‘The End’: The Doors’ dive into Jim Morrison’s morbid psyche
On The Doors’ debut album, it’s like Jim Morrison predicted the future. “Break on through to the other side,” he demanded on their debut single and album opener, kicking down the doors to the music world and unleashing the public persona that is still obsessed over today as he took on the role of a kind of shamanic leader.
Then, after nine tracks of rock and roll glory, establishing and proving their music power to represent the bulk of their career, it comes to a close. “This is the end, beautiful friend,” Morrison sings. Even on his debut, he seemed acutely aware of his ending, putting his morbid psyche on display.
The most common reading of ‘The End’ is that it’s about the 1960s. Released in 1967, Morrison seemed to be looking around at the dangerously hedonistic decade he was standing in and beginning to see the glorious beginnings of the cultural revolution decay. In the eyes of the band’s keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, Morrison was creating melodrama for their modern age. He said, “He was re-enacting a bit of Greek drama. It was theatre!” Complete with murderers, the rejection of your parents, motorcycle rides, spiralling out in fields and countless other images from the ‘60s, all twisted into a psychedelic apocalypse, Morrison is presenting his dramatic take on the end of the 1960s.
But in hindsight, the end of the 1960s also meant the end of Jim Morrison. It could be argued that no single person captures the energy of the era quite like him. He had the raw sexuality of the free love era, the androgynous look of a world fighting for equality and fluidity, the poetic intellect of the new literary set, the rock and roll power of all the decade’s best frontmen, the cult energy that had groups across America by the throat and the total reckless abandon that led to the who period getting dark. Morrison feels like the ‘60s personified, so just as the decade had to get darker when what went up must come violently crashing down, Morrison had to, too, dying of an overdose in 1971.
There is a level to which ‘The End’ feels prophetic of this. But on a wider scale, it feels like a telling of the musician’s entire life and being. From this debut single, Morrison’s music was obsessed with death. Throughout their discography, they view it from every standpoint as a topic that clearly plagued the singer.
As a child, Morrison genuinely believed his body had been taken over by the souls of dead native americans. He spoke and sang about seeing an accident on the road and feeling the spirit of these dead bodies take him over. From this moment on, death was within him, either as a second spirit to his own or as an enduring obsession.
It made him morbid but in a different way. Morrison wasn’t scared of death. The tone of ‘The End’ is resolved and content, not sombre or fearful. He said of the song, “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.” So in the song, as he repeats “beautiful friend” like death is calling out to him, telling him it’s all over, or even when he switches to “my only friend” as if that’s him speaking to the one thought that’s been with him his whole life, his one is one of acceptance.
It’s still morbid, yes, but it’s clear that Morrison had been sitting with death too long to fear it anymore. Instead, it was beautiful, perhaps even comforting to him, with ‘The End’ being an insight into the singer’s psyche.
