Strange Days (The Song)

[othercircles]

Strange days have found us
Strange days have tracked us down
They're going to destroy
Our casual joys
We shall go on playing
Or find a new town

Yeah!

Strange eyes fill strange rooms
Voices will signal their tired end
The hostess is grinning
Her guests sleep from sinning
Hear me talk of sin
And you know this is it

Yeah!

Strange days have found us
And through their strange hours
We linger alone
Bodies confused
Memories misused
As we run from the day
To a strange night of stone

What is up with this recording. The drums have some kind of phaser on em and it sounds like theres about 10 edits where cymbals get cut off and then quickly fade back in.

I hear morrison used some keyboard thing for that voice effect and hit the keyboard every now and then to get it..

so maybe when he hit that it overdrived the master so much that the whole song clipped and they had to back off the signal momentarily? Just seems like a really poorly recorded track that could have been alot better.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Technical article on"Strange days" album

This is a technical article on the recording of Strange Days the album and has info on some of the methods used.....
can't say I agree about the poor recording but then I have never listened to it with a musicians ear.......the whole album is still stunning to me even after 38 years (that's 35 and a half in Doors management years.... ) and the title track an awesome achievement.....

[jym]

I really like the sound on Strange Days (the song). It's one of the first uses of a Moog synsthesizer in Rock, I think it sounds pretty cool.

[ensenada]

i dunno what a moog synth is but strange days has great effects imo to create the chaotic doors sound, sweet!

[othercircles]

Its a neat effect for the voice yea.. but its a bit hard for someone who isnt so familiar with them to understand half the lyrics.. and ... again im not certain this is the cause but SOMETHING is causing the track to sound like theres several bad edits on the drum track.

[ensenada]

ok yeah, the lyrics are a little hard to understand to be fair. but that adds to the strangeness and chaotic effect i reckon. how ever they editied it has produced a great tune, an unforgetable tune. it may have flaws to a trained sound ear, but they certainly dont take from the experience.

[othercircles]

Yea I love it now that Im familiar with the words. I wouldnt change a thing.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This is one of the most interesting Doors songs.
Morrison's rare foray into a political statement perhaps.
During 1967 Vietnam was beginning to be seen for the slaughter it was going to be, race riots were all across America and draft marches filled the streets so without doubt strange days had found America as it came to grapple with it's past and look towards its future.
The Summer Of Love a pivotal time in US History.
Morrison has indeed been proved right as a strange night of stone was surely the result.

Musically it features perhaps the first use of a Moog synthesizer in rock history when Paul Beaver was invited into the studio by the band.

More information on the album itself.

Strange day's the album

An interesting look at the making of the Strange day's album

Technical article on"Strange days" album

Strange Days LP Cover

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Whereas the artists, producers and engineers at a facility like the EMI Studios on Abbey Road in London benefitted from in-house technical staff who created devices to satisfy their unconventional sonic demands, this was not the case at Sunset Sound. "The big studios like United and Radio Recorders and RCA and Columbia had their techs," Botnick remembers, "whereas at all of the independent places like Sunset and Harmony and Gold Star we did our own stuff. The way the console was set up at Sunset, there was a patch point everywhere. The patchbay was immediately to my right on the floor and it went up to the top of the desk, so you had to patch everything. There was nothing ever normalled in the console. I could therefore make a microphone appear on whatever pot I wanted it to and, in the days before Fuzztones, if I needed to effect a guitar on a track like 'When The Music's Over' I could come right out of the fader into another line amp and then turn up the output. That line amp would, of course, feed another fader, so you really wouldn't hear the first fader because it didn't finish the circuit — the signal would go from microphone to mic preamp and from the mic preamp to the fader. Then I would go out of that fader into another mic pre, and the more I'd turn it up, the more distortion there would be in the next mic pre. And then that's when the tubes would blow. If I had done that working for a major facility, I'd have probably been kicked out on my ass! Still, in my estimate, that guitar sound on 'When The Music's Over' is one of the cleanest and most beautiful that I've ever recorded, not to mention how well Robbie performed."
Meanwhile, it was thanks to Paul Beaver that the Doors were introduced to the synthesizer. A year earlier, in 1966, Beaver and his partner Bernie Krause had purchased one of Robert Moog's first units, and after some fruitless attempts to popularise it around Hollywood, they displayed it in a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival and subsequently attracted interest from some among the rock cognoscenti. Paul Beaver himself quickly became one of LA's most in-demand session musicians, yet in the case of Strange Days it was only his Moog that made its way into Sunset Sound Recorders for use on the title track.
"We created an envelope where we could feed Jim's track into the Moog so that he could play any note on the keyboard and it would process his voice," Botnick explains. "I then added a little delay and fed the whole thing into an infinite tape repeat. That was hand-played."


The year 1967 marked a high point on both sides of the Atlantic in terms of songwriting creativity and technological innovation, and in the latter regard Bruce Botnick was constantly coming up with new techniques to attain credible new sounds. For instance, at the same time that he was recording the Doors' Strange Days album, he was also engineering Van Dyke Parks's Song Cycle LP, and it was the desire to achieve a fluttering effect on the vocal which gave rise to a Botnick invention that Parks dubbed the farkle: three-quarter-inch masking tape was creased in eighth-inch folds and wrapped like a fan around the capstan of an Ampex 300 full-track mono tape machine at 30ips. The tape then ran through the recorder and fluttered as the rubber capstan bounced, and, by bringing back the output of the farkle to the mix, Botnick was able to attain the sought-after effect while adding plenty of echo from the famed Sunset Sound chamber and delaying it further via an Ampex 200 three-track at 15ips. This same spirit of innovation prevailed on the Strange Days project.
"One my big things was messing with echo," Botnick recalls. "That Ampex 200 would hold 14-inch reels, and it had been converted to three-track from a quarter-inch mono. Allan Emig had actually got an Ampex head stack and attached it to this machine, and made his own record/playback amplifiers. Those amplifiers were totally separate, they weren't even on the same chassis, and they had different equalisations available. They had NAB, they had the European CCIR, and they had AME, which was Ampex Master Equalization. That was basically a pre-emphasis type of noise-reduction system, where it put in more highs on record and less highs on playback to ostensibly cut down the tape hiss. It was really ahead of its time, a precursor to Dolby in some respects, but I'd use it on that machine as the delay for the echo, because I loved that 167-millisecond delay in the Ampex at 15ips. I would make the record side AME but the playback NAB, so I got this bump in the curve and it really made the echo chamber shine. I always delayed the output in the chamber, not the input, because it sounds different.
"Then I had a really nice EMT plate that I used for Jim's vocals, because we recorded our echo live on him. How many singers would do that today? None. Nobody has the courage to make that kind of commitment. Back then, however, everybody did it — I don't know of a studio that didn't record the echo live. In those days people didn't think as much about these things that get in the way of performing."

Classic tracks Strange Days
From Sound On Sound 2003

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

One of the surprises of 2011 has to be the discovery of Strange Days as part of a tape from a 1966 London Fog gig.
It's not clear whether Strange Days was a work in progress from the Fog days or a completed idea from the bands beach house days.
Nonetheless it is a startling reminder of how different the band was even in it's earliest days.
Strange Days and Break On Through were on London Fog setlists back then in early 1966 as a clear indication that this band was indeed something unlike the bands of the time.

The only information available so far is that Ray Manzarek provides harmony vocals to Jim's lead.
It seems obvious that this Strange Days will be far removed from the 8 track studio Strange Days but in terms of evolution of Doors songs will be an invaluable piece of Doors History.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

This interesting version of Strange Days comes from Morrison's 65/66 Green Songbook. We know Strange Days was played at the London Fog in early 1966 but as yet do not know if the lyrics reflect this page and are radically different from the lyrics found on the 1967 album.

Green Songbook



Strange Days

Strange Days have fallen on me
Strange Days have fallen on me
Strange Days have twisted my head

Strange Days have fallen on me
Strange Days have fallen on me
Strange Days have found me in bed

Strange Days have found me baby
Strange Days have found me baby
Strange Days have shown their light

Strange Days have found me darling
Strange Days have found me darling
Strange Days so clear at night

Rescue me from
Rescue me from
Rescue me from stranger days than
these

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Handwritten Jim lyric.