Traditionally, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones duke it out for the tenuous title of Greatest. Band. Ever. Occasionally, The Beach Boys or Led Zeppelin are mentioned in the same discussion, but rarely, if ever, are The Doors seriously considered. The band's ringleader, Jim Morrison, was too much of a pinup—and, eventually, too much of a drunk—for their music to be taken seriously. Had The Doors began a few years earlier (that is, had they not emerged from inside the drug revolution of the late '60s), they may have had the chance to mature and hone their skills as a band before transposing their music to the world of psychedelic rock the way The Beatles had done so successfully around the same time.

But if The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club and The Beach Boys had Pet Sounds, then the Doors's answer was Strange Days. The liner notes of the 40th-anniversary edition of the album details how, in a pre-online-leak world, engineer Bruce Botnick snagged an early copy of Sgt. Pepper's and played it for The Doors, inspiring the band, along with producer Paul Rothchild, to invent new methods of studio recording. This experimentation can be heard in the very first notes of the title track, as Ray Manzarek's spacey keyboards set the tone for Morrison's eerie, distorted warning, "Strange days have found us." It's the perfect introduction to a perfectly strange album.