Released January 4, 1967 Label Elektra | Recorded August 1966 | |
Genre Psychedelic rock
raga rock
art rock
spoken word Length 11:41 [album version]
6:28 [Apocalypse Now version] Writer(s) Jim Morrison
Ray Manzarek
Robby Krieger
John Densmore | ||
"The End" is a song by the American rock group, The Doors. Its lyrics were written by the lead singer, Jim Morrison. He originally wrote the song about breaking up with his girlfriend Mary Werbelow, but it evolved through months of performances at Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go into a nearly 12-minute track on their self-titled debut album. It was first released in January 1967. The song was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing. Two takes were done and it has been held that the second take is the one that was issued. However, there is also a view that the issued version of the song was an edit of both takes, with at least one splice. The band would perform the song to close their last live performance as a foursome on December 12, 1970, at The Warehouse in New Orleans.
Contents
Lyrics
In 1969, Morrison stated:
Every time I hear that song, it means something else to me. It started out as a simple good-bye song... Probably just to a girl, but I see how it could be a goodbye to a kind of childhood. I really don't know. I think it's sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be.
Interviewed by Lizze James, he pointed out the meaning of the verse "My only friend, the End":
Sometimes the pain is too much to examine, or even tolerate... That doesn't make it evil, though – or necessarily dangerous. But people fear death even more than pain. It's strange that they fear death. Life hurts a lot more than death. At the point of death, the pain is over. Yeah – I guess it is a friend...
Shortly past the midpoint of the nearly 12-minute-long album version, the song enters a spoken word section with the words, "The killer awoke before dawn..." That section of the song reaches a dramatic climax with the lines, "Father / Yes son? / I want to kill you / Mother, I want to..." (with the next words screamed out unintelligibly). Morrison had worked on a student production of Oedipus Rex at Florida State University. Ray Manzarek, the former keyboard player of The Doors, explained:
He was giving voice in a rock 'n' roll setting to the Oedipus complex, at the time a widely discussed tendency in Freudian psychology. He wasn't saying he wanted to do that to his own mom and dad. He was re-enacting a bit of Greek drama. It was theatre!
In John Densmore's autobiography Riders on the Storm, he recalls when Morrison explained the meaning:
At one point Jim said to me during the recording session, and he was tearful, and he shouted in the studio, 'Does anybody understand me?' And I said yes, I do, and right then and there we got into a long discussion and Jim just kept saying over and over kill the father, fuck the mother, and essentially boils down to this, kill all those things in yourself which are instilled in you and are not of yourself, they are alien concepts which are not yours, they must die. Fuck the mother is very basic, and it means get back to essence, what is reality, what is, fuck the mother is very basically mother, mother-birth, real, you can touch it, it's nature, it can't lie to you. So what Jim says at the end of the Oedipus section, which is essentially the same thing that the classic says, kill the alien concepts, get back reality, the end of alien concepts, the beginning of personal concepts.
According to Mojo magazine,
Comprehensively wrecked, the singer [Morrison] wound up lying on the floor mumbling the words to his Oedipal nightmare, 'Fuck the mother, kill the father.' Then, suddenly animated, he rose and threw a TV at the control room window. Sent home by (producer Paul A.) Rothchild like a naughty schoolkid, he returned in the middle of the night, broke in, peeled off his clothes, yanked a fire extinguisher from the wall and drenched the studio. Alerted, Rothchild came back and persuaded the naked, foam-flecked Morrison to leave once more, advising the studio owner to charge the damage to Elektra.
The genesis and the use of the word "fuck" is described by Michael Hicks as follows:
During this period, Morrison brought vocal ideas into the instrumental solo section. Between the organ and guitar solos he approached the microphone and intoned two brief lines from the middle of the song "When the Music's Over": "Persian night, babe / See the light, babe." More strikingly, when the retransition motive began, he held the microphone against his mouth and screamed the word "fuck" repeatedly, in rhythm, for three measures or more (the barking sound that one hears during this passage on most live recordings). This was probably not a spontaneous vulgarism, but rather, a kind of quotation from another Doors song, "The End." Paul Rothchild explains that in the Oedipal section of the studio recording of "The End," Morrison shouted the word "fuck" over and over "as a rhythm instrument, which is what we intended it to be." That "rhythm instrument" was buried in the studio mix of "The End." Now, forcefully superimposed on "Light My Fire", it shocked many a fan who had come to hear the group's most famous song.
The Pop Chronicles documentary reports that critics found the song "Sophoclean and Joycean."
"The End" was ranked at number 336 on 2010 Rolling Stone magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song's guitar solo was ranked number 93 on Guitar World's "100 Greatest Guitar Solos of All Time". However, the song was also ranked at 26 in Blender's list of the "50 Worst Songs Ever".
Personnel
Usage in film and television
Versions
While the 1967 release of the song is the best-known version, there are other, slightly different versions available.