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The End (The Doors song)
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007) |
| "The End" | ||
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| Song by The Doors | ||
| Album | The Doors | |
| Released | January 4, 1967 | |
| Recorded | Late August–early September 1966 | |
| Genre | Psychedelic Rock | |
| Length | 11:40 | |
| Label | Elektra Records | |
| Writer | Jim Morrison Robby Krieger Ray Manzarek John Densmore |
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| Producer | The Doors Paul A. Rothchild |
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| The Doors track listing | ||
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"The End" is a song by The Doors. It evolved through months of performances at Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go into a nearly 12-minute opus on their self-titled album. The band would perform the song to close their last set. It was first released in January 1967.
"The End" was ranked 328 on Rolling Stone's list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (2004).
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The spoken-word section of the song includes the lines "Father/ Yes son?/ I want to kill you/ Mother, I want to...fuck you," (with the last two words screamed (almost) unintelligibly). This is often considered a reference to Sophocles' Oedipus the King, a production of which Jim Morrison worked on while at Florida State University.
Said Morrison in 1969, "Everytime 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 it's imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be." Producer Paul Rothchild said in an interview that he believed the song to be an inside trip, and that "kill the father" means destroying everything hierarchical, controlling, and restrictive in one's psyche, while "fuck the mother" means embracing everything that is expansive, flowing, and alive in the psyche. Ray Manzarek, the former keyboard player for the Doors spoke about it defensively saying,
| “ | 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! | ” |
Jim may have been influenced by the Jungian concepts of individuation and archetypes, and was certainly influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of going beyond the limited types of human beings that have so far existed by loving Dionysian vitality and life ("the mother") while rejecting Apollonian systems and traditions ("the father").
The lyrical reference to "the Blue Bus" has been variously conjectured to refer to either Indian mystic Meher Baba's "Blue Bus" tours of the 1930s or to Santa Monica's "Big Blue Bus" public bus lines. The link to Meher Baba seems unlikely given the dark and nihilistic tone of the song, with its references to insanity, patricide and incest, concepts alien to the life and outlook of Meher Baba. A reference to a bus line is a somewhat better possibility, but probably the most likely conjecture is that Morrison was referring to the drug oxymorphone, an opioid substitute for morphine, which in the drug culture at the time was occasionally referred to as "The Blue Bus" due to its availability in blue 10mg tabs. Given Morrison's affinity for drug and alcohol misuse, and the overall "otherworldly" tenor of the song, this seems a more likely probability. The inspiring image would be that of being together with one's lover in the altered, dreamy state of consciousness induced after taking the opiate-like drug. Similarly, the line "the blue bus is calling us" likely refers to the addictive attraction of numorphan that develops in abusers of the drug, and "driver where you takin' us" would refer to the altered consciousness and insight experienced through drug experimentation.
Another explanation for "the Blue Bus" phrase would be that, in the United States, military inductees have long boarded blue buses for transport to basic training, or for movement around a base. "The End" was popular during the Vietnam War, and Morrison may have intended it to be an anti-Vietnam anthem. Morrison was born at the height of World War II, while his father was an Admiral in the Navy. As a child, he was a "navy brat", and thus familiar with military life. No doubt he saw many "blue buses" in his youth.[1]
The following are phrases from "The End" that may help put the phrase "the Blue Bus" in context. The phrase "The west is the best, The west is the best, Get here, and well do the rest" could summon images of troops preparing for transport to Vietnam to fight in the proxy "West vs. Communist" cold war. Other phrases with military allusions include "Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain" and "The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on; He took a face from the ancient gallery." This may be the image of a soldier dressing to do battle in modern times, with an allusion toward a Roman infantryman. The phrase could also be an image of a Greek actor putting on a mask to perform in a play, except prior language implies a Roman allusion rather than one of an ancient Greek. Much of the brutal context of the song, implying random acts of killing, seems to make more sense in the context of war rather than in a drug trip gone bad, or the carefully prescribed plot of a Greek tragedy (cf. Oedipus). Further, the song begins and ends similarly: "This is the end, Beautiful friend; This is the end, My only friend; The end of our elaborate plans; the end of everything that stands; The end; No safety or surprise; The end; I'll never look into your eyes... again."
Robby Krieger's slinky, haunting guitar lines over D drone in DADGAD tuning using a harmonic minor scale recall Indian drone and raga-based music, as has often been noted, and the rolling and dramatic crescendoes of John Densmore's drums recall Indian tabla rhythms. The music as a whole, though, does not sound entirely or even particularly "Indian". The sharp, ringing edge of the guitar recalls the 50s rock and roll style, while the fingerpicking attack may derive equally from the flamenco guitar style Krieger had studied as a youth and from folk music. Ray Manzarek's organ is used sparingly to provide an inconspicuous bass line (I-V-I-V-I-V...) and fills. One may find a strong similarity to Chopin's "Funeral March" theme and also to Sandy Bull's guitar instrumental "Blend" - but this may be more to do with the quality of the melodic minor scale than with any specific influence.
Structurally, the song rises to three separate mini-crescendoes separated by slower sections of half-spoken, half-sung lyrics before building to an enormous psychedelic crescendo right after Jim Morrison sings the "meet me at the back of the blue bus" verse. Previously, the song had been weaving along on its melodies to an encounter with the ruling powers of the mind, the controlling "father" structure and the longed-for "mother", or freedom. The final crescendo represents an attempt to break through to that freedom. Aterward, "The End" departs on a wistful note when Morrison sings, "It hurts to set you free, but you'll never follow me. The end of laughter and soft lies, the end of nights we tried to die." In the context of Morrison's first interpretation quoted above, this lyric and the associated music that softly reiterates themes from the opening may mean that the comfort of childhood will be sacrificed for freedom.
Director Martin Scorsese once used the song in a sex scene montage in his early student film Who's That Knocking at My Door (1968).
However, "The End" was most famously used as a framing device for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, in which its dark, poetic passage marked the film's descent into the surreal. The sound of helicopter rotors from the beginning of the film are often included in recordings of the song. However, this version of the song is also incomplete, and the sounds of a jungle replace most of the lyrics in the second half of the song.
This usage has led to other, often satirical usages, ranging from two sequences on The Simpsons television series in which the song plays while Homer contemplates suicide and another, "Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore", in which, in an Apocalypse Now parody, he thinks he is a god, to a Saturday Night Live sketch in which John McCain is driven to madness while campaigning for George W. Bush as a parody of Apocalypse Now.
The song was also used in Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors, where it plays while the band explored drugs in the desert.
It was used in the final episode of The Dennis Miller Show, during another Apocalypse Now parody sequence, in which Dennis was airlifted by (we are led to believe) a helicopter out of the set.
The song was also referenced in a 2006 episode of The Venture Bros. entitled "Assassinanny 911", in a scene which also parodied the Apocalypse Now usage.
- In the March 1, 1997 version of the Phish song "Weekapaug Groove", recorded on Slip Stitch and Pass, vocalist Trey Anastasio starts out by indirectly quoting the Oedipal section of this song, saying, "He walked on down the hall... He said, "Father, I want to kill you... Mother... I want to cook you breakfast.... Then I wanna...I wanna borrow the car.... Then I wanna... Ooooooooooh."
- Floater, out of Portland, performs the song during their live shows in a medley with their song "Settling" from their 1998 concept album Angels in the Flesh and Devils in the Bone
- During the Zeitgeist tour, The Smashing Pumpkins used a tease of "The End" as an intro to "Silverfuck".
- Rap group Three 6 Mafia sampled this song for their song "I'm So Hi" on their album When the Smoke Clears.
- The episode "Assassinanny 911" of The Venture Bros. includes a sequence where Hank (under the influence of poison) quotes the Oedipal section of the song and tries to kill his father with a machete while a Doors-influenced score plays in the background.
- Chris Cornell, both solo recently and while fronting the grunge behemoth Soundgarden, will tag portions of "The End", among other songs, onto the breakdown of the 11+ minute long Soundgarden opus "Slaves & Bulldozers" during live performances.
- ^ In one of his Vietnam War poems, William Caughly mentions a "blue bus" in relation to the military draft: "But when they called (the draft board), "I answered - no Vietnam for me, no blue bus; and I knew they'd never use the nukes - right? They just never got the chance. Day before I leave for basic training, anti-war rally in Los Angeles in front of the Century Plaza Hotel....") William Caughey, A War Story, 1992