With you.
Every night messing around.
No other purpose than to soak in the pace of the city, we arpenterons streets in the shadow of impressive Manhattan skyline sipping coffee boiling and disgusting. We will make the tourists, we gallop Times Square to the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park at Chrysler Building, boufferons we pretzels in us funny. We'll talk about Paul Auster. We chantonnerons generic NYPD Blue. We will take taxis, and the Staten Island ferry course. We hallucinerons the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.
And then, a few days after our arrival, when the euphoria will be somewhat settled, we will travel to St Patrick religiously in order to listen to the song Savatage adequate. Crossing Lexington, I hope you soulèveras your skirt above Marilyn subway mouth outrageous, before we bifurquions on the 36th to finally reach Sniffen Court, which, like the grave of Jim at Père Lachaise is a shrine of Rock.
This is where, you know, what was shot in 1967 the splendid picture of Fellini inspiration illustrating the second installment of The Doors. Maybe there we will light a cigarette sitting under the white knights, always present on the far wall, to give free rein to our imagination and try to picture the photographer Joel Brodsky delivering his instructions to acrobats escaped from La Strada, and trumpeter in the background, which was none other than his taxi driver and was also compensated $ 5 for his time. Can I take your hand, we will close our eyes and listen to this disc.
For despite its sunny birth in Studio B of "Sunset Sound Recorders", located between Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards mythical Los Angeles, precisely on Selma Avenue, "Strange Days" is a New York disc: melancholy, rainy, poetic and disillusioned, inciting dreaming and spleen. And Sniffen Court will be the ideal place to fully enjoy this album, remembering her dark beauty and fascinating aura.
"Strange Days" is firstly a technological revolution. It must be remembered that in the late 60s, most major studios are equipped only with four tracks, as battery taken, for example, are best with three microphones (bass drum / snare and one last placed above the kit to all the cymbals and toms), and the technique of "bouncing" to "melt" several tracks recorded by grouping them in a single order to free others only just born, developed by the legendary and brilliant George Martin, producer and fifth Beatle, should I specify. If these techniques seem childish today since available on all home studios first prize, it seems necessary to situate the context to better appreciate the fantastic sound, both powerful and delicate, created by producer Paul Rothchild and sound engineer Bruce Botnick.
For "Strange Days", the Doors spend four tracks from the first album in eight brand new tracks designed by Allan Emig, which will allow them, as the Fab Four did on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" which released four months before, enrich their work many overdubs and other modulation frequencies, and thus give a remarkable consistency and a particular color to this "Strange Days" psychotropic. Note also that it is they who for the first time using a Moog synthesizer (which can be heard on the title track).
This disc is then a terrible and especially against foot-Summer of Love and the hippie atmosphere of 1967. While American youth, flowers tangled hair, baisouille and fogs the brain in San Francisco between two events against the Vietnam War, believing yet possible an idyllic life, the Doors already have illusions in the closet and buried all traces, however small, of hope. Hallucinating antithesis of carefree. "Sgt Pepper's", the second full-length, available only eight months after the first album, contains only ultra-pessimists and unfortunately visionary songs: "Strange Days-have found us, Strange Days-have tracked us down, They are going to destroy our casual joys ".
Fatal prophecies, fatal addiction, helplessness observations, feelings of discomfort and loneliness are therefore the frame of this brilliant work. The most striking example is the poem "Horse Latitudes" a violent metaphor for the futility and even the absurdity of human life, evoked through the sea route taken by Spanish vessels to transport horses to the West Indies . The wind often is missing in the subtropical latitudes, and sailboats could find it immobilized for a long time. Every drop of water becoming precious, sailors sometimes solved to throw overboard the poor standards. Jim describes a terrifying way their struggle, vain, and their agony, followed almost instantly by the calm sea again smooth, flat, as if nothing had happened (Carefully refined and sealed over).
Even the titles a priori happier ultimately prove morbid: "Moonlight Drive" (first song of the Doors, a version was recorded for the previous album) is actually an invitation to suicide so Big Blue; and "Love Me Two Times" hides under his appearance kids a sense of unease and urgency to enjoy a near end seeming inevitable. As for "My Eyes Have Seen You", it gets light so the theme of the totalitarian drift dear to George Orwell: "Let them photograph your soul / Memorize your alleys / On an endless roll" ...
Before you slashing your wrists, a little more cheerful story ... You know that a real rock band has to have its multitude of incidents involving lousy cam doses and / or unrestrained groupies. I have one to tell you. Just like Freddie Mercury, who composed "Bohemian Rhapsody" by sniffing coke on the transparent piano the famous producer Roy Thomas Baker while making jigs, legend has it that Jim had recorded "You're Lost Little Girl" with the help of his muse Pamela Courson, notorious heroin addict who, ironically, he addresses in the song: "You're Lost Little Girl / I think that you know what to do / not?". Bruce Botnick not being satisfied with Jim intonations when taking this piece, he suggested jokingly that we look down a prostitute to perform oral sex at the Lizard King, which would surely his sweetest voice . Pam, who was lying in the studio, took offense that we want take away what was rightfully his and went into the cabin. The decision that followed was good. This is also the song that Ray played at farewell to Pam in 1974.
Music ... How do you describe this unlikely mix of blues influences, rock, jazz, psyche; this surreal and unique melting pot serving of an alcoholic crooner on LSD, owned and hypnotic?
Not surprisingly, this is still the talented organist Ray Manzarek Daniel size that the lion's share, ensuring the bass lines with his left hand on his Fender Rhodes piano bass while playing rhythms or melodies on his Vox Continental natural extension of his right hand. Two titles were, however embellished with bass guitar, recorded by Douglas Lubahn (Clear Light): "You're Lost Little Girl" and "My Eyes Have Seen You".
Robbie Krieger and John Densmore Paul are far from being back, saying if the group antagonistically, finesse guitar opposing a battery of increasingly violent (eg replay fisheries and this strikes so surly on "Strange Days" or "Love Me Two Times"). Both musicians and balance in a perfect way the symbiosis between Ray and Jim Black Angel charismatic, skinned, sexy and uncontrollable whose talent blows furiously on "When The Music's Over", apocalyptic anthem and timeless, which by its terrible violence and infinite freedom, is essential to my mind as an essential precursor to Extreme Music.
The Cry of the Butterfly we have very far away, we will reopen your eyes and we will, with difficulty, to reality. We will let evaporate the ghosts contortionists, acrobats and other Mr. Muscles that are sure even dance a little before our eyes moist, wet from this experience and this feeling of anxiety and depression that invariably follows the listen to this masterpiece, perhaps because one has seen deeply, and it will forget it again, a grim truth: Music is your only friend, until, The End, up to The End .. .
You make baggage?
* ZazPanzer for Spirit of Rock *
