Might as well do the Doors’ entire discography while we’re at it then, no? After all, you only live once, or at least, let’s hope so, because if we are indeed mere creatures of Nietzsche’s eternal return, then I am fated to endure all seven Del Amitri albums on a never-ending loop, and I’d rather sit in Tartarus boiling in my own piss than that. But, quick, let us hysterically repress this immensely disturbing and clinically significant intrusive thought pattern, pick up where we left off with the emotional crescendo of 1971’s L.A. Woman, and travel back in time to Strange Days, the Doors’ sophomore record, released in…
September 1967? What? Three months after Sgt. Pepper’s? Is it just me or does that seem, well, early? Because in my imagined rock’n’roll chronology, the Doors’ sinister psychedelica somehow belongs to the darker, more jaded 70s. But this mental framework is evidently inadequate; Jim and the lads were foundation rock mainstays, and thus yet another corrective to the symbolic function of the 1960s as a La-La-Land of permissive love-thy-neighbour liberalism brought to an end only by the inveterate killjoys of Tricky Dicky’s silent majority and Charlie Manson’s less-than-silent “Family.”
For behind the peace-and-love platitudes, the 60s were actually dark as fuck, and if you want proof, just listen to Strange Days, because it’s mad as a box of frogs. Apparently it didn’t have the same impact as its predecessor; it sold fewer copies, while the critics could smell too many reheated leftovers – a common complaint with respect to “difficult second albums.” And yet, if you want my opinion, Strange Days is more emblematic of the Doors’ signature sound than any of their other releases. Yes, the record is perhaps best remembered for the pub rock of “Love Me Two Times” and “Moonlight Drive”, but these are also the most conventional and, for my money, disposable departures from its broader sonic and lyrical leitmotifs.
Strange Days is less feral, more psychedelic, and in fact, more unsettling than The Doors. It is dominated by Ray Manzarek’s kamikaze electric organ, which signally usurps the guitars as the album’s lead instrument. The result is a garish, grotesque, macabre funfair, in which the lunatic Morrison appears less as the half-savage, sensual, swampland seer of the debut, more as a malevolent and depraved circus master. His role is to gleefully draw the listener into a disturbing departure from everyday life, until the mordant closer “When the Music’s Over” turns the lights back on and permits the curtain to fall across what little remains.
As the title suggests, the album’s key theme is the discombobulating strangeness brought on by touring, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, sleep deprivation, burn out, sunstroke, poor diet, fame, artistic and commercial pressure, mass conscription, unresolved oedipal tension, garden variety existential fragility, and being forced to endure Jim Morrison’s “spoken word poetry” on a daily basis. Its songs are populated by shellshocked, glassy-eyed, budding psychiatric patients who, for one reason or another, can no longer function normally, have taken leave of their senses, and have passed into the realm of the Dionysian; of pure, unmediated, unmoored jouissance.
Unlike on The Doors, however, this is no longer presented as a Nietzschean triumph, more a weird, wired, worrying sign of impending psychological disintegration. To no one’s surprise, Jim is particularly invigorated by his benighted subjects when they just so happen to have great cheekbones – “Unhappy” or “Lost Little Girls” that he aims to console, cajole, and convince to break on through to the other side into, presumably, the hole in the ground where he sleeps.
He’s the Lizard King and he can do anything, I suppose, but of course, the real cultural import of Strange Days lies in its ominous prefiguring of the hippie dream’s impending eclipse. Remarkably, the Doors issued their baleful prophecy at the very height of San Francisco’s fabled “summer of love”, whereby a bunch of beardy, bohemian beatniks took it upon themselves to sleep on park benches for six months, perhaps believing that their valiant initiative would usher in a new social order.
Shockingly, it didn’t, and at the very end of that summer, Jim and his fellow horsemen of the apocalypse reemerged with Strange Days to provide an unsettling repudiation of the deludedly idealistic flower power zeitgeist, a full three years before it was conclusively consigned to its grave along with Sharon Tate and 40,000 American soldiers. The Doors were not a 70s band but, in their persistent gloom and refusal to foreground the guitar, they arguably offered a darker, more prescient foreshadowing of the coming decade than any of their contemporaries, at a time when tangerine dreams and marmalade skies were still very much on the menu.
Rating: * * *
Standout track: “People are Strange”