does with “The End” and The Soft Parade later rolls out with its title track, “When the Music’s Over” caps off Strange Days with an epic journey that takes wild twists and turns en route.
Cancel my subscription to the resurrection
Send my credentials to the house of detention
I got some friends inside
The face in the mirror won’t stop
The girl in the window won’t drop
A feast of friends, alive she cried
Waitin’ for me
Outside
One of the many pleasures of this project is that I get to write about songs like “Unhappy Girl,” one I’ve had a relationship with for decades.
I think it’s probably the first song that I connected the delightful word “carnivalesque” with in a musical context. And it very much is that, its Vox Continental organ swirling via his right hand as his left hand holding down the lower keys with a Fender Rhodes Piano bass.
Sidenote I: There are very few ways that musicians position themselves while on stage that are cooler than Manzarek hunched over his set of two instruments. And how many other keyboardists would even enter that conversation?
Sidenote II: Manzarek’s sly innovation here, playing his part backwards (with overdubs added in later), adds a sublime and surreal psychedelic flair.
If it’s not clear, “Unhappy Girl” is a Doors’ deep cut I still fully and actively adore.
Speaking of deep cuts: “My Eyes Have Seen You” is pure early Doors’ energy and it’s incredible. Shoutout here to both Krieger’s flamenco guitar stylings and the line about being under television skies, always dug the hell out of that.
My eyes have seen you
Free from disguise
Gazing on a city under
Television skies
Television skies
Television skies
In attempting to hear the Robbie Krieger-written “Love Me Two Times” with fresh ears, I come away believing that it’s a perfectly constructed blues rock number with just the right dusting of psychedelia and mystery to remain vital as hell over half a century later.
And then the wink about the narrator – a pretty solid role here for Morrison, I think we’d all agree – needing some more loving before hitting the road is the cherry on top.
“Moonlight Drive” may be the most romantic song that The Doors ever produced, simply gorgeous and groovy both.
I’ve gotten this far without yet mentioning “People Are Strange,” arguably one of the best-known Doors tracks circa the mid-2020s.
It’s very possible that my first ever exposure to a Doors song came by way of seeing the fun, scary, and very ‘80s vampire flick, The Lost Boys, in the summer of 1987. That Echo & The Bunnymen cover version is… I’d say stranger but I’ll go with weirder than the Strange Days original.
I didn’t like that version very much, and I still don’t. And it may have even colored my appreciation for The Doors’ version for a lengthy spell.
But these days, when I listen to Krieger’s guitar, Manzarek’s bouncing organ, Densmore’s offbeat jazz rock drumming, and hear Morrison stretch out streets are uneven when you’re down, it’s pure magic.
As is Strange Days from dawn through bright midnight.
Some stats & info about The Doors – Strange Days
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Rock Music, Hard Rock, Blues Rock, Psychedelic Rock, SoCal Bands
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – 3.5 out of 5 stars
- When was Strange Days released? 1967
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #12 out of 1,000
The Doors’ Strange Days on Spotify
A lyrical snippet from The Doors’ Strange Days that’s evocative of the album in some way, maybe
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What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective review of what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.