50th Anniversary Edition of the Doors’ ‘The Soft Parade’ Announced

The Soft Parade stands as one of the Doors‘ standout albums, due to it featuring the classic Doors track “Touch Me” — and that album celebrates its 50th album this year.

To commemorate the occasion and honor the legacy of the band’s fourth studio album, the Doors have announced a lavish 50th anniversary re-release, with a street date of October 18. The announcement came on July 18, the exact date of the album’s 50th anniversary.

#TheDoors’ 4th studio album, #THESOFTPARADE was released 50 years ago today!

To celebrate, THE SOFT PARADE: 50TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION 3CD/1LP set is dropping on October 18, featuring over a dozen unreleased songs & studio outtakes. Pre-order yours: https://t.co/PqqjcwSLwR pic.twitter.com/BOL0Cn8hyq

— The Doors (@TheDoors) July 18, 2019

Via the news release:

To commemorate the album’s 50th year anniversary, The Soft Parade will be reimagined on a newly expanded 3CD/1L set. THE SOFT PARADE: 50TH ANNIVERSARY DELUXE EDITION includes the original studio album – and the B-side “Who Scared You” – newly remastered by Bruce Botnick, The Doors’ longtime engineer and mixer. The collection is a limited edition of 15,000 individually numbered copies and also includes the original album on 180-gram vinyl along with liner notes by noted rock journalist David Fricke.

The core of the new collection is comprised of more than a dozen unreleased songs. Among the highlights are stripped down “Doors Only” versions of five tracks where the horns and strings have been removed (“Tell All The People,” “Touch Me,” “Wishful Sinful,” “Runnin’ Blue,” and “Who Scared You.”) The set also features three of those stripped-back versions with new guitar parts added by Robby Krieger (“Touch Me,” “Wishful Sinful,” and “Runnin’ Blue).

The collection also uncovers three songs from studio rehearsals – with Ray Manzarek (a.k.a. Screamin’ Ray Daniels) on vocals – that include an early version of “Roadhouse Blues,” a song that would be released the following year on Morrison Hotel. These three songs include newly recorded bass parts by Robert DeLeo of Stone Temple Pilots, who joined Krieger and John Densmore at a tribute concert for Manzarek in 2016, three years after the organist died of cancer.

A trio of studio outtakes collected on the set’s final disc feature the much-bootlegged, hour-long jam, “Rock Is Dead,” which appears here in its entire, surviving form for the first time ever. The track finds The Doors riffing through the entire history of rock ’n’ roll, from early delta blues through surf music, ending with the death of rock.

Stream the original album below, via Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/album/75bLu4Ung5QbMdJYxx7wTI?si=BsPUV0QWQnyMBq_3UquqPw