People Are Strange

The Zoo Crew has got “People Are Strange” spinning right now, off The Doors’ second album, Strange Days, and if you are out there on the highway with the window down, this is the one that makes the whole sky feel a little crooked. Zoo Freaks have been riding this track since the station first fired back up, and it still lands like a letter from the canyon. The song came out of a real low afternoon in Laurel Canyon in 1967, back when drummer John Densmore and guitarist Robby Krieger were sharing a place up on Lookout Mountain. Jim Morrison walked in looking wrecked, the kind of down that does not want company. He almost never unloaded on the band about his head, only about the music, so the two of them were caught off guard. Krieger suggested they walk up the hill toward Appian Way, just to get a look at the city and maybe knock the mood loose.

Densmore wrote the rest of it down years later in Riders on the Storm. Morrison came back off that ridge euphoric, paper crumpled in his hand, and sang the lines that still open the record: people are strange when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly when you’re alone, women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, streets are uneven when you’re down. He told them it arrived in a flash while he was sitting up there looking out over Los Angeles, and that it felt good to be writing again. Krieger heard the melody and knew it was a hit before they even got back to the house. In a later talk with Guitar World, Krieger filled in the turn. Morrison had been in one of those suicidal, downer moods, and Densmore had said come on, let’s go see the sunset. Up on the ridge the sun was bouncing off the tops of the clouds, and Morrison flipped. He said he finally understood why he had felt that way. If you’re strange, people are strange. The lyric got scribbled right there.

Ray Manzarek told a different story, and the band never really settled it. In an old radio interview he put the song on a walk through New York. Morrison had spent the night at Andy Warhol’s Factory, everybody passed out, and around five in the morning he started back toward the hotel in midtown. The city was empty and he liked it that way. Then the subways started emptying, people climbing out of the ground like creatures, and by the time he hit midtown the street was packed. Manzarek said that was the picture behind the song, the city waking up around a stranger. Whichever hill or sidewalk you believe, the feeling is the same. Alienation bends the faces. The single went out in September 1967 with “Unhappy Girl” on the flip, and it climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. Strange Days itself landed at number 3. The track sits in a kind of carnival waltz, closer to old European cabaret than to the garage blast of the first album, and that tilt is part of why it still sounds like a side street instead of a main drag.

They cut Strange Days at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, same room as the debut, with Bruce Botnick engineering and Paul Rothchild producing. A magazine piece from the sessions caught Morrison suggesting they try “People Are Strange” and Rothchild waving it off because it was not ready yet, living on another tape. The song made the album anyway, slotted after “Moonlight Drive,” which is a nice little circle if you know how the band started. All four names ended up on the credit, the way the Doors usually did it, even though the spark was Morrison’s lyric and Krieger’s ear for the hook. Fans have argued for years about whether the words are a postcard from an acid afternoon. Densmore pushed back on that. The walk was about a mood, not a dose. The official camp has posted about the track over the years as one of the cleanest pictures of that outsider feeling ever set to a groove, written while Morrison was sober enough to scribble. The Zoo Crew leans toward the canyon version, because a sunset over the basin will rearrange a man faster than a subway stair.

The band that carried the song started on a beach, not in a boardroom. Morrison and Manzarek had crossed paths at UCLA film school. In the summer of 1965 they ran into each other again on Venice Beach. Morrison said he had been taking notes at a rock and roll concert going on in his head, and Manzarek asked to hear something. Morrison sang “Moonlight Drive.” Let’s swim to the moon, let’s climb through the tide. Manzarek said he had never heard lyrics like that on a rock song, and that was the moment they decided to put a group together. Manzarek had already been playing keyboards with his brothers in Rick and the Ravens. Densmore, a drummer from the Psychedelic Rangers whom Manzarek knew from meditation class, came aboard that summer. In September 1965 they cut a demo at World Pacific, six Morrison lyrics including “Moonlight Drive,” “Hello, I Love You,” and “My Eyes Have Seen You.” The brothers drifted off, the bass player went with them, and Krieger, another Psychedelic Ranger, stepped in on guitar. Manzarek took the bass lines himself on a Fender Rhodes piano bass, which is why the live band never needed a fifth body. Morrison named them after Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, the Blake line about cleansing the doors so everything appears as it is. A residency at the London Fog and a wild night at the Whisky a Go Go on the Strip got them to Elektra. The first album arrived in January 1967. Before that year was done, Strange Days was already in the racks, with “People Are Strange” sitting in the middle of it like a crooked mirror.

That is the long road from a film-school kid on the sand to the song the Zoo Crew just dropped on the air. If you want the rest of the story straight from the source, the band’s official home is still up at thedoors.com, and the band page there walks through Strange Days and name-checks “People Are Strange” right alongside “Love Me Two Times” and “When the Music’s Over.” Their official Facebook is facebook.com/thedoors, the Instagram sits at instagram.com/thedoors, and the X account is x.com/TheDoors. Fans who want a room to talk the records have kept The Doors fan club - Liquid Night going as a public group, and the Jim Morrison - Fans Creative Tribute group is another active hangout for people still carrying the poetry. Park all of that next to the official site and you can wander as far as you like. When you come back, the Zoo Freaks will still be here. Ride with the rest of the set over at THE ZOO, commercial-free, the way the canyon used to sound before the streets got even.