The End (The Doors song)
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"The End" is a song by The Doors from their self-titled album. It was gestated through months of performances at Los Angeles' Whisky a Go Go. The band would perform the song to close their last set. It was first released in January 1967 on their self-titled debut album.
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[edit] Influences
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 unintelligibly). This is often considered an homage 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 could be goodbye to a kind of childhood." Morrison had also said that the song is 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. This interpretation of his own lyrics recalls to us Morrison's lifelong passion for freedom. He 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 lyrics' reference to "the Blue Bus" is almost certainly a reference to Indian mystic Meher Baba's "Blue Bus" tours of the 1930s. However, it may also be a reference to Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus public bus lines or Fetrow's blue bus which they took many trips in.
[edit] Music
Robby Krieger's slinky, haunting guitar lines over D drone in DADGAD tuning recall Indian drone and raga-based music, as has often been noted, and the vital, unpredictable 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 alternate-tuned folk. Ray Manzarek's organ is used sparingly to provide the inconspicuous but essential bass line (I-V-VIII-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 probably has more to do with the quality of the melodic minor scale than with 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. Just afterward, "The End" departs on a wistful, post-orgasmic 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.
[edit] In film
"The End" was 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.
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 used in Oliver Stone's 1991 film The Doors, where it plays while the band explored drugs in the desert.
The song was referenced in a 2006 episode of The Venture Bros. entitled "Assassinanny 911", in a scene which also parodied the Apocalypse Now usage.
