Strange Days by The Doors, Elektra Label, 1967, value £200 mono, £150 stereo

THIS is another album cover that has no band name and no album title on the front, writes MICHAEL BROOKS. It is only identified by the two posters on the wall in the background, strangely, posters advertising the first Doors album, pasted over with a small banner proclaiming Strange Days.

This was their second million selling album. Keyboard player Ray Manzarek said, "The Doors were looking for a cover that was different to what most other bands were doing, we didn't want anything psychedelic as we weren't that sort of band." What The Doors did get was a cover that was really cosmopolitan, a show of carnival characters, complete with a strongman, jugglers and street entertainers performing in what appeared to be a European piazza, but was in fact a New York side street. The album photograph was taken in Sniffen Court, now a flagstoned mews on East 36th street between Third Street and Lexington Avenue. Former 19th Century stables, they are now all private homes.

Photographer Joel Brodsky was asked who the performers were? The trumpet player was the taxi driver who took Brodsky to the site, he said, "For five dollars, will you stand over there and blow a trumpet?" The juggler was Brodsky's assistant, Frank Kollegy, who later appeared on several other album covers that Brodsky photographed. The strongman was from a circus but also worked part-time as a doorman. Singer Jim Morrison loved the cover, "It was everything the band asked for, overall it looked like an assembled La Strada circus troupe, the strongman, the juggler, the acrobat and the little people."

It is generally accepted that Morrison had been reading The Doors Of Perception by Aldous Huxley and was inspired by a quote which read, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite." Others say it is from a poem by William Blake that had a passage that read, "There are things that are known and things that are unknown, in between the doors."

Jim Morrison eventually became the architect of his own misfortune. Tragically, years of hedonistic excess had taken its toll and on July 3, 1971, he was found dead in the bathroom. The verdict recorded a heart attack, he was 27. He is buried in Paris' Pere Lachaise cemetery, in the exalted company of Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust and Honor de Balzac.