WHAT HAPPENED THE NIGHT BEFORE THE RECORDING OF “WHEN THE MUSIC'S OVER”?

 

According to what Robby Krieger (the Doors' guitarist) said in a 2021 interview (at minute 28), something really curious happened the night before the recording of "When The Music's Over". This complex and wonderful song is the closing track on the California band's second album, "Strange Days", and has remained in music history as one of the group's best performances.

It is April 1967 and the recordings of "Strange Days" have been underway for a few weeks. Krieger receives a call in the middle of the night: it is Jim Morrison. He calls him for help since he has taken too much LSD along with his girlfriend Pamela Courson. It was, as we said in the opening, the night before the studio recording of When The Music's Over".

The guitarist goes to Morrison's house and finds him and the girl naked as well as visibly shaken by the effect of the acid taken. He proposes that they go out into the fresh air to try to recover, and they willingly agree.

The next day at the recording session Morrison does not arrive. However, the rest of the band records the instrumental track of the song and, only several hours later, the singer arrives in the studio to lay down alone the incredible vocal part that we can hear on the record.

An episode, like many others of this kind, happened in those magical days where the Doors, along with many other artists, were writing the best pages of modern music history.