What is the meaning behind The Doors’ 1967 classic ‘The End’?
It’s either the most thunderously gripping summons of psychedelic awe or the perfect example of the ‘Lizard King’s pretentious theatre, depending on where you stand on The Doors.
Even the naysayers will at least agree that an audacious spirit flashes and burns at the centre of ‘The End’. Closing The Doors’ 1967 eponymous debut, the nearly 12-minute odyssey serves as the record’s dark counter to ‘Light My Fire’s amorous surge, a coven wander of lysergic snarl and acid rock storm clouds, spotted the death of the hippie idyll just as the West Coast was about to bloom into its peace and love apex.
Such flowery gravitas will irk the committed Jim Morrison haters, but it’s difficult to comment on ‘The End’s weighty conjuring without likewise taking a plunge into its cavernous fever dream. There’s a primal beast lurking within The Doors’ shadowy masterstroke, held on a leash by their frontman and kept at a distance during ‘The End’s moments of terse suspense, then let loose when slavering and gnashing like Morrison’s ferocious id. If ‘Light My Fire’ is the record’s grand phoenix, ‘The End’ scores its demonic incubi, pulling the listener deeper into the haunted wood.
Naturally, such elemental drama offered an electric soundtrack for Apocalypse Now’s phantasmic Vietnam War trip, sonically lifting protagonist Captain Willard, machete in hand, to snake through the gothic jungle and mete out primordial violence on the towering Colonel Kurtz in the movie’s gripping finale. While immortalised in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 picture and standing as an epic relic of the counterculture, just what were Morrison’s lyrical visions of desperate lands and insane children really about?
So, what is ‘The End’ about?
The Doors’ murky saga was shaped and realised by repeated on-stage playthroughs, eventually taking on its behemoth character when ready to commit their lengthy jam to record at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound in August 1966.
The lyrical seeds were first planted by the demise of Morrison’s first real love, Mary Werbelow, whom he met as teens in Florida’s Clearwater Beach in 1962. According to a report in the local St Petersburg Times, the two finally broke up three years later amid Morrison’s developing taste for drink, LSD, and infidelity, but remained close friends while The Doors began to explode until losing contact for good in 1968. His connection to her would hover over lines in ‘The End’s brooding introduction: “This is the end / Beautiful friend” and “I’ll never look into your eyes again.”
Morrison maintained a more ambiguous stance, however. He’d stated in a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone what exactly ‘the end’ could be: “Probably just to a girl, but I could see how it could be goodbye to a kind of childhood”.
A year earlier, The Doors frontman suggested that ‘the end’ was the face of mortality rearing its head in life’s abyssal brink, telling journalist Lizzie James, “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.”
‘The End’ is also powered by a potent Oedipus complex. Around halfway, Morrison oozes the almost stream-of-consciousness “Father / Yes, son? / I want to kill you / Mother, I want to …” before erupting into a primal howl of anguish. Such Freudian fodder was a topic he’d immersed himself in. As well as performing in a student production of Oedipus Rex’s Athenian tragedy, a deeply complicated and grievance-filled relationship with his naval admiral father has been speculated to lurk amid ‘The End’s patricidal lyrical flashes.
Drummer John Densmore shed further light in his autobiography when Morrison offered deeper clarity to the paternal angle of ‘The End’s existential pursuit, “…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.”
Lost love, patricide, and maternal incest. Such motifs form one of the many lyrical strands of ‘The End’s nebulous nightmare, a conjuring from a subterranean netherworld that only The Doors and Morrison’s poetic visions seemed to possess a key to.
