The Doors-Strange Days (1967)

 

Artist: The Doors

Title: Strange Days

Label: Elektra

Format: LP

Cat #: EKS-74014

Year of Release: 1967

Country and Year of Edition Issue: US Allentown Record Co. variant of original press

Sold Price: $12.99

Listed Condition: VG/VG

Sell Date: 10/16/20

Discogs Last Sold: 8/31/20 VG+/VG+ $40.00

Low: $3.75

Median: $12.00

High: $125.00 VG+/VG with detailed notes

Current low price: $1.00 F/F, $10.50 VG/G,  $19.00 VG/VG+

Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 32

Have/Want: 1458/660

Where Sold: Cambridge, MA

Time it took to sell: 4 years

Where and When Bought: Worcester, MA Al Bums $3.99

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: A

Sad To See It Go?: No

This is a weird sell with prices all over the place with all sorts of conditions.  Someone got $125.00 for as VG/VG+ this with a heavily detailed description.  My copy did contain the inner sleeve with a tear on the photo and the lyrics so I think my buyer got a deal at $12.99, but this had been put up for bigger money (I can't fully remember I might of had it as high as 25 or 30 at one point) and dropped over time.  I graded VG for this there was some ungluing on the cover but the vinyl played very clean for a 50+ year old record.  I remember thinking this was a very clean original copy when I bought it used in the early 80's.  

Oddly enough, of the 6 Doors studio albums with Morrison, this was the one I listened to start to finish the least.   It is chock full of hits, 5 out of 10 tracks are AOR standards, and the closing "When The Music's Over" is an epic classic coming off the heels of "The End."  "Horse Latitudes" is more of a spoken word poem intro to "Moonlight Drive" that AOR and later compilations chopped.  It actually makes more aesthetic sense together, but a little too wacked out for commercial sensibilities.  The 60's "excesses" i.e. everything that was good about the era, was methodically eradicated from later generations consciousness, to be replaced with some other "radical" behavior that is also eradicated by future sensibilities.

This leaves us with the three tracks that a droning digital radio DJ would call a "deep cut."  "Unhappy Girl,"  and "My Eyes Have Seen You" paired in the middle of side 2 conceptually with "I Can't See Your Face In My Mind."  I makes me think an album should be made of historically ignored Doors tracks since only the first one is fully an A+, every cut a psychedelic 60's rock standard in one way or another.  Yet these cuts don't make me gasp with the feeling my psyche has missed out.  It is actually giving me deep consternation whether I should give this an A or an A-.  I have changed this back and forth about 3 times.  

I don't want to get all Fantano on you, but my Doors tier is all in the A spectrum with The Doors and Waiting For The Sun and Soft Parade at the top and Morrison Hotel and LA Woman at the bottom with Strange Days smack in the middle.  That pompous fuck would probably stretch those albums out through his entire scale, but he has yet to do a Doors tier.  It should be noted that the king of music critic pomposity, Dave Marsh, savaged the Doors personally in the second edition as the most overrated band of all time in the second Rolling Stone Record Guide alternating between 2 and 3 stars out of 5 for every studio album.  This one got 2 after getting 5 in the first edition (although later canonized in 2012 as their 409th greatest album of all time).  In all honesty I don't have the patience to wade through 2020's reshuffling of the deck online to suffer through their "insightful" commentary.  I think Strange Days did not make the cut this time, and I probably wouldn't put it in my top 500 either, but it's still an A record.

For me, Morrison was dead a year after I was born, so like most rock kids of my generation, The 1980 Greatest Hits set was my introduction.  My nice local librarian that guarded the pop records that were so desired they kept them in a file cabinet to take out, gave me a line on the new records as they came in brand new, since I was a lovable child music fanatic, religiously taking out the max before I had a paper route to buy used records regularly.  This meant I had access to new music within a year of release before all of Worcester MA took the records out and trashed or stole them.  So I took that Greatest Hits album out nice and clean.  I had found all the Doors studio records used under $5 in my paper route years.  Amusingly, the best of the albums was a dollar bin fine in really bad shape.  I never replaced it, even on CD.  Somehow, the compilations and my record buddy next door were enough for me.  In hindsight, I NEVER rebought ANY of the Doors on CD until I bought the entire remastered studio discography box sometime in the 90's or even early aughts.  For whatever reason the vinyl was enough for me, as most of the music was so subliminally ingrained by commercial radio, I never had the urge to actively play it.

That doesn't mean I didn't like it.