The Doors - Strange Days (1967) (Full Album) #beautifulcovers
It was 1967 and The Doors were preparing to release their second album: Strange Days. The first, their self-titled album, had been a commercial success. However, there was something that left a bitter taste in the mouths of the band, particularly its frontman Jim Morrison: the album cover.
For Strange Days, the task was entrusted to photographer Joel Brodsky, with one condition: the band must not appear.
Jim Morrison hated the cover of their first album: “our faces are ugly and useless,” he declared to a newspaper during an interview a few years after its release. Therefore, for no reason at all did he want to appear on the cover of Strange Days. They could put anything on it, but not his face.
A suicidal choice, according to some. Especially at that time, showcasing the faces of musicians on the cover was, if not a rule, at least a good habit. Furthermore, Jim Morrison was already considered a sex symbol back then, and showing his handsome face on the cover could sell more copies. Especially among the girls who were literally going crazy for him.
Morrison's annoyance with the cover of The Doors stemmed from the fact that Jac Holzman, the owner of their record label, Elektra Records, had decided to promote the album by leveraging the singer's aesthetics and sex appeal rather than the music. Nothing like this had ever been seen before: oversized images of Jim Morrison adorned the enormous billboards along Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. All of this was unbearable, and Morrison kept repeating that his close-up on the album cover ended up distracting attention from the songs. With Strange Days, the music had to change.
Despite the setting seeming more European, Parisian to be exact, the backdrop of the cover for Strange Days is Sniffen Court, an alley on 36th Street in Manhattan.
When Joel Brodsky was contacted to create the image, there was just one dictate: the band must not appear.
And so it was: you have to look closely to find a reference to The Doors. Their four faces are relegated to a poster on the wall of the alley, one of those used to promote concerts.
For the realization of the image, some ideas were discarded, such as one that involved gathering dozens of dogs. Brodsky then, after several failed attempts to capture street artists in the streets of New York, decided to construct the scene from scratch.
The cover of Strange Days seems like a Fellinian vision, with characters of every kind: a trumpeter, two acrobats, a juggler, a weightlifter, two dwarfs, and a model. All found among the photographer's acquaintances. The juggler, for example, was his assistant, while the model – Zazel Wild – was a friend of his wife's. The others came from the circus or, more simply, from the street.
