The 500 - #409 - Strange Days - The Doors

 I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

Album # 409

Album Title: Strange Days
Artist: The Doors
Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Acid Rock
Recorded: Sunset Sound Recorders, Hollywood, California
Released: September, 1967
My age at release: 2
How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat
Song I am putting on my Spotify Mix: Love Me Two Times

Strange Days album cover

Much like a visit from tedious relatives, the popular experimental group The Doors are best tolerated in small doses. It is a style of music that can often be too gloomy and introspective -- a depressive hangover from a different generation. However, all is not uninspiring. A song by The Doors can be perfect on a mixed playlist. Their songs also play brilliantly on many movie soundtracks such as the following:

• Alabama Song (Whisky Bar) adds the perfect amount of discordant whimsy in the strange British comedy The World's End 
• Love Her Madly captures Forrest Gump's unrequited love for Jenny in the 1994 film.
• And I can't imagine Apocalypse Now without hearing The End playing through the hypnotic and unnerving opening sequence.

That being said...I've never owned a record by The Doors. This week, as I listened to Strange Days on Spotify, their second studio release from 1967, I again found myself fatigued by their sound. 

Last March, in my review of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (Album #440) by Irish band The Pogues, I made a similar statement. The Doors are like the laptop steel guitar, perfect in moderation...but not easily digested all night. In fact, as I cued the record up for a third time, my wife asked, "Is there something else we can listen to?"

True to my word, I gave this record a half-dozen quality spins in a variety of circumstances. There are some tracks on Strange Days that I quite enjoyed and lead singer Jim Morrison's lyrics always get me thinking.

Jim Morrison of The Doors 

Morrison's poetry, much like the music of The Doors, is hit and miss. Some lyrics stopped me in my tracks when I first heard them as a teenager. However, as the years passed, I outgrew them. Regardless, they still get your thinking, even if to wonder..."What does he even mean?" The middle passage from When The Music's Over is one example of a lyric that would have floored me as a 17-year-old, heck, it still grabs my attention now:

"Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection

Send my credentials to the House of Detention. 

I've got some friends inside."

I suppose Morrison was a much like the beat poets and writers that surrounded him in the sixties (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac William S. Burroughs). They were all embracing alternate forms of spiritualism while challenging conventions, pushing up against authority and viewing the world through an unreliable lense. Sometimes soft, sometimes focused and sometimes warped and clouded by heavy drug use. For all four writers, their outcomes were varied, but, when they worked, they really worked.

Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac (l-r)

I suppose it's fair to finish by letting the poet explain himself. When asked about his work, Morrison once said:

"Our work, our performing, is a striving for a metamorphosis. Right now, we’re more interested in the dark side of life, the evil thing, the night time. But through our music, we’re striving, trying to break through to a cleaner, freer realm. Poetry appeals to me so much-because it’s so eternal. Nothing else can survive a holocaust but poetry and songs. No one can remember an entire novel, but so long as there are human beings, songs and poetry can continue. If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it’s to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.”