This morning, I listened to music on my iPhone on shuffle mode, and a song played from Pink Floyd. It was an instrumental track from Dark Side of the Moon that had me asking myself which band I prefer: Pink Floyd or The Doors? Since I own a fair amount of Pink Floyd albums and maybe one or two Doors albums, the question wasn’t too hard. In fact, I don’t even think it’s close. It’s Pink Floyd by a mile. Nothing against The Doors, but I just thought they were weird for the sake of being weird. Maybe if I’d lived in the sixties and experienced them when they were still around, I would’ve enjoyed more of The Doors. But as a child of the eighties who discovered them at my aunt’s house in Central California when I was about eight years old, I looked at The Doors in a different light.

In the mid-eighties, I lived in Pittsburgh, and to see my relatives, my parents flew with me out to California. In her living room, my aunt had a large stack of vinyl records below her silver turntable. Of all those records, if I could remember correctly, she included the first Doors album along with LA Woman. At that age, I thought “Break on Through” was groovy. In its entirety, I listened to the first Doors album, and the record was scratched and crackly when it spun beneath the needle on the turntable. It played like a children’s album on acid. Appropriately, the last song was called “The End.” Jim Morrison did his thing with his spoken word poetry about nothing except psychedelic imagery, and it spooked me. I must’ve been too young to listen to that record, but it still intrigued me for how scary it was. My aunt let me keep it with a stack of other records such as The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I really enjoyed that one, and The Doors album grew on me the more I listened to it. Although I couldn’t say what they were about, both albums told somewhat of a story.

And then around that age, I visited my older cousin in North Carolina. He collected cassettes, not vinyl, and introduced me to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, which was even weirder than The Doors but a different kind of weird, a subtle weird. Once again, when my cousin played it for me, I was too young to understand the theme of the album. Not until I was in my twenties did I find out from a friend that it was about how time and money both drove someone insane. It was an intriguing concept, I thought. By then, I came to appreciate Pink Floyd more than The Doors.

For a good reason, after about fifty years, Dark Side of the Moon is still on the album charts. Now, in 2024, it reached number one again in the UK. How incredible. In fact, it could be considered the greatest album of all time, which makes me wonder why Pink Floyd isn’t mentioned among The Beatles or Rolling Stones. Maybe their catalog wasn’t as impressive. After all, the Syd Barrett years were too weird for me, far too psychedelic to the point where they were unlistenable. My friend said that Syd purportedly went on an acid trip and never came back. Many years later, he visited the band at their studio, still tripping. By then, Roger Waters had taken over as the lead singer, and they dialed back their weirdness by a lot to make their music more inspiring.

With that said, other than Dark Side of the Moon, Meddle was, for the most part, an enjoyable listen, except for the twenty-three-minute song “Echoes.” Wish You Were Here, which was about the absence of Syd Barrett, fatigued my ears with its long tracks. Animals and Atom Heart Mother were too conceptual for me, and The Wall was only good if I was in the right mood. Otherwise, the album sounded too bipolar.

But if I had to compare their discography to The Doors, I would say it was much more impressive. Although LA Woman was cool, nothing from The Doors came close to the depth of Dark Side of the Moon. I was never quite a fan of Jim Morrison howling all the time, and The Doors always used too much organ. His poetry sounded too pretentious, while Roger Waters, who co-wrote most of the lyrics for Pink Floyd, struck a chord in me.

I don’t remember what I did with my aunt’s records. My mother may have sold them at a garage sale or thrown them out. But still, I appreciate my aunt for giving them to me. They were some of the best gifts of my childhood. Maybe I should’ve kept them. At least, years later, my friend would burn a CD of all of Pink Floyd’s MP3s, although something about vinyl would’ve made those albums better keepsakes.