The End

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

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

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free

Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby

The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best

Get here, and we'll do the rest

The blue bus is callin' us
The blue bus is callin' us
Driver, where you taken' us

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall,

And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...I want to...WAAAAAA

C'mon baby,--------- "take a chance with us"
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
C'mon baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
On a blue bus
Doin' a blue rock
C'mon, yeah

Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

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
This is the end

Is this song perhaps the most profound integration of words and music ever produced.....gets my vote!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"Someone said to me The Doors are playing at The London Fog, you ought to go by and hear them. And I thought about it. And I decided
not to, as much as it would be nice to hear them. And to see Jim again. But, that parting on the desert was truly the end.
That was it. I had made my decision. And I didn't go to see them. I left for New York.
So you know the lyrics of the song, . . .'I had to
set you free, you would never follow me'
When The Doors came to New York in the winter of 1967, I asked
Jim about that song, "The End", and when he had written it.
He grinned, you know like he used to do, and said, "Oh, right about the time you split for New York."...
Well, I couldn't go on his trip. And he couldn't go on mine, because he had work to do. . . So that's what the farewell was all about."
close friend Phil O'Leno
## Morrison actually wrote that part for Mary Werbelow in 1966

"We didn't start out with such big ideas. We thought we were going to be just another pop group, but then something happened when we recorded 'The End'. We saw that what we
were doing was more important than just a hit song. We were writing serious music and performing it in a very dramatic way. 'The End' is like going to see a movie when you already know the plot. It's a timeless piece of material . . . It was then that we realized we were different from other groups. We were playing music that would last for years, not weeks."
Jim Morrison

The End
Morrison had worked on a student production of Oedipus Rex at Florida State. But his exploration of its sexual taboos took on bold new life in the eleven minutes of "The End," which evolved during the Doors' live shows at L.A.'s Whisky-A-Go-Go. "Every time I hear that song, it means something else to me," Morrison said in 1969. "It could be goodbye to a kind of childhood."

[jym]

TheWallsScreamedPoetry said:

"Someone said to me The Doors are playing at The London Fog, you ought to go by and hear them. And I thought about it. And I decided
not to, as much as it would be nice to hear them. And
to see Jim again. But, that parting on the desert
was truly the end. That was it. I had made my
decision. And I didn't go to see them. I left for New York.
So you know the lyrics of the song, . . .'I had to
set you free, you would never follow me' When The
Doors came to New York in the winter of 1967, I asked
Jim about that song, "The End", and when he had
written it. He grinned, you know like he used to do, and
said, "Oh, right about the time you split for New
York."...Well, I couldn't go on his trip. And he couldn't go on mine, because he had work to do. . . So that's what the farewell was all about."
close friend Phil O'Leno


Hey, has it occurred to anyone that Morrison would tell people what they would like to hear regarding the meaning of the lyrics? I mean everyone who knew him has a DIFFERENT story on the meaning of 5 to 1 but each swears Jim told them the meaning.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Its like Val Kilmer said after talking to nearly 100 people who knew or had met Jim....he said he ended up with 150 different views of Jim Morrison. Thats whats so enjoyable of trying to figure out what the bugger was on about.
Ray tells the tale under the Venice pier (on his LHM film DVD extras) of how The End began as a love/goodbye song to Mary Werbele Jim's old girlfriend and then look what it became...
He was probably the most enigmatic songwriter ever.....
Thats cool in my opinion.

[danceonfire]

The End is by far my favorite Doors epic! I also love the way it was used in Apocaplypse Now.

[ensenada]

I eould say that the end is my fave song ever. however i have different doors favourites depending on my mood.

[danceonfire]

Yeah, I know what you mean.

[ensenada]

ever since i heard the end though, i found if you sit quietly whilst listening to it it is capable of taking you away to a fantasy land. it is one of the most captivating, trippy tunes i have heard, and i have heard a good few. o think the song originally started with Jim playing with a little love song, which spiralled out of control and became the epic we know and love today.

[danceonfire]

Ensenada said:

ever since i heard the end though, i found if you sit quietly whilst listening to it it is capable of taking you away to a fantasy land. it is one of the most captivating, trippy tunes i have heard, and i have heard a good few. o think the song originally started with Jim playing with a little love song, which spiralled out of control and became the epic we know and love today.

I know what you mean. When I listen to The End, I like to put my earphones on and just sit back, close my eyes and let the music take me where it may.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

In the special features section of Love Her Madly (Ray's Godawful Movie) Ray takes us on a trip around Venice and at one stage stands under the Venice Pier. He explains that the exact position he is standing is the spot where Jim first came out with....
"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"
Which was his goodbye song to Mary Werbele who had been a girlfriend before Jim moved to LA and had come to the city as a dancer.
Amazing to think that that bit of whimsy would become one of the most amzing rock epics ever...

[danceonfire]

I haven't seen Love Her Madly. But I have seen Evergreen and Induction. They are both on the Collector's Edition DVD. I didn't really like either one of them.

It is amazing how what started out as a goodbye/love song developed into one of the best epics ever.

[marcel]

the end is the best doors song
when i dead that song will be played in church


my only friend the end

[ensenada]

when i roll off the mortal shit pan, i want people are strange and break on through played. remeber that guys, cos your all invited ;D

[danceonfire]

Ensenada said:

when i roll off the mortal shit pan, i want people are strange and break on through played. remeber that guys, cos your all invited ;D

I want The End and Riders on the Storm played when I go to the Great Beyond.

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Q Magazine Special Edition
100 Songs That Changed The World

THE END The Doors
The case for: bringing a genuine intellectual gravitas to pop

As teen pop idols go, Jim Morrison was a strange choice. A drop-out film student from UCLA and a self-styled "erotic politician" who sought to break through the doors of perception, he was a far cry from The Monkees. But, in the days when the counter-culture was blooming and the nation's consciousness was expanding, Morrison was a genuine pin-up -- his group, The Doors, hitting Number 1 in the US with Light My Fire. Little did the adoring teens suspect that the accompanying album included a song in which Morrison claimed he wanted to have sex with his mother. Kind of.
The End was one of the first songs Morrison wrote for The Doors in 1966. It started life as a simple, down-beat tale of dying love, given an Eastern tint by Robby Krieger's sitar-like guitar tuning. However, the singer's weighty reading matter informed the rapidly expanding improvised section in the middle, as Morrison began to include random snatches of poetry when the band performed the song live. Inspired by Frederick Nietzsche's examination of classical Greek literature, The Birth Of Tragedy, Morrison had become intrigued by the character of Oedipus -- the hero who outfoxed the wily Sphinx, killed his father and ultimately discovered the horrible truth that his wife was actually his mum. As Nietzsche put it, "The same man who solved the riddle of nature (the ambiguous Sphinx) must also, as murderer of his father and husband of his mother, break the consecrated tables of the natural order." And that was right up Morrison's street.
According to Danny Sugerman in his book No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison unveiled his Oedipal epic at an infamous show at LA's Whiskey A Go-Go. As the eerie middle section began, Morrison painted the sinister picture of the "killer" who enters his parents' room and tells his father he wants to kill him. Morrison broke the tension by howling, "Mother, I want to fuck you!" The Whiskey's owner Phil Tanzini banned the group on the spot. "You are one foul-mouthed son of a bitch," he told Morrison.
The first attempt at recording The End was aborted after Morrison trashed the studio while on a particularly woozy acid trip. Throughout, he repeated the mantra, "Fuck the mother, kill the father..."
"Essentially it boils down to this," explained producer Paul Rothchild in an interview with Crawdaddy magazine shortly afterwards. "Kill all of 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. The psychedelic revolution."
The group returned the next day and nailed the song in two takes. "When it came time to do The End, a very different mood took Jim over," recalls keyboardist Ray Manzarek. "He became shamanistic and put himself into a trance." The weird mood translates to the finished recording, which concludes The Doors' self-titled debut LP and lasts over 11 minutes -- unprecedented on a pop record.
The End represented, as Rothchild had correctly surmised, a social revolution. The "fuck you" pay off was edited out of all pressings (until it was included on The Doors box set in 1999), but rather than merely sblack personing about the "naughty" drug culture, The End placed the psychedelic experience in its proper literary context. The fact that The Doors could do this on a "pop" album demonstrated how the burgeoning genre of "rock" was evolving into an adult art form. Morrison and The Doors unashamedly dabbled in the classic Dionysian urges of music, excess, ecstasy and the breaking down of boundaries. Frederick Nietzsche would have approved.
Martin O'Gorman

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

"The Doors: Jim Morrison's daily routine was to smoke dope all day, drink beer in the evening, level off with shots of speed, and then drop acid shortly before going on stage."

Despite his abrupt departure and the fact that Love never made a cent for the label, Elektra still have reason to be grateful to Arthur Lee for recommending that they check out another band causing a stir in the Sunset Strip clubs in 1966, called The Doors.
Drop-out student Jim Morrison was living on someone's roof in LA's Venice Beach, dropping acid and writing poetry, when he bumped into Ray Manzarek, who was trying to decide between a career in film or music. The problem was solved after they worked up 'Moonlight Drive' together with Jim's acid-soaked lyrics. For their first residency at the London Fog on the Strip, Manzarek remembers that they played "stoned every night. It was the great summer of acid, and we really got into a lot of improvisation."
By the time they graduated to the Whisky A Go Go, Morrison's daily routine was to smoke dope all day, drink beer in the evening, level off with shots of speed, and then drop acid shortly before going on stage, where he would regularly wave phials of amyl nitrate under the noses of the band and audience. On this regime The Doors developed the songs that made up the first couple of albums. Morrison later said that "some of the best musical trips we took were in clubs".
One night Morrison failed to show up at the Whisky. After the first set the band tracked him down to a nearby motel, where he was incoherently muttering "ten thousand mikes [micrograms]". The band eventually realised this referred to his acid intake -- which was more than 20 times the normal dosage.
They got him to the club, and the second set was, not surprisingly, a mess. He was coming down during the third set as they played 'The End', when he suddenly came up with the dramatic lyrical finale: 'Father.'/'Yes, son?'/'I want to kill you.'/'Mother, I want to ... fuck you!' It got them fired from the club, but it gave their first album an unforgettable climax -- even with the last two words omitted.
For The Doors the rest, as they say, is legendary. Significantly, they were about the only LA band to conquer San Francisco.
from "Trippin' The Light Fantastic" by Hugh Fielder.
Classic Rock November 2003

[ensenada]

"The Doors: Jim Morrison's daily routine was to smoke dope all day, drink beer in the evening, level off with shots of speed, and then drop acid shortly before going on stage."

that sounds like my dream day! ;D

[ensenada]

why does the article refer to jim as a drop out student? is this from someone listening to the doors movie where he says he quits, which actually never happened?
the best songs ever made are all probably drug induced, opening the doors of perception they said...and i believe they really did!

[TheWallsScreamedPoetry]

Ensenada said:

why does the article refer to jim as a drop out student? is this from someone listening to the doors movie where he says he quits, which actually never happened?!

Myth is always more interesting than reality.....

[ensenada]

true!