Strange Days

Recorded in the breaks between tours at Sunset Sound, with Rothchild producing and Botnick engineering, now on a then cutting-edge eight-track machine. Morrison played the Moog synthesizer on the title track, programmed with the help of Paul Beaver, and Manzarek added marimba. For Unhappy Girl he played his keyboard introduction backwards, and for Horse Latitudes Botnick varied the speed of tape recorder noise by hand-winding it. Moonlight Drive and My Eyes Have Seen You dated from 1965 demos. People Are Strange came out of a walk in Laurel Canyon with Densmore and Krieger, from which a dejected Morrison returned euphoric with the first lyrics. Krieger wrote Love Me Two Times, and the album ends with the eleven-minute When the Music's Over, whose keyboard part Manzarek took from Herbie Hancock's Watermelon Man.

It peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and went platinum, though it could not match the success of the debut, which stayed in the top ten for more than ten months. Rolling Stone said at the time that it had all the power and energy of the first record but was more subtle and more intricate. The cover photograph by Joel Brodsky was taken at Sniffen Court in Manhattan. The writer Stephen Davis considers it the best Doors album.