SACD The Doors – Strange Days

Strange Days as a hybrid multichannel SACD from Analogue Productions’ Doors series: Doug Sax mastered it using an all-tube system under the supervision of Bruce Botnick, and the surround programme comes from Botnick’s own 96 kHz/24-bit mixes. All ten songs play in one sequence – from the title track to “When the Music’s Over”.

The studio joins the band

Only a few months separated the Doors’ debut from Strange Days in 1967, yet the second album shows the group in a new light. The songs keep their clear outlines while unfamiliar sounds and unexpected transitions appear around them. Jim Morrison’s voice, Ray Manzarek’s keyboards, Robby Krieger’s guitar and John Densmore’s drums remain the core – and the studio becomes a fifth source of ideas.

At Sunset Sound in Hollywood, the Doors again worked with producer Paul A. Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick. An eight-track machine replaced the four-track setup of the debut, giving room to record ideas separately and bring them together, and Doug Lubahn joined as studio bassist on most of the songs. The result keeps the band’s performing energy while exploring possibilities that could only take shape in the recording room.

Concise songs with an oblique perspective

“People Are Strange” packs its unease into a brief, unforgettable form, and “Love Me Two Times” sets a mobile guitar figure and a different rhythmic emphasis beside it. Both became singles, yet neither shows the album’s full range. “You’re Lost Little Girl” leads into a more restrained setting, and “Moonlight Drive” draws your ear to the connection between Morrison’s singing and Krieger’s guitar colours.

The title track is among the early rock recordings to feature a Moog synthesizer, with Paul Beaver helping the band work with the new instrument – not to show off technology, but to make a voice or a texture sound strange. The short “Horse Latitudes” interrupts the sequence with spoken words and sound effects, keeping familiar forms delightfully off balance.

Eleven minutes change the scale

At the end, “When the Music’s Over” gets a completely different amount of space. The roughly eleven-minute performance builds tension through recurrence, interruption and exchanges between the band and Morrison’s voice; Densmore’s entrances and Manzarek’s recurring figures keep you oriented as the music changes state. After so many short pieces, the finale feels truly expansive.

Botnick later explained that the doubled guitar solo got its distorted character by feeding one microphone preamplifier into another – practical craft behind an unreal atmosphere. Even the cover avoids the usual band portrait: Joel Brodsky photographed street performers in New York’s Sniffen Court. Image and music both let a familiar world become wonderfully strange.

The hybrid multichannel SACD from Analogue Productions

CAPP 74014 SA is a hybrid multichannel SACD from Analogue Productions’ Doors reissue series. According to the publisher, Doug Sax mastered it using an all-tube system, overseen by the Doors’ producer and engineer Bruce Botnick. The surround programme comes from the original 96 kHz/24-bit files that Botnick mixed and mastered for the DVD-Audio release Doors/Perception, made from the original eight-track analogue master tapes; for the SACD, those mixes were up-sampled without filters to DSD with the Weiss Saracon converter and authored by Gus Skinas at the Super Audio Center. For the surround programme you need a multichannel-capable SACD player and a matching setup; the CD layer plays on any conventional CD player. The disc contains the ten songs of the original album.

You order from Michael 45 in Germany. We arrange the US import and ship from Hilden.

Also in another edition: Strange Days

More SACDs by The Doors: Waiting For The Sun · The Soft Parade · Morrison Hotel · L.A. Woman

Artist page: All titles by The Doors

Customer question: Buying Analogue Productions records in Europe

Musicians

Documented selection of participating musicians. Personnel may vary by track; this list does not claim to be complete.