Out of the murk comes a tiny Leslied organ snaking down steps into a room filled with a band playing a big minor key groove. As with the first album there is a thick toned Fender bass playing a ground and this time Densmore is matching its arpeggios with thumping tom toms to make a pumping floor both tough and easy. Jim comes in with the title of the song and the whole album: "Strange Days have found us...." His voice seems to come from two different places; one up close and the other from a '60s sci-fi movie set (it's actually the original vocal fed through a Moog synth). His voice is stern and weird at once as he describes bodies exhausted from decadence, presided over by grinning hostesses, abused, confused and used. We run from the day to a strange night of stone. I don't think that stone is druggy. This is a landscape of hedonism and race riots, the America of 'Nam and assassination. The Doors never were a band for flower power.
A jazzy bass figure is joined by a bright arpeggiated pattern on the guitar, coyly shifting on its feet from one minor chord to another as a wolf in leather biker pants sidles up. Whispering percussion enters just before Morrison with his croon:"You're lost, little girl." She's lost but she knows what to do. What that is is not stated but we can guess. A fluid slide solo from Kreiger lifts the middle section with a flirtatious smile and it all repeats. That's all there is to it except that the tension suggested by being lost but knowing the way out celebrated by the croon that might have started as Sinatra-like but which Morrison made his own.
An all-out blues riff from Kreiger, some tack piano from Manzarek, bass and kit and we're in. "Love me two times BAY...beh. Love me twice today...." This is the only track on the album I feel like skipping, though I'll always leave it running. I'm just not really into the rant-na-nana blues that this is in. Granted, there are some great interventions that stop it from the kind of scholarly blandness of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with a huffing stuttered rhythm in the chorus and, yes really, a harpsichord solo that comes in like gangbusters. Not much to it Jim's horny and wants you to know and, you know, tomorrow never comes.
A keyboard figure like the first track starts out Unhappy Girl but this time it climbs before falling again, joined by a piano and featuring a few out of 4/4 bar experiences before the band kicks in with Jim singing about an unhappy girl whose trapped in a prison she made for herself, the opposite of the lost little girl a few tracks back. A short song but a good one for hearing what the band did to create texture, allowing every instrument in a busy arrangement to be heard equally well. Morrison refrains from landing on each verse in a higher intensity for this one, preferring the effect of restraint on the song, he is curiously easy about the girl dying in her own prison. It becomes unsettling.
Winds, backwards echo-ed pianos on dark waves. "WHEN THE STILL SEA CONSPIRES AN ARMOUR!" Horse Lattitudes is all sound effects like screams and thrashing as Morrison yells the words. The story is that he saw an image of a sailing ship throwing horses overboard and wrote the words compulsively. Some commentary claims the opening lines are from Nostradamus. All I know is that I don't really care as the imagery is so strong and the delivery so nightmarish that I never have a problem leaving this on. I imagine a lot of listeners find this jarring, an unwelcome break in the flow but I love how it tears the already quite edgy pop music apart without context or claim of greater concept. It's just there. Also, anyone who thinks that Jim Morrison's poetry was a lot of well turned non-sequiturs might consider how all of these images make internal sense. I can't think of a more effective description of a drowned horse than "stiff green gallop".
A big clean piano announces the tango rhythm of Moonlight Drive. The drums kick in along with Kreiger's spooky slide bites, glowing in the groove. "Let's swim to the moon, uh huh, let's climb through the tide..." Morrison is not the wise debaucher of Lost Little Girl or the cold observer of Unhappy Girl, here, he's the one who offers his hand with a smirk of conspiracy, inviting adventure. There's a strut here but it's a joyful one. His voice rises with each verse until, with the band crashing and wailing around him, he's screaming as he watches her glide. The sophistication in the rhythm, Kreiger's whinnying slide solo and the building force give this three-minuter the feel of something more epic. This was, according to lore, the song that Morrison sang shyly to Manzarek on Venice Beach and fired Ray up so much that it germinated the band. It was held over from the first album and finds its place here very satisfyingly at the end of side one. It fades with the band still firing and Jim murmuring about the oceanside and getting real tight. While there is something a little late '60s about all the other tracks so far this one stands outside of more localised pop history the same way that Hey Jude or Sympathy for the Devil do, focused beyond fashion or its own time.
Side Two begins with the Brecht number. The Whisky Bar song of the first album proved so inspired and popular (and fitting) that they did another for this album except this time they wrote their own. People are Strange starts with a descent through D minor, cheekily missing the second last note to play a fluid 2/4 minor progression on the old Gibson SG as Jim croons: "People are strange, when you're a stranger. Faces look ugly when you're alone." This section and the chorus (though both could be choruses) which starts, "when you're strange faces come out of the rain" are repeated without any development in the lyrics but we get a guitar and then piano solo both of which are full of the gallows-life swagger that Bert and Burt used to stuff the Threepenny Opera fuller than a Thanksgivin' toikey. And it's delicious, strutting and raising more than one big frothy glass to loneliness and obscurity in a cold and hating world. Wonder how that went down at the corner of Haight and Ashbury (actually, probably really well, considering the accounts of anyone who didn't go there for the acid).
Then it's back to dirty sexy R&B. Mine Eyes Have Seen You. This would merge in my memory with Love Me Two Times as a track that just goes past rather than draws me in but it does have its charms like the riff made by a piano and guitar flirting with each other teasingly until Jim comes in repeating the title. He goes from a croon to a big blues shout ending each verse telling of his compulsion on seeing beauty. There's almost no restraint here, he could go all night but there are two images that yet let real poetry in: the fade talks about photographing her soul, memorizing her alleys on an endless roll which draw a lot from the L.A. of fame, flashbulbs and disposal as much as his own screaming lust, and the other image is something that also haunted cyberpunk writer: television skies. Mine eyes see a field of spiky black antennae poking into a low cast sheet of purple grey cloud. It's another piece in the image I have of this album's songs set in a warm overcast night.
An icy minor key arpeggio rings in downward steps as I Can't See Your Face in My Mind begins like a fall of pearls against smoked glass. Morrison croons the title twice over this figure, sounding like he is just discovering this absence. The band kicks in quietly slinky over the more whimsical "carnival dogs" lines but then returns in a consoling mood with a repeat of the opening figure. On so on alternating icy narcissism and a haunting self-doubt strange to him before this moment as he "can't seem to find the the right lie." In the end he tells her he won't need her picture until they say goodbye. This is a disturbing song, at once musically beautiful and emotionally eerie. Used, she is a ghost to him, faceless unless he is given a reminder. She did leave an impression - he's shocked out of doling out one of his lines - but it's not her image, it's something more profound, dark and consuming. The Lothario brought low by one of his casualties. And there he is after the goodbye, in the dark, alone.
A strident mechanical chop of organ chords begins the album's epic. The Doors ended their albums with these so often that it's easier to count the omissions. Waiting for the Sun broke up its Celebration of the Lizard suite into smaller songs (restored in more recent rereleases) but did put the long and judging Five to One which just qualifies. Morrison Hotel just doesn't have one. I'm counting Riders On the Storm as, even though it doesn't have a spoken monologue or breakdown as its length and musical scale qualifies it. On Strange Days it's the showstopper older than the one of the debut (The End): When the Music's Over.
The band comes in after a few Morrisonian encouragements and we strut a little like this with Manzarek's keyboard getting antsy and stuttery, goaded by a restless hihat. Finally, Jim screams and the rest pour out a big noise, Ray doing the same kind of octave bass as on The End using the Fender Rhodes bass keyboard. And Krieger comes up from the depths with a prehistoric growl from his SG and an amp driven so hard the notes are constant and droning, like keyboard pedals. A higher one of these seems to morph into a single organ note that holds over the groove a cleaner guitar settles into a pentatonic noodle on the middle strings and the song begins.
"When the music's over," sings Jim with a kind of relaxed urgency, "when the music's over turn out the light." A sudden build to a tidal roar with Jim screaming over it about dancing on fire with some great momentum from the music which then courses into a screaming banshee version of the earlier growling section, with Krieger's multitracked overdriven guitars sounding like tortured ghosts (it was about half a decade before the e-bow made that tone easy, here, as with Hendrix, it took a lot of work).
After the second storm settles Jim starts in with the monologue. Unlike the one in The End this is mostly sung over Manzarek's thumping keyboard bass and icy organ fills sliced up by Krieger's surly blues vamping. There's no Oedipal section here and the images are a lot freer, fragments, the vision of a prisoner taunted by a girl in the window, the ravaged Sister Earth stabbed in the side of the dawn and a weird voiced mob who want the world. The instrumental bed is not the slinky raga licks of The End but spiky and unfriendly. We're walking through a benighted cityscape, eyes alert to the shadows and the corners, fearsome but beautiful in its alienness. We climb to another screaming tide of sound and then a calm for the last chorus which itself builds to a screaming climax, raging against the dying of the light (or maybe it's the apocalypse, hard to tell). "Un-til the end. Un-til the ... EEEEEEEEND!!!!"
What gets me about this song is how it can easily sound contrived and overdone if you don't think about it as a live piece which is how it was developed and written. See also, The End and both of these are in contrast with the surrealist workout of the later Soft Parade which more artfully passes through lutes and harpsichords, cocktail jazz before getting down and dirty with a blues groove. That sounds contrived (love it, though) but this one sounds controlled for drama. What I mean by that is that the band could get away with all kinds of sloppiness live as long as that core was intact, the stroll through the end times but in the studio it had to work without that context. Isolated, I'm not sure it does, featuring so much of the studied bad boy and well baked psyche rock but if the context is only the rest of the album it's plenty to let this showcase of a strong band fronted by a real poet (good? bad? the poetry rings genuine) and a great sense of aural cinema.
Whether you buy into the legend of Jim or find it the same as I find Nick Cave (not a fan) you can still hold it at arm's length and luxuriate in a set like this for being true to its vision and finding so many honest ways to support it (through musicianship, showmanship and fiery youthful imagination). Though no one declared this a concept album it works as one as we stroll, humming along, from Venice to Mulholland, through the Summer of Love except this is what is looked like and how it felt at three a.m. For its violence of vision and sheer playing muscle this will always be my favourite Doors album.
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