STRANGE DAYS

I really wanted to mention this album, as it is, for me, the most important Doors album of the relatively-few they managed to produce in the life of the unit. The main reason for its importance is the inclusion of When the Music's Over, surely a seminal moment in Rock. Pure drama rather than a song, the simplistic melody gains power from its blues base, and even more so from the wonderful images the words evoke, a veritable dark landscape inhabited by all kinds of portraits and movie scenes.

The whole album has a kind of darkness attached to it, and on the downside of the coin, an almost-bored professionalism that threatens to make the whole thing meaningless or not serious. Certainly, this album doesn't have the magic atmosphere of the previous album. But in the end, the darkness prevails and draws us in. Strange Days (the song) is routine in melody, anything but in lyrics. Even the pop songs are haunting, the singer sounding like he's living half-way between life and another dimension. Which of course proved to be the case. It wasn't an act, it was real.