Happy Anniversary: The Doors, The Soft Parade

47 years ago today, The Doors released their fourth album, an effort which found the foursome stepping a bit outside the box from their sounds of their previous LPs and embracing brass and string arrangements.

“It was to be a sonic extravaganza,” Ray Manzarek wrote in his autobiography, Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, “with horns and strings augmenting our basic guitar, keyboards, and drums sound. We were going to bring in jazz cats, country-and-western pickers, and classical pickers.”

Like the majority of the band’s catalog, The Soft Parade was produced by Paul A. Rothchild, but Manzarek took advantage of the opportunity to be very hands-on in the process. “I enjoyed the hell out of the production of the album,” wrote Manzarek. “I especially enjoyed working with Paul Harris on the arrangements for the tunes that were going to get a sonic wash of horns and strings.”

While it may not have gone down in history as the easiest album to record (Manzarek described it as having taken “an ungodly long time to complete”) , it nonetheless proved to be a commercially successful one: it provided The Doors with another top-10 album – it hit #6 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart – and gave the band another top-5 single with “Touch Me,” with three other tracks (“Wishful Sinful,” “Tell All the People,” and “Runnin’ Blue”) all climbing into the Hot 100.