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 sniggering 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
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3/6/03