‘The End’ explained: Oedipus and death trips in The Doors’ classic
During the height of flower power, The Doors felt like everything that the hippies weren’t supposed to be. There were plenty of artists who were crying out against the Vietnam War, but rather than protest against the darkness, Jim Morrison was there to provide a mirror to his generation and make them question whether this was the life that they wanted for themselves a few years down the road. After all, their name was calling back to Aldous Huxley, talking about opening up the doors of perception, and with their debut, the band left the entire California rock scene stunned.
Because when breaking it down, what else was there in Los Angeles at the time? There were certainly new and interestings bands like Love breaking onto the scene, but since Jimi Hendrix got most of his greatest hits when he first landed in England, seeing The Doors coming up in the same stomping grounds as Janis Joplin and The Mamas and the Papas made them look like the pariahs of the scene for harshing everyone’s buzz.
But Morrison was never destined to make happy songs whenever he approached the mic. He wanted to make an epiphany go off in the listener’s head whenever he sang, and while hits like ‘Break On Through (To The Other Side)’ and ‘Light My Fire’ did a great job of getting people on board, some might not have been ready for tunes like ‘End of the Night’ or their take on ‘Back Door Man’ that comes midway through the record.
Since none of the band members wanted to cater to the traditional three-minute rock song format, it wasn’t out of the question for them to stretch out their songs as long as they would go, but there was something different about ‘The End’ closing the record. This was a sign that the version of rock and roll paradise that existed right off Sunset Strip was much darker than anyone imagined.
So, what was the song ‘The End’ written about?
But when listening to the first half of the song, no one would have expected the song to take such a dark turn. There are different elements that people hadn’t heard from them yet, like Robbie Krieger’s crazy sitar-style lead lines, but when Morrison opens his mouth to sing for the first time, it seems like he’s more dejected that his love affair from before has gone as far as it could go.
Even John Densmore subscribed to the song being a simple breakup tune at first, saying, “‘The End’ started out as a goodbye love song. ‘This is the end/beautiful friend’.” If that were as far as the song went, it would have been the most drab way to end the record, but that was never how the band thought about their music.
They had been known to jam before anything else, and while the musicians could stretch out for extended solos, Morrison also wanted to find some time to improvise. He was a living, breathing poet whenever he got on that stage, and when the rest of his bandmates would die down halfway through the tune, ‘The Lizard King’ was free to ramble off in a free-verse style before tapping into something truly disturbing.
But what makes ‘The End’ so dark?
Right as the music would get quiet, a lot of what Morrison was saying seemed to have more to do with the scene itself. A line like “The West is the best” would have been given a round of applause when they played it at the Whisky A-Go-Go, but Morrison lived to push the envelope, and when he got to the midsection of his solo, he decided to retell the story of Oedipus Rex by saying that he wants to kill his father and do things to his mother that aren’t necessarily the most family-friendly.
Organist Ray Manzarek even said that Morrison caught the band off guard when he sang it for the first time at the Whisky, saying, “Nothing was going on except [my piano] and Robbie playing some sitar things, and he goes, ‘The killer awoke before dawn’. [I’m thinking], ‘Oh my god, what is he gonna do?’ [He said], ‘He put his boots on, he took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hallway baby.’” The band was shocked, but the staff at the venue was none too impressed, firing them on the spot and telling them never to play that song again.
It’s possible that a lot of people didn’t want to hear something this dark in the era of Flower Power, but since the Manson murders were right around the corner, Morrison seemed to be tapped into something that seemed to predict how dangerous Sunset Strip would become. Everyone responded to him singing about Oedipus Rex, but a line like “lost in a Roman wilderness of pain and all the children are insane” is a far better encapsulation of the movement that birthed a song like this.
